Cultivating the Chinese Presence at SXSW

The Forrest Four-Cast: May 16, 2017

I am excited to be speaking about SXSW at the US China Innovation and Investment Summit on Tuesday evening, May 16 in Houston. I also participated in this event a year ago — last year’s conference was a great experience and yielded some very significant connections.

Being involved with events like these helps grow the Chinese presence in Austin in March. While this presence was larger than ever before in 2017, we still a long way to go to better reflect some of the most exciting developments in the Far East.

Most exciting developments? As Ramy Ghorayeb notes in his recent overview piece in Startup Grind, “The next years will be the years of China tech. They have built their reputation on their capacity to clone American products, but it is wrong to think that they are only defined by that. All the new Facebook features you have seen in the last years? They are copycats of WeChat’s, China leading messaging app.”

A similarly upbeat analysis from Cyriac Roeding appeared in Recode about a year ago. In a piece titled “After Three Weeks in China, It’s Clear Beijing is Silicon Valley’s Only True Competitor”, he wrote: “Big startups are built in three to five years versus five to eight in the U.S. Accordingly, entrepreneurs who try to jump on the bandwagon of a successful idea scramble to outcompete each other as fast as they can.”

We want even more of these kinds of entrepreneurs at SXSW. If you have a compelling idea about the evolving Chinese tech scene, then start thinking about your speaking proposal for next year’s event. Enter your speaking proposal via the PanelPicker interface, which opens on June 26.

Hugh Forrest tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often (but not always) cover technology-related trends. When not attempting to wordsmith or meditating, he serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW in Austin.