Tencent is Hiring in Silicon Valley, Will You Join?

Tencent, the Chinese internet giant and one of the most profitable internet companies of the world has just held a press conference at Santa Clara, CA. The event is titled Growing with QQ, and quite surprisingly, quite a few high level guys flew here, including Martin Lau, the President; Jun Wu, VP websearch; Huican Zhu, Chief Architect; Steve Zheng, Chief Software Architect and Head of Tencent Research; Brad Bao, General Manager of Tencent Social Games and Tom Qi Zhang, HR of Tencent America.

Everyone gave a speech (some of which is quite in details) about Tencent’s vision and plans from different angles, which at least for me, I never attended any event hosted by Tencent like this in China. The purpose of the event, is to convince silicon-valley based Chinese (even foreigners) to join Tencent (American), and according to the job description, you can tell for Tencent American, it focus on Social Gaming.

There were ~300 people attended the event. 98% of them are Chinese-looking and I noticed that some are from companies like eBay, Google etc. I am wondering how many of them would be seriously thinking of the possibility of joining Tencent.

In past a few days, I was talking a few Chinese friends who are working for eBay, Google, Apple and Linkedin. They all tell me one thing, there are many Chinese working in Silicon Valley which is cool, but the question is that how many of them are at the companies’ management level?!

Martin describes that the Tencent is the one of the most promising, international and ceiling-less platform for Chinese. For Chinese living abroad for years, they are good at English communications, understand both western and eastern culture, master the latest technology and ideas. Martin basically delivered the message, if you join Tencent, there will be no culture hurdle, you can still stay in Palo Alto and more important you will have better chance to jump to the next level of your career. As the matter of fact, the speakers, Jun Wu, Huican Zhu and Steve Zheng are all ex-Google, ex-Microsoft staff based in states,

Martin said, the vision of the company is to be the most respected internet company of the world and the mission is to enhance people’s quality of life through Internet services. I don’t really know how long it might take, but if we can have more Chinese companies truly share the same vision, one day, for Chinese, who is going to care about Silicon Valley.