Jonathan Weil reporting in Bloomberg:  Astroturf-marketing campaigns and manufactured news events are standard fare for big corporations looking to influence lawmakers, regulators and the public. We’ve grown numb to their antics. So it’s usually not a big story when some hare-brained promotion or lobbying effort goes wildly off track.

But when a billionaire hedge-fund manager uses the same techniques to attack a company whose stock he’s shorting, the dark arts of public relations suddenly seem novel again. So we find Bill Ackman’s hilariously inept crusade against Herbalife Ltd., the nutritional-products distributor.

Neither Ackman or his firm did anything illegal. He shorted the stock in late 2012. He had a billion dollars riding on the bet, last we heard. And he’s been trying to convince government officials that Herbalife is a pyramid scheme, so that they’ll open investigations into the company and put it out of business. He seems to believe every word of what he says about Herbalife.

But as an investment thesis, shorting Herbalife has been a horrible idea.   Herbalife’s stock has failed to cooperate with Ackman: It more than doubled in 2013, although it’s been down this year.Plenty of other hedge-fund managers could have told him from experience that the prospect of future regulatory action is rarely a good catalyst when shorting a stock. The government might not act, even if the company is a fraud.

Undeterred, Ackman’s firm, Pershing Square Capital Management, hired a small army of lobbyists and P.R. specialists to run a national campaign in hopes of making his prophecy come true. They in turn have enlisted people such as U.S. Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and U.S. Representative Linda Sanchez of California, both Democrats, to ask for investigations of Herbalife.

Civil-rights groups representing minority voters have lined up to take Pershing’s money and sent their own letters (often worded identically) to various muckety-mucks complaining about Herbalife’s sales tactics. When regulators did nothing in response, citing a lack of victims, Ackman threw money at an effort to find victims.

Still, the regulators have done nothing. And who can blame them? If they did something now, they would look like Ackman’s tools.

Clearly Ackman is only playing the system the way it cries out to be played. One of the groups that fronted for Ackman’s anti-Herbalife campaign, the League of United Latin American Citizens, took $10,000 from Pershing last year.  If you look at the same page on Lulac’s website where that donation is listed, you’ll see that Lulac also took money from the likes of General Motors, Coca Cola and Google. Those companies donated to Lulac for the same reason that Ackman’s firm did: to advance their interests.

Just about every big company gives money to lobbyists, P.R. firms and nonprofits to promote its business. There really are no rules, as long as you don’t break the law or libel somebody. The difference with Ackman is that he’s promoting his business by trying to hurt Herbalife’s business. If you find that offensive, you can take satisfaction in the fact that he’s failing.

Susan Wu talks about some of the most important things she’s learned about start-ups so far, including focusing a team and vision around first principles rather than products.

“I’ve found that the best companies I’ve ever been involved with were ones where the founders were committed to delivering genuine, lasting value (either in the form of happiness or improved quality of life) to their users above all else, and were committed to being patient in accomplishing this goal,” Wu says.

For example, Stripe is a payment software, but the team are focused on boosting the GDP of the internet. At the moment this is through providing a frictionless payment system, but the scope to grow beyond that is unlimited.  She says this approach has been shared by many of the founders she’s worked with, including Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams, Flickr and Etsy founder Caterina Fake, Elad Gill from Google, and Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison.

“When I reflect upon it, I think that what all of these people have in common is an unusual curiosity and drive towards understanding the world. Being a leader in our industry isn’t just about building products that generate billions of dollars of revenue, it’s also about illuminating new ways of thinking about products, users and communities that lead to entirely new ways of interacting or transacting online.”

Focusing too much on generating revenue to the detriment of getting the user experience or core value proposition product can create a weak foundation she cautions.

Having survived and thrived in start-ups for decades, Wu says getting the relationships right – whether it’s between co-founders, company and customers or product and users – is critical.

“The most frequently repeated thing I counsel is that founding a start-up with someone is like getting married. In many ways, it’s just as emotionally intense, you’re stuck together for at least five to seven years (if the company goes well), and you had better make sure to do the same amount of diligence in figuring out that you want to be ‘married’ to your co-founder as you do your real life partner.”

Comparing the local start-up ecosystem to Silicon Valley in 1996 and 1997, Wu adds there is great opportunity for Australia to build the community they want.  “We don’t need to inherit all of Silicon Valley’s shortcomings. We can choose which parts we want to adopt and which parts we want to evolve,” she says. “It’s still relatively early days and there remains a lot of work we need to do to strengthen the community, but there’s plenty of promising talent and growing momentum.”

Wu agrees with ongoing local commentary that one of the primary issues facing the sector is a lack of risk capital, adding investors here don’t look upon past start-up failure as a positive signal as many investors do in Silicon Valley.  As an investor, team is the most important factor for Wu, who then looks at scope and slant or vision, and ability to execute.

“Though I’ve never articulated it as such before, there’s a simple litmus test: Am I learning something by talking to this founder? Are they saying something insightful that helps me see the world in a new way? Are they saying things that force me to question some of my basic assumptions?” she says.

Sun defined what she believes to be a woman’s unique role. “Women are the core of a family and take responsibility for caring for both the old and the young, and building harmonious relations in the family. If women can endeavor in promoting morality and civilization of family, serious incidents will reduce in the society because a woman’s role is irreplaceable,” explained Sun.

“We will work on making Renmin University a Think Tank of public diplomacy. By integrating domestic universities, we are hoping to create a platform. We believe the institute can provide resources for public diplomacy for the whole country. It can spread relative knowledge among college students,” said Sun.

The phrase ‘public diplomacy’ was included in Chinese President Hu Jintao’s report, delivered at the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC). Spokesman Zhao Qizheng also outlined the diplomatic work of Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) at the first press conference of last year’s annual session.

Renmin University of China research institute on public diplomacy was founded in Beijing on February 26, 2014.

The institute, which will be headed up by Zhao Qizheng the former director of the State Council Information Office, will consist of research teams from the School of Journalism and Communication, the School of International Studies and the Peking Opera research center of Renmin University. Executive Director of Renmin University National Opera Study Center and celebrated Peking Opera artist Sun Ping will hold the post of vice president of the institute.

Public diplomacy has become a key issue at the annual Session, and CPPCC members have all made their contributions in this respect.

Sun is active in international cultural exchange activities among different countries, and has a deep understanding of diplomatic policies and the importance of public diplomacy.

As part of her proposal, Sun reveals that she hopes Peking Opera will become an elective course in universities.

Sun concluded the interview with the comment. “As a professional woman, I usually give consideration to both my family and work. Only if you take them as main tasks to grasp can you do good work overall.”