East v. West

Last Wednesday night in New York, we hosted 30 of the top consumer tech founders for dinner. The event started at 8pm—a time when Silicon Valley is typically winding down, but the East Coast was just getting started. With an abundance of red wine and espressos (a powerful combo), a fascinating theme emerged: the geography of innovation is shifting.

For years, we've accepted a simple narrative: Silicon Valley creates, the East copies. The Valley birthed personal computing, the internet, smartphones—and Asia + everyone due east followed, adapting and localizing these innovations. But our dinner conversations painted a different picture. The "East vs West" dynamic isn't just shifting—it's fundamentally inverting.

While Silicon Valley continues to push the boundaries of technical innovation, the East and China specifically has masterfully executed a different playbook. Rather than competing on deep technical breakthroughs, they've excelled in rapid operationalization and distribution—a strategy reminiscent of their approach to manufacturing, but now applied more broadly. This success stems from several key factors. First, the embrace of a "good-enough" product philosophy, prioritizing speed to market over perfection. It's ironically similar to Mark Zuckerberg's "done is better than perfect" mantra, though executed at a different scale and velocity. Second, the focus on a rapidly expanding middle class with enormous purchasing power, as evidenced by the staggering scale of events like Alibaba's Singles Day (139 billion in sales) compared to Black Friday (11 billion in US).

Perhaps most crucially, the East developed under fundamentally different market constraints. With an advertising market just a quarter the size of the US and a cultural aversion to subscriptions (reflected in consumer-protective policies like WeChat's easy cancellation features), companies had to get their unit economics right from day one. Unlike the Silicon Valley mantra of "we'll figure out monetization later," the East adopted a "tomorrow isn't promised" mentality that demanded immediate profitability.

These conditions created the perfect storm for rapid innovation—often leapfrogging Western approaches entirely. The combination of massive user bases, fewer entrenched business models, and intense competition has led to the development of novel features, super-app ecosystems, and commerce methods that now influence Western product development.

The easy dismissal would be that the East is simply picking low-hanging fruit while Silicon Valley tackles harder technical challenges. But this misses a crucial point: their distribution prowess is creating real competitive advantages that challenges even Silicon Valley's most established players. Take Temu's meteoric rise: while Amazon built its empire on technical innovation and logistics mastery, Temu is aggressively capturing market share through sheer operational and distribution force—flooding the market with over 9,000 ads across platforms. The impact is so significant that Amazon, the quintessential Silicon Valley success story, launched its "Amazon Haul" in direct response to Temu's threat. This isn't just a different approach; it's proving to be a legitimately disruptive force that's forcing Western tech giants to adapt their playbooks.

The Amazon versus Temu battle may be the most visible flip between East and West influence, but it's just the tip of the iceberg. Look at any app store category and you'll find a telling pattern: where Western companies once dominated with well-funded, technically sophisticated products, teams of hungry developers from the East are now claiming serious territory in the top charts through their relentless focus on distribution.

And this isn't just a China story. From Cyprus to Warsaw, Istanbul to Paris, and yes, even New York City, we're seeing a new wave of founders who've internalized these distribution-first principles. They're proving that innovation isn't just about technical breakthroughs—it's about getting your product into users' hands by any means necessary. For this reason and a lot more, we're bullish on the East.