The German city of Bielefeld has bred a lot of young, ambitious Internet entrepreneurs. The Dreyer brothers were craving to leave for southern Europe when their father suggested Shanghai instead, because of an article titled “Shanghai-The City of the Future” in a newspaper.

To the day five years ago, the Dreyer brothers booked their tickets to China. Today, David, Julius, and Robert, 28, 26, and 24 respectively are millionaires. The NetCircle is their Shanghai-based company which specializes in creating and sustaining large-scale Web communities. The most prominent one is a dating site ranking among Germany’s top 20 Web communities.

More than 2 million members who create 2.5 billion page views per year visit the Dreyer sites. Besides website development, the company also does business in Internet start-ups.

Last year, The NetCircle made a profit of 35million yuan ($5.1 million). The young brothers employ more than 50 staff from more than 10 countries and their work place is located at the end of Shanghai’s Yichang Road, occupying an area of 1,000 sqm. Their workplace is a little arrangement of two-story brick houses, an obvious contrast to the city’s overall modern and sensational layout. It is a renovated version of a warehouse, thus gets the name: Warehouse Creative Center. The three young German brothers work in one of these houses, striving for their dream.

The brothers started their small Internet business early in their teens back in Bielefeld. At that time, they bought memorable Web domains and programmed them to be easily found by search engines. Their work did attracted a lot of traffic to those sites, which were more serious but harder to find, so they made a decent amount of money from those websites. The money was enough to send them on a long holiday, and after some consideration, they chose the charming China as their destination.

The brothers rented a six-room apartment in the Putuo district, Shanghai, for their working holiday. They did some Internet project rather leisurely at first, but unexpectedly, one of their dating sites became so popular that they had to work all hours to keep the site running. Then they recruited some IT experts, and a 30-member team crowded into this small apartment by the end of 2007. It was a win-win strategy for both parties when the municipal government leased the brothers the old warehouse at a reasonable price while The NetCircle boys agreed to renovate the building.

During their expanding process, the brothers hired Swiss Claude Ritter as CEO to help optimize their business structure. Due to its fast-growing pace, the company needs many more hands to handle this challenging job of the Web projects. The problem wasn’t the lack of applicants, but the right people to be hired in this international team, consisting of Chinese, Germans, Uruguayans, British, Kazakhs, and many others. Misunderstandings are unavoidable in such a culturally diversified environment, but it also invites creativity and inspiration. Also, their pleasant working climate has won them a good reputation as an attractive employer.
Ritter says they receive 30 to 40 applications every week, but only one or two of them are qualified to an interview and pre-employment testing.

The NetCircle plans to expand their group scale by another 10 to 20 percent in 2009 and they are particularly interested in hiring Chinese employees. Ritter explains that if they employ more Chinese staff, things will be easier for the company operation with fewer language barriers.

Ritter has encountered culture shock himself when he first came to Shanghai in 2005 on a 4-month university project. He didn’t know a thing about China or a word of Chinese at that time. He had been more interested in going westwards, like America，but the novelty and possibilities in China finally persuaded him out of his original plan. Things proved his correct choice for after the project. Ritter became so reluctant to go back to Switzerland. Then he found a job in the Dreyer’s company as a project leader and now becomes CEO after fours years.

Ritter learned to speak some everyday Chinese to better communicate with the local people, but it is quite another story for the Dreyer brothers who take regular Chinese lessons every weekday since their arrival in Shanghai, and they can almost speak fluently. Julius Dreyer expresses his feelings about learning Chinese that the more he knows about the language the more familiar he becomes with Chinese culture. He’s happy that he has got over the initial culture shock that leads to the uneasiness of many foreigners in Shanghai.

It is fairly easy for foreigners to live together in Shanghai for there are so many of them to form a community, but Dreyer suggests going out of this circle and meet new people and experience new things to expand their life circle.

Of course, a foreigner should take things easy, not in a rush too often, especially with Chinese food. So he always orders the strangest dishes to him to conquer his prejudice against Chinese things and he thinks it worth the try.

Now the Dreyer brothers are planning to set up a new business, Julius and David want to work in other places but Robert will remain in Shanghai to finish the projects.

They are preparing for a novel life in Barcelona and create a new and a more wonderful life. The plan is to develop a new branch of The NetCircle, which will focus on marketing and sales and some supplementing work to the headquarters.

They are embracing the world as a whole and trying new things all the time for a more fabulous life!

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