Fabrice Grinda on China: pragmatism, scale and a robotics craze

FJ Labs co-founder Fabrice Grinda spent October 9–17 in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Hangzhou on a founder and investor trip organized by Kevin Ryan, visiting about a dozen companies including UBTECH, Tencent, Hai Robotics, BYD, GCL Perovskite, RedNote, C12.AI, BrainCo and Unitree. His verdict: China is a hyper-competitive, relentlessly pragmatic ecosystem, structurally ahead of the US in hardware and manufacturing but behind in software and autonomy.

• Pragmatism above all. Local governments actively court foreign investors with introductions and licensing help. Founders stay out of politics and focus on building, shipping and getting funded.
• Scale is a structural advantage. Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei market covers everything from single prototype units to mass production within a few blocks. BYD's Zhengzhou site covers about 130 km² and targets 1M cars a year. Tencent's Penguin Island HQ cost about $4.5B, less than a fifth of Hudson Yards, on seven times the land.
• Less far ahead than expected. Drone delivery is still rare outside showcase sites, no eVTOLs were seen flying, and self-driving lags San Francisco. Grinda thinks Figure AI is ahead of UBTECH and Unitree on software.
• Robotics is a craze. Task-specific robots like Hai Robotics are the ones actually being deployed, with only about 10% of warehouses automated today. Unitree gave the most impressive humanoid demo but puts useful household humanoids 3–5 years out. BrainCo's non-invasive neural prosthetics impressed him most.
• Relentless domestic competition. Founders see other Chinese startups, not Western ones, as their competition. The West is a market and a source of capital.

Source: Fabrice Grinda, "A Week in China: Pragmatism, Scale and the Robotics Craze"