October 17 and 18 I went to Shenzhen for more lectures, company visits, and pitch events.

We stayed at the excellent JW Marriott Bao’an from where we took a bus to tour Tencent’s new headquarter building.

Everything about Tencent is impressive: the growth, the building, the tour (obviously inspired by Disney’s theme-parks…). We were fortunate enough to be able to meet for several hours with the Deputy Director of Industrial Research Center at Tencent Research Institute, to whom we also pitched our companies.

After that, we crossed the street to meet the famous Richard Chiang (Chairman of 90+ Group and the Global Channel President of 3NOD). He’s quite a character with an amazing personal story! We bonded over turning our life stories into our businesses. In the tour of 3Nod one can easily see how an integrated design/prototyping/manufacturing chain works (for example, they manufacture most audio speakers, all Lenovo laptops, etc). After he invited us to lunch, he guided the tour of IDG sports accelerator.

Then we headed to another investor pitch event, this time at the brand new CKGSB Shenzhen Campus. After that, Prof. Bo Ji took us to dinner at The Taste of Shunde.

The next morning, I met with Abraham Liu, Huawei’s VP for Europe and Chief Representative of the company to the EU Institutions in Brussels. Then we went to CKGSB Shenzhen Campus for a lecture by Prof. Bo Ji on “Internet Marketing in China”. After lunch, we headed to the Smart Hardware Accelerator, where we toured the facilities and the amazing stuff they’re building there, and we held our final investor’s pitch.

Richard Lv was kind enough to drive me to Shenzhen Bay Control Point, where I took a bus to Hong Kong.