Comment by api
16 hours ago
They are? Most of what VC funded companies do has been done before at a smaller scale, often with less polish and at a higher price.
VC money is used to scale up, cut costs with scale, capture markets, and then usually prices go up later depending on the economics.
The Chinese state is basically just acting as a big VC fund for Chinese manufacturing industries. A VC fund with a sovereign currency and the ability to sustain burn-mode for decades.
It doesn’t always work. There are some absurd examples of Chinese waste produced this way like “ghost cities.” But when it works it works, and at tremendous scale, and they can just dominate entire industries.
It's questionable whether the ghost cities truly exist though. I was under the impression they were a product of China's bizarre savings and investment market, and that a lot of them have since filled up?
They were a product of forward-looking planning. Those cities were empty when built, but have since all filled up.
Meanwhile in the west we don't build anything and then are surprised when we run into insane housing shortages.