China Will Lead the Tech Industry

Connie Chan

Partner | Andreessen Horowitz

Connie Chan has a master’s degree in engineering from Stanford, where her classmates were Facebook’s future first employees. She thought that she knew what tech’s leading edge looked like. Then she went to China and discovered she had no idea. On massively popular messaging apps like WeChat, people did way more than just talk. They got marriage licenses and birth certificates, paid utilities and traffic tickets, even had drugs delivered—all in-app. Tech companies in the US, she realized, could no longer take it for granted that they led while the world followed; the stereo­type that China’s tech companies are just copycats is obsolete. “If you study Chinese products, you can get inspiration,” Chan says. As a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, she now specializes in helping American startups understand just how much they have to learn as China’s tech industry races ahead of the US in everything from messaging to livestreaming (now a $5 billion market). No matter the protectionist rhetoric coming from the Trump administration, US tech firms see billions of dollars to be made in China, and vice versa. As these two financial giants play overseas footsie, Chan acts as a facilitator. “I spend so much time teaching people what they can’t see,” she says. It won’t stay invisible for long. —Marcus Wohlsen