Hong Kong

The Land of Milk and Money

By JAY CASPIAN KANG

Fredy Harianto was one of 30 or so people who congregated at the headquarters of Boot HK, an incubator for Internet start-ups in Wan Chai, one of Hong Kong’s many business districts, to hear a lecture on how to create a punchy, likable corporate blog voice. The attendees were mostly young; each had sharp clothes and impeccable posture. Only two were born in Hong Kong.

The demographics of the room reminded me of what a London-born banker told me a couple of nights before: “There are only two reasons why a white guy will come to Hong Kong. The first is to make money and evade taxes. The second is girls. But really, once you get down to it, there’s really only the first reason.” In Hong Kong, individual income tax maxes out at 15 percent, and many businesses operate under tax-free status.

And of course, nearly everyone at Boot HK had been seduced by the proximity to China, the biggest market in the world. There was a college kid from Berkeley who was vaguely interested in starting “some sort of social-networking site.” There was a guy from Nebraska who also wanted to create a social-networking site — this one for industrial manufacturing companies. Seated next to me was a half-drunk Chinese-American investment banker, who seemed to have come only to drink Boot HK’s liquor and berate the young and hopeful. About 20 minutes in, he interrupted the lecture, stood up and demanded that everyone explain why, for God’s sake, they would ever want to start their own companies. After it was clear that nobody wanted to answer, he pointed at a woman and said, “You start.”

Most of the boot campers ended up saying they wanted to found Hong Kong’s Groupon, Hong Kong’s Zynga or Hong Kong’s Yelp, in the hope that they could cross over to the Chinese market. The investment banker rolled his eyes after each response, clearly agitated by the collective lack of imagination.

Then came Fredy Harianto. When the question of why he wanted to start his own company got to him, he leaned forward onto his elbows and started yelling: “I am so tired of everyone saying that the Chinese people are not creative and that everything they are doing is a copy of American Internet companies. They are right!” The room went silent.

When the lecture finally ended, the entrepreneurs milled around, forcing eye contact and passing out business cards.

Before he left, I asked Harianto if he would meet me for lunch. The next day, we walked up the steep, narrow incline of Wyndham Street in central Hong Kong because he said the best dumplings in the city were somewhere around some corner. We found the place down an alley lined with English pubs in the expat district called Soho. A woman came from behind the counter and yelled at us in Cantonese before throwing two laminated menus onto the table and stalking off. “The people of Hong Kong are very rude, but I still love them,” Harianto said. “No. 1: They are my people. No. 2: They are very motivated to succeed.”

Over lunch, he talked mostly about American movies. During a brief period of unemployment last year, he downloaded “The Social Network,” which opens with the line, “There are more people with genius I.Q.’s living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States.” Over the next three months, Harianto watched the opening scene as many as 10 times a day. “Those words were chilling to my spine,” he explained. “I saw what Mark Zuckerberg said as a calling to the Chinese people. If there are so many geniuses in China, we should broadcast that genius to the rest of the world.”

To achieve this goal, Harianto scraped together $7,500 to start offilink.com, a social-networking site he describes as the perfect mix of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. In Hong Kong, all forms of commerce are fueled by the tinder of billions of business cards. The exchange of cards is reflexive and ceremonial: two hands when presenting and two hands when accepting, each and every time you meet someone whose station in life might be equal to or greater than your own. Within a week of arriving in Hong Kong, I was finding them everywhere — between the pages of my notebooks, in every pocket, in between the sheets of my bed. Harianto’s idea: Take all these business cards and put them online.

Everyone I talked to in Hong Kong, from the billionaire clothing manufacturers to the unionized domestic workers, buzzed with a similar ambition. Just as everyone who moves to San Diego considers learning how to surf, nobody comes to Hong Kong without, at some point, considering some entrepreneurial endeavor. It was easy to see how Harianto, still spearing his dumplings in the empty restaurant, got so wrapped up in the idea of success.

“Offilink has to start here, in Hong Kong,” he explained. “This is the place the world looks to for leadership in business.”