E82: All-In Summit: Claire Cormier Thielke on China + Q&A with Flexport's Ryan Petersen

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:00)
We're really excited to have Claire with us. Come on out, Claire.
Are you here?

**David Sacks** (0:04)
All right.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:05)
What are we... What will we be talking about today?

**Claire Cormier Thielke** (0:10)
We're going to be talking about China, you know, just as everything has been all spicy.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:14)
Yeah, well, just again, we're trying to make today about just easy, breezy topics, you know, the most easiest things to manage. So we...
armaments, Ukraine. Let's go to China. Sure. Please welcome Claire.

**Claire Cormier Thielke** (0:28)
Egg.
We are going to actually keep this pretty apolitical today and maybe talk a bit about the parts about China that are less discussed in the headlines.
And Jason reached out and he said he wanted to really understand what were some problems that we wanted to see solved. So I'm a property developer. I run Greater China for Hines, we're the largest private real estate firm in the world.
And we have an incredible Greater China team. I know I see this folks in the front, they're like, where is she? I can't possibly spot her in there.
So we have a team that is working across Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Dongguan and Hong Kong. And we get to work really across the real estate spectrum. So we built the greenest skyscraper in China.
We built some of the first international serviced apartments in the country. And are doing some really interesting innovative projects, like in Hong Kong. We bought a distressed hotel that we're turning into really a new kind of living, collaborative living that's super technology enabled for a young population there, where the average white collar young person, it takes them 20 years of salary to be able to buy an apartment. So we get to approach these problems that are not unique to our part of the world, but often the solution is a combination of East meets West. So back to kind of what's the problem. Well, you know, we're sitting right now in Miami, a place that is super exciting, thanks to a lot of the things that are happening right here that have been hyped by a pretty awesome mayor, right? What did he do? He got on Twitter and he talked to all of us about what this city had to offer. It had key ingredients. It had universities. It had an upward trajectory. It had young people looking to collaborate. And at the end of the day, that's where we want to be, right? We want to be sitting together in awesome spaces like this, exchanging ideas with other interesting people. That's how you do cool stuff. And so as property developers, we think, you know, how do you create spaces where people want to be their best, right? Collaborate with others and build a better future. So that's a lot of jargon. But what does that actually mean? Back to the problem. Well, first, these ingredients are pretty clear. I teach a class at Stanford on this called Who Owns Your City? And the students usually pick it up in the first 10 minutes. It's a place that has pretty good infrastructure.
Can I get a job? Can I afford to live here? And is there cool cultural stuff that keeps it from being too bland?
But then, you'd say, okay, well, cities can learn from each other, right? You can just take those ingredients and apply it. And that's what Suarez did a great job of here. But we are living in a time where the East and West have never been more divided.
And building a city, building buildings is really hard. It's like the most extreme version of hardware.
So as a property developer, we spend our time really thinking about what are the big macro trends? What are startups focused on?
Where do they want to be? Because our spaces need to be relevant for 50, 70, 100 years. And we can't pick up our building and move it somewhere else. And so you try to take the arbitrage of what's working in one part of the world and try to apply that to another and solve problems. And that's where you find great returns, but it's also where you build places that are going to be relevant for folks. And so, you know, just a couple of examples up here behind me. So, you know, we talked about the living challenges. So for folks to be able to afford a place to buy. But the concept of rental apartments, so like multifamily, if anyone lives in a multifamily building with one landlord, that isn't totally a thing in greater China. Often people are left to rent from an individual landlord, pay a deposit that's enormous, cost prohibitive, and get, you know, quality of product that really is not up to what they would expect. And so taking a very, in some ways, kind of Western concept and applying it in a place that technologically is probably about 10 to 15 years ahead in terms of what that average user is used to, okay? They're used to unlocking a door with their phone, their WeChat is their ID. It's the way they meet new people. They can physically shake hands on WeChat to introduce themselves to a friend. It's where they keep their coupons. It's how they pay their rent. It's how they pay their taxes in some regards, right? We don't have that in America. But if you're like me and you live in Greater China, you do. And so how do you combine those things together to create something that doesn't exist? You see up behind me a logistics building.