CyberLabs Aims To Be China’s Start-Up Factory

A new venture based in Zhuhai, Cyberlabs Corp., is planning to be the idealab! of China.

Cyberlabs hopes to attract talented Chinese IT professionals from the mainland, Silicon Valley and around the world.

“Cyberlabs is designed to spark the Chinese Internet economy [and] to serve as a launchpad for Chinese e-commerce start-ups,” said Don Xia, CyberLabs founder and CEO.

According to Xia, the new company will provide start-ups technical, marketing and management services in addition to R&D, seed funding, and “a network of international business connections and Chinese government institutions.”

In return, Cyberlabs will receive a 10 to 20 percent equity position in each startup.

Don Xia is no stranger to the Web business in China. He was the founder of several prominent Chinese Internet companies that including online directory ChinaBig.com and content providers China Infobank Limited and China Business Resouces Limited, no ChinaE.com.

Cyberlabs says that it will leverage representative offices in San Francisco, Beijing, Hong Kong to take advantage of multiple markets for seed funding and human capital.

Xia added that Hong Kong was chosen because of its pool of entrepreneurial talen, its sound legal system for the benefit of start-up’s shareholding structure, and the city’s emerging second board, Growth Enterprise Market or GEM.

Duncan Clark, founder of Beijing-based Internet research firm BDA China Limited, commented that anything that unlocked China’s depth of IT talent was good for the Internet industry. “Once the human capital of China is locked, we’ll see more surprises.”

However, Clark said that 1999 was the Year of Internet Startups in China and that 2000 will witness a lot of shut downs.