After hearing their pitch, my first question was, “So, you’re a Medical Doctor that graduated from Harvard, you’re from Chicago, and you’ve chosen to move to Shenzhen?”
“Well, yeah, that’s pretty much the story,” he answered.
“So why did you pick Shenzhen, instead of staying in Chicago?”
“That’s a long story, but essentially, we have a better opportunity to be successful here…”
Now, here is the crazy thing… There were multiple people that had similar stories.
This happened two days ago on our Explorer Partnership trip to China. We were in Shenzhen at a top startup accelerator to hear pitches from nearly 20 different companies.
Now, these startups weren’t working on the next hot dating app, or on a program that matches your dog’s clothing.
The startups we heard from are solving real world problems.
One company was working on protecting our food supplies by saving honey bees. They are developing a process that uses machine vision and smart mite elimination to increase the bee population.
Another company has developed an ‘internet of things’ platform that helps parents track and improve a child’s language and social development.
And another company was developing robots that performed tasks in high risk industrial operations. For example, they had a small robot that removed the microscopic dust that accumulates on electric vehicle motors, which is cancerous to human workers who normally must clean these motors.
All of these young companies had incredible teams with alumni from Stanford, MIT, Oxford, Harvard, and dozens of other top universities from around the world.
So, what were they doing in Shenzhen?
Well, after we toured the city for the day, we understood. The pace of development in this part of China is simply unbelievable. It’s literally impossible to describe unless you see it with your own eyes.
You can feel the energy in the air… it’s almost palpable.
I’ve got a lot more to share about this coming soon… including the companies we met with that are very close to becoming Asia’s newest unicorns.
