Chatting Banquo-Style

I had a prospect insist on a meeting yesterday.  I headed over with only a vague approximation of where to find the place.   The building was one of these cheap faux Rococo offices blocks that have been thrown up across the city twenty years ago.  From the outside there was a ton of green ivy that looked like weeds covering a drainage ditch. I wasn’t sure for a moment, but then, looking up I saw the company’s logo, there in orange. 

The coolest, newest, fastest, more disruptive company in China.  Perennial assignations here since the word “internet” was first translated.  Often these companies were simple copies of what had been started in the U.S.  Protection allowed local variants to metastasize, sometimes commandingly. But claims of “innovation’ were always cast in brackets, as this was after all a ‘coddled’ terrarium.

Ten years ago, I visited Toudou’s new offices in Shanghai.   They had refurbished a cool, old factory space along a river . . .can’t recall if it was the Huang Pu or was it the Suzhou Creek.  Inside there was tastefully commissioned graffiti sprayed all over the walls.  It was a far cry from the usual visit to a Chinese state-owned-enterprise.  Meetings made you feel over-the-hill.  Surely there were some peers about.  But not many. 

Today, ten years on, I was with someone on my team who is precisely ten years younger than I am.  He kept commenting on how old he felt.  Everyone seems hopelessly young when you’re older than they are.  The office was busy, everyone was earnest, and the infectious newness of everything was quietly off-putting.  A decade’s worth of come-and-gone companies,  me now, chatting Banquo-style in the bathroom. 

Outside upstairs, they’ve done a remarkable job to repurpose the silly old building into something cool.  Something that takes advantage of its rather exceptional site at the end of the canal.  They invite us to partake in the lunch that is there, catered for all by different providers every day.  It’s very kind of them.  Soon, we’re discussing practicalities of what is to be done and the haunted feeling has disappeared.  

Wednesday 09/06/17