In a few hours I am leaving to the airport for a week-long trip to Holland. I will be in Hilversum at Spill Group and in Amsterdam for PICNIC 07. Gary Wang & Yang Lei will also be there on their honeymoon, and Tudou VC Bill Kung will also join us on Friday. It promises to be a busy but interesting week.

I just noted that the weather in Amsterdam is going to deteriorate a lot starting on Monday (rain and only 14 degrees C, brrr…). I am therefore going to repack my suitcase and add some sweaters and a coat. The first time in many, many months that I have to wear one.

A few weeks ago I had lunch with some Indian business partners. During the lunch they told us that upon arrival from Mumbai, they had paid RMB 626 for a 19 minute taxi drive from the Longyang Road Maglev Station to a hotel in the Pudong financial center. They knew the amount was too much, but the driver had used the meter, and the figure was indeed RMB 626.

I asked them for the receipt, that they had luckily kept. It turned out that the driver had added RMB 600 in toll fees to the actual amount of RMB 26. Because the receipt is only in Chinese they could not read that of course, and they had paid up.

One of our people then called the taxi company, to complain about what had happened. We faxed them the receipt (the fax number is still written on the receipt), but they later replied that the taxi driver’s identification number is not correct. This means he probably changed his ID number in the taxi meter software.

I hate it when these things happen, it gives Shanghai a bad name. You read about cheating cabbies in the local paper sometimes, but normally only when there is a crackdown. I assume the reports are just some isolated cases, and this happens much more frequently – especially at Longyang Road station where lots of foreigners arrive and there is no supervision like on the airport. Too bad we could not nab this taxi driver.

So far Typhoon Wipha did not have much impact yet on the weather. It’s now Wednesday lunchtime, and the typhoon has hit the coast at Wenzhou in Zheijiang province earlier this morning. According to the latest forecasts it won’t reach Shanghai until tonight, and the weather today is actually better than yesterday. Although there is a lot more wind, the rain has stopped. I think this will change over the next couple of hours, but for now it actually is quite pleasant outside. I just went for a walk to buy a Starbucks coffee, and I enjoyed the warm wind that was blowing.

Last night I was interviewed by Dutch radio about the typhoon, but at that time I did not have too much news to give them. A few minutes ago I did another live interview, but I still could not give them the ‘exciting’ news of being in the middle of a typhoon. They might do another interview tonight.

Update (Thursday evening): In the end Wipha missed Shanghai, and we just had a lot of wind and rain. Nothing special. But as the Shanghai Daily pointed out today, the evacuations and other typhoon-related measures were still useful: “It was a test for the public services system”.

Outside my window it’s raining hard, the reason is that a typhoon is approaching China’s East coast. Chances are that it will hit Shanghai tomorrow, and the current rainfall is the beginning of the typhoon. Today a total of 200 mm is expected, meaning that likely the city will be flooded (not unusual for Shanghai).

The office management started to warn us yesterday already when typhoon Wipha was still a regular one. Overnight it changed from a normal tropical storm into a severe storm, and Bloomberg now started calling it a super typhoon. It is expected to land as a Category 4 storm, with winds up to 250 km/h, the fiercest one to hit Shanghai in 10 years. This morning the management in our apartment building also started to issue warnings, saying that we had to make sure to keep doors and windows closed, and make sure that nothing was outside on any of the balconies.

At the moment 200,000 people are being evacuated in lower parts of Shanghai, and put into temporary typhoon shelters. I don’t think this happened during the last typhoon that I witnessed in Shanghai. I also wonder whether I should park my car in our parking garage tonight: during the last typhoon that parking garage was flooded, and many cars were totally damaged. I did not live in my current compound yet, but remember it because it was reported on many TV stations due to the fact that the majority of the cars were Mercedes, BMW or Porsche.

I hope the typhoon will change it course over the next hours, but if it doesn’t I plan to Twitter live about it. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/marcvanderchijs

This weekend Spill Group Asia and our game development company Zlong Games went on a company outing in the mountains of Zhejiang. We left early Saturday morning (6:45 AM at the office!) by bus, and arrived around 11 AM close to the outward bound base. During the bus ride (in two buses, the company has become too big for one bus) I had planned to get some extra sleep, but that did not work out. Most of the ride was used to introduce oneself, and to introduce the people in front of you. The persons in the back had a hard time remembering all the names and information.

Upon arrival we started with a lunch in a local restaurant: without enough food at regular times a Chinese outing can never be a success! Lunch was followed by a short introduction by our ‘drill sergeant’, a former member of the Chinese Special Forces. We all had to stand in lines, and the 4 people who were too late got a punishment. The tone for the weekend was set! Then we did some group exercises, and after that 3 groups were formed. These had to come up with among others a leader, a name, a song and a flag within a few minutes, and had to present that. Laughing during the presentation was punished by 20 push-ups, as the leader of the second team found out quickly.

Then we set off on foot to our base camp on top of a mountain. The slopes were slippery, and sometimes it was quite dangerous. At some points you had to climb over wet, slippery rocks with hardly any grip and if you would fall you would end up 10 meters lower. I had the feeling most people did not see the danger, because many are not used to the outdoors. I am, however, and did not feel all that comfortable. Later I asked people if they had not been afraid, and although some had been a bit scared the general answer was: “The coaches guided us, so there was no problem”. Luckily there was no problem, but I doubted the professionalism of the organizing company a bit. Indeed I slipped once, but not at a dangerous location, and hurt my back pretty badly. I was not able to participate in most other activities because of this, which was a pity.
After a 2-3 hours uphill hike we arrived at our base camp, where we did several more group exercises and set up our tents for the night. They were not completely water proof (the guide: “If it starts to rain hard it’s best to sleep inside one of the buildings.”), but luckily there was not much rain overnight. The evening was spent with games at the camp fire and a barbecue, and we were all so exhausted that by 10 PM most people retired to their tents.
At 5:30 it got light and we got up. We had to clean the tents and get ready for some morning exercises – only after that we were allowed to have breakfast. After some more activities the group went on a cave tour – crawling through water and climbing inside the caves. Because of my back injury I could not join, which I really regretted. Around 3 PM we descended the mountain again and by 4 PM we were back at the buses. All in all a weekend where people got to know each other a lot better, with some elements of a boot camp, but mainly lots of fun. Except for the hike on the first day I would recommend this to every company that wants to improve its team spirit.

In two weeks I will be at PICNIC 07 in Amsterdam. I will be in a panel on Friday, but will attend many other sessions as well. If you want to meet up with me during these three days, please drop me a note at marcvanderchijs (at) gmail (dot) com. Feel free to add me on the Picnic Network as well.

During lunch I was going through my RSS feeds when I came across a blog post by Jason Calacanis. In case you don’t know him, Jason is a US-based serial entrepreneur and A-list blogger. I have been reading his blog for the past two years or so. Today Jason had an interesting quote on his blog, that I fully agree to:

I’m amazed at how pessimistic the average person is. I’ve come to realize in my career is that the difference between people who gets things done and those who do not is this pessimism. I’ve always been attracted to the folks who say “what if we could…” or “what if you.” When I hear people talk like that I get engaged. When I hear “that’s been done already….” and “that will never work…” I want to walk away from the conversation.
(Emphasis added by me)

I recognize exactly what he says, I also hate it when people only look at the negative side of things. And it’s the main reason why most people can never successfully run a business, either their own or someone else’s. Without new ideas and products a company cannot outperform the competition. In the blogosphere pessimism seems to be even worse. If I look at the negativism in blog comments at some of the business blogs I subscribe to, I am not sure whether I should laugh or be sad. Initially I often feel sad for the people who have such a negative mindset, but when thinking it through it’s probably a good thing. Not everybody should be an entrepreneur, and hopefully they will one day join the competition.

It actually fits to the blog post I wrote earlier today about the problems I had to solve at work. If you are a pessimist you might give up, only the optimists continue and succeed. And I probably would not have been in China in the first place, had I been a pessimist.

As some of my readers know, the past two weeks have been pretty tough for me business-wise. I found out some things were going on behind my back, and some senior people in game development had to leave because of that. Honestly, for a few days my outlook on doing business in China became a lot more pessimistic. But I now I realize that it was partially just bad luck and I am getting over it. Sometimes you meet and trust the wrong people. But you need to be able to trust people to do business, without an optimistic outlook on life and people you cannot grow a company.

Pessimists would probably say: “See, I told you. The cliché is true, people in China will only try to rip you off.” But I see it different, if you do business the odds are that people will eventually try to take advantage of you, you just have to be smarter than they are. Yes, it caused me some sleepless nights, but in the end it’s actually good for the company – the rotten apples are gone and good people have already replaced them, and I will have firmer control on the daily operations.

And it’s also not just China: it happened to me before with German business partners, who seemed reliable but turned out to be crooks, and it will likely happen again. You learn from these things, and the experience makes you stronger. I might be a bit more careful as a business person, but in the end it won’t change the way I do business in China. Only optimists can be successful!