Interview with Tao Zhang from Dianping.com

This week kicks off a special series of interviews with Chinese entrepreneurs. With the help of Georg Godula from http://www.web2asia.com/, I've been getting interviews with some of the very top guys in China (ie those websites you've seen in Alexa's top 100 listing, but never had any clue what they are about!). China is an incredible market, here are some stats: - 300M people online (biggest in the world) - average US$200/month income - multiple $1 BILLION/year dollar business models already existing, built on this low income population of internet users. However, China has 1.3 billion people in the country, so many more will be coming online soon AND you can expect their monthly income to increase dramatically too, raising CPMs a lot. Bottom line: watch out for China, because this is going to change the internet landscape significantly. Our first interview is with Tao Zhang who is the CEO of Dianping.com basically the Chinese version of Yelp (that started 2 years before Yelp did!). Some of the points we discuss include: - how they handle fake reviews - how the site is monetized (its profitable Judys Book + others failed in this market), - their funding from Sequoia and Google - How US companies can expand to China - How US entrepreneurs can get started in China.