We just got done hosting Lean Startup Machine in Shanghai and Sao Paulo. There's an incredible appetite for entrepreneurship in both cities. What do you guys see as the main differences between the US & Brazil/China markets?

There is a lot to do, a lot of opportunities not realized, and we can have a glance of the future looking at more developed markets. But on the other side i think we have holes on the pipeline and ecosystem that had prevented for decades the development of a much more richer ecosystem, but that is taking place as more socialization of the values, beliefs and tools take place to help the local entrepreneurs start practicing without needing a full deployed working vc industry.

If US = base case, here are my top 3 China differences:
1) Eat or be eaten. China's tech giants (Tencent, Baidu, Ali, etc.) are far more likely to clone you than acquire you. Build a moat, mount machine guns, and outrun the penguin.
2) Need a hammer? Build it yourself. There's no equivalent to AWS and other essential parts of the startup toolkit in China. Big co's are trying to create this, but no one trusts them.
3) Teams are BIG. Where an early-stage US startup will have co-founders and a few employees, the same in China could easily have 30 employees. It's a combination of: cheap labor, low productivity, doing everything in-house (HR, PR), and the need to move fast.

Finally I suspect China and Brazil should be two separate branches!