BV Capital

Location: Beijing

Company Description: Bob Li recently left his cushion job as a Business Development Manager at Red Herring-Beijing to devote more time to stewarding his first venture: Very86.com, a platform to support social networking sites (SNS) tailored to local communities. The site, meaning VeryChina (86 is China’s country code), provides the basic tools for individuals to create and manage a social network for their interests. Currently, Very86 is only focusing on social networks for cities and already has 14 cities up and running, the oldest being for the city of Tianjin, which has already registered 80K members. The company already owns over 200 domain names and plans to eventually promote the site to be used for special interest groups in addition to city SNS. The model is very similar to Ning.com but Li is quick to distinguish Very86 from Ning. Besides the sites’ Mandarin interface, domains will be franchised out to site managers for a fee to instill ownership and ensure sites are maintained and usership promoted rather than having networking sites started on a whim and abandoned after a short time.

Li and his team are currently fundraising to expand the sites and working on developing additional revenue streams through the franchised sites.