Allen Liu of PingCAP: Seven Pitfalls to Avoid When Going Global

Recently, Max Liu, co-founder and CEO of PingCAP, an early Yunqi Capital portfolio company, shared his insights on going global. His talk, titled "Random Notes on Going Global," covered compliance, regional market differentiation, market selection, and entry strategies.

1. From a time-saving perspective, if you're not fully committed to going global, don't do it — don't bother with globalization at all, because the challenges in between are substantial.

2. Starting with the term "going global" itself: you need to shift your mindset to a global one. Don't think of yourself as a Chinese company going abroad — think of yourself as a global company.

3. Running a global company requires building consensus. This involves the concept of contribution — when we're in a place, we need to contribute to that place. Don't let people feel you're just there to do one thing: "make money," with no contribution.

4. When going global, compliance and legal considerations must come first.

5. If you compare on-premise (OP) and cloud scenarios, these are two different forms. The cloud form has significantly higher compliance requirements than OP — geometrically higher. Because "whoever holds the data bears the complexity."

6. Developed countries abroad have extremely high expectations for contract seriousness. So there's no such thing as chasing payments — if the contract says pay by a certain date, payment happens then. But the same applies to penalty clauses: if they're in the contract, they're enforced. So contracts must be reviewed carefully, including the risks you yourself are taking on.

7. Labor laws vary in strictness across countries, and companies need to think carefully about hiring. Some countries have particularly strict privacy protections — what information you can ask about before an employee joins, what you can't ask, what you can say during interviews, what you can't say — all of this can carry risk. So labor law is an area requiring special attention. Corporate and tax law also matter, but arise less frequently than labor issues.

Supplement to point 7 — example from US labor law regarding interview privacy: Employers cannot ask about personal information unrelated to job capability, such as marital status, family, age, race, religious beliefs, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, or disability status — these all fall within personal privacy. Employers also cannot request access to a candidate's social media accounts like Facebook or Twitter unless directly relevant to the job.

8. Book recommendation from Max Liu: The Great CEO Within: The Tactical Guide to Company Building. The author, Matt Mochary, is an executive coach for Silicon Valley tech CEOs. In the book, he shares tools for effective leadership and business operations — learning how to build startups into strong, large companies through accountability, effective problem-solving, and transparent feedback.

Recommended book: The Great CEO Within

Q&A

1. Xu Shaoqi, CEO of Greetech: When expanding into a new country, should we handle all these compliance issues ourselves, or hire local third-party agencies? Should we tell them our main business, or mainly rely on our own research into local laws and regulations?

Max Liu: There's probably no universal answer. From my experience, it's rare for an external law firm to give you targeted answers. Some institutions might give you guidance — like what areas to pay attention to — but it's hard for them to give you a precise answer. Because only we know where we're going to operate. Are we setting up a local entity? How many people are we hiring locally? What's the plan for year one, year two? Only we know these things. So you can ask around, and consult law firms when setting up locally. But ultimately, the solution needs to be driven by us ourselves, going through compliance issues one by one.

2. Jiang Libing, founder of Xuedianyun: What difficulties did you face in the early stages of entrepreneurship?

Max Liu: Entrepreneurship starts with a dream — not being satisfied with just being a top player in China. During the journey, we paid a lot of tuition, which is where the importance of fundraising shows. New regions have high costs, trial-and-error costs, and fit issues. You'll pay several times the cost of a team, plus time costs. Initially we sent people overseas, because product knowledge matters a lot — having expert support for POCs is critical.