Fritz Demopoulos, who co-founded Chinese travel portal Qunar and now makes early-stage startup investments through Queen’s Road Capital, said that if he had a single piece of advice for founders looking to pursue their “China dream,” it boils down to one word: “Commitment.”

Demopoulos was interviewed on-stage at TechCrunch Shenzhen. He noted that while some entrepreneurs “want to focus on a project for one or two years, or want to focus on the Chinese opportunity for one or two years,” the average company that goes public is a decade old.

“To take that same analogy, you need to commit at least 10 years to the Chinese market,” Demopoulos said.

After all, he described China as “ruthlessly competitive” and a “highly dynamic market,” with factors like mass immigration from the countryside to big cities and rapid growth in consumer spending and borrowing.

While Demopoulos is based in Hong Kong, he invests across Southeast Asia. Outside of China, he said he’s interested in countries like Vietnam and the Philippines, but he described Indonesia is “first among equals.”

That’s because it has a young population in the early stages of consumerism and an Internet economy — he said it resembles China 7 to 10 years ago.

“Some models that worked in China 7 to 10 years ago might work today,” he said. “It’s like taking a time machine.”

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