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FEELING CONNECTED: "I
like communities," says Chen. At DuDu.com,
kids share photos and virtual personas online.
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by the time this sees print,
much will have changed in the life of Joe Chen, MBA
’99, CEO of 1000 Oaks Inc., an Internet holding
company that operates several websites in China.
The number of employees at Beijing-based 1000 Oaks will
have increased to about 195 from 150 at the end of May
(“We hire every other day,” says Chen),
he will be in new quarters (double the 10,000-square-meter
space he occupied when STANFORD visited) and his user
base of 10 million plus will have undoubtedly grown
astronomically.
If the numbers don’t go up and up and up, it just
isn’t China.
This is Chen’s second run at web portals and if
he does as well as he did the first time around, he
will do very well indeed. Along with Nick Yang, MS ’99,
and Yunfan Zhou, MS ’99, he co-founded Chinaren.com—a
“communities” portal serving China’s
alumni groups. Today it boasts 40 million registered
users.
Why do high school and university graduates flock to
Chinaren? Chinese institutions, with few exceptions,
do not maintain alumni operations.
Chinaren was charging to the top of China’s Internet
pop chart when Sohu.com acquired it in 2000. Chen, who
remembers how every other business student at Stanford
had a business plan in his or her pocket, still savors
the memory. “We raised $10 million [in startup
funds], sold it for $33 million and when Sohu’s
stock was trading at $42 a half year ago, it was worth
$48 million!” And even though his baby is grown
up and married off, he is ever the proud dad. As host
of China’s and probably the world’s largest
alumni club, Chinaren maintains its own brand under
the Sohu umbrella and continues its longstanding membership
in the global Top 25 most heavily trafficked websites.
“I still like communities,” Chen says, recounting
how he was drawn back into the segment less than 24
months ago, and why his company started DuDu.com and
acquired MOP.com (which came with 9 million registered
users).
At DuDu’s Avita page, kids can get into serious
role-play creating their own online personas—building
up composite facial and physical features, then “shopping”
for suitable hairstyles and clothing. The images that
young surfers can remake over and over for a few pennies
(collected through user accounts at DuDu’s partner
telecom providers) become personal proxies for chat-room
and e-mail exchanges—mostly, it seems, about how
funny everyone looks. Other DuDu subscription services
include daily tips on how to handle relationships with
boyfriends and girlfriends.
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PERSONA PLAY: Users shop for
virtual physical features, hairstyles and clothing.
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Spending a yuan or two here and there adds up to over
a dollar a month per user, multiplied by 1 million users.
Chen reiterates that DuDu is still new. Yet, “we’re
already earnings positive,” he says. “These
two sites [DuDu and MOP] combined are the biggest user
community for young people in China.”
“We developed [Avita] in two months,” Chen
says. Such a short turnaround from concept to market
would be unthinkable in the United States, he adds.
By the time the idea was discussed, engineered and financed,
the market would be gone. “In China, we just chunk
it out. We just do it.” Lower engineering costs
certainly help, Chen says, but it’s the potential
for growth that really drives this approach.
It won’t be long before these kids will be grown-ups
in suits with pockets bulging with credit cards, when
online payment should be as common as Beijing’s
candy-coated plums. Exactly what Joe Chen will be chunking
out by then is anybody’s guess, but undoubtedly
it will touch the lives of millions. |
