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September 7, 2005
Making it in China
At SES San Jose, Champagne Jimmy kindly gave me a copy of Business 2.0 August 2005 issue and pointed out an article which he thought I'd like.
It's an article I'd highly recommend you read, even if you have NO desire to come and hang out with me in the Peoples Repubic of China.
I wont spoil the fun for you, but think of it very much like "Selling Shovels" rather than "Panning for Gold"
Seeing Barrett Comiskey lounging in the rooftop beer garden of Shanghai's fabled Peace Hotel at twilight, sipping his cool Tsingtao and gazing down at the hurly-burly street scene below, you may be tempted to call out, "Hey, buddy. You're dreaming." A year ago, Comiskey, 29, came to China to seek his fortune. He brought with him a Stanford MBA and not much else. He speaks some Mandarin, and he has a Taiwanese wife, Jojo Tsai, who is fluent. But for much of the time he's been here, he's hardly had 2 yuan to rub together, and he owes $100,000 on his school loans. His business partner, Andy Mulkerin, seems at first even more out of his depth; he arrived four days ago with a freshly minted Harvard MBA, but he's also deep in grad-school debt and speaks not a word of Mandarin. Weirder still, he just turned down a job at McKinsey that would have paid him more than $100,000 a year. Why? So he could come to China -- the new land of opportunity.
Posted by shak at September 7, 2005 4:24 AM