Foie Gras

I have been quite busy as of late, and will have a good couple of updates to fill everyone in.  In the meantime, I came across some interesting articles regarding foie gras a few weeks ago, and while I don't lean one side or the other, I found two articles that shed a new light on the contentious delicacy.

Incanto restaurant issued a letter in retaliation to attacks on its name (and owners) in this letter titled Shock & Foie

The Village Voice put out a bit more in depth look into the matter and focused its findings on the US market and farm system.  Is Foie Gras Torture?

I look forward to seeing any remarks about it, and will be back soon with relevant updates to China.

Knocked down a peg

Morning coffee meetings are always much more intimidating than evening pint meetings.  Such was the case yesterday morning when we met with a man named Marcus Maher.  Marcus has been out and around China and Vietnam for 8 years or so after leaving the Australian military.  He found his way into business by writing a small pamphlet helping Vietnamese pass the immigration exam for Canada (which he figured out by temping for a friend in the business).  He has since started and sold 7 successful enterprises and is currently a majority shareholder for a wine bar/wine wholesaler in the Sheco neighborhood of Shenzhen.  

Tom is a minor player in the wine bar, and helped set up this meeting with us to discuss the basics of life out here in Shenzhen.  He's a no frills guy and listened to a tight-lipped version of our business idea and more or less blew it out of the water (something we were actually hoping for).  The guy knows his stuff, and while he took us down a peg, he also offered some very valuable advice and was keen on letting us know what it took to survive out here.  

There are so many small things we are learning every day and to be quite honest, many of them are quite frustrating.  One thing that I find as entertaining as it is frustrating is our current apartment search.  In the US back in the day, many landlords were hesitant to rent to foreigners, especially any from Asia due to either ignorance or distaste for the smells generated by a different culture's kitchen.  Neighbors were never keen on a foreign family or person moving into their building and there was always a bit of disdain towards them.   We have found two landlords pull the same thing on us, and some of the various eyes cast towards us ring similar to those back at home.  It is too bad because the unwilling landlord held an amazing unit, that we were really set on.  Such is life, but the irony here is definitely amusing.

Still no camera, but the weather is not picture perfect, so I am not too worried, the rainy season here is full underway and a good umbrella is on my to-do list.  Laptop is about ready to run out of juice, I will be back here soon.

Hong Kong Day Trip

It feels like we have been here a month, and yet, it has only been a week.  Our days are busy with the basics, meetings, getting acclimated (cell phones, data plans, apartment hunting, etc), and of course cocktail meetings, which one may argue are more productive than the afternoon-kind.  The expat scene here is unreal.  Alex came in to China on Friday and on his flight from Beijing he sat next to an expat businessman, and they got to talking.  Nice little meeting, no big deal.  Later that evening a friend of ours, Mark, comes down to our apartment and says to Alex, "So you're the guy that sat next to Jason on the flight from Beijing."  The community here of non-natives is apparently very tight-knit, something we have found to be a welcome change from the business scene and friendship circles back home.  Everyone shares information whether it be where to get the best dry-cleaning rates, or which secretarial firms to use for your particular business.  The best thing about them though is the ability to tap into their networks and Chinese connections here.  That networking is infinitely more useful than any Blackberry breakfast back home. 

We are making quite a bit of progress, and True Wind should be set up officially within the month (our initial incorporation was Anemoi Partners LLC and is the parent company for our education service).  

Back to Hong Kong though...  One, it's an unbelievable city; two, the night life is pretty swank.  We were in town Monday to meet with a few web developers and get a banking account set up for the business.  Olivier's girlfriend Elena happened to be in town with her Fordham Law school arbitration team.  Apparently there is a big competition in Hong Kong where law schools send teams to compete in various lawyery matters.  The nice thing about this is lawyer happy hours.  We were given special entry into one of their cocktail hours, and I must say it is pretty cool to tell people you live over in Shenzhen, are involved in a small education start-up, and were in town for business that afternoon.

This brings me to an expat institution in Shenzhen (parents and worried parties, this may a good time to head back to msnbc.com)  the inebriated border crossing.   There is one border spot that stays open 24 hours a day, and is home to one of the oddest travel situations I've seen so far.  Seeing as it is essentially a right of passage here, we committed to it after deciding that Monday night was not an important enough evening to merit a late-night hotel crash in an overpriced foreign city.  I will not venture into details, but the trip is indeed something everyone should do once.  It is quite an adventure.  

Interesting days so far

Ladies and Gents, I have finally taken some photos.  Unfortunately they were with a phone and so may not be of the highest quality.  That being said our first full day we met with some friends/coworkers of Tom's for lunch.  The venue was located in Shenzhen's burgeoning design district, which was actually quite impressive.  A group of developers and artists took a complex of old factories and converted them into studio space for their respective design houses.  Over the course of a couple years several restaurants have sprouted up as well as a few bars, and is now a hot spot for hip young shenzheners to come hang out.  The photos are of a pretty neat art car situated in front of someone's studio as well as the gym of designer Kenneth Ko.  This guy is apparently quite a big deal in the area and provides interior design for both business and home.  The odd thing about this man is his vanity, a former professional body-builder, his studio also houses a dual purposed gallery/fitness gym which I have detailed down below.  Sadly, membership here runs somewhere in the alley of 250USD a month.

Membership aside, the area is really quite interesting and serves as another window into some of the more creative sides of a city obsessed with manufacturing.

I'll let everyone know when I do actually come across a digital camera and figure out how to post galleries and such. We have been incredibly busy in the last few days in meetings and trying to figure out the basic logistics of True Wind.  

A Little Introduction, if you will

The morning smog has not burnt off yet, and as a result the city is cast in a rather grey color similar to a fall fog-laden morning on New England.  As I sit in our apartment 26 stories up, I feel it is necessary to give a bit of a back story to the trip that has brought me to China.  I have admittedly been a less-than-considerate friend in the last 6 months and owe it to the people I've been out of touch with to do a little fill-in session.

My post-collegiate life has been less than glorious thus far, and as a result I began looking for something to do that would get me settled up for a couple years.  Working for the family business (while convenient) is not why I studied what I did in college.  Then again, many will argue what I did study could not really take me anywhere but to a random office going over spreadsheets and research reports.  Unfortunately, I am allergic to Excel and coffee mugs with witty sayings that adorn office cubicles.

Now with all this post collegiate doom and gloom two things happened that perked things up a bit: My father invested in a design suite that would allow him to create and manufacture custom jewelry in-house, and I am blessed with friends who have similarly restless souls.  The jewelry design set me free to travel out to Illinois for training and provided me with a creative outlet to get back into art that I hadn't realized I missed quite so much.  The other nice thing about working with jewelry is that it is shiny, and it holds my attention, because it is shiny, and sparkly.  This world could be all fine and good but would leave me (again) short of my education or perhaps potential.

This is where China begins to become relevant.

Two friends from high school, Olivier and Alex, were similarly restless and getting tired of their fast-paced New York City jobs.  China quite literally called them (in the form of a college-friend of Olivier's) and prodded them to see how receptive they might be to an adventure out there.  This friend (Tom) has lived out there for three years and was looking into starting a business up after spending time working for the big corporate world of Sourcing.  I was approached along with other members of our group and expressed interest.  The original business iteration would have us trying our hand at a Car Wash, which is not quite the institution that it is in the US.  I was approached because of my extensive experience in the automotive care industry, having spent two arduous summers washing and detailing only the finest autos that Lexus had to offer.  Our interest carried us into the world of due diligence, a term I had never come across in my days. Our process kept on hitting walls in logistics, price, and ease of transition.  The conclusion was then drawn that the only way to make any real steps forward was to get on the ground in China and see what there was to offer.  This was in May/June of 2008.

Fast forward to August.

*Lengthy entry I know*

Shenzhen is a city located about 40 minutes outside of Hong Kong in the mainland of China.  I could tell you more, but I'm sure the Wikipedia has something to offer. It is worth noting, however; that Shenzhen is a major manufacturing hub complete with special economic zone status and a rather large central business district. That basically translates into lots of people (roughly 15 million), with a large middle class who save some 20% of their annual earnings.  Now, I make no mystery that I am in no way well-versed with anything regarding finance/accounting/money/business, but I do know that there is a lot of money being spent in this area.  Our real goal was to try our hand at starting a business and maybe take home some of that 20%.  

The trip reflected our desire to get into business, being less about leisure and packed with business meetings with various expatriates. Each of these individuals had moved out to China and were involved in nearly every facet of business, from wine bar start ups to factory owners.  The time spent out there was exploratory and gave us a relatively clear picture of the opportunity to try our hand at business in what has been dubbed "The New Wild West".

After a busy week in Shenzhen and Hong Kong our minds were racing and our livers were not fond of us.  The idea that stuck involved taking our educations, and in fact our alma maters, and using them to give Chinese high school students the advantages offered to us during the college application process.  It would be impossible to copy-cat our pedigree, and would be something hard to replicate given then level of English we were capable of composing and teaching.  While this may not sound humble, I must emphasize that Alex and Olivier mastered writing skills taught to us in high school and honed this skill in their respective colleges (Georgetown and UPenn).  We saw first-hand how students in the US hand-fed application essays and walked through standardized tests by hired tutors.  Why not offer this service to students in China?  

The market seemed ripe for this sort of endeavor, and while thousands of US students travel abroad to "teach English and get away for a year or two", it was our goal to turn this into a viable, growable business model. I could go into more detail, but this entry is far too long and boring already, so I will simply say, 8 months later we arrived in Shenzhen, incorporated and ready to go.

Whether or not this endeavor is successful, it is sure to take us through a veritable roller-coaster of victories and defeats that will shape how we emerge from this unbelievable country.

Landed

Greetings from Shenzhen

Olivier and I landed successfully in Hong Kong after a scant 16 hour voyage over the North Pole and half-way across the globe.  The weather here is 75 and humid, though once the morning smog burns off the views are impressive.

We were lucky enough to get temporary digs in the Four Points Hotel apartments until we find more permanent housing (apartment hunting in China is going to be interesting).

There will be a more detailed post with pictures coming once I catch up on some sleep and get my brain functioning again.  Get excited.