Marc van der Chijs. Photo: Courtesy of Marc van der Chijs

By Jonathan DeHart

Marc van der Chijs is well-versed in the art of reinvention. After a promising start in the automotive industry, he launched a consulting and trading firm, became a student of Chinese and now runs an online gaming company.

But perhaps he is best known for co-founding Tudou.com, China's first video sharing website, with co-founder and CEO Gary Wang in 2005. Yet, he is not content to rest on his laurels. Since 2006, van der Chijs has stayed involved with Tudou as board member and chose to direct his focus toward other businesses, including the online video game company Spil Games Asia, where he serves as CEO.

Always ahead of trends, he now reflects on doing business in China and his post-Tudou life in Shanghai. "This is where my network is," he told the Global Times. "And in China, where your network is, your business follows."

A bit of luck

After van der Chijs graduated with a master's degree in business economics from Maastricht University in his home of The Netherlands in 1995, he got off to an enviable start in his career.

Landing a job at the Stuttgart, Germany, headquarters of what was then DaimlerChrysler, he was later transferred to work at the company's Northeast Asia office in Beijing. This is where the typical career path ended for van der Chijs. 

"I felt bored at Daimler," he said. "I was just making presentations and collecting figures. I knew I could do more, but I wasn't sure what it would be." Not one to stick around once passion fizzles, van der Chijs quit his job and decided to study Chinese.

While figuring it out, van der Chijs founded a profitable trading and consulting company. However, he had the sense there was something bigger out there for him. In a chance encounter with Wang, van der Chijs found his ideal match.

"At first I just wanted to create a podcast website based in China," he said. "Not many people had broadband Internet at the time. And there were no video sharing sites yet. But Gary recommended we go for video."

This idea became Tudou. Neither of the two entrepreneurs knew how big the site would become. "Of course you hope things get big, but you never expect things to get as big as Tudou," van der Chijs said. "You need a bit of luck. For me, meeting Gary was my biggest stroke of luck. He's the guy behind Tudou. I'm part of it, but he's the real driving factor. He really deserves the credit for this."

Trend spotting

One trait that has served van der Chijs well over the years is his knack for spotting trends. There is no better example of this than the foresight he and Wang had in launching Tudou when they did.

"That was even before YouTube, which Tudou beat by about two weeks in its launch date. People who follow technology often have similar ideas around the same time. It was purely coincidence," van der Chijs said.

Today Tudou is among the world's largest users of bandwidth. Its 25 million daily users and 170 monthly users purportedly run 1 petabyte, or 1 million gigabytes, of data each day through the site. Although YouTube plays more videos in a day, the average video played on Tudou is longer. This means that Tudou plays about 15 billion minutes of video daily, while YouTube clocks in at 3 billion minutes.

The Chinese meaning of the website's name, "potato," which alludes to the English idiom "couch potato," is apt. While competing websites like Youku.com have put a greater emphasis on redistributing content from television, Tudou aims to position itself as a "more hip website where people can share their own films," according to van der Chijs. "We look more at how involved users are," he added. "The most important point is the quality of the content."

To this end, Tudou is now setting its sights on developing a number of high quality original shows and creating a brand image akin to what the American cable television channel HBO has done. "In the future I really think more people will use their computers in the way that they watch television now," van der Chijs said.

This focus on television was not born in a vacuum. "After I quit at Daimler I got involved with a film company here in Shanghai," van der Chijs added. "We made the first Chinese reality show back in 2003."

The English name of the show, which was sponsored by Sony and Ford among others, was "Beyond Infinity." On the show, 12 contestants were sent to Hainan Province where they had to compete and complete certain tasks over the course of two weeks.

"They got really worn down and had a special room where they could gossip about the others and so on," van der Chijs said. "In the end, we just hoped we would get some good material. And we did. Ultimately, the show did relatively OK. But we were really early in doing that in China. We doubled or tripled the ratings for the local stations we debuted on." 

Although that was his only run-in with film production, the experience changed the way he views film today. Turning his eye towards the user-made films on Tudou, van der Chijs and Wang decided to start a film festival for user-created video.

"We originally planned to do a festival akin to Burning Man," he said. "We planned to hold it somewhere like Guilin or Yunnan. But we never managed to pull it off due to not having enough money. When Tudou grew a bit we scaled down our Burning Man ambitions and decided to do a video festival instead. At first we organized a late night festival in an old church in Moganshan. The festival has become more formal ever since."

Beyond Tudou

Reflecting on his successes, van der Chijs said, "My life actually hasn't honestly changed that much since launching Tudou." Now a family man – he is married to Tudou Chief Administrative Officer Grace Wang – with two children, aged 1 and 2, he has refocused his attention on Spil Games, an online video game company, and angel investing in Shanghai.

"Compared to Tudou, the revenue from Spil Games is quite small," van der Chijs said. "But it's definitely a profitable business. We're moving more in the direction of massive multi-player games that don't require players to go to a server to download anything."

According to van der Chijs, 50 percent of earnings of Spil Games comes from virtual items purchased in online worlds, while the other 50 percent comes from advertising. Regardless of the industry, van der Chijs thinks that the key to doing business in China is having a Chinese partner.

"As a foreigner doing business in China, you have to be willing to step aside and let a local partner take care of things on many occasions," he said. "For me that's OK. I know that's the way it is, and that I can't change it."