Editor’s Note: Meet Junling Cui, our exclusive wOw woman on the scene in Beijing. For the Olympics, wowOwow goes right to the source for an insider’s perspective on the news coming out of Beijing. Junling will be reporting from both the women’s perspective and from the point of view of a Chinese national, on all things Olympics — from the athletes’ stories to the social impact of the games.

Day Three

One of the great things about the Olympics is that Beijing’s already intense social swirl is only getting more-so. Pretty much everyone who’s anyone in town — and indeed from across China — is here, out and about. I had dinner tonight in a courtyard restaurant in one of Beijing’s few remaining “Hutongs”—the narrow, winding streets that defined yesterday’s capital — with an extraordinary Chinese businesswoman. Today’s post won’t be about sports. It’ll be all business.

Hu Chao, 47, is the cofounder and CEO of a Beijing-based company called Leyou. She got her MBA at San Francisco State University in the mid-’90s and married a Chinese American guy from Taiwan who worked for CISCO in the States during the tech boom. The two of them then returned to China, convinced that their future here was bright.

Her husband continued to work for CISCO, and, just over seven years ago, Michelle started up her own company. She was convinced, having glimpsed the power of e-commerce in its relatively early stages in the United States, that its potential was huge in China. She thought she could sell clothes and toys to parents with kids between the ages of newbie and six.

She picks up the story: “My timing was bad. The tech bust had come to the U.S. and spread pretty much everywhere. Plus, the infrastructure for e-commerce wasn’t yet developed sufficiently. People didn’t have enough trust in the online payments system, and the business didn’t grow enough as fast as I thought it would.”

So in a twist that U.S. readers will appreciate, Hu had a counterintuitive thought: "If the Internet age is on pause, why don’t I take a page out of American commercial history?" She turned the time machine back by more than a century: "I started a catalog" — like Sears, Roebuck & Co., which used its first printed mailer in 1888 to sell jewelry and watches. The Chinese market for babies’ clothes and toys was intensely fragmented, but the catalog helped Hu break through the clutter. Her company, Leyou ("happy friend" in English) expanded its number of retail outlets (it had started with one store in Beijing) and by 2004, as e-commerce matured in China, her original idea began to gain traction. At this point, venture capital money for e-commerce had begun finding its way to China, and in the last three years, Hu has gotten funding from two major venture funds, as well as Goldman Sachs. The online portion of her business in now about 40 percent of Leyou’s total revenue stream.

Sitting in the restaurant tonight amid a group of Americans and Chinese brought together by the Olympics, Hu said she doesn’t believe there are any serious barriers to women entrepreneurs in China. “No, not anymore. China is, of course, a conservative country; but in business, if you have an idea and are tough, people will invest in you; not because you’re a man or a woman — but because your company can make money. And that’s all we can ask for, right? Isn’t that sort of the American way, too? That’s one of the lessons I took away from my years in San Francisco.”

Hu says she hopes to be able to take her company public in two to three years. In China, never mind the medal count, that’s the gold most people want to go for.

Back to sports and the Games tomorrow!