E82: All-In Summit: Claire Cormier Thielke on China + Q&A with Flexport's Ryan Petersen

We're really excited to have Claire with us. Come on out, Claire. Are you here?

Hello.

Great. What are we-

(claps)

Welcome, Claire. What will we be talking about today?

We're gonna be talking about China, you know-

Ah.

... just as everything has been all spicy. We'll-

Yeah. Well- well, just again, we're- we're trying to make today about just easy, breezy topics that, you know, the most easiest things to manage, so we-

(laughs)

Armaments, Ukraine, "Let's go to China." "Sure." Uh, please welcome Claire.

Hey.

(claps)

What's going on?

Let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sa- What's going on? And I said- We open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you guys. Queen of Kin Wan. Going all in.

We are going to actually keep this pretty apolitical today, and maybe talk a bit about the parts about China that are less discussed in the Hailan- in the headlines. And, you know, Jason reached out and he said he wanted to- to really understand what were some- some problems, and he wanted to see solved, that we wanted to see solved. So, I'm a property developer. Uh, I run Greater China for Hines. We're the largest private real estate firm in the world. And we have an incredible Greater China team. I know I see there's folks in the front, they're like, "Where is she? I can't possibly spot her in there." Uh, so-

(laughs)

(laughs) So, we have a team that is working across Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Dongguan and Hong Kong, and, uh, we get to work really across the real estate spectrum. So, uh, we built the greenest skyscraper, uh, in- in China. Uh, we built some of the first international serviced apartments, uh, in the country, and are doing some really interesting innovative projects. Like in Hong Kong, we bought a distressed hotel that we're turning into really a new kind of living, collaborative living that's super technology enabled, uh, for a young population there, where the average white-collar young person, it takes them 20 years of salary to be able to buy an apartment. So, we get to approach these problems that are not unique to our part of the world, but often the solution is a combination of East meets West. So, back to kinda what's the- the problem. Well, you know, we're sitting right now in Miami, a place that is super exciting thanks to a lot of the things that are happening right here that have been hyped by a pretty awesome mayor, right? What did he do? He got on Twitter and he talked to all of us about what this city had to offer. It had key ingredients. It had universities, it had an upward trajectory, it had young people looking to collaborate. And at the end of the day, that's where we wanna be, right? We wanna be sitting together in awesome spaces like this, uh, exchanging ideas with other interesting people. That's how you do cool stuff. And so as property developers, we think, you know, "How do you create spaces where people want to be their best," right, collaborate with others, and build a better future? So, that's a lot of jargon, but what does that actually mean? Back to the problem. Well, first, these ingredients are pretty clear. I teach a class at Stanford on this called Who Owns Your City, and the students usually pick it up in the first 10 minutes. It's, uh, it's a place that has pretty good infrastructure, uh, uh, can I get a job, can I afford to live here, and is there cool cultural stuff that keeps it from being too bland. Uh, but then, you know, you'd say, "Okay, well, cities can learn from each other," right? You can just take those ingredients and apply it, and that's what Suarez did a- a great job of here. But we are living in a time where the East and West have never been more divided, right? And building a city, building buildings is really hard. It's- it's like the most extreme version of hardware. So, as a property developer, you know, we spend our time really thinking about what are the big macro trends? What are startups focused on? Uh, where do they wanna be? Because our spaces need to be relevant for 50, 70, 100 years, and we can't pick up our building and move it somewhere else. And so you try to take the arbitrage of what's working in one part of the world and try to apply that to another and solve problems, and that's where you find great returns, but it's also where you build places that are gonna be relevant for folks. And so, you know, just a couple examples. Uh, up here behind me. So, you know, we talked about the living challenges, uh, so for folks to be able to- to be able to afford a place to buy, but the concept of rental apartments, so like multifamily, if anyone lives in a multifamily building with one landlord, that isn't totally a thing in greater China. Often, people are left to rent from an individual landlord, pay a deposit that's enormous, uh, cross-prohi- you know, cost prohibitive, and get, you know, quality of- of product that- that really is not up to what they would expect. And so taking a very, in some ways, kind of Western concept and applying it in a place that technologically is probably about 10 to 15 years ahead in terms of what that average user is used to, okay? They're used to unlocking a door with their phone. Their WeChat is their ID. It's the way they meet new people. They can physically shake hands on WeChat to introduce themselves to a friend. It's where they keep their coupons. It's how they pay their rent. It's how they pay their taxes in some regards, right? We don't have that in America. But if you're like me and you live in greater China, you do. And so how do you combine those things together to create something that doesn't exist? Uh, you see up behind me a- a logistics building. Uh, but it's actually six stories high, something we're developing that is a- a giant-... almost like a refrigerator, uh, but a high rise, super tech-enabled. Uh, and that's because, you know, they got a lot of people. That building will be sitting within a 45-minute driving radius to 45 million people. And yet, China only has a quarter of the cold storage capacity per capita that the US does. Okay? It doesn't take a genius to see that this trajectory is, you know, lower left to, to upper right. And so again, you're taking this concept of East meets, meets West. The building up here, uh, just behind me, is, is in Shanghai. It's about a million-foot tower. You have a lot of those here in the United States, big fancy office buildings, you know, where people used to go to sit at their computers and do work. Um, but this one is very different from one that you may have walked into earlier this week. This entire building is on WeChat. You can interact with the building on WeChat. You can interact with the landlord. You can interact with your other tenants. Uh, you can have chance encounters or, uh, organize a yoga trip in the afternoon, uh, with the people, with the space, using this digital interface. So in, in a way, it's really combining the way we live right now. We live in a physical world, but so much of our idea sharing, our collaboration is happening in the air, right? In a digital experience that we can't see. And so it's another combination of this East meets West. And so, what becomes a problem, and an opportunity, but a problem, uh, when you sit in the middle of this world, like my team has the honor to do, uh, is you see that there are all of these opportunities for us to be able to share this, really the best of what the West has to offer, with the innovation that's happening on the ground in China, but it is so hard to talk about in this very divided world. And so we like to take the positive side and say, you know, we're living in this world of, like, Magic and Larry, and how can we make each other better? So, I thought I'd use just a few minutes, and then we'll hang out with the besties, um, to, to maybe share, uh, a story that, that maybe y'all haven't read so much about so that you get the benefit of knowing a little bit about what's happening over there. And you can see an example of where sort of East meets West and that collaboration can make us all better. So up here is a gentleman y'all will probably recognize. It's Deng Xiaoping. You know, famous for really the opening up of China. And, you know, he was an experimenter. You know, he had this vision of what China could be. And he saw what the importance of the physical world, the physical infrastructure, what a role that could play, uh, in, in... to enable the economy to jump further. And so, the picture to the other side is Shenzhen, which, in 1980 was barely a, a fishing village. It had about 58,000 people, very few paved roads. And Deng Xiaoping, he was from Sichuan, so he really understood what it was like to not be from the big city. And so he declared it a special economic zone, special economic zone, so Jingji qiuju. And that meant that it would be this place to experiment with, uh, bits of capitalism, with free trade, et cetera. So what is it today? Well first, there's that same road, a long progression, just a few years after it was declared a zone. And then up here behind me is what it looks like now. Shenzhen is over 12 million people. The average age is 29. Uh, it's really the tech hub of China. Uh, so companies like DJI, which makes 70% of the world's drones. Uh, they call this area home. And, uh, and just within this area, if you were to go shortly from where this picture is taken, you'll have two of the world's five biggest ports by tonnage, okay? So how do you take that head start and turn it into something further? Well, they took a lesson out of the book of the West, and they created something called the Greater Bay Area. It's like the... Yeah, yeah, okay. You guys get it. (laughs) And so, what is the Greater Bay Area? Well, it is a collection of nine cities on the mainland side, uh, some of which may be familiar to you guys. So Shenzhen is mentioned, and Guangzhou. Guangzhou is about 18 million people. Uh, places like Zhuhai. Do y'all remember, you know, several years ago, there was this thing about China building the longest bridge in the world? Everyone's like, "Where is that?" Okay, it was in Zhuhai. Uh, and then, so nine cities on the China side, and then Hong Kong and Macau. And together, this, this area, it's about the size of, call it West Virginia, today has a GDP that's sitting right around Canada and South Korea, okay? About 1.7 trillion. In 2017, they declared this Gre- Greater Bay Area name, and, and it was there to really back up a lot of the investment, frankly, that had already started to join these cities together to create a super region. So within that super region, they spent about 300 billion to build infrastructure to further connect it. So within just four years, they'd built 2,000 miles of speed rail, like high-speed trains. You know, we have like a little, you know, one from here that goes to Fort Lauderdale. You know, Texas is gonna get one in the year 2090.