I flew to Shanghai to attend muShanghai and show people that signing deals doesn't always require getting on a plane.
Romain Blumberger poses for photos with fellow attendees at muShanghai. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]
The workshop I ran at the Alibaba Center was called "How Chinese Brands Sell B2B Internationally Without Networks". Standing in Shanghai and arguing that you don't need networks to sell is a bit like standing in France and arguing you don't need bread. The irony was not lost on me.
First, who is saying this? I am Romain Blumberger, Swiss-French, and I build outbound sales systems for B2B companies. My job is to help businesses reach customers they have never met and turn cold contact into real pipeline. I learned it the hard way: running community growth across 21 markets for a crypto exchange, then closing partnerships for DeFi protocols, and now doing it full time as a founder. The question underlying all of it never changes. How do you earn trust with a stranger, at a distance, before anyone books a flight? I also lived in China from 2018 to 2021, studying in Chengdu, which is why flying back to teach in Shanghai felt less like a business trip and more like a return.
About 60 people showed up. That was the biggest room I had ever spoken in front of, and I was nervous. Nobody knew me a few weeks earlier. By the time I was on stage, plenty of them did. That was the entire point of the talk, sitting right in front of me, 60 people deep. The relationship was already built. I had just built it on purpose instead of waiting years for luck to do it for me.
MuShanghai
The talk was the reason I came. MuShanghai was the reason I stayed.
It is one of the few places I have seen where international founders and Chinese founders genuinely share the same room. Most ecosystems quietly pick a side. You either get the expat bubble talking to itself, or a local scene that foreigners observe from the outside without ever truly entering. MuShanghai sits on the line between the two, and it works because nobody there treats that divide as a wall.
The best moments had nothing to do with my own work. I watched it happen more than once: a founder from Europe and a founder from Shenzhen would start talking, and somewhere in the middle of it you could see them realize they were solving the same problem from opposite ends of the world. One had the market and not the manufacturing. The other had the manufacturing and not the market. Neither had the full picture alone, and for 20 minutes at a side table they built it together. Watching that click happen, over and over, was worth the trip.
Hongqiao transportation hub is one of the largest integrated transport networks in the world. [Photo/Shanghai Hongqiao International Central Business District]
What changed while I was gone
I thought I knew China. Shanghai was my first reminder that I knew only one version of it.
The city does not behave like a place waiting to become a global hub. It behaves like one that already is. You feel it in Hongqiao especially, which is built as a gateway, the point people move through on their way in and out of the country. That makes it a fitting home for a CBD trying to be genuinely international instead of just standing next to the idea.
I left in 2021 and came back to find it a step ahead of where I left off. China has gone fully digital. I do not think I touched cash even once. There is barely anywhere left that would take it, and nobody expects you to. Everything is reduced to a tap: fast, modern, and frictionless. Within a day, you stop noticing because it just becomes the way the place works. And underneath the convenience, there is a current you can feel. Hongqiao does not read like a CBD that has arrived. It reads like one where big things are about to happen, and everyone moving through it seems to know it.
What I took home
I teach founders that you can build trust from anywhere, before you ever buy a plane ticket. I believe it, and the workshop proved it: a total of 60 warm strangers in a room I had reached from a laptop.
But I still got on the plane. The system gets you the meeting. Showing up is what you do once it does. Shanghai did not change my mind about how selling works. It reminded me that the laptop and the room are not rivals. They are the same move, finished in person.
