Day 9: Shanghai

Today we had some free time in the morning because our first company visit rescheduled. It was nice to be able to sleep in and get things reorganized. In the afternoon we had a lunch meeting with Wing, a Bentley alum and 2 CEOs who started their own businesses in China. It was nice to have informal discussion with people for a change, rather than the presentation style of the company visits.

The first guy we talked to was Ed - he has a company that deals with managing customer experience. Basically, we works with companies (such as hotels, restaurants) to train employees and develop standards for customer experience. Although he does some customer satisfaction surveys, they don't do any qualitative interviewing or focus groups. It was interesting to hear him talk about the Chinese attitude towards being detail oriented in regards to things like proof reading or resumes. In Europe or the US we would be sure to check a document for typos, but in China it's just not the case.

The second guy we talked to was Will - he heads up a private equity firm with offices in Beijing and Shanghai. He talked a lot about how blurry the rules were around business practices when it comes to dealing with the Chinese government - nothing is ever the same or simple. He also talked about the importance of personal relationships. He said that he does a lot more socialization with his clients outside of work than he did in the US. This is his primary mode of growing and maintaining his business.

After lunch we went to an EMC research and development center. We met with a sales guy there. I didn't realize that EMC stored 2/3 of the words data - yeesh. He talked a bit about their employee recruiting and work life. He also talked about how they're releasing their first consumer use storage product and the relevant challenges associated with that in the Chinese market.

After the company visit we went to eat at a Japanese restaurant - great to have a break from Chinese! It was another one of those all you can eat deals...but the entire menu was in Chinese (with pictures, of course)...we basically just pointed at a bunch of stuff we thought we wanted and waited to see what came out. The food was really good and we had tons of it. They also gave us plenty of beer and hot sake - a few people tried to do sake bombs, but the cups were too big and got stuck in the larger glasses... it was actually pretty funny.

Next we went to an acrobatic show. There were tons of contortionists, gymnasts and dancers. Although the story-line of the show was pretty lame, the people were definately talented. We got to see 5 motorcycles drive inside this ball - apparently this is the world record for something like that, so it was pretty sweet.

After the show, a few of us decided to go out to a bar and meet Wing (the former Bentley grad) and Ed, one of the guys we met with for lunch. It was great because they had a deal where it was open bar for like $15. We stayed there for a while and then headed to this other lounge-type place. The whole place was covered in marble, and they had pretty good martinis. I tried to do some salsa dancing...I don't think I was all that successful..haha. Overall the night was fun - there was such a mix of people out, it kinda felt like I was in Boston.