WeChat for the West

Sup? 

What if I told you... there are *two* Internets. And you only use one of them...

Well, soak that in for a second. Because it’s true. Just about all of you reading this grew up on the Silicon Valley-centric Internet that is predominant in the West. The experience is driven by companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft.

The other internet emerged in the early 2010s (side note: do we call this the 2010s or the 10s?) with the success of WeChat. This other internet is Chinese-centric. It is dominated by the BAT companies: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.

It’s not perfect, but it’s different.

Here's a snippet from a recent WSJ article covering the two Internets:

Bei-jing’s cen-sor-ship is like its pol-luted air, he said: “You’re in it and it seems OK, then you leave and you realize how bad it was.” Yet he loved WeChat, the app that can do mul-ti-ple tasks, and missed it when he left China.“When I came back to the U.S. it was like com-ing back to the Stone Age,” he said. 

"Not be-ing able to use WeChat, every-thing felt just old fash-ioned.”

I’ve been trying to get smart on this, but the more I learn, the more out of touch I feel. Outside of moving to China, I can’t do much to lessen my learning limitations. And that makes me sad.

So this week’s idea is this: an educational app that simulates WeChat, but pre-loads the apps you already use on a daily basis. So you'd login, then link to a messenger service (and perhaps import your contact list so you could text), rideshare services, payment apps (like Venmo), etc. Using the app would get you closer (but not all-the-way) to experiencing the connected Chinese-centric Internet.

The challenge would be to live your life within a single app. What does it feel like to access LevelUp and pay for your Sweetgreen within the same app you use to hail an Uber or text a friend? 

The theory is that after using it for just a week or so, your empathy for users of the Chinese Internet would grow. 

Why not just download WeChat and do this yourself? Go ahead. You'll see a familiar interface (similar to WhatsApp or Messenger) and probably walk away not “getting it.”Try to open the games portal or access other services, for instance. If you don't speak Chinese, you’ll get stuck.

There is some precedence for this. As Facebook expanded into the developing world, it introduced “2G Tuesdays.” For an hour each Tuesday, employees could switch to a 2G experience to simulate what Facebook's experience looked like in the developing world. This helped their product teams design and build experiences for millions of users and increase their adoption of the platform.

Who should build this? This is a pretty academic proposal, but for anyone curious:

• An ed-tech startup like General Assembly or Coursera
• A university program like Stanford’s D School as they educate the next-generation of product creators
• A public policy think tank wanting to educate the public

What are the stakes?Kai-Fu Lee, former head of Google China and prominent VC, put it well in his book AI Superpowers:

China’s alternate digital universe now creates and captures oceansof new data about the real world. That wealth of information on users—their location every second of the day, how they commute, what foods they like, when and where they buy groceries and beer—will prove invaluable in the era of AI implementation. It gives these companies a detailed treasure trove of these users’ daily habits, one that can be combined with deep-learning algorithms to offer tailor-made services ranging from financial auditing to city planning. It also vastly outstrips what Silicon Valley’s leading companies can decipher from your searches, “likes,” or occasional online purchases. This unparalleled trove of real-world data will give Chinese companies a major leg up in developing AI-driven services

Sure enough, AI investment in China is surging. It was higher than in US investments in 2017.

Now soak that in.

Thoughts? Send ‘em my way.

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