“When you go to China, you have to rethink how you do everything. You have to start from scratch. In many ways you have to become Chinese,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick remarked at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.

On August 1, Uber sold its China operations to native competitor Didi Chuxing Technology Co. Though it was packaged as a failure for Uber, Kalanick tried to argue otherwise.

“You can make the argument that it’s very clear that our investment is worth $7 billion now. That’s a good return in two years’ time. We feel pretty good about our efforts there. We feel very good about our partnership that we have now,” he said.

Kalanick first started testing the ride-hailing app in Beijing in early 2013. He gathered his “best people” — a team of six or seven people — and camped out in an apartment for a couple weeks and launched seven months later. During those few months, Uber invested over $2 billion into the country.

Then, in August, Uber sold its China business to Didi in exchange for a 20% stake in the company.

“We thought it would be super interesting and maybe impossible for us to go and do a transportation thing in China. China is just so different than the rest of the world,” he noted.

He warned the audience: “When you go into China thinking you know how to do something, you’re going to get your ass handed to you. You have to think of everything as different until proven otherwise. [You] have to break everything down and then build the thing back up.”

He said he doesn’t see the partnership as defeat or success; it was, rather, a learning experience, and as a Didi board member, he’s looking forward to exploring the country even further.

“It is what it is. [Getting into China] was a wild, amazing, entrepreneurial journey for us, for me.”

Though Silicon Valley is seen as the “north star for innovation” now, Kalanick said it would be foolish for fellow entrepreneurs to neglect the other global hubs for creativity and disruption.

“I call it the three bays: The Bay Area, Beijing and Bangalore. You’d better start spending time in China.”

Melody Hahm is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering entrepreneurship, technology and real estate. Follow her on Twitter @melodyhahm.

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