Izak Jenie (right) with other Nexian Selular Group Directors

At 43 years old, Izak Jenie is still talking about new business ideas and starting projects. He just can’t stop. This is a man who has started more than ten companies in Indonesia, beginning at age nineteen. Most of them failed, but those that survived are renowned companies in Indonesia today and are generating tens of millions of dollars in yearly revenue. Some very successful companies Izak started include Jatis Group, Jatis Mobile, and Metrotech Makmur Sejahtera (MMS).

Coming from an average income family, Izak was hungry for success. His first startup was a computer graphics company launched in 1989 during his university days. Computers were not widely available then and there was no internet. Izak was lucky enough to get a PC at home and he subsequently taught himself digital graphic design. Being one of the first few guys in Indonesia with this skill, he got lucrative projects from advertising firms. He was able to pay his tuition fees with some cash left over to treat friends for meals. However, competition grew and his margins thinned. He got out of the business in its fourth year.

The early web

After graduation, his friends were able to get high-paying corporate jobs quickly, but it took Izak nine months to get a job as a graphic designer because most companies hired based on academic results. He worked for one year but realized that he didn’t like the routine corporate job. While at the office, Izak would often work on other tech projects that interest him. One was called the Free World Dial-Up service, it would allow people to call overseas using the internet and save on overseas call charges. It’s basically exactly what Skype does today, but Izak was working on that concept in 1995.

That same year, he read a book titled Going Digital by Nicholas Negroponte and it made him realize the world was going to change. He quit his job and started an online bookstore. Concurrently, he also started a few other companies with different partners. These startups all failed. Poor timing and partnership disputes were the causes of their demise; for example, the online bookstore flopped because there weren’t many people online in the mid-nineties and almost no one did their shopping there.

Despite failing numerous times, Izak never gave up. Together with Jusuf Sjariffudin and Ishak Surjana, he co-founded Jatis Group, an IT consulting company in 1997.

One of his early employees there said:

Before joining Jatis, I asked Izak why this (Jatis) will be a success? Izak answered nonchalantly that he had failed in so many previous companies and in each failure, he learnt something from it. As such, he had already learnt how to fail. Jatis will not be a failure.

And indeed, Jatis became a hugely successful company. It provides IT solutions to banks, telcos, payment companies and other corporations. Its products include internet banking, mobile banking, and tax systems. At one point, more than 80 percent of Indonesia’s mutual funds traders were using Jatis’s trading platform. The company started with ten employees and eventually grew to over 500 by the end of the third year. In the same year, it also received $10 million from 3i, a well established VC firm from the UK, for it to expand regionally to Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines.

Going mobile

In 2002, together with Erik Ridzal, Izak started Jatis Mobile, a subsidiary company under Jatis Group. Jatis Mobile deals with ringtones, location-based services and mobile content. As he already had good partnerships with local telcos through their work with Jatis Group, Jatis Mobile was able to make lucrative partnerships with telcos and was profitable from day one. Jatis’ group revenue had already hit $40 million.

In 2010, Izak started Metrotech Makmur Sejahtera (MMS). MMS’s core business is to build a messaging application on Nexian mobile devices, which are hugely popular in Indonesia. Izak brought in Nexian’s owner as a partner and together they launched Nexian Messaging. The platform attracted five million users in eight months, half of which were active users. Now, it is recording more than three billion messages sent per month and is still growing twenty percent month-on-month. In 2011, Singapore’s Si2i acquired a majority share of Nexian Group for $175 million.

Advice for young entrepreneurs

Izak says his failures are the cornerstone of the success of his latest three companies. Some key things he learned from those failures:

Getting good partners for startup is crucial. I like Warren Buffet’s investment theory for this. If you know from the outside that there may be trouble, then don’t get involved. Because once you get in, it’s difficult to get out. Similarly, in finding partners, if you foresee potential problems in working with them, then don’t get started.

I wish I had mentors in my early days. That way, I could have avoided some failures and attained success earlier. After going through so much, I can now easily think through the whole business cycle and identify potential pitfalls and opportunities. That comes from experience and it is what young entrepreneurs lack.

Managing expectations and cash-flow is important. You should always discuss with the team about the business outlook. Whether it will reach profitability in six months, one year or three years, we need to discuss it upfront. With expectations set, people are then able to plan their finances and focus on the actual work. If not, financial problems can be brought back to the family and cause tension among the team and their families. If you cannot meet your expectations and you make families suffer, then you should stop and go back to a corporate job.

When starting on something, I always like to think and work on something new. It’s a bit risky but that is what entrepreneurship is all about. If you do it right and if you are focused enough, you will get somewhere. Nobody is stupid enough to start a business to fail, if you fail you are not focused enough. Many entrepreneurs already know the plan to succeed, but along the way, they fall for distractions to make quick money. In my twenty-plus years of experience as an entrepreneur, I met all kinds of entrepreneurs: the very calm ones, the very aggressive ones, all kinds of them. Regardless of the style, those who got somewhere are those who are highly focused.

Izak is currently still the main man at MMS. Despite the success, he just doesn’t seem to stop; he co-founded a new startup, M-saku, a mobile payment system for Visa cardholders in Indonesia. The kind of resilience he has shown when times are hard, and the passion he has exhibited through his 25 years of entrepreneurship, are exemplary. This is what young entrepreneurs in Asia should learn from: to see entrepreneurship as a long-term journey rather than gunning for a quick exit. To help younger entrepreneurs, Izak dedicates some of his time to be a mentor at Founders Institute Jakarta.

Izak Jenie (third from right) with some of the Jatis team during a dinner.

During Startup Asia Singapore a month ago, I met Streetdirectory‘s founder, Firdhaus Akber and learned about his entrepreneurial journey. From my perspective, it was one hell of a roller coaster ride: one that involved the excitement of seeing exponential growth in traffic, the promise of an IPO and him being courted by flocks of investors; and the low times of being forced out of his own company before scraping his way back in, and getting sued by a Singapore government agency in a lawsuit that lasted more than a year.

StreetDirectory is a Singapore startup that was founded back in 2000. It is a portfolio company of Hong Kong’s JDB Holdings, whose portfolio also includes JobsDB, 88DB, Openrice, Cozycot, FlowerAdvisor and SgCarmart (which was recently acquired by SPH). Streetdirectory has a team of around 200 staff across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Hong Kong and boasts more than 1.2 million registered users and 1.3 million apps downloads.

Connecting the Dots

Firdhaus started his first full time job before starting university. He worked as an instructor at a fitness club and did enough to convince his boss to entrust him with managing the club. He deferred school to focus on the job. Then he moved to join an event company as a salesperson. He also worked at an IT company at a job that involved him handling brands, building relationships and making sales. Reflecting on his entrepreneurial journey, he attributes what he has achieved at Streetdirectory to the many skills he picked up in these previous jobs. He has found that despite the diverse industries he has worked in, it all connects.

Unknowingly, the different exposures in my previous jobs helped me greatly in running Streetdirectory. When I became a boss, all these pieces came together. I got the experience of managing a team in the fitness club; I got the skills of doing sales from the events company and the skills of developing relationships with important clients through my work at the IT company.”

Photo credit to The Titan Times Daily

The Roller Coaster Ride

Firdhaus started Streetdirectory with three other co-founders in 2000. Previously, they had approached him on numerous occasions about the idea of building an online map. But he rejected them every time as he was skeptical that people needed an online map and he didn’t see how it could be monetized. But they were persistent and eventually he decided to give it a shot.

In the beginning, the founders funded the startup themselves. In 2000, there was no other online map company in Singapore. The idea was to get maps from a government agency, Singapore Land Authority (SLA), and put them online. The business took off almost immediately.

After operating for a while, people started knocking on my door. These people were venture capitalists. Suddenly, I realized Streetdirectory is actually in the dot com arena. I didn’t realize that. I started researching and understood more about it. Shortly after the VCs’ visit, HSBC bank also came and offered to bring us to IPO. During this period, something was happening to our site. On a daily basis, our traffic jumped without us doing anything. If today’s traffic is 3,000, next day will be 6,000 and 12,000 day after next. This 100% daily growth rate continued for a while and there was never a day traffic didn’t grow.

Being traditional business people and not the typical dot com founders (who value traffic more than dollars), the founders saw this phenomenon growth as a liability because the server cost is expensive. Cash was the main problem for their business then. They started to do consulting projects for governments, schools and get SMEs to advertise on their sites. The consulting projects involved helping government agencies and schools to map out their campuses and also listing them on the street directory maps. Through these projects, they were able to bring in revenue to balance their books. They also raised a million Singapore dollars from angel investors at that time.

During the third year of operations, things got dramatic. Firdhaus was voted out of Streetdirectory as the board felt that he wasn’t contributing enough to the company. At this point in time, Streetdirectory had already grown to become the leading online map portal for Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia and sales were doing well. Firdhaus went off to do consulting work on his own. He re-joined the company only a year later, when one of the co-founders wanted to cash out and move on; Firdhaus bought back his shares and came back.

Firdhaus’s roller coaster ride did not stop there. Due to copyrights issues, the SLA sued Streetdirectory and wanted it to take down the maps. This would effectively put Streetdirectory out of business, as maps are fundamental to its business. Firdhaus took on the lawsuit and fought it for over a year, incurring huge legal fees. During that time, shareholders and directors pulled out of the business, leaving Firdhaus as the remaining shareholder.

Surprisingly, during these troubled times, a Hong Kong investment group still choose to put faith in his team and backed them. The group advised them to develop their own maps and not fight a losing lawsuit against the state-owned agency. Adversity brought out the best in his team and the remaining members of the team fervently re-created their own map. Interestingly, despite having its service suspended for three months, the traffic for the re-vamped site (with the new in-house maps) did not show any decline.

Looking back at his own experiences, Firdhaus advises entrepreneurs to be resilient.

Entrepreneurs need to understand that they may not be successful on the first time, most aren’t. One needs to learn to pick themselves up and try again when they fail. What I learned from my Hong Kong investors was their nonchalant attitude towards failure. Why be so concerned about failure? If you fall down, pick yourself up and try again. Just keep trying, there’s no one who will fail forever.

Since setting its eye on Indonesia in October, Australia-based global outsourcing online marketplace Freelancer now has more than 100,000 Indonesian users. Besides business, Indonesia country manager Helma Kusuma told us that Freelancer also has the noble goal of spurring entrepreneurship growth through the act of doing freelance jobs. And to help inspire more Indonesians to take part in the freelancing and entrepreneurship industries, the company is holding a contest which lets Indonesian people share their inspirational stories about the two professions.

The competition’s name is “I Am Brave. I Am Free. I Am Freelancer.co.id.” To participate in the contest, you must be a Freelancer member as well as a fan and follower of the company’s Indonesian social pages. Participants need to write their stories on a blog, and then put the story link as well as their Freelancer username on the competition’s photo page here. The competition promises an iPad Mini for the main winner and IDR 1 million (US$103) for each of the two other finalists.

The deadline for entries is March 10th. You can find more information about the competition here.

Inspiring entrepreneurship in Indonesia

So what’s the relationship between freelancing and entrepreneurship? A lot, says Helma. As a former fellow freelancer and entrepreneur herself, she believes that the habit of taking freelance jobs will encourage people to open their own businesses some day. She said that taking a freelance job introduces the idea of being “free” when doing a job. This idea includes having the luxury to choose which clients you want to take, and what working time suits you best. And when you’ve tasted that freedom, you want to taste it again.

Helma said that around 90 percent of the job offers on Freelancer come from developed countries – the UK, the US, and Australia are the top three employer countries. Most of the freelancers come from developing countries like the Philippines and Bangladesh. Hence, the money offered for the listed jobs there is quite significant for people living in Indonesia.

She then explained that these people will eventually start seeing more income from their side jobs, and start to think that they could actually freelance more often to make a living.Eventually they will receive so many freelance jobs that they can transition into starting their own company and give those jobs to their subordinates. This has happened to a lot of Freelancer users over the years.

And even if not so many people have come so far as opening their own businesses, a lot of them have felt the benefits of working freelance jobs anyway. Helma shared the story of one Indonesian Freelancer member who needed extra income for marriage. The guy found the answer by taking jobs from Freelancer and from there, he managed to earn enough money to stage his dream marriage. Helma also told us about a guy with four children ridden with huge debts. In desperation, the guy started to look for freelance jobs and in the end managed to pay back all the debt. Both of them may not have started their own companies, but their stories have touched and inspired a lot of people to start taking freelance jobs too.

Standing Out from the Herd

Credit: jephmaystruck.com

Some people, including myself, might wonder “How can I compete with the other seven million members to get a job from Freelancer?” It must be challenging to earn your first job there as you need to compete with the other users, including those who are more experienced and have a better reputation inside the system. Surely employers will prefer to choose them rather than a first-timer?

Helma explained that there will always be a chance for everyone at Freelancer. She paraphrased a few tips from Daniel Pratidya, one of the top Freelancer users:

First, make sure your profile looks great and credible, complete with pictures and past works so that potential employers can trust you better.

Second, because you are new-comers, your first priority is not to make money, but to build your reputation inside Freelancer, so you are advised to bid with the smallest fee for your first projects. After you have good reputation, then you can start raising your fee. This puts you in an advantage because reputable and experienced users would definitely be more expensive than the first comers, they would also choose more complicated and high earning projects too. So you won’t necessarily be competing with the top dogs for simple projects.

Third, and this tip I find very interesting, is to offer a sample of your works to potential employers. For example, if the employer needs translation jobs for a 20-page document, then you might want to offer to translate two of those pages for free to show how good you are with what you are doing. This last one takes some effort, but it will make you more recognized among other the companies on the platform.

And after you’ve taken up some jobs and have built up your reputation. It’ll then be much easier to receive more jobs and command higher fees from them.

You can read more tips from Daniel on his blog.

Helma says that there are other Indonesians besides Daniel who are among the company’s top 30 users. One of them is Indonesia’s Edward Sutrisno who managed to earn $15,000 for designing Freelancer’s current logo. And the number one Indonesian user (who she cannot disclose) now earns around IDR 1 billion ($ 103,000) a year from Freelancer’s jobs. So Indonesians are not only on par with the rest of the world when it comes to skills, but can also be among the best.

English is almost compulsory

Credit: memegenerator.net

So far I haven’t found a direct competitor to Freelancer’s services in Indonesia. There are a few which might be construed as competitors like crowdsourcing design marketplace Sribu, but that is only for the design sector. The jobs and contests Freelancer offers cover more than the design sector. The top two jobs on the site are for IT and content writing.

The biggest challenge the company might face in Indonesia is the language barrier. As mentioned earlier, most of the jobs come from English speaking employers from first-world countries. And while the job information will be translated into the Indonesian language by the Freelancer team to help local users understand the task, the users will still need to communicate with the foreigners themselves later on. Having bad English can be a problem then.

Furthermore, users will also need to create credible profile information to attract employers better. And they will need to make their profiles in English. From my experience living in the capital city of Jakarta for more than two decades, only those lucky enough to study at a good (and sometimes expensive) school would have good English fluency, and those people are not the majority in the country. So while there will be a lot of users that can use the site’s services, only few of them can actually gain the maximum benefit and get jobs from it.

Collaborations are welcomed

Apart from all that, I still find Freelancer’s business and goals very interesting. While the service mostly caters to the smart people, it can still encourage those smart people to pursue entrepreneurship later on, and the country does need more entrepreneurs. According to a study last year, only 17 percent of tens of thousands of new college graduates are interested in becoming entrepreneurs. And so far, only 1.56 percent of the country’s population are entrepreneurs. That number looks especially bad when compared with neighboring Malaysia’s rate of 5 percent or Singapore’s 7 percent.

Helma said that the local startup community’s founders are a testament to the relationship between the freelance profession and entrepreneurship. She mentioned that StartupLokal’s initiators Natali Ardianto and Aulia Halimatussadiah as well as Bandung tech community FOWAB initiator Anggi Krisna took freelance jobs before they built their own respective startups. Anggi in particular was among those who took freelance work from Freelancer ¹.

Helma said that the local startup community’s founders are a testament to Freelancer’s success in encouraging entrepreneurship. She mentioned that StartupLokal’s initiators Natali Ardianto and Aulia Halimatussadiah were among Freelancer’s members before they both built their own respective startups.

She said that the company will have an office in Indonesia when the site achieves the 500,000 member mark in Indonesia. This will probably be achieved next year. For the moment, she welcomes potential collaborations from Indonesian communities which have the same vision of encouraging entrepreneurship in the country. The company also plans to build an Indonesian blog in the near future.

MOL is one of the biggest payment companies in Southeast Asia, with over 680,000 physical and online payment channels, 60 million annual transactions, and yearly revenue over $300 million. Some of MOL’s main payment products include:

1. MOLPoints is an online wallet for purchasing virtual goods, specifically for game credits and online content.
2. MOLPay is an online wallet for purchasing non-virtual goods like products and services from online enterprises.
3. MOLCards is a prepaid card sold at MOL distribution channels. It is used to top up MOLPoints.

MOL also owns Friendster after its acquisition in 2009. I recently met up with MOL founder Ganesh Kumar Bangah as he told the story of MOL’s founding.

Ganesh started work at age 17 in 1997 when he was still an undergraduate. He worked as a promoter in a Johor-based company, Cyberfield. Cyberfield does development, runs cyber cafes, and also produces a cyber cafe management software that it sells to other such cafes. After working there for some time, Ganesh dropped out of university to focus on the company because of the potential he saw. It was a decision that he doesn’t regret but doesn’t encourage either.

In the interview, he quipped cheekily:

I saw an article that the Singapore government wants to turn Singapore into a Silicon Valley. They should encourage students to drop out.

Starting up

During the dot com bubble period in 1999, Ganesh and his two co-founders had the idea of spinning the cybercafe management software off as a separate business entity and offering the software for free to cafes around the world. They approached Tan Sri Vincent, a Malaysian self-made billionaire and founder of the Berjaya Group to pitch this idea, which raised two million ringgit ($640,000). It was a small investment compared to Tan Sri’s other investments, but Ganesh feels this was a blessing in disguise.

At that time, Tan Sri invested 200 million ringgit ($64 million) in 30 other startups. Some of those startups raised ten to fifteen million ringgit. I only raised two million. It was one of the smallest amounts raised. If I had raised ten million, I would have shut down the company in one and a half years. Because I raised two million, I managed to wait it out. When you raise fifteen million, you tend to build your burn rate to one to two million per month. And when you have one to two million ringgit burning every month, you cannot generate revenue after one year, you need to cut the team. When you cut the team, it’s a downward spiral.

With the investment, MOL AccessPortal was launched in February 2000. Within three months of giving the software away for free, it was installed in more than 15,000 cyber cafes across the world.

Solving problems

But MOL had problems monetizing its users as there wasn’t Google AdWords to easily monetize the traffic. As such, Ganesh and team developed their own payment system and turned the wide cyber cafe network into a payment system where people could pay cash at the cyber cafes for online transactions. This master stroke instantly made MOL into a potential giant monetizing machine with a wide distribution channel in Malaysia and across the world.

With the payment channel sorted out, the team faced a chicken-and-egg problem of having few transactions happening. There weren’t many virtual goods to be purchased online back then as there were few merchants online. The team went out to solve this by working with game publishers. In 2002, MOL was the exclusive payment gateway provider with Helbreath, an extremely popular Korean game. The partnership propelled MOL’s reputation, which saw many game publishers using MOLPoints. By December 2003, MOL got listed on the Malaysia Stock Exchange.

Starting the company was the most challenging time because the internet hadn’t picked up yet. So you needed to learn how to wait it out and bootstrap, especially at the beginning. The first three years are the toughest times. After we get traction, it’s just growth. The first day I started collecting game payments, my revenue was like 3,000 ringgit from one game. Today we collect more than a million ringgit a day from online game payment alone. And we work with more than 250 to 300 game publishers all over the world.

From good to great

Many entrepreneurs dream of getting listed but Ganesh had his sights on bigger things. In 2008, he again roped in help from Tan Sri Vincent to de-list and privatize MOL. This was another monumental moment for the company. By now, both of his co-founders had exited, and Ganesh was the sole remaining founder in the company. He went on to expand MOL to India, SIngapore, and Thailand and passed the milestone of $100 million yearly revenue. In 2009, MOL acquired the giant social network Friendster, presenting the world with a rarely-seen phenomenon: a Southeast Asian firm acquiring a giant US internet company.

Despite the success he has achieved so far, Ganesh doesn’t seem to be slowing down. He hinted at several acquisitions in the company road map and market expansion to other countries is part of the plan. At a personal level, Ganesh also does angel investing and mentoring of local entrepreneurs. Certainly more entrepreneurs in Southeast Asia could learn from Ganesh’s example: got funding and being listed don’t have to be the end of the story. Sometimes, it’s just the beginning.

MOL’s ten-year anniversary

Bowei on the first ‘World Startup Report’ stop in India.

American entrepreneur Bowei Gai is in Australia right now. That’s not too remarkable in itself, but his visit to Melbourne right now is one of 36 city stops in 29 countries that Bowei will make this year as he travels the globe for his World Startup Report project. He tells us that it’s a self-funded effort to create 29 startup ecosystem reports for each nation he visits. On the way, Bowei will rely on the kindness and assistance of fellow entrepreneurs as he takes part in events at each stop so as to drum up enthusiasm for the crowdsourced data that will ultimately shape his reports.

Started in India on the first day of the year, Bowei’s adventure runs through to the final stop in Singapore in September. He explained to TechinAsia today that this all started as a hobby. When he made a China startup report in 2011 just for colleagues to check out, that infographic slideshow went viral and eventually proved to be the seed of the idea for the global expedition. “I felt a need for these kinds of reports,” he says, to provide both insights and overviews of startup ecosystems around the world – things that could be used by new startups and general tech enthusiasts alike.

Melbourne to Sydney

Bowei’s Melbourne stop is a good example of how the World Startup Report works. At each city there’ll be a series of talks and panel discussions hosted by local startup luminaries, and Bowei will get assistance in setting up meetings that will help him gauge the players from the newest startups to the most notable VCs in that area. Then he puts a Google Document online where those with local startup knowledge can help crowdsource all the needed details and data. The Australian document is here.

York Butter Factory in Melbourne. Click to enlarge.

In Melbourne, Bowei is being hosted and helped out by Stuart B. Richardson, a managing partner at Adventure Capital and founder of the York Butter Factory, an impressive repurposed industrial building that’s now, as my colleague Vanessa said when she visited last summer, a really awesome co-working space.

The World Startup Report’s previous stop, India, was the longest that there’ll be, clocking in at three weeks in length. On that occasion Bowei got backup from Benjamin Joffe, whom readers might recognize as one of our Startup Arena judges. The filled-in Gdoc for India gives a good sense of how much crowdsourced input that people will have – and just how much of a task it will be to turn all that into a coherent report.

He’s arriving in Sydney tomorrow, and there’ll be an event at Fishburners on February 4th for which there are still some free tickets available.

Crowdsourced wiki

Bowei admits that it’s all harder than he thought, and that, three weeks into the vast World Startup Report project, he sees that it can be tough to “squeeze out time to write reports” in between all the events, meetings, and flying. He’s writing them as he goes along, and we can expect to see the first report published “near the middle of the trip.”

Aside from the reports, the project will also yield a community wiki which can be updated by nominated country “ambassadors”, with a wiki for each country. This sounds like a particularly nice way to create something long-lasting and easily updatable from the whole trip.

Bowei, whose own startup CardMunch was sold to LinkedIn, says that no country’s startup ecosystem is harder to tackle than another, no matter how mature or unformed the entrepreneurial landscape is there. He tells us that he’s keen to explore the relatively new startup scene in Myanmar, which recently showed its enthusiasm by holding what might be the world’s largest ever Barcamp event.

The next stop for Bowei, who was born in China and moved as a child to the US, is Colombia, which will come after a much-needed break for Chinese New Year that he’ll spend in Hong Kong. After that, the stops in Asia to look out for are:

• April 3 – 13 in Manila, Philippines
• April 13 – 19 in Yangon, Myanmar
• April 19 – 26 in Bangkok, Thailand
• April 26 – May 3 in Kathmandu, Nepal
• August 10 – 17 in Seoul, Korea
• August 17 – 26 in Tokyo, Japan
• August 26 – 31 in Taipei, Taiwan
• August 31 – September 4 in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam
• September 4 – 11 in KL, Malaysia
• September 11 – 17 in Jakarta, Indonesia
• September 17 – 24 in Singapore

Yes, China is not on the list, but his startup report for that country will get an update.

You can catch @bowei on the move on his personal Twitter or follow updates on @worldstartuprpt. Here’s the full World Startup Report itinerary in map form:

View World Startup Report in a larger map

How BillPin Came About

Some of you might recall in the interview with BillPin co-founder Aileen Sim, she mentioned that having to live in shared households poses a problem because most expenses are shared – from bigger expenditures such as rent and utilities, to minor ones such as groceries and McDonald’s delivery.

As for Darius, having lived overseas for 15 years, he has resorted to various expense-tracking services. He used to keep track using Billmonk, but since the acquisition six years ago, the service has become dated and lacks sufficient mobile support. In recent years, he has also used platforms like Google spreadsheets, Evernote, and even WhatsApp group chats to track shared expenses.

But none of these solutions were ideal, so the team decided to build something that was: BillPin. BillPin is designed to allow you to keep track of your shared expenses fairly, lowering the risks of you getting into an argument with your housemates.

How BillPin Works and Some Statistics

Available on both iOS and Android platforms, BillPin is simple and straightforward to use. All that is required is for me to click on the “Bill” tab located at the bottom of the screen. I will then be brought to the next screen to “Select A Friend” from my contact list, indicate whether I owe my friend money or vice versa, enter the amount, and the purpose for the amount owed. All the minor details will then be recorded in the “Events” tab, and the general summary will be in the “Home” tab (pictured below).

Users who do not have the app will receive an email notification once the bill is pinned, and users who have the app receive both push and email notifications. It is also a plus if you have a Gravatar profile, because your picture will show up in the list too.

Darius tells us that while there are many bill-splitting apps on the iTunes App Store or Google Play, they do not notify friends once there is a bill pinned. He explains:

[The] goal is to create the social graph for your money, to have a transparent and real-time record of the tabs you keep with your friends, which would reduce friction and disputes caused by shared expenses. Friends are fun and it’s good to share, but we want to take away the stress of dealing with the money!

BillPin is currently still in the early stages of its launch, with a healthy user acquisition rate of five to ten percent per week. It has also recently launched its Android version, and is hoping to see a higher growth rate soon.

Darius also tells us about some interesting behaviors in the app. He notes one passive user in a group could possibly be a very active user in another, and the top five words that are frequently pinned include lunch, dinner, rent, grocery, and Internet. I wonder why would they include the word Internet?

Using user data, the team has even created an infographic on users’ favorite drinks during the holiday season (pictured below):

Second-Time Entrepreneur – Good or Bad?

Apart from the fact that most of the co-founders are from NUS Overseas Colleges, they are also second-time entrepreneurs. While being a second time entrepreneur could mean that you’re wiser, it can also thwart your imagination. Then again, could also mean that you will get preferential treatment from the startup community, including investors. On this, Darius shares:

[We] obviously have an advantage. It is much easier to raise funds, [but fortunately], we have the ability to self-fund it substantially for now. [There] are certainly many other advantages too, [but] above it all, would be the chance to work with an excellent team (pictured below) where you had the chance to form [friendships with] over time and experience. We have a great team at BillPin. [We have known each other for a long time,] because we were comrades in our respective startups, and found the opportunity to come together to make something worthwhile.

But as much as being second-time entrepreneur can be an advantage, it can also be a double-edged sword. Often, Darius finds himself at a crossroads wondering whether to move forward or do something else, particularly because with his previous startup experience, he is even more cautious about taking the next step:

I find myself dismissing many ideas because my past experience tells me that they are unlikely to [succeed]. On one hand, I [could] probably be right and end up being more efficient; while on the other hand, [it is uncertain] what works and doesn’t. [Often,] you will have to try and eventually figure a way out. A first-time entrepreneur […] will try everything one can, with all the energy and zest that one possesses.

He also draws parallels between the ambition levels between a first-time and second-time entrepreneur. With the success of the first startup, the ambition level is a notch higher. Darius explains:

You will want to do something that has a lasting significant impact. [However,] it is very hard to foresee how one move will lead to the other, so you end up second guessing yourself very often, on top of being much more careful about making decisions. In comparison to [a first-time entrepreneur], the motivation to keeping afloat is very strong. Survival is what keeps you on your toes, so you keep jumping from one place to another, [in the hope of finding] a break in the process that would get you somewhere.

A more geeky way of putting it is perhaps that it is hard to find the path to the global maxima especially if you can’t see very far; while without the compulsion to reach such goals, it would be easier taking small incremental steps to somehow get to a local maxima. I guess these are both double-edged swords, and we constantly remind ourselves to know how to use it to our advantage.

For the entrepreneurs out there, give us your thoughts on this in the comments below. And for those who are keen to give BillPin a shot, it is available on both iOS and Android.

Let me put it out there – raising seed funding is easy. If you are not too greedy or choosy, nearly every Singapore government agency has some scheme to seed your first idea. We have MDA for media-related startups, Spring Singapore for new, innovative ideas, and even MCCY with funding for social enterprises that help the community.

Frequent readers of startup related news sites such as SGE, TechinAsia, and the myriad of other sources covering the startup scene in Southeast Asia, will note a bubble brewing in US$250,000 to $500,000 seed rounds. Prior and further to this, many (in Singapore and Malaysia especially) have already gotten a first round of funding from a government agency.

So with all this cash being thrown around, why focus on revenue first? Shouldn’t it always be about market share and all the other fancy valuation terms Silicon Valley invented? I’ve heard many startup founders explain their business strategy as “mindshare” or “let’s worry about that later, we can raise funds anywhere.”

I must beg to differ; vehemently even.

Silicon Valley’s model of making many technology startup founders incredibly wealthy has become surprisingly entrenched. However, I don’t believe that same model applies in Southeast Asia, or even to Asia in general. Here’s why:

1. There is no “next round”

Venture capitalists focused on funding firms in the three to five million dollar round are an extremely rare breed. A Singapore-based VC in that category once remarked to me that “for every 50 seed round funders, there is only one of me”.

So what does this mean for us startups? Well, it means we cannot continue being deluded by Silicon Valley – which I might add, Bravo TV has sunk to new depths – and admit that the situation is actually quite dire.

After blowing over $50,000 on your initial development and another half a million on what’s called market share acquisition, all that’s left is a company without any real tangible value.

But perhaps you are nearly there and just a few more months away from reaching the tipping point. It doesn’t matter because without funding you are next to dead. And your company, worthless.

2. Losing Equity Reduces Motivation

There is the oft-cited saying that all startup founders would have heard at least once, “Would you rather own a slice of a big pie, or own all of a tiny pie?”

As much as you want to take that next investment to grow your fledgling startup, core values of your company will change the moment external funders come in. This is not to discredit the many great angels out there who genuinely want to contribute back to the scene – but ideas and your mission will change, at the very least to some extent.

Suddenly, instead of creating and living the job (and life) you want, it becomes managing quarterly cycles and living by KPIs. A great number of Singapore startups are already intimately familiar with dreaded “funding milestones,” which become the dictator of your company’s strategy and growth.

With all these distractions, founders and key employees become less motivated and the once promising startup gradually loses that opportunity-grabbing agility as it becomes yet another corporation.

My favorite book that underpins my startup philosophy is Get Real by 37Signals, the group that created products like Basecamp. I highly recommend it for all founders interested not in following a fund-chasing approach, but instead want to build a company and the perfect job for yourself.

3. This is NOT Silicon Valley

Many in the West are looking at Southeast Asia and Asia with much interest. It’s a growth region with a lot of potential. I don’t disagree with that.

What the numbers don’t tell you is that Asia is extremely diverse. Made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of languages, cultures, and religions, Asia is not an easy market to acquire. This is especially so in Southeast Asia, where there is almost no shared language across countries. You cross over the causeway from Singapore and the predominant language becomes Bahasa Melayu. Take a ferry down south and it’s Bahasa Indonesia. To quote the phrase often seen on market T-shirts in mainland Southeast Asia – Same same, but different!

To put this into a comparative context, if it takes $35 million to gain widespread adoption in the more homogenous and highly liquid US (though Americans might disagree with that description), $3 million is almost impossible to get your startup Asia-wide adoption.

So with all this doom and gloom I’ve mentioned, how then do I see our startups surviving? I advocate a revenue-first approach. Every single product line introduced must come with some form of viable and executable monetization plan. Basically, give your investors more dollars for their dime, and throw away the notion of Silicon Valley get-rich-quick schemes.

Singapore is considered a developed market, but developing markets are all around it. This evening at a Founder Institute event, TMG’s founder Alvin Yap, who recently raised more than a million from SingTel and Softbank, was put on stage to share his entrepreneurship experience.

One of the topics touched on how Singaporean entrepreneurs do not having the right mindset to expand to nearby regions. One day could be good, another day could be effing shitty so that’s actually part of the life as entrepreneurs.

Alvin also says that it is tough for sheltered Singaporeans to expand abroad because we just don’t have the right connections in developing markets ¹. To overcome these difficulties, Alvin says that it is important to get out of your comfort zone and go meet people. He talked about his experience when expanding to Indonesia and other developing markets:

We don’t know anything, so we have to get a good local person to help us. I do not work in a developing market without a local partner.

Alvin also talked about how aspiring Singaporean entrepreneurs can get a head start. He offered to key points:

1. Start working as early as possible: Alvin says that the pressure of working is far greater than pressure we faced in school. Starting work early will help to build your stress endurance young.

2. Travel to as many developing markets as possible: This advice reinforces his previous point that Singaporean entrepreneurs need to get out there to network and make friends in developing markets.

Alvin and I meet from time to time when we are both in Indonesia. And sometimes we see him working at a Starbucks while waiting for openings in someone else’s schedule, just so he has a chance to speak to him/her. He’s clearly hungry to expand his network. I believe there are many lessons we all can learn from him.

(See also: Monetizing the Feature Phone Industry)

Japanese VC firm Global Brain held its annual startup-focused conference in Tokyo last week, the 6th Global Brain Alliance Forum (GBAF). The firm and its limited-partner investor Nifty unveiled their future investment strategies. In addition, nine tech startups from Japan and the rest of Asia pitched to a Japanese crowd of angel investors, entrepreneurs, and local media.

We’d like to highlight one panel discussion in particular titled “Asian venture companies on track for growth.” Panelists included Gwendolyn Regina Tan (the co-founder of SGE.io, Singapore), Mark Hsu (partner at TMI, Taiwan/台湾創意工場 許安德先生), Mohan Belani (the co-founder of e27, Singapore), James Jung (the co-founder of beSuccess, Korea) and Willis Wee (the founder of Tech in Asia, Singapore/亜洲科技 黄心泉先生). The panel was moderated by Global Brain’s James Chan(陳亮宏先生).

Asian markets are diverse

Mark Hsu(許安德), partner at TMI

The session kicked off by emphasizing the market diversity in the region. “Asia is so huge,” Mark Hsu noted.

Even if we pick one country in South East Asia to talk about, there are many different views [which we cannot apply to] the entire region together. But the ratio of a country’s population to its GDP is a good index to find how much potential a country has. For instance, Myanmar has 55 million people with a GDP of 70 US dollars a month per capita, and Indonesia has 240 million people with its GDP per capita at $300 dollars a month. A country’s population and productivity index lets you easier to understand the state of the country. Thailand’s economic growth is extremely fast now.

e27’s Mohan Belani also pointed out Thailand, calling it “one of the fastest countries in terms of the speed of spreading internet infrastracture in Southeast Asia.

Willis Wee(黄心泉), TechInAsia

James Jung from BeSuccess proudly introduced his country, noting, “Korea’s internet penetration rate is as high as 91 percent, and our mobile penetration rate also high as 70 percent.”

Tech in Asia’s Willis Wee says, “I’m interested in Vietnam. Facebook and Twitter are highly widespread in Indonesia too, and it will be the next big one after mainland China.”

Gwendolyn Regina Tan from SGE argued for Myanmar’s potential and said, “Its infrastructure is not well-prepared, but the country has many investors and a big population, which means there’s a high potential for rapid growth.”

One thing all panelists appeared to agree on was the region’s high potential to develop further.

The gap in broadband availability and online payments

Moderator James Chan moved on to the next topic about internet infrastructure and online payment issues in the region, with special consideration to the fact that in some countries in Asia a majority are still using feature phones.

Mohan Belani, co-founder of e27

All panelists pointed out the fact that in some regions payments are still made via mail and very few people use credit card payments. TMI’s Mark Hsu says,

In Taiwan, convenience stores have spread around the country since about 10 years back. But now, the number of e-commerce sites have exceeded the number of convenience stores and department stores. Most of e-commerce sites can accept credit card payments but customers tend to pay at a convenience store and pick up what they’ve ordered online there.

e27’s Mohan further adds:

Most Thai people don’t have a credit card, but they do have a bank account, so they can buy something online and pay by debit card.

The e-commerce business is trending now in Southeast Asia, and banks are intensifying investments in developing infrastructure which at this point is still inadequate. Broadband availability differs from country to country, and there’s a big gap in terms of online market opportunities.

Willis Wee explains:

Everyone should see not only consider [high-capacity] broadband countries [1] but also “non-laptop” countries. In these “non-laptop” countries, people usually don’t have laptops but mobile penetration rates are extremely high. Entrepreneurs have to recognize these market gaps and discover business opportunities by filling needs or addressing gaps.

Venture capitals and the surrounding environment in Asia is not yet mature

James Jung(정현욱), co-founder of beSuccess, Korea

James Jung from beSuccess points out:

Korea has more than 500 angel investors. Our startup ecosystems are working closely with the US, and there are many cases where US-based companies have invested in Korean startups. Similar to Singapore, the Korean government is also proactively involved in helping startups in their growth.

e27’s Mohan adds:

The state of VC firms in Singapore is not yet mature. Startups can get support from big enterprises but there are still few angel investors there. That’s why VC firms provide hands-on support for early-stage startups as well as funding.

He says this is where angel investors should take the lead, in his view. TMI’s Mark compares this with his region:

[Like] Singapore, Taiwan does not have many angel investors. We have highly-skilled engineering talents which have not yet discovered from our workforce pool. Cyber Agent Ventures has come to Taiwan, and Japanese companies are keeping their eyes on the startup trends in Taiwan.

SGE’s Gwendolyn says:

We need more time to mature the market. For entrepreneurs, news like a startup [emerging] from our country to make a successful exit could motivate them to launch their startups.

For Southeast Asian countries, there are many things to learn from Japan

Gwendolyn Regina Tan, co-founder of SGE.io

For the fourth topic, the panel discussed the relationship between Southeast Asia and Japan. They pointed out that entrepreneurs place too much emphasis on Silicon Valley, and need to be more conscious of discovering market potential in Asian countries. The region has more than double the population of the US, and more big deals and more business partnerships could be made if the region was unified and every country worked well together. They say, every startup community in Asia has to have a sense of unity, and they would like to explore how we further impact the entire startup ecosystems and unify the market.

e27’s Mohan points out that “Japan has an important role for startups in Southeast Asia. It is one of the best place for fostering entrepreneurs and IPOs.”

Likewise SGE.io’s Gwendolyn adds that “Japanese working abroad motivate us a lot. I’d like to learn how Japan brings innovation. In many aspects, there are many things to learn, and we’d like to share with many people what we’ve learned from Japan.”

BeSuccess’s James says:

Kakao Talk has acquired 70 million users worldwide, and Japan has Line [2]. [This base of users] will definitely generate a lot of business chances.

Willis focused on the affinity of Japanese companies for SEA markets, and closed the session saying that,

Good products from Japan may bring great impact to Southeast Asia. Additionally, there are many things to learn from insights and knowledge that Japanese entrepreneurs have. Moreover, we can learn a lot from the fact that Japanese companies are good at expanding business overseas. I hope there will be more cases where Southeast Asia and Japan can work collaboratively.

A big thanks to Shintaro Eguchi for his awesome write-up over on Startup Dating.

Over on the Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) blog today, the company is highlighting entrepreneurship in South Korea, as well as its involvement and support via its Google for Entrepreneurs initiative.

Google has partnered with Korean accelerator and incubator Kstartup to support Korean startups beginning in 2013, with help from AppCenter, and the Korean Communication Commission as well. It will be a three-month acceleration program in Gangnam (yes, that Gangnam), which Kstartup explains further on its website:

Through this partnership with Google and others, Kstartup will provide free workspace, technical, operational and business mentoring, as well as seed funding to startups we choose through a selective screening process. Whether an entrepreneur launches a startup in Korea or globally, we are confident that Google can provide the necessary resources needed to help scale the business locally or overseas.

Techcrunch cites Kstartup’s David Lee as saying that Google will provide "an undisclosed amount of funding as well.

In its blog post, the search giant also elaborated on its partnership with the Global K-Startup competition this past year, and listed the winning startups which it describes as follows:

• BrainGarden – vocabulary learning mobile application with social game feature
• Whatugot – social networking mobile application for collection and sharing favorites
• WATCHA – movie recommendation application with personal collection gallery features
• KnowRe – innovative adaptive learning solution focused on math education
• Alarmmon – mobile gaming alarm application with various character branding
• Classting – web/mobile application for classroom management and inter-class connection and collaboration

As we have noted before, Korea is a stronghold for Android in terms of smartphone OS market share, so it would make sense for Google to throw support of this kind behind the ecosystem. When we spoke with the folks at Tapjoy earlier this year, we saw that the company’s users on Android were more than quadruple those on iOS. That’s a strong indication of the platform’s popularity in the country.

Thomas Wong, Local Singaporean

I drafted up a few quick diagrams to explain the funding scene in Singapore. It’s not complete, but might be helpful to some. There are three main sources to look into when starting out. Of course I am presuming you are not planning to fund it entirely on your own.

1. Friends and family
2. Private funding
3. Government funding

Friends & Family

I’ve seen mixed advice on this aspect, and I agree that you’d mostly only get one shot at this. But I’ve seen enough businesses that exist on support from supportive family and friends, a famous one would be Sir Richard Branson. It’s great to get started and get you off the ground, but you’d want to get familiar with raising funds from cold contacts/investors as soon as you can.

Private Funding

This is a pretty unmapped territory as there are a plethora of options. There are some networks like BANSEA, which pool together a mix of private investors and government linked ones as a collective of seed investors. There are also MNCs with funds dedicated to identify interesting startups to invest in, [like] Google Ventures, Gree Ventures, Intel capital, and even Singtel’s Innov8.

Recently, the entire Hackathon trend has been ported from the US to Singapore, where people who want to begin on their startup journey can participate in these thirty to ninety day events. They form a team, pick an idea, and patch together a product that they then pitch to investors at the end of the process on “demo day.”

There are private funds and investors, Innosight, DFJ, and some invest considerable amounts even at seed level. I personally know two companies who raised a million dollars from individual investors, without a technology or traction in place when they pitched. Basically, it’s a jungle out there, you’ll need to talk to people, do your own research, and keep your ears on the ground to identify which funds to approach.

A good way if you have the connections, though, is to identify these funds from a higher level on the value chain. If you have friends in finance, fund managers, fund of funds, wealth managers, they might be able to give you a quick take and even introductions to the people running these funds. Most of these guys work with or fund these angel investors, venture capital, or seed investors.

Government Funding

The Singapore government has been working hard to lift entrepreneurial activity here for a while, and they have put in place number of schemes to facilitate that, each focusing on various industries and stages in a company’s growth. I’ll cover three of the more popular ones for fresh startups.

Essentially there are three schemes I’ve come across that a fresh technology startup in Singapore would normally look into.

• There is the ACE program administered by SPRING Singapore; they match about $50,000 to about $21,500 you raise on your own. (Thank you, Brian, for pointing out the original inaccuracy http://www.techinasia.com/startu…)
• There is iJams reloaded, administered by MDA. It has two phases to its funding scheme. MDA works with private or institutional incubators to administer this fund. In the first phase, MDA will match $50,000 to about $10,000 that the founders or the incubator puts up. If the milestones are hit and the startup is eligible for phase two, MDA will match $100,000 to $100,000 raised by the founders or the incubator.
• There is also a scheme under the NRF (National Research Foundation), TIS Technology Incubation Scheme. “NRF would co-invest up to the lower of S$500,000 or 85% of the incubator’s investment in a qualifying company, and grant the incubator the call option to buy over its investment at 1.1x before the second year, and 1.15x between the second and third year.” Check out (NRF reopens TIS, opens floodgate on early-stage tech investments in Singapore) (James Chan, thanks for pointing out my confusion and original inaccuracy http://www.techinasia.com/startu…)
• There seems to also be an NRF ESVF scheme which offers up to $3 million, though I don’t have much details on this scheme (NUS Entrepreneurship Centre)

There are some nuances for each scheme that a founder should be aware of, between schemes and between the bodies that administer these schemes.

Nuances

On top of where to get funds for your startup, each funding scheme has its own set of advantages and intricacies. These are some things to think about when deciding which funding scheme would work for you.

I’ve shared a quick mind map with a few more details of the funding landscape in Singapore. It’s not complete, but is a pretty good guide to founders fresh to the ecosystem. You can view it below.

More questions on Startup Advice and Strategy:

• What are the leading startup trends and ideas of 2012 and 2013?
• What are some good places to connect with entreprenuers in India when starting a startup?
• What are some great “must-watch” videos on Youtube for entrepreneurs?

Joydeep Sen Sarma, engineer

There are a lot of reasons for this. I will try to do this in decreasing order of intractability (and focus mostly on the environment in India):

1. The Indian education system is hostile to outliers. As an example – a teen who just loves to spends all his time programming (and can’t stand anything else like social sciences/arts/literature) can have a very bright future (assuming he has talent) in the US – and has none in India. The system in India will give him/her poor grades, teachers/parents/friends would destroy him emotionally. Forget about doing well – such a person would do very badly in India – and I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up as a wreck.

Just to back this up – in all my years of interacting with multiple adjacent batches of IITians (and alumni of other Indian schools) – there is but one true outlier that I have seen who ever made it through the system.

To state the point a different way, what we consider top Indian talent (grads from IITs etc. – going to top schools or employers in US) is almost systematically biased (because of how they were chosen) to not be tech geniuses of the types that start large iconic tech companies.

2. The Indian technology market – whether it’s consumer or business – is not leading edge. This makes it very difficult for young local entrepreneurs to make a breakthrough. (After all almost all new tech giants emerge from new markets/technology trends.)

This is no less important than the previous point. By the time entrepreneurs in India latch on to something, they are both playing catch up and – even worse – competing with a lot of other people who have caught on as well. The fact that there’s very little about the Indian market that doesn’t make Western tech products (like Facebook/Apple) portable – doesn’t help.

Starting a B2B tech business in India is the hardest. The market for any leading edge business product is almost entirely in the West.

3. Indian venture capital markets are way behind American counterparts in terms of funding risky, pathbreaking ventures. The differences are apparent in valuation, in early focus on cost/revenues and in (predominantly) funding of copycat concepts from the West.

This point is not fundamental, and these things can change. Examples of breathtaking success can change the risk premium for example.

4. Startup and Engineering Culture in India is nowhere close to that in places like Bay Area:

• Engineers don’t remain engineers for long. Very soon they become hands off managers and architects. As a result, expert level hands on engineers – particularly those with both depth and breadth – are much harder to find.
• In my personal experience, intensity at Indian startups is lower. The urgency, the sense of do-or-die, is much lower.
• The few truly great hands-on experts prefer to stick to top employers like Google/Microsoft etc. and are rarely to be found sticking it out in a startup garage.
• Equity compensation is often drastically lower in Indian startups (especially for engineers). There seem to be a raft of reasons for this, but regardless, this makes the previous three points pretty logical. It’s a vicious cycle.
• Mentorship – there’s no Steve Jobs or Peter Thiel here to mentor the local Zuck. The people who made it big in India in tech (on the backs of the consulting industry) are unlikely to be the right mentor for the next Twitter/Facebook/Apple. Less dramatically, the lack of top class engineers who have spent 10+ years programming just means there’s less mentorship for the younger ones [1].

Again this point, overall is not fundamental – these things can all change with time. But these cycles are very hard to break and will take a long long time (if ever) to do so.

Other points – predominantly those related to absence of good governance, poor infrastructure, regulatory hurdles – don’t affect tech businesses as much. But I am sure they affect B&M businesses a lot.

Age is an interesting factor. If young local entrepreneurs have the deck stacked against them, then the ones with potential that remain are the ones that are more experience and education. But as anyone with a kid or two knows – achieving something remarkable (from scratch) after the onset of family life is just an order of magnitude harder.

The silver lining here is that if the reasons are well understood, the solutions can be articulated. What if we have a Super30 program for outstanding young programmers for example? Can we expose such a talent pool to the latest and greatest in technology, including liberal travel to major global tech hubs? What if we can put them in mentor/partnership programs with industry folks who have a solid understanding of the business landscape and with top engineers, both local and abroad. There seems to be potential ways out of where we are, but it won’t just happen by itself.

Aashish Gupta, Founder & CEO Yellowleg.com

It all starts with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (see below). Wanting to “change the world” is presumably right at the top of that triangle. A human being feels that need only after the needs lower in the triangle are fulfilled.

Now coming to Indian entrepreneurs, given the socio-econonomic backgrounds that the vast majority of our nation comes from, most people get their education and devote their lives to creating a better life for themselves and their families. By the time they feel the need to “change the world” they are probably in their mid-thirties, at least. By contrast, many US entrepreneurs start their journeys sometime during college. That’s a huge headstart – both in terms of amount of time they have to develop their skills and the level of risk they can take at that life-stage.

Even among the few Indians who hail from privileged backgrounds (or work their way into it), the general environment of scarcity dictates that they devote their lives to preserving their wealth and maintaining status quo.

This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Startups:

• What are some incubators for start up companies in India?
• How do you launch a startup when you don’t have any technical experience?
• What are the factors that should encourage you to pursue entrepreneurial activities in China?

Tao Tao, co-founder GetYourGuide

Business:

• Cheap labor. One of the many reasons why Google keeps an office in China is because IT talent is still comparably cheap. But if you listen to stories from Chinese entrepreneurs, it’s incredibly difficult to find and attract those of the entrepreneurial type unless you give out a lot of equity or your name is Kai-Fu Lee. Having a Chinese partner is essential though.
• Large & growing markets, even if you go into niche verticals. Opportunities are especially strong in mobile, more so than internet in general, both given larger and faster mobile penetration and already crowded online markets.

Personal

• The entrepreneurial environment. You’ll often get to meet people who are creating firsts, be it the first whiskey bar in town, the first modern art village, or the first party on an aircraft carrier. Very often, it’s something that already exists in the West, but it’s nice to get to know some people that are shaping the cultural and business landscape of a city and country.
• If you fall in love with the place. As difficult as it is to describe this point, it’s probably the most important reason for anyone to stay in China. As an entrepreneur, you need to be passionate about your product and customers, which is something you can’t do if you don’t like the place to begin with. I can only recount my personal Beijing experience, which was a combination of constantly feeling a little bit out of place yet completely absorbed in the thousands of things going on at the same time. If you live in Beijing, there’s no day or night off. The Economist wrote a great article about being expat in general, and most Beijing expats that I spoke to could identify with the sentiments described there:
  

  To quote the most telling passage “An American child psychologist, Alison Gopnik, when reaching for an analogy to illuminate the world as experienced by a baby, compared it to Paris as experienced for the first time by an adult American: a pageant of novelty, colour, excitement. Reverse the analogy and you see that living in a foreign country can evoke many of the emotions of childhood: novelty, surprise, anxiety, relief, powerlessness, frustration, irresponsibility.

  For entrepreneurs and adventurers, China is one of those rare places with a good mix of exotic estrangement, openness to foreigners, and economic opportunities.

More questions on startups:

• What are some incubators for start up companies in India?
• What are the leading startup trends and ideas of 2012 and 2013?
• What is the best advice for a young, first-time startup CEO?

1. Focus on what you are good at

At FusionCharts, we have been developing and selling interactive data visualization solutions for a decade now. We pioneered the very concept of interactive charting and have been the industry leaders in it ever since. Traditional wisdom would say we should expand into other verticals and push the pedal. But we still stick to data visualization since that’s what we know best, that’s what people know us best for, and we think there is enough room to expand further in the space. Expanding into other verticals without much of a connect is only going to spread our focus too thin – and before we know it, another player in the industry would have surpassed us at the one thing we were good at.

2. Don’t offer a product, offer a complete package

Your product might mean the world to you, but to the world it’s just another product. In essence, people don’t care what your product can do, they want to know what it can do for them.

So right from the early days at FusionCharts, we had real-life business demos on our website like sales dashboards, KPI monitors, and network monitoring dashboards that people would check out as soon as they hit the website – and then they’d go, “This is exactly what I am looking for.” Given that we were this unknown company from India, we needed to establish that connect really fast to sell to large enterprises. In addition to the demos, the complete package we offered included comprehensive docs, a product tour, and best practices documents.

3. On the internet, no knows you are small

We were able to sell to 10,000 customers including the likes of NASA and the US Army sitting in India. And, more importantly, without having a single dedicated salesperson on our ranks.

How did we do this? Quite simply, using the power of the internet. A good website created a great first impression, a first-of-its-type product with comprehensive docs and demos, and quick and reliable tech support. That was it. We didn’t have to be present at tradeshows around the world, have expensive offices in expensive cities, or have affiliations with industry bodies just to prove our credibility. The internet helped us mask how small a company we actually were.

4. Hire slow, fire fast

I was working all by myself for the first three years at FusionCharts even though I had enough money to put a team together. Of course, being a 20-year old, I didn’t know much about putting a team together and all the legalities that go along with it. I didn’t want things going wrong.

But even later, once I learnt all of that, I was very selective about hiring people. We hired people only when we badly needed them and were sure that they were a perfect cultural fit for FusionCharts.

We got to 10,000 customers without a single dedicated salesperson but only when I felt I could not handle all the load myself – and other parts of the business needed more of my time – did I decide to hire a VP of sales. Unfortunately, the VP of sales wasn’t a startup guy, and a lot of tasks were beyond his dignity, so I fired him quickly too.

For most of our positions, we look at between 20 to 100 candidates before making the hire. And if we have even the smallest doubt about someone, we pass them over.

5. The best money you can get is the customer’s money

These days funding is sexy. Raise a couple of million dollars and everyone on the blogosphere starts talking about you. You start to have a feeling of accomplishment already.

Raising money, however, just solves one problem: money. But it creates a whole lot of other problems. The biggest of them is being answerable to your investors, most of whom want you to scale up quick, often compromising on the quality of the product and the vision of the company as a whole.

Get money from customers instead. Make a good product that solves their problems, sell to them and be answerable to them. That can never be a bad thing.

6. Traditional business wisdom has no guarantee of working for you

Nothing in the business world is carved in stone. Marketing was all about the 4Ps that they taught in business schools around the world until the 4Cs happened. And then social media happened and marketing changed again.

Don’t go by what the business pundits have to say. Go by what sounds to be the most logical solution to your problem. It might defy all conventional business wisdom but if it the most logical, it is the correct solution.

7. It’s all about people

Even in the intangible world of software, it’s all about people. Customers, employees, vendors, partners, industry watchers — they are all people. It is people who create the technology that makes the world (or at least a small corner of it) a better place. And people have their own aspirations, wants and needs, that you need to listen to and take care of.

8. Give people more reasons to remember you than just the product

Business is not just about your product or service. It’s more what people feel about you. At every touch-point they have with you and your business, give them a reason to remember you. Delight them. A genuine conversation, a good story, they all add up.

Every time we go to a trade show, along with the objective of getting sales leads, product feedback and press coverage, another of our objectives is to give people a nice and happy feeling about meeting us. And we do whatever it takes to get people to smile and remember us even months after the trade show is over. And it all adds up when someone writes in to say just how nice it was meeting the team even months after the tradeshow.

9. Everyone loves a good story

Recently, we completed a decade of being in business at FusionCharts. And to celebrate that, we wrote a book on the complete journey of the company. The book talks about all the mistakes we made, lessons we learnt along the journey, and the hilarious incidents that happened along the way. The feedback we have been getting on the book is astounding. People love the story and are writing in to say how they feel a part of FusionCharts after reading our candid account. Everyone loves a good story, no matter how left-brained they are.

10. Entrepreneurship is a journey, not a destination

This is something I learned much later in my entrepreneurial journey. Stories of obscene nine-digit exits and massive IPOs used to get me all excited earlier and made me dream of the day I would have one of them myself. But then I paused to take a look back at the FusionCharts journey and realized it is the small moments that came along the journey, both good and bad, that I cherish the most. The loss I made on my first sale. The time I changed accents and pretended the call had been transferred from the support to the sales department. The delight at seeing Barack Obama using FusionCharts. These are the moments I will remember and smile about for the rest of my life.

Entrepreneurship will give you the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Enjoy them all.

If you’re familiar with the Chinese tech scene, chances are you are also familiar with serial entrepreneur Lei Jun (pictured above). Recently, I had a chance to speak to him to learn more about his story as an entrepreneur, and about his latest venture, the disruptive phone-maker Xiaomi.

His journey goes back to 1992 when he joined software maker Kingsoft after graduating from Wuhan University. Kingsoft back then had just five or six people, but today the company has more than 3,000 employees. The company IPO’d in Hong Kong in 2007. While working at Kingsoft (HKG:3888), Lei Jun ran the site Joyo.com as a side project. Joyo started as a downloads website but later it became an online bookstore. Success followed, and Amazon subsequently acquired Joyo for a whopping $75 million in 2004 – now it’s today’s Amazon China, at Amazon.cn.

After Kingsoft went public, Lei Jun jumped full-time into angel investing which saw him invest in over 20 startups, including browser maker UCWeb, clothing e-tailer Vancl, and payments service Lakala. All of his investments targeted companies in the mobile internet space. Lei Jun says that from 2007 to 2010, he has overseen over 70 funding rounds among his portfolio companies. And through his angel investing experience, Lei Jun became familiar with many local and international investors which he says have helped greatly in what would be his next venture – Xiaomi. He tells me:

We got to know a lot of investors and know what they like and don’t like. Through many co-investments opportunities, we have built trust among these investors. So when it came to investing in Xiaomi, things were a lot easier.

The birth of Xiaomi

Through his experience as an angel investor, Lei Jun firmly believes the mobile internet would be the next wave. And he believed in the importance of creating a channel, through hardware, in the mobile internet industry in China. “A phone as a channel,” he emphasizes. That idea gave birth to Xiaomi on April 6, 2010, over a year before its first smash-hit phone was revealed.

The Xiaomi Mi2, unveiled this summer and set to launch later this month.

Xiaomi was inspired by Apple, and Lei Jun pays great credit to Steve Jobs who he believes has shaped how the world uses phones and the mobile internet. Lei Jun saw the opportunity to create a smartphone tailored for China, a hardware company which can ride on the mobile internet wave. Lei Jun tells me that Xiaomi is built on three building blocks:

1. E-commerce
2. The openness of the Android platform and Xiaomi’s own MIUI skin
3. Xiaomi’s fans

Regarding e-commerce, Lei Jun said Xiaomi could sell phones online without having physical stores, and that greatly reduces costs. The saved resources can be put into making better quality phones. Before Xiaomi launched the first-gen M1 phone, the attractive and versatile MIUI, an Android ROM, had already been in the works for a year and was already used by lots of keen Android tweakers who flashed it onto their phones. Lei Jun says that MIUI gained the recognition of Android fans across the world. Every Friday, there will be a new MIUI update to keep the Android ROM updated and fresh.

In the near future, Xiaomi aims to operate in different mobile operating systems, which may include Windows Phone,” said Lei Jun. But that won’t come too soon, he noted.

Feedback from fans about their perfect phone

Fans play a huge part in Xiaomi’s success. What Xiaomi has become today is largely due to fans’ feedback. For example, to test the upcoming Mi2 phone, Xiaomi invited over 1,200 fans to provide feedback which the company could then learn from. For example, some users of the first-gen phone, the Xiaomi M1, didn’t know that the SIM card has to be pushed into the slot until a “click” sound is heard. In its revamped Mi1S unveiled this summer as a cheaper alternative to the new Mi2, Xiaomi has added in instructions to inform users that the SIM has to be pushed in. Lei Jun says of the company’s enthusiastic fans:

Most of the fans have ideas about their perfect phone. But many of them can’t do it because building a phone is tough. So they would give us feedback about the features that they think should be included in our next model. And if we incorporated that in our new phone, they will share the good news with their friends.

Besides providing feedback voluntarily, Xiaomi fans also serve as an echo chamber for the phone-maker. Lei Jun says that word of mouth marketing is perhaps one of the company’s best promotional channels. He describes Xiaomi users as people who are usually banded in a group. If one person starts using a Xiaomi phone, his or her friends would most likely start using it too. And in that way, the word spreads. Fans’ enthusiasm over Xiaomi was apparent when we attended the recent Xiaomi Mi2 launch event in Beijing. Fans paid to be there (the ticket revenue was donated to charity) and wore orange to show that they are fans of Xiaomi.

No IPO for at least 5 years

Xiaomi has so far sold 3.52 million units of its outgoing M1 smartphone and aims to sell over 5 million total units by the end of this year with the Mi2 soon available – a bit later this month – in the market. Lei Jun says that his company has already hit more than $1 billion in revenue and is expected to hit $2 billion by the end of 2012. He also claims that Xiaomi is perhaps the fastest company to hit $1 billion in revenue in just a year of full operations.

Xiaomi is already a profitable company and is looking to expand to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the near future. When asked about markets outside of Greater China, Lei explains:

We’re not thinking about other markets like India or Indonesia, yet. We want to stay focused on the Chinese market first before expanding.

Lei Jun has also communicated to all his investors that Xiaomi has no plans to IPO within the first five years of operation. He explained that the focus right now should be on building a world-class phone and business model around Xiaomi, and not worry about the exit just yet. Plus, the recent Facebook IPO has shown the negative side of being a public company. Figures and statistics have to be revealed to investors and the public, which he believes will distract from the company’s focus on building a great product.

Will Xiaomi expand into tablets? The answer is “No,” says Lei. He feels that the tablet is a very competitive market already thanks to Apple’s iPad. He pointed to the recent iPhone 5 launch event whereby Apple’s CEO Tim Cook revealed that the iPad has cornered 68 percent of the tablet market share, with 91 percent of all tablet web traffic coming from the iPad.

When asked about Xiaomi’s greatest barrier, he explains that integrating software and hardware with a beautifully crafted mobile phone design is always the greatest challenge. To overcome that, Xiaomi’s core team members include people who previously worked at Motorola, Google, Microsoft, and Kingsoft. Plus, the team also has the network of contacts to attract more quality talent moving forward.

To date, Xiaomi has raised $347 million in total funds – the series C of $216 million was revealed this June – and the company is already profitable. But Lei Jun insists that Xiaomi still has a long way to go before it can become a world class product which can compete on the world stage. Things are looking great for Xiaomi and most people in the Chinese tech industry will agree that its selling-like-hot-cakes phone and mobile platform is a force to be reckoned with.

After loads of negative publicity when Research in Motion (RIM) opened a BlackBerry factory in neighboring Malaysia, Canada-based RIM built the BlackBerry Innovation Center as a sort of peace offering in May 2012. Today it’s announced that, in partnership with the Institut Teknologi Bandung (Bandung Technology Institute; or ITB), RIM will give 30 scholarships to mark its commitment to develop the Innovation Center.

This Innovation Center is focusing on developing mobile apps – useful ones, such as for mobile healthcare systems, smart transit/transportation, smart mobile learning, logistics, etc. The 30 high-potential students will receive mobile computing research funding. So far, eight scholarships have been given for master’s and doctoral degrees. RIM will add 10 master’s degree students and 12 final semester undergraduate students to its list.

The scholarship covers tuition at ITB and research incentives during their studies at the BlackBerry Innovation Center ITB. Master’s degree students also receive laptops and BlackBerry smartphones. Grantees will follow the curriculum organized by ITB. While working there, the program will provide training to develop the student’s BlackBerry apps. The students will also be mentored about entrepreneurship. The managing director of RIM South Asia, Hastings Singh, explains:

As corporations become part of the community, RIM has committed to Indonesia and to invest back into the community in the form of long-term initiatives. Our collaboration with ITB, which in turn will help encourage Indonesia to become a leader in the mobile industry, is a good example. The 30 scholarship recipients will be equipped with the latest technology and education that will equip them with the skills and knowledge they need to build his career and start a business in this sector.

Eight scholarship for the master’s program were received by Ardhian Ekawijan, Dicky Arinal, Puspoko Poncho Ratno, and Rizky Ario Nugroho. While the doctoral program awardees are Rahmadian Pamungkas Iqbal, Nurul Oktariani Pratiwi, Susetyo Bagas Bhaskoro and Nur Iksan. An ITB spokesman, Dr. IGB Baskara Nugraha, stated that ITB had chosen them based on its own criteria:

The scholarship recipients have demonstrated excellent performance and personality, impressive academic record, and have motivation in the field of mobile software development and entrepreneurship.

This research program might help repair RIM’s lack of apps compared to iOS and Android. Not only that, the Innovation Center is also a way of winning the hearts of Indonesians so as to secure RIM’s (very uncertain) future. RIM said in January that Indonesia has five million users and predicts that’ll rise to 9.7 million users by 2015. This clearly shows Indonesia holds an important role in BlackBerry sales in the global market.

Just as communities need places of learning, the whole startup ecosystem can benefit from entrepreneurial hubs. In India, The Startup Centre wants to be that critical resource. Founded 2011 by Vijay Anand, who’s the CEO too, it’s an incubator for early stage startups, with two main programs: a resident program that lasts for six months and takes on new teams every month, and an accelerator that lasts the same period of time and leads to about $20,000 in seed funding.

Of course, the journey is more important than the act of graduation, so there’s a very experienced group of mentors on hand to ensure that everyone’s keeping things lean and reflexive. Last year we heard from one Indian entrepreneur, Teliportme’s Vineet Devaiah, that bad mentors in India are one of the three biggest barriers to a startup’s success in the nation; so a curated, expert bunch of overseers at TSC is a welcome addition to the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the country.

The Startup Centre is headquartered in Chennai and has two outposts in Bangalore and Mumbai.

(See also: China’s Innovation Works now incubating 50 startups, worth $600+ million in total)

Since we last chatted with Vijay in May of last year, TSC was so new that it didn’t yet have a track record. But now we can see that it has helped mould some interesting alumni, such as Unclassroom, AppStark, Mirraw, Luttie, and TinySurprise. In total, TSC now has eleven resident startup teams, three resident graduates, and a good many more who have collectively created 92 prototypes and plenty more ideas.

With all those new developments under the belts of both TSC and Vijay himself, the startup scene in India is still dogged, he reckons, by a lack of exits as a motivation and reward for the whole startup scene. Vijay explains:

TSC's Vijay

The space that still needs a bit more work on, is in the M&A [mergers and acquisitions] scene. Its still very nascent and large companies are yet to come to the ‘build vs buy’ dilemma and go for the buy route. But there are a lot of native companies and a surge of foreign companies making inroads into India, which should mean that there should be a splurt of M&As coming up soon – but as of now, it is not a natural one and does take a bit of work to make it happen.

Despite frequent comparisons of India and China in terms of their emergence, Vijay reckons their entrepreneurial paths are far apart:

We’ve seen quite a few companies from India, also setup base in the US and do rather well – so it looks like India is following the Israel scene in terms of building a corridor between the US and India rather than the route a few other south Asian countries have taken.

It also means the local entrepreneurs have had to adapt. Sitting in India (or Asia for that matter), its hard to expect the market to behave like the US. People prioritise very different things – be it family, or education over a drive for consumerism; and as entrepreneurs we are starting to see startups that also adapt to that and make that as part of their offering and marketing strategy. […] Over the past decade or so the maturity of the ecosystem has come a long way. There is much more gradient in the venture funding scene which is allowing for a lot more flexibility in the kind of companies that are getting built.

The second batch of accelerator applicants are now being accepted; the deadline is September 30th for a kick-off on October 15th. Find out more info here. Also, you can follow The Startup Centre on Facebook or Twitter.

[Photo source: The Hindu]

The outspoken Qihoo 360 (NYSE:QIHU) CEO, Zhou Hongyi, has been taking part in a panel at the China Internet Conference here in Beijing this afternoon. While there are other speakers at the panel, all eyes were on him. Zhou, from time to time, has been quite an ass, fighting with different leaders in the Chinese internet industry. Nonetheless, I do have respect for Zhou for the things he has achieved as an entrepreneur. His words still bring some weight, which is evident as people clap enthusiastically whenever he speaks.

The recent search war is Zhou’s most recent battle with a giant (Baidu). The moderator asked why Zhou is always constantly fighting battles with the giants, be it with words or actual products. Zhou was calm and took the question pretty well, I thought. He first established that Qihoo 360 operates in a very startup-ish manner. And he believes that a startup should be built to disrupt. So if Qihoo 360 wants to be in the game, it has to continue to disrupt and that means taking market share from big players at times. And disruption, like it or not, will somehow piss people off. Zhou said:

I urge entrepreneurs to think different from big companies. It is unlikely that you will be successful if you follow the big companies because they are big and they set the rules of game. If they didn’t do a better job in UX, do it, if they haven’t exploit a new space, do it [Note: Translations are mine].

The moderator also said that Qihoo 360 is one of the companies which budding entrepreneurs look up to nowadays. But Zhou humbly denied that and said that they are small compared to others. He claimed that Qihoo 360 is often bullied by other big companies and thus they have to disrupt to stay afloat.

For entrepreneurs who are not in China, you may want to take it with a grain of salt. Zhou is obviously talking about starting up in China where competition at the high level is very harsh. But the general spirit is right, I think. Disruption is important. If not doing that, why bother building a startup?

Also catch:

• Pony Ma’s speech at the China Internet Conference

• Inside Life at Qihoo 360: Exclusive insights from a former employee

Photo: windows8update.com

Many thousands of years ago (approx 200 BCE), there was a relatively tiny innovation that changed global geo-politics — the domestication of horses. Hundreds of years ago, we have had innovation in arts, sciences, biology that all have made us (almost) masters of our destiny.

It is almost undisputed that innovation has advanced humankind, created countless advantages and immeasureable wealth. We in Singapore, have been very fortunate to see a huge surge in startups thanks to governmental support along with generous investors who distribute valuable capital, experience, and resources.

I think a tech startup would be the ideal vehicle that endeavours to explore the cutting edge. This would generally yield two outcomes: a high rate of trial and error failures (imagine how many kicks humans must have endured to tame the mighty horse?) and secondly, return on innovation.

Yes, it’s return on innovation versus Return on Investment. Imagine if humans stopped trying to tame the horse, just because there was no direct line of sight to economic impact.

But how can we measure return on innovation? How can we celebrate those who push the envelope of innovation vs those who “Asianify” an existing successful business? And this celebration should also include daring investors who genuinely believe in innovation versus something else. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong in being the biggest and baddest shoe maker or the slickest retail shop that provides the most economic value but not necessarily best innovative value. And its important we make that distinction.

So to me the idea of a tech startup or tech venture capital has a special meaning which should be measured by its own set of metrics.

There’s an interesting piece from Kyoto news today about how many Japanese companies are increasingly moving headquarters or operations to Singapore. With a more favorable tax rate, Singapore is, so far, the preferred outpost for many Japanese companies looking to expand beyond domestic borders.

This is a phenomenon that we have written about many times in the past with the number of big name internet companies setting up shop in Singapore over the past few years.

Perhaps most notable is the Crosscoop facility on Robinson Road, apparently the default landing ground for Japanese companies in Singapore, which hosts DeNA [1], GREE, Recruit, and @Freaks. KDDI’s advertising unit Mediba is one of the latest companies to set up shop there in October of last year. It also hosts startups as well, which is a big attraction given that Singapore is such a friendly place for entrepreneurs.

Back in May of this year, advertising giant also Dentsu announced the opening of a Singapore office with the goal of expanding into Southeast Asia’s mobile advertising markets.

Kyodo cites SMU’s Toru Yoshikawa who explains some of the advantages of being in Singapore:

Japanese companies want to globalize their operations by hiring staff with diverse cultural backgrounds, and while Japan may have highly competent engineers and managers, they don’t have much experience operating in multicultural environments, so Singapore is an ideal location because they can hire English-speaking staff.

As nearby Southeast Asian markets continue to grow, we can expect to see more companies take advantage of Singapore’s unique geographical and cultural position.

Recently we talked with an interesting Indonesian company, StartupBisnis.com, which is aiming to provide useful knowledge and content for entrepreneurs in the country. It is still very much a very young startup, dating back to just this February when it was founded by Denny Santoso and Rhein Mahatma. Interestingly, the young startup’s Twitter account already has reached more than 18,000 followers so far. So how did StartupBisnis achieve that feat?

StartupBisnis puts out about one article per day, mostly on the subject of entrepreneurship. The topics covered range from startups, finance, leadership and management, and sales and marketing. There are even pitches, similar to the entrepreneur guide website Inc.com. The Indonesian website sources its ideas and content from successful entrepreneurship stories and interviews from across the world. Recently it had an interview with Hendy Tanata, the CTO of US-based startup Love With Food, who is of Indonesian descent; you can see the article here.

Rhein explains to us that he started the website to help out Indonesian entrepreneurs with ideas for proper business strategies so they could have information about the competitive startup landscape. During his time helping out a tech incubator finding good startups in 2011, he discovered that most of them were lacking proper knowledge about entrepreneurship.

When asked about StartupBisnis’s revenue model, Rhein explained that the website makes money from “ads, affiliate services, sponsored content, and paid tweets.” He added that he might consider adding premium content, and events, in the future.

StartupBisnis’ is ranked 1,773 in Indonesia according to Alexa, and averages around 500 to 900 visits every day, which is not bad for a six-month-old website. Regarding the secret to their Twitter followers Rhein said that 18,000 followers isn’t that impressive, and that he is expecting to greatly exceed that number. He explained about his Twitter strategy:

For the last two years I’ve been working as social media strategist and it connected me with some friends that have big [amounts of] followers on Twitter. I also help advise some friends on how to grow their followers so it’s just natural if you connect well with these guys, they will help you achieve your vision.

The team consists of only four people so far: Rhein and Denny as the founders, and two freelance writers. Denny Santoso also runs Indonesian health portal DuniaFitnes.com and SixReps.com, while Rhein himself was an online community manager for a marketing magazine back in 2010. They all work part time for the StartupBisnis.

Somehow over the years ‘advertising’ has become a dirty word in the startup community. Why invest in paid advertising when your amazing product will generate network effects and go viral? After all, you are armed with Facebook, Twitter, Weibo and your awesome blog where advertising your product is free. This has become conventional thinking in many startup pitches.

I don’t mean to sound like a jerk but the reality is your product is probably not as good as you believe and only three people are consistently reading your tweets (and one of them is your best friend). There is a dangerous and false notion that products sell themselves. They don’t. You and I probably are not building the next Instagram or Pinterest so lets get serious. In my experience the old adage “it takes money to make money” is usually true. From day one, you should build your startup with a balance of great engineering, design, user experience and online distribution. Fall short in any one of these areas at your own peril.

There is no question that there is a place for social promotion and inbound marketing for any startup that needs to build awareness. In fact, I believe every startup should start marketing this way. Generating your own press, writing a blog, and social outreach are a must. After all, it is imperative to understand your position in the market and how you will present your brand and value proposition. There is no better way to do that than listening to early customer feedback. This only takes the investment of time and an open mind.

My position is that relying solely on inbound marketing is not enough. Barriers to launching a technology startup get lower every day and that naturally drives more competition who are fighting for your target customer’s attention. Furthermore, you are going to find the coming years more challenging to raise capital from external investors. Believe me when I say that customer ‘traction’ is going to be a prerequisite for them. Pointing to page views or app downloads is not enough, more and more investors want to see real revenue traction and you need real paying customers to achieve that.

I strongly suggest provisioning investment for online search and display advertising to supplement your PR, social, and content marketing efforts. Online advertising is highly performance-based, it’s measurable – and when done well it simply works. In Asia, your traditional competitors are likely investing in traditional media. Let them have it. You have a chance to own the online channel so take it. Learn the fundamentals of search marketing, display advertising, retargeting, and landing page optimization. Blogs such as Kiss Metrics, Hubspot and SEOmoz will teach you everything you need to know. Any startup that can master online distribution has a real advantage over a technical team that only builds product.

I believe paid advertising fell out of favor as the lean startup movement gathered momentum. The lean startup approach is smart. The idea of building a minimal viable product, getting early and frequent customer involvement, and iterating makes total sense. I was living in Silicon Valley in the year 2000 and in hindsight the startup scene was completely out of control. Technology was obscenely expensive, development teams were huge, releases were few and far between and companies were spending millions of dollars in the name of building a “brand.” ROI (Return on Investment) did not seem to be in anyone’s vocabulary at that time.

That said, there is a happy medium. Startups are building and deploying products smarter and faster than ever before. But never underestimate the positive impact of smart paid advertising. You are making investments in product development, in people, and in time. Don’t make the mistake of believing customer traction is the natural result of building a great product. Customer traction is the result of building a great product and making customers aware of why they need it. As always, good luck and I am pulling for you. I leave you with this quote from Steuart Henderson Britt:

Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.

No need to master everything before you start. Just start!

I like to think I’m a doer kind of person. Put me in a lecture room and it wouldn’t do me any good. I learn better if I just do it, make mistakes, and learn from them. But often, I think people are very worried about making mistakes, especially here in Asia where failure is treated like some big disaster or something. It’s funny.

Ray Wu from the Lean Startup Machine recently asked me if the “Lean Startup Concept” would be accepted here in Asia. I think it would, because it is like the golden model on how you build a startup practiced by many in Silicon Valley. Accepting and understanding the lean startup model is one thing, but executing it is another. I don’t claim to be an expert in the lean startup model but I do know that to minimize loss of resources, it’s better to push your product out fast and then iterate and improve based on user data and feedback. Keep doing it so your product gets better, approaching what consumers really want.

Now that being said, the model first assumes that you’re not afraid of failure. And we know in Asia, where “face” is an important thing, we can’t really accept big failure (though things are getting better now with the younger generation). So my take is that while many folks understand the lean startup concept, people may not be actually practicing it.

Pushing out a minimal viable product could cause you to lose face. A kung fu master in a typical Chinese kung fu show will tell you that the disciple will not be allowed to go down from the mountain until he masters all the kung fu skills. The point is, it’s in our culture to be fully prepared before doing something big. And that’s gonna suck in too many resources; and poor folks like us don’t have that luxury.

Solution? Just do it. Whether it is launching a new product, entering a new market, or even a simple feature. If you succeed, good. And if not, then it’s also good. If you learn from it and quickly bounce back, you can then do it better next time. Tell that to your team members too. To fuck things up means you must have done something massive, and perhaps bold, but failed.

The journey is rewarding, regardless of the outcome. This is why we do it.

This is why we are entrepreneurs.

[Image via zhangyuanwai]

Taking a break from serving as a firm-but-fair judge of our Startup Arena contenders here in Jakarta, Daniel Saito (pictured above) now sits down with our own blogger, Charlie, to discuss his entrepreneurial life and journey. Daniel is director of sales at SkySQL, the database solutions company which was spun off from MySQL.

#16:09: “Most of my career is checkered with startups, whether they succeeded or failed,” begins Daniel. One of his first grew to be Netscape browser, and with that one of tech’s first IPOs. Then moving to Japan, he helped kick into life the Japanese web business. “There was no such thing as venture capital back then,” and so it was tough to persuade banks to provide financial backing.

#16:11: On his FBI run-in, Daniel admits that he was a hacker as a 15-year old, and was caught and slapped “with a heavy fine … but no jail time.” He points out he did no harm.

#16:12: So what’s a hacker? He says it’s someone “with a passion” and that these hacks – but not “cracks” in the illegal sense – are innovative and now, finally, embraced by startups of all sizes, right up to Facebook.

#16:13: He sold his Japanese ISP for $50 million back then, just before the first tech bubble burst. And that’s when he lost a lot, having taken shares as his exit booty. “And so it was back to work,” Daniel says.

#16:14: On selling MySQL for a billion dollars to Sun Microsystems in 2008, he says that was the point – in 2008 – where he was asked to bring his spin-off company, SkySQL, to Asia. But the exit to Sun caused a lot of people to leave, some of whom went on to form MariaDB. Daniel stayed on for eight months after the Sun takeover, but then took the core team “to replicate the core business literally overmight” in then forming SkySQL.

#16:17: MySQL’s success was, in large part, due to its basis on open source server infrastructure. He says that the Japanese social network Mixi was his first customer in the nation, as well as a great believer in the company and open source.

#16:19: Should a billion dollars be the goal for startups now? “Building a good product should be the priority … a product that people find value in it.”

#16:20: Any mistakes on his entrepreneurial journey? He says that hiring is key, and to keep a good corporate culture, one where the team can believe in themselves and have good communication. Often, he says, startups that lack all that tend to fail.

“It’s a lot about the interaction” between teammates, relying on one another for things to get done, “Hackathons build great culture. Facebook does this well, and Google with its 80/20 system – not sure if they still do that.”

#16:22: The term serial entrepreneur “is overplayed,” says Daniel. “You don’t call an artist a ‘serial artist’” because entrepreneurs always want to create things, especially if it’s in their blood.

#16:23: SkySQL has a team of 13 in Indonesia, and he finds the country “is a great place for innovation,” and there are “significant downloads of our binaries” because they want to download things for free and put it to use. It’s helpful, he says, that it’s bilingual – well, among the tech community as a whole.

#16:25: How about pitches? He’s going to be hearing a lot more when the second part of our Arena continues later this afternoon. He says that a startup must be disruptive and innovative – and that’s really the only way to stand out and grab the attention of investors. Plus, passion is noticeable and attractive to investors among founders – someone who ploughs in their own money, can pivot or do anything so as to ensure a launch.

#16:26: What’s next for Daniel? They’re incubating SkySQL and another startup of his, called Homerent, which is a social travel and rental platform focusing on Japan and anyone who visits.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Jakarta 2012, our startup event running on June 7 and 8. You can follow along on Twitter at @startupasia, on our Facebook page, on Google Plus, or via RSS.

Darius Cheung posted an interesting opinion piece about his thoughts on the startup scene here. And I particularly like his point about ‘waiter vs doer.’ If you have been following my thoughts, I think it’s pretty obvious that I hate waiters as well. Not those in a restaurant – but people who don’t act and just complain about things.

Apart from waiters, I also hate celebrity entrepreneurs, those who talk and tweet a lot but with no real results. Their mouths are their most valuable assets. My closest allies are people who are doers, people who sometimes talk (yes, inevitably) but also produce good quality work – be it an entrepreneur, investor, interns, or someone climbing the corporate ladder. I have the inbuilt habit to detect bullshitters and I will usually move myself away from them. Because bullshitters, I believe, are negative people to be around. And I really mean it.

So enough of the ranting. My point is that as an entrepreneur (myself included), we’ve got to be more ruthless with ourselves. I can’t speak at Darius’ level as I have not yet crossed the victory line in the way that he has. But I do know that hard work is required to get something done well. You know that too, don’t you? School taught us that, but it seems hard to apply the same thing in real life, unfortunately.

Hard work and sweat aside, you also need to mix with the A+ people. Not those snobbish people who think they are smart, but with people who you know you can rely on for group projects. And in entrepreneurship and business, it is important to mix with people who are doers, and not waiters. Seriously – your clients and customers included.

Surrounding yourself with A+ players makes you positive and want to strive for the best. It helps to get things done quicker too. Many folks advised me to hire only the A+ doer-type people. I did that and I have been very fortunate so far. But that’s not enough: you’ve got to hang out and network with other A+ players outside your team, including people like students/interns who have the potential to be an A+ type player. It also requires you to detect bullshitters so you can remove yourself from him/her. The doers are the ones that make things happen while the waiters will just stand there and BS about things not going their way. As an added bonus, the A+ people also attract other A+ people. That’s the general impact that I find and it should only get better as your network gets larger. Have fun doing, not waiting or BS-ing.

First, Lei was asked what being an entrepreneur means to him. He responded:

Being an entrepreneur means doing what others haven’t done, or doing what others haven’t done successfully. The very successful entrepreneurs are often iconoclasts, the larger-than-life sort. If he [the entrepreneur] has the courage to challenge everything, I think that’s a quality worth encouraging. Experience is the sum of things that have come before, [but] before Facebook, who knew that Facebook could be created? So I encourage entrepreneurs to challenge authority, to topple the existing rules; that is what successful experience is.

Later in the interview, Lei was asked more directly to offer some advice to budding startups and entrepreneurs on how to find investment. This is what he said:

Dont’ burn incense, it’s useless [i.e., don't just pray for a lucky break]. No investor’s money comes easily, because our money was earned with blood and sweat, too. Lots of people ask me: why don’t you invest in me? Because it’s my money, I can invest it in him or I can invest it in you. So, why should I definitely invest it in you?

If I’m following Lei correctly here, he’s saying entrepreneurs need to remember that no one invests in ‘good enough,’ and that you’re going to have to compete for every penny. If you go in with a why-wouldn’t-they-invest attitude, you’re probably going to fail.

[Huashang Wang via Sina Tech]

Wear a helmet if you plan to expand your business abroad

Even though our core team is made up of five different nationalities all across Asia, Tech in Asia is still legally a Singapore-based startup. Singapore is small and it seems like a mandate that all local startups have to somehow expand abroad. As a budding Singaporean entrepreneur, I have to admit that it’s tough expanding business beyond this cozy, sunny island. It’s fun too, of course. There are all sorts of issues which we have faced, and I thought it might be helpful to share three of them with you below:

1. Hiring

We needed a lot of hard work and luck to form our current core team, spanning across China, Japan, Singapore, and Indonesia. And in Asia, at least from my experience, it’s very difficult to find the right fit. It makes things even more difficult for us when we don’t really have a physical office. We work virtually in an IRC chatroom; it’s part bootstrapping and part the nature of our work. We needed people to be based in key cities throughout Asia. I owe a lot to the many kind referrers who pointed us to the right people for hire.

We made a bunch of hires that didn’t quite fit as well (although that doesn’t mean they are not good). But that’s just part of the game. We couldn’t afford to spend money to advertise for job positions on LinkedIn or job portals. So asking around is the best way to for us to find the right talent. We still do that even today.

2. Culture

It’s good to be a Singaporean because we get exposed to many different cultures even when we’re young. Whether we are in China, India, or Indonesia, we at least have a little basic understanding of the various cultures. But that’s just on the surface. Every culture has different business practices. Some good, some frustrating. But to do a business in any country, you have to live and breathe its culture. The worst thing that could happen to a Singaporean is to bring “Singapore arrogance” to the table.

But seriously, no one gives a shit about you or your product. If you’re in their country, you play by their rules and customs. I don’t claim to be an expert but I’ve come to learn that no matter where you’re doing business, sincerity is of utmost importance. You can’t really fake it because eventually your body language will give you away over time. If you provide value and at the same time are on good terms with the person who you’re working with, things should roll out just fine.

3. Legal and tax

This is perhaps one problem that startups neglect the most. But to do business in any country, you have to understand its legal system. Or at least the laws that will or might affect you. For this speak to your lawyer and to folks who have done or are doing business in the country you’re planning to expand to. Spend time to understand the potential pitfalls and how to avoid them. It is a big hassle, I agree. But a needed step to be on the safe side.

So there are three points which cover the major issues we have seen when expanding and hiring abroad. Of course it is by no means a complete list. So for readers who have additional points, please add them via comments below. Its always good to see startups who are planning on expansion. Other issues we face include adapting to languages, payment methods, and also corporate structure.

While it’s tough doing business abroad, it is worthwhile doing so. We didn’t take much of a rest after Startup Asia Singapore before jumping full-time into Indonesia. It’s been a crazy ride — exhausting yes, but extremely fruitful. We move fast, take huge risks, and we could easily fail. But we just love seeking new experiences. And expanding abroad certainly gives us that, as well as lots of great new opportunities!

Is there a bubble in the startup industry? It looks like it. At least that’s according to a discussion panel at GMIC, which included Robin Chan (founder and CEO at Time Machine Ventures), Bao Fan (founder and CEO, China Renaissance) and Huoy – Ming Yeh, (managing director of Silicon Valley Bank China).

It’s the same familiar points, but worth noting. Stupid money is being invested in companies, with no revenue at most times. But few acquisitions are happening in China and Asia. Most investors can’t find the 50x returns they are looking for. And because there’s an excess of capital, more folks are coming out to build startups, raise money, and hoping to be the next Facebook, Google, or Instagram. But you see the disconnection. There’s a lot of money and startups, but very few exits in Asia. That’s how I interpret it.

That said, Bao Fan pointed out that it is a natural cycle of the mobile and internet industry. The next bubble burst and dry spell would test the companies’ true strength. It is good in that sense as the industry somehow needs that. Those who survive are likely to do well. Robin Chan specifically pointed that the gaming looks to be on the downside. He didn’t explain why, but his comment does bring some weight as he previously founded XPD which was acquired by Zynga, which eventually became Zynga China. Chan has also angel invested in Twitter, Square, and Foursquare.

In China, he invested in Xiaomi, which I believe is now a billion dollar company. He is also skeptical about funding mobile applications as he sees no exit in China. For him, only a few companies in China can compete globally. And guess what? He pointed Xiaomi as one. And he noted that Weixin (now WeChat) was another. It’s important to note that Weixin is part of Tencent. Bao Fan did point out others, including Dianping, Youku, Renren, and YY.

While there’s excess capital to invest, I thought Huoy-Ming Yeh gave a good alternative view on investing in startups. Most investors in China are investing in trending industries – or basically clones – and that is fine of course. It’s their money. But new and bold ideas should also be invested as she believes that it would help push innovation, and hopefully, also nurture the next “Yao Ming” within the Chinese tech industry.

[Image: phitolandia.com]

This is part of our coverage of the 2012 Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing. See our interviews and reports from the event here.

Raising money is tough. It’s more an art than a science. So what should entrepreneurs keep in mind before approaching investors? At a discussion panel, “The Pros & Cons of VC Funding,” participated in by six investors from across Asia, I quickly jotted down some of their pointers. The panel was moderated by Volker Heistermann, the co-founder/MD at Yushan Ventures. Panel members were as follows:

• Li Feng, partner, IDG
• Hiro Mashita, business alliance, Hikari Tsushin Inc.
• Yen-Lu Chow, managing director, WholeTree Ventures
• Cyril Ebersweiler, partner at SOS, founder at Chinaccelerator
• William Bao Bean, managing director, SingTel Innov8

Their advice does not constitute a comprehensive list of course, but it should start entrepreneurs thinking before raising money from investors:

1. Check out the VC partners: There are several partners in a venture capital firm. Understand who are the partners you most like working with and ensure that he/she is the right person to work with.

2. Rapport/Chemistry: Finding the rapport and chemistry with the investors looks like the top tip from the investors in this discussion panel. This is key to making sure the relationship is a good one, with potential to go a llong way.

3. Check out their portfolio companies: To find out what kind of companies the investors have invested in already, check out their portfolio. So for example, a clean tech company need not waste time trying to raise fund from the a VC who is focused on the consumer web products.

4. Lifecycle of the firm: Every investment firm has a lifecycle, often of about 10 years or 15 years. As the investment firm is approaching the end of the lifecycle, it is likely to focus on exits – that is for its portfolio company to either go for an IPO or get acquired. So understanding the lifecyle of the fund is important as startups would like to have enough time to grow before hitting the exit button – if that happens at all.

5. Check out other options: Institutional investors aren’t the only source of funds. Also look into angels, crowdfunding, and friends, family, and fools.

6. No 100 percent control: That said, not everyone should raise funds from investors. If you are a control freak – meaning, someone who wants to have 100 percent control and ownership – then it’s better to stay small and grow organically. Founders need to take note that raising money from investors means giving part of the ownership to others in exchange for potentially greater growth.

7. Busy angels aren’t cool: Interestingly, William Bao Bean from SingTel Innov8 shared that the most famous angels in China aren’t the best investors to go with. (He didn’t mention names, though.) They usually have too many other commitments, generally having invested in over 40 to 50 startups. They have little time to mentor. William also noted that these “famous angels” in China usually take a large equity at a very small sum of money, which usually leaves the founders very little equity to stay motivated by the time they exit after raising several rounds of funding. So, yes, take note of busy angels. Even if they are famous, it could boil down to nothing if they are too busy for you.

So recently a startup folded. And seriously it scared the shit out of me. I know startups tend to fail. But seeing someone close to me folding their business did strike me hard in the heart.

It’s like witnessing one of your loved ones pass away. Will that happen to us? Possibly. After all, most startups are born to fail.

So I’m dedicating this memo to myself, my team members, and fellow entrepreneurs as a reminder to fight hard. Fight hard so you have no regrets. If the venture fails, we all know we tried our best.

There are 101 reasons why a startup can fail. But don’t let the reason be a lack of effort or passion. We can’t control the competition or the market. But we can make ourselves stronger, make the team stronger. We can struggle and push further, and take risks to go a higher level.

Even if we fail, then the journey will have been beneficial. Try again, knowing you can do better with a load of startup experience behind you.

I wish you good luck, founders!

The China-Singapore venture fund Gobi Partners has announced the appointment of a new venture partner for the Gobi Singapore Fund in the form of Shaw Soo Wei (pictured right). Ms Shaw is an experienced media executive as well as someone who’s steeped in the Singaporean entrepreneurial scene, recently working as a consultant to businesses in the region and getting some of them into the mainland China market.

Revealed exclusively to Tech in Asia by Gobi Partners this morning, Shaw Soo Wei becomes the second such venture partner after Dextrys’ James Tong. Her knowledge of both her home country and the China market – in both the private and public sectors – will be put to use at Gobi helping startups to expand across the region. Gobi invests in early-stage IT and media startups and manages over US$300 million in potential funds.

Shaw, in a statement issued upon her appointment, described the Gobi Singapore Fund as “a leading investor in cross-border opportunities in China and Southeast Asia.” Outlining her role, she explained:

As Chinese and Southeast Asian media companies start to expand beyond their home markets, my focus will be identifying early-stage investment potential and key leaders in disruptive innovation.

Ku Kay Mok, a partner at Gobi Singapore, lauded the new venture partner by describing her as an “experienced executive with strong connections with the media sector.” Mok added:

As we continue to invest in consumer-oriented digital media startups, she will be instrumental in identifying media trends and opening doors towards business and market opportunities as these companies scale and work with existing content providers and other traditional media players.

The last time we saw Gobi Partners in action was just last month when a game studio that it had invested in was sold at a very tidy profit. That sale saw Gobi claim that it has now achieved 60 percent in internal rate of return (IRR), a quantitative measure of a fund’s profitability of investments.

I often find that investors with no entrepreneurial experience kinda suck. I mean, if you are giving advice to startups, you really should have at least gone through the highs and lows of an entrepreneur before doing so. Some investors might argue that they are the head of some major MNC or CEO of a big company. It isn’t the same. Climbing the ladder and creating one are two different things.

To improve your chance of succeeding, entrepreneurs need to be picky with investors. Don’t get lured by cash and high valuations. More often then not, it is the connections and the experience of your investors that will make or break your dreams, especially in your first startup attempt. That said, not everything should rely on the investors, and entrepreneurs need to work hard and execute well.

I find that in Asia there’s an imbalance of power between investors and the startups. Investors ask questions like: What experience do you have? What’s your business model? Your break-even point?

But entrepreneurs need to start asking some questions about investors too. A few of the more important questions:

• How can you help my startup?
• What is your experience?
• How would you fit into my expansion plans?

If the investors get flustered with some simple questions, walk away. You know that he is being an ass. Consider inform the community as well so that others can avoid him in the future. The handful of investors who I personally like tend to speak to entrepreneurs like a friend. They don’t have any hint of a snobbish attitude or what I call the I-have-the-money-face.

The good investors were once on the other side of the table (some still are) and understand exactly how hard it is to succeed. They know when to push and when to let go. And it often takes just a couple of coffee meetings to click with special people like those.

[Image: Shutterstock]

From IFC's 'Ease of Doing Business' survey

Founded in the 14th century as Sinhapura, by King Parameswara and turned into a major trading center, in the 1800’s by Sir Raffles – Singapore has been at the crossroads of global commerce and culture for centuries. My earliest memories of the city are from the late 1980s. The nation was in its baby boomer days, young citizens were moving into HBDs high-rise towers, gleaming new infrastructure in places like Sentosa was being built, and there was a general sense of optimism in Singapore’s young population about what their country could become.

Almost a quarter of a century later, I am happy to see that Singapore has been one of the developmental success stories of our region. Singaporeans have shown the world what a small multi-ethnic island without any natural resources or military prowess can achieve through just human endeavor and visionary leadership.

I believe that the country now stands at an important juncture in its story. It could, like parts of the west, walk into the sunset with its aging population, or it could leverage the physical, social and economic infrastructure it has built, and become a symbol of economic hope for a new, confident and resurgent Asia.

The convergence of opportunities

The Economist recently wrote about how our world is increasingly divided into three socio- cultural spheres of influence [1], the Anglosphere, the Indosphere and the Sinosphere. The article quotes a study by Pankaj Ghemawat, ‘Why the world isn’t flat,’ [2] that two countries which share a common language trade 42 percent more with each other than two otherwise identical countries that lack that bond and countries with former imperial ties trade an astounding 188 percent more often. The article ends with a reminder on the enduring ties of tribes and how this will continue to shape the cultural and economic future of our globalized world in this new ‘Asian century.’

Along with its administrative advantages, Singapore’s unique cultural, linguistic and historic linkage to all three of these spheres is creating a situation where the country now offers some of the same ingredients that made cities like London, New York, Bombay and Shanghai great economic centers in the past.

I believe that the current environment in Singapore makes it inevitable that more than a few great global businesses will emerge from here in the coming years. Whether “natives” or immigrants start all of these is a moot point.

On a recent visit, I had the opportunity to attend Startup Asia, a regional summit for startups in Singapore and the ASEAN region. The international nature of the entrepreneurial ecosystem was evident from the various companies I came across, with Indian, Malay, Japanese, Indonesian, American etc entrepreneurs or key team members.

Based on the 25+ companies I met while in Singapore, the strong Web 2.0 bias of purely Singaporean teams seemed evident. On the other hand, more international teams seemed to have a greater depth of focus on addressing regional and global consumer opportunities within healthcare, security, education and environmental technology. This is hardly surprising. In a country with the cleanest air in Asia, negligibly low crime rates and radio taxis that arrive within minutes, there don’t seem to be many visible problems to solve. When there is a cross-pollination of ideas from around the region, a more robust and interesting business focus seems to emerge within the company.

In addition to government investment programs like SPRING Seeds, IDA’s Infocomm fund and numerous incubators, there seems to be an active Angel, VC and PE investor ecosystem in the country. These investors are increasingly investing in local start-ups to target regional and international markets. LPs seem to be supporting this trend eyeing cleaner corporate governance and greater exit potential of portfolio companies based out of Singapore.

On the talent front, competitive salaries ensure that graduates from respected local institutes like SMU, NUS, NTU are joined by top graduates from India and Australia. The protracted slow-down in western markets, Chinese political challenges and Indian uncertainty also seems to be accelerating the brain-gain [3] into Singapore. On this one trip alone, I met at least four seasoned entrepreneurs who were relocating into Singapore from the west to take advantage of the Asian markets.

A few hurdles to overcome

As is usually the case, all this has come at some cost. From an increasing disparity among its ethnicities, an often over-bearing government and recent distaste for skilled immigration, the city-state has some tough issues to address. Add to this its aging population and rising regional competition from cities like Shanghai and Dubai, success is not as imminent as it once seemed.

The recent push back on immigration and PR approvals [4] for qualified foreign nationals from certain countries has created uncertainty and risks upsetting the momentum that has been built up over the last decade. The last thing Singapore needs at this point is to catch the west’s economic malaise by restricting investors and entrepreneurs who want to build global businesses in the country.

Singapore’s tryst with destiny

As greater affluence and economic integration makes political divisions less relevant, Singapore has the opportunity to become a major center of entrepreneurial activity in Asia. Its efficient administration, cutting-edge infrastructure and access to international multi-lingual talent make it a safe-haven for entrepreneurs, from which to build regional and global businesses.

The IFC’s annual ‘Ease of doing business survey’ consistently ranks Singapore at the top [5]. According to Singapore’s Deputy Prime Minister Mr. Teo Chee Hean, 5000+ new tech enterprises have been registered in Singapore every year since 2006 [6]. He also shared that 61 percent of all enterprises survive for more than three years. These are impressive credentials!

It is often said that chaos breeds creativity. Asia as a whole should be a hotbed of creativity – and it is. However, a factor that is often ignored is that unsupported creativity often leads to failure. Creativity needs nurturing and support to turn it into something tangible.

At the confluence of three powerful socio-economic spheres, Singapore seems to offer the perfect environment for great ideas to convert into great businesses. It remains to be seen if this small island will seize a historic opportunity and position itself as a crucible of great ideas and businesses.

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

New information from the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank confirms what we’ve been talking about on this blog for some time now. Singapore is one of the friendliest environments on the planet for entrepreneurs.

The latest Doing Business report ranks Singapore at the top of its ‘ease of doing business’ rankings for the sixth straight year. The nation is also rated high in trading across borders, protecting investors, and resolving insolvency. You can see more details in our infographic [1] below and in our interactive map.

As for other Asian regions, Hong Kong was ranked second just behind Singapore, the report citing its new online system for company registration. Malaysia rose five spots to number 18 on the list thanks to numerous reforms “including a new one-stop shop for start-ups, computerization of commercial courts, and improved insolvency proceedings.”

As for China, it still sits in the middle of the global rankings, but the report says among East Asia and Pacific economies that it has advanced the most over the past six years. South Korea was ranked eighth, and Japan was ranked 20th.

Summary

PO founder Willis Wee spoke with Sold.sg co-founders Angeline Tham and Tian Qiuyan about their penny auction business, which now has over 80,000 users and is making a profit. They spoke about issues with the penny auction model, plans to expand into other areas of Asia (they’ve just established a branch in Malaysia), and what it’s like to be a female entrepreneur.

For the full story, check out the live blog transcript below.

Liveblog

#14:27: And that’s it for this session, the last session at Startups in Asia (Singapore) 2012! Now on to Startup Arena!

#14:25: What are your three tips for female entrepreneurs? (1) Be confident. (Qiuyan). That’s it. “I don’t think there’s anything specifically for females,” says Angeline. “Be decisive [...] don’t be afraid to take risks,” adds Qiuyan.

#14:25: “So far we’ve not really faced any gender discrimination,” says Angeline.

#14:23: Do you face any difficulties as female entrepreneurs? Not really. ‘Actually, it has helped us.’

#14:21: Just recently launched a version in Malaysia. Where else do they plan to expand? “We definitely have plans to expand in the region,” says Angeline, and they also have plans to expand to new models, since “we know that this model is not for everyone.” But both ladies are coy and won’t say anything specific about their plans. They will admit it’s in the area of e-commerce, and categorized as B2C.

#14:20: Willis has determined both Qiuyan and Angeline are single, and is attempting to find them some dates amongst our audience of single entrepreneurs.

#14:18: This founder team is two friends and one brother, but Willis says we hear advice about not running businesses with friends and family. What are the pros and cons of doing it? Qiuyan says one “pro” is trust. You know you can trust family and close friends. Also, knowing each other helps with management. Cons: “We see each other too much.”

#14:17: Lots of failed competitors. Why? Qiuyan: “There’s a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes that people don’t see.” Operations (they sell about 40 different items per day), customer service and education, IT issues. “It takes a lot more work than what people see.” Competitors fail to realize that.

#14:15: How do you prevent scams and frustration? They do their best to educate users about the model, and advise users not to use the site until they understand the model. But “we deliver on whatever we’ve stated on the site,” says Angeline. ‘If it was a scam, we wouldn’t have our names, addresses, and faces on the site.’

#14:14: In total, the site has around 80,000 users and is making a profit. Angeline says the profit margin is around 10 percent. They also recent received a cool million (dollars) in funding from various angel investors.

#14:13: So why the penny auction model? “We learned about the idea [and] thought it would do really well here [in Singapore],” says Angeline. “It’s something that we’re passionate about.” But they do more than just penny auction, and are looking at other models for potential expansion.

#14:10: “The salary is [...] definitely a huge thing to let go of, prestige is another,” says Qiuyan. Being a banker can become part of who you are, apparently, which makes it harder to leave, so letting go was difficult. But ultimately she decided it wasn’t worth it. It’s better to have a good team and work with trusted partners.

#14:08: You can make a lot of money in banking. Was there fear in moving to a risky startup? “Definitely.” Angeline says it helped for them in that they didn’t need to support their families financially. But at the end of the day, what’s important is what you enjoy.

#14:06: So why did they choose to leave banking and do a startup? “Banking is…bureaucratic.” In a startup, “we can choose our own fate,” says Qiuyan. “In banking you work like a dog,” says Angeline, and they didn’t feel fulfilled.

#14:01: Sold.sg is a pay-to-bid site. Users purchase tokens to participate in auctions. It’s a “penny-auction site.” Is it a scam, asks Willis? No. “We don’t believe in manipulating auctions,” says Angeline.

#14:01: This coffee chat is with Angeline Tham and Tian Qiuyan, the co-founders of Sold.sg.

This post is a part of our coverage of Startups in Asia (Singapore), Penn Olson’s first tech conference. Our full coverage of the event can be found here, for our RSS feed, click here.

Summary

Serkan Toto is the moderator, talking to Francis Lee (Joyent), Zane Adam (Microsoft Azure), Christopher Bousigues (Nubefy), and Simone Brunozzi (Amazon Web Services) about web services and startups.

Liveblog

#15:01: And that’s a wrap!

#14:57: Lots of very technical stuff in this chat which is really fascinating but going way too fast and deep to liveblog. Hopefully the startups present at the event are taking notes…

#14:54: Simone says that lean startups can make use of the cloud to test out upgrades, such as with rolling out a new version of its software to only half of its customers, and then quickly roll back if there are issues. Amazon does it itself, he says, with a software update being implemented on its own servers every 11 seconds. Whoa!

#14:51: Large companies can now act like a startup, and the cloud is part of that, says Zane, thinking of Samsung’s SmartTV and that being a bew platform where startups are jumping on Microsoft’s Azure to power those.

#14:47: How about startups in Asia? Zane says that Asian startups are adopting cloud platforms really quickly, and cites the example of a startup using his Azure solution to power its Mobage (DeNA) platform game.

Simone, from Amazon, says that Asia is “one of the hottest markets.” Francis says that companies are now seeing the sense in the cloud, and the cost benefits of it, giving you savings that are tangible and allowing startups to scale their growth very exactly.

#14:41: “Just sign on and try,” encourages Christopher, as it doesn’t involve a lay out. “Try all of them,” he says, and listen to feedback from other users.

Francis says that entrepreneurs should look at very specialised features, such as node.js and how the providers runs that kind of thing.

#14:36: The Microsoft guy, Zane, says that a huge amount of layers of defenses need to be put up. Christopher points out that startups need to think of their very specific needs, and project into the future. For example, will a certain cloud provider allow you to expand into APAC with ease?

#14:35: How truly safe are these services? The Amazon guy says that clients – and those of other providers – praise these for making their platform safer then ever. “My default, the level of security you get in the cloud is higher than in proprietary solutions”

#14:33: “You can’t just stop thinking […] You still need to do your homework,” says Zane, because cloud providers are not devoid of any issues. You still need to be aware and careful, he emphasizes.

#14:30: Can cloud storage providers ever be a problem, asks Serkan? The Nubefy points out that the public and private cloud can be an issue, especially across countries and different legal frameworks. And so startups need to think about what data is not sensitive enough so that it can be put into the public cloud.

#14:29: Francis expands and says that cloud services can save you money to either scale up or dow depending on your needs at any stage.

#14:28: The Amazon man gives the example of a startup that went viral with its Facebook app, and so all it needed to do to ‘scale’ was to whip out their credit card and upgrade their Amazon storage.

#14:26: “For a startup, you need to look at infrastructure costs,” and so web services are great for startups to avoid a huge layout. So says Zane.

#14:23: Serkan, the host of the discussion, intros the four panelists. Francis is an engineer at Joyent, which is a US-based cloud service company, which ranks secord or third behind Amazon.

Microsoft’s Zane is representing its Azure cloud platform. Christopher is from Nubefy which is a management as well as a cloud service. Oh, and Amazon.

General Summary
Willis Wee spoke with James Tan, the co-Founder of 55tuan who we have written about before and managing partner at QuestVC. James discussed his own experiences going to China to do business there, and explained that while his experience there has been a fruitful one so far, that it can often be an arduous process for foreign startups to adjust to the market there.

Liveblog

#10:09: Typically we want to invest in local startups, because for foreign startups to come into China and learn the local system, local markets — it can take as long as three years, and that’s just too long.

#10:07: If your idea is something we think makes sense for Chinese market, we would be happy to help you do everything along the way. But at the same time we don’t want to make it too comfortable.

#10:06: On China besides Beijing: You can explore, but its still pretty much about Beijing for me. That’s where companies can find the necessary talent. The country can support many hubs, but there is still one major center and that’s Beijing.

#10:04: James refers to how many companies in China “copy first and innovate later.” If you look at all the big startups in China. Baidu, like Google. Tencent like MSN and ICQ. All of them started as copied but differe greatly from the originals now. It means localizing and innovating on top of the initial idea.

#10:01: I’m not going to defend [Chinese copying], but if a good idea comes from the west, it will be copied anywhere in the world. Executing well is important, because even if you copy, it may not work if it is not executed well.

#10:00: Advice to entrepreneurs: Find good partners. I think events like this help, I would love to see Penn Olson do an event like this in Beijing.

#09:59: There is a crisis of trust in Chinese companies that started back in May or June. We took a step back to look at the best time to list. We had to step back and ask, do we need capital or not.

#09:58: There are many ranking criteria. We typically go by revenue, which see us in the top three. Top three players are always consistent. There are only three sites that have a transaction value of 200 million RMB. Every day we transact more than $1 million.

#09:57: Three months after launch we had about 80 competitors.

#09:56: James explains how he went to China on a scholarship, met cofounders there. Cofounders all from Qinghua university.

#09:53: 55tuan is one of China’s largest ecommerce site. But the model has changed much since it started.

I gave a sharing session at the National University of Singapore last Wednesday about my experience living in China for a year. I am currently in my last semester at NUS majoring in Communications and New Media, with a very fun minor in ‘Technopreneurship.’ In order to obtain my Technopreneurship minor, I opted for a global immersion project called the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) program. In my case, I was attached to an Innovation Works’ invested startup called XingCloud, and took courses at Tsinghua University.

Before I could even share any thoughts about my experience there, some students already left the lecture theater. Even though I was following perhaps more popular talks from people from Silicon Valley, Bio Valley, and Stockholm, I couldn’t help but feel a little down about this.

A few cloned apples shouldn’t spoil the bunch

But after I gave my talk, many of the reactions I heard asserted that China has no innovation and creativity. Really? Some of them tell me that Chinese rip entires idea from the West and replicate them in the East. While this is indeed the conventional wisdom, it proves less-than-wise in that it often overlooks the fact that such entrepreneurs tweak and adopt the idea to suit to the local culture.

Regarding the oft-cited example of Sina Weibo — a micro-blogging tool which has surpassed it’s western counterpart, Twitter — it has adopted a number of innovations, tweaking the entire microblogging idea to suit local markets. In my opinion, it’s wayyyyyyy better than Twitter in terms of the user experience, value added services, and even the interface.

I attended one of the mobiTalk sessions organized by the Great Wall Club and recall 500 Startups founder Dave McClure saying that it would be foolish not to replicate business ideas into markets which no one have tapped into. I mean it makes sense right? If you see an opportunity to serve a huge market (such as, China), it would be silly to miss on the potential big bucks.

Should you let it get to you?

Cloning is when people replicate ideas, and it’s often associated with China. But what makes you think that it does not happen in the west? Take for example Zynga’s FarmVille. Wasn’t this replicated from Farm Town? Farm Town was the ‘first mover,’ but who’s doing better now?

People will try to learn what makes others successful, and try to follow in their steps, right down to the tiniest details such as the button placement, color, layout etc. If your product is being copied, you might feel a strange mix of anger and flattery.

I’m not saying that copying is cool, but I just wanted to illustrate that we live in an ecosystem which follows very Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest rules. But if you play the game, it’s dwelling on those who don’t play fair will only distract you from the ultimate prize. Instead try to think, how can I surpass them? How do I tweak and localize to suit to regional markets? How do I adopt innovations to stay ahead of competitors and clones? If you already have the first mover advantage, you should be leveraging on it, putting in an effort to stay out front. If you’re the leader, then act like it.

If you have a chance and are interested in tech startup scene, I encourage you to visit China (Beijing in particular). You might be surprised with the talent and innovation you find there. It really isn’t just cloning over there. You will believe me when you see it.

Photo: Andrewwolk.com

Image: playupl.com

From time to time people would say that here in Singapore or Southeast Asia we needed a big money exit – you know, like X acquires Y for $100 million. That would inspire folks to step out and build businesses, because let’s face it, who wouldn’t want to get out with bags of money.

But the idea of building a business to sell kind of sucks [1]. While there’s nothing wrong selling a business, the mentality of starting a business and gearing it up to get acquired one day isn’t quite right. There’s no way to guess who your acquirers might be and there’s no tried and true way to ensure you’ll get acquired. You can’t force your potential acquirers to sign any cheque. Instead, your time should really be spent thinking about building a solid product that serves a real need, and at the same time able to pay your bills.

Entrepreneurs in the tech circle can probably pick up one good lesson from the traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. Entrepreneurs who are running cafes, eateries, or milkshake stalls are very focused on making their milkshake taste right and very focused on breaking even as soon as possible. There isn’t any hint of thought that one day their businesses would get acquired. I had a rough ride building a educational center for five years so I understand what it is like to run a traditional business. The fixed costs are unbearable, especially for businesses which are constrained by space. Just the rental fee alone would probably dominate up to 40 percent of your total cost. So everyday our team was trying our best to make full use of the rental space to drive revenue, and at the same time provide great value to the customers.

On the other hand, entrepreneurs building digital products often don’t incur such lofty fixed costs. It is also relatively easier to receive investment which allows entrepreneurs more time to get their product right and spend less time wondering how to make money. We all read the headlines that say this startup gets acquired or that gets acquired which make young entrepreneurs millionaires in a matter of years or sometimes even months.

Such external influence might have led some people to have a sort of misguided motivation to build a business. Perhaps we all can pick up a lesson or two from entrepreneurs who run traditional business. They may not be cool in your eyes but their focus on getting the product right and the urgency of reaching their break-even point as soon as possible is admirable. At the end of the day, revenue and profit is the common standard people use to judge your business. And to generate profits, entrepreneurs have to build something that people want to use and are willing to pay for. Your customers pay your bills, not your potential acquirers (I mean they could but what are the chances?). So the mindset should be to solve a problem with your product, serve your customers well, and build a sustainable business. Only then will your company have value and you can be in a more comfortable position to decide whether to continue building your empire or cash in and move on to your next venture.

Chairman of ACE, Teo Ser Luck (speaking)

Update (Jan 20): We received a correction update from ACE that it aims to support 500 startups under its Startups scheme. Each startup could receive up to S$50,000 in grants which sums up to S$25 million in total possible investment.

We have good news for our Singaporean friends in the startup community. The chairman of Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE), Mr Teo Ser Luck, announced at a press conference today that ACE will be providing seed capital to a target of 500 startups. So if each startup receives about S$50,000+, then the total amount, as we estimate, would sum up to about S$28 million to $30 million. (see update above)

What’s more, the new ACE startups program will also remove the requirement for applicants to be below 26 years old. This means even if you’re in your 40s or 50s and extremely passionate about starting up, this grant is absolutely for you.

Why the shift?

ACE recognizes that good business ideas can come from anyone regardless of their age, and will be extending a helping hand for those mid-career professionals and managers who are looking to leverage on their existing business networks and experience to start their own businesses. They are hoping for a bigger pool of startups, encouraging more talent with good ideas to create meaningful and sustainable businesses.

In addition to removing the age limit, there are also tweaks to the innovation criterion that was set in the earlier scheme. The program now targets startups who are able to differentiate their businesses from competitors and stand out within the industry. So startups need to pay attention to minor details which will better serve consumer markets.

Less red tape, more support

ACE also hopes to cut bureaucracies and streamline processes to help startups get funded fast. It has also set up five sub-committees (mentoring, networking, overseas chapters, communications, and ACE startups) to help entrepreneurs ease into the Singapore startup ecosystem. In a nutshell, these sub-committees are in place to allow mentors to guide startups in their growth, get entrepreneurs to be plugged into business communities, create a support network, and aid in overseas expansion.

So aspiring entrepreneurs out there (especially those previously held back by the age limit), what are you waiting for? To find out more about ACE’s new program, visit www.ace.sg today!

Credit: justinlattaway.com

A successful entrepreneur told me something this morning that is pretty true: “You’re only as good as your weakness.”

Take for example, perseverance, which could be seen in two ways. When your startup succeeds, the people around you say you have effing awesome determination. But when you fail people say you are way too stubborn.

Which is true?

I thought about it but concluded that an entrepreneur needs to know when to let go or when to keep moving forward. Letting go doesn’t necessary mean giving up your dream. Rather, it’s more about finding an alternative way to reach your goals when facing difficulties.

So how do we know when we need that change?

Besides user data or taking advice from mentors, a lot of the time my heart is the best filter and indicator of my next move. I do track user data and based on what I receive, make changes accordingly. But most of the time I make changes based on my gut feeling. So far, I haven’t gone too wrong. My gut, surprisingly, tends to be right (at least for now).

The world can say all kinds of good and bad things about your startup – “Your product sucks,” “It rocks so much that I use it everyday,” “You should change focus.”

But the thing that matters is what you believe in. It is, after all, your startup and you should know it better than others.

I tend to listen to people who have real solid entrepreneurship experience and are usually critical and not afraid to tell the truth. For folks who haven’t been entrepreneurs before, I will often discount their advice. But that is just me.

You see, even after picking up external advice, we often follow our heart anyway. And sadly most people like to hear nice things rather than the truth. These are the folks who can’t be entrepreneurs. Though nice words are encouraging, what really helps in product development is honest and painful feedback.

Take all advice and feedback with a grain of salt. Listen, filter, and then follow your heart. You know your product better than anyone else does.

You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart,

— Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.

Lee Kai-Fu at Disrupt Beijing

When Rebecca Fannin, Startup Asia author and Forbes contributor, asked Lee Kai-Fu of Innovation Works about his advice for tomorrow’s entrepreneurs, Lee gave the following three bits of advice, in his own words (for my thoughts, scroll below):

“First, don’t think your idea will change the world. But understand the trend. That is much more important. Because if you’re going into an explosive growing trend, you just have to do a good job and it will take you to the top. And if you think… you know… I’m in a flat trend but I’m going to do something that will kill all the competitors. I think that’s just going against the wind and not productive. The trend is your friend.”

“The second piece of advice is to focus on simplifying. Entrepreneurs are all smart and they all want to do everything. And they have a new idea everyday, a new product, a new feature, a new market. And that slows everything down. The model to develop a new company, especially an internet company, is to build something simple and target a very small network of people and then experiment and grow from there. The lean startup process.”

“The third thing is don’t go alone. So many Chinese entrepreneurs want to be that big boss. This is very Chinese – to be the big boss, everybody is your underling. But in a role to build a startup, it is so challenging, lonely… You want a partner who can encourage you, work with you, partner with you, and lift each other to go through troubles. You also want someone whose skill complements you. And who has an implicit strong trust in you, to really take it to the next level.”

For the full interview, watch the video below:

On Following the Trend…

Personally, I’ve got to agree with Lee’s points. Seriously, only a few dare to fight against the prevailing trend (such as, perhaps, a well-known VC like Lee).

Although I do want to point out that trend-following is also one of the best explanations why most entrepreneurs are building crappy products which are usually a mash-up of buzz words like social, mobile, and location. While it’s great following trends, it is equally (if not more) important to solve a real-life problem.

Some good examples which we have covered so far are NX28.com which helps village farmers to trade farm stocks on the internet, and XY Mobile which is bringing the Lao language onto the web and onto gadgets. Both startups solve real problems. And as long as problems are solved, people are willing to pay for the services (we hope).

Of course, Lee’s advice in the interview isn’t complete and I’m not here to point out that he is wrong. Rather, I hope that while chasing the trend, entrepreneurs should be logical enough to build something that is useful and not something that is simply just plain cool. The real cool is when you make money with a product that solves real problems.

Lee Kai-Fu is a popular and perhaps fatherly figure in China. On stage with Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch Disrupt today he explained that helping young people in China is one of his goals. And to do that, he wrote books and started Innovation Works to inspire and groom entrepreneurs in China. While writing is his forte, he now uses Sina Weibo to spread his message. Five years ago he said that people would come up to him and say “I read your book.” But now people say “I follow your weibo.”

There is a fair share of criticism that Lee isn’t an entrepreneur and is more of a corporate man. Perhaps many folks forget that Lee built Innovation Works pretty much like start-up. I remember Lee also mentioned at Qinghua University that Innovation Works also follows the lean startup model, the very concept that he preaches to Chinese entrepreneurs.

After several years running Innovation Works, Lee is in a good position to comment on the scene in China. He says there are a lot of engineering talents in China, and the calibre of entrepreneurs is high and are people are hungry for success.

For the first nine months, Innovation Works followed the Idea Labs’ concept. He said it works well, but the model isn’t customized for China and couldn’t attract the best entrepreneurs in the country. He said that the best Chinese entrepreneurs wish to have more control over their start-ups.

Lee says that Innovation Works has now adopted the Y-Combinator style, providing seed financing for new ideas. It also provides help in HR, design, and legal resources to new start-ups. He notes that founders should focus on the product.

Sweet Spot

Lee says that investors in China are in a sort of sweet spot right now, as labor cost remains low in China while start-up valuation is high. That of course has attracted many entrepreneurs to set up their own businesses. If you’re one of the folks looking to get funding from Innovation Works, note this down. Lee says that they are basically looking for founders who have passion, the desire for success, and strong understanding of the domain they are working on.

So a founder in the LBS market needs to understand LBS in real depth. Lee also says that he will not accept folks who are sleazy and steal source code from others. One more point is that Lee expects the leader/CEO to be strong and able to lead the company from start to finish. That’s extremely important as it is tough to change CEO in China.

Chinese society doesn’t embrace failure. Lee says there will probably be only one Pony Ma out of every 15,000 drop-out or newly graduated entrepreneurs (an arbitrary number I guess). But it doesn’t make sense for Innovation Works to invest in them, because it just doesn’t make financial sense. Rather, Innovation Works would prefer to invest in start-ups with experienced founders. He discussed the same point at Qinghua.

While talking about the prospective on Chinese companies going to the U.S, Lee says that it is tough because both cultures are vastly different. Lee recommends Chinese companies to expanding to Southeast Asia markets (hell yeah!) where the cultures are closer to China. Lee feels that if there’s a choice, a Chinese company should leave U.S and Europre as its last expansion destinations.

[Photos from Duncan Leung]

This is a part of our TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 event coverage.

TechCrunch Disrupt kicked off with Tencent founder Pony Ma on stage with Sarah Lacy. One point that interested me is about the reputation Tencent has built in China. Lacy says that in China, entrepreneurship means “life, death, or Tencent,” as many Chinese start-ups hope to get acquired by Tencent.

And the common death knell in China could come from any one of the big boys — Tencent, Baidu — who have the ability to introduce (copy) products so quickly that it forces entrepreneurs out of the business. Lee Kai-Fu made the same point last week at Qinghua University.

There are no shortage of complaints that Tencent isn’t an “open” company but Ma said his company has made an effort to change that. Ma says that the revolution of the Apple app store has given him the idea of being a more “open” company.

Internally, that was a struggle as Tencent’s developers are ambitiously trying to build everything by themselves. But slowly, Ma explained that they find it impossible to do everything, and the concept of embracing third party developers started to take shape.

Lacy also talked about Groupon’s fading power in China. Ma didn’t share much as Groupon, because after all, Tencent is their partner in China. However, Ma did reveal that there was a lot of struggling from the start as both companies aren’t synchronized technically or culturally in China. The Gaopeng venture also started too soon before problems were ironed out.

Ma then shared his entrepreneurship experience which goes all the way back to the 1990s. In 1998, after about seven years of working experience, Ma saw an opportunity by integrating internet and messaging into a service. He says that his initial idea was to build software and sell it. He didn’t really envision a company the the Tencent of today.

He noted that email solutions can be sold to a couple of telcos, but for instant messaging (IM) there can only be one platform that can be sold. So instead of selling the solution, Ma and his team decided to build and maintain their own IM solution. That of course is QQ, the IM that most Chinese use today.

Ma also says that entrepreneurship back then was way tougher. It was harder to raise/make money on the Internet. And surprisingly, he said he was writing a lot of proposals rather than coding and building the actual product.

He admitted that China is indeed a harsh environment. Tencent also faces problems with developers running away with ideas and getting investment to develop it in the early stage. The key to solve the problem, from Ma’s perspective, is not to be greedy and share the pie with the people you trust to ensure more growth and profitability. China, as everyone knows, is a market which that copies fast, where an idea can be replicated in a matter of hours after launch.

Taking Apple and Steve Jobs as a source of inspiration, Ma says that entrepreneurs in China should take pride in the product they build. And Ma humbly says that Tencent is also working hard to learn from Steve Jobs.

You can create Steve Jobs figurings, though.

Last weekend at Qinghua University, Lee Kai-Fu shared some interesting thoughts on mobile and entrepreneurship in China. The conversation with the moderator (who is also a professor) and audience, like it or not, somehow focused too much on creating a Steve Jobs.

As Lee asserted that fresh graduates are unlikely to make it into his incubator program, Innovation Works, the moderator, probably for the fun of it, argued and said that there are so many talented young people in Qinghua and China who could be the next Steve Jobs.

But he later also confessed that it is tough as he hasn’t met students with the right ingredients yet. And of course, there’s also the usual criticism about Chinese culture and education, which are believed to be hindering entrepreneurship here.

Sure, that’s personal opinion. But I find it a little disturbing that Steve Jobs became the central reference point throughout a session discussing entrepreneurship in China. How about successful entrepreneurs like Pony Ma, Jack Ma, and Robin Li? Why aren’t they the “Steve Jobs of China” or at least recognized/referenced as Chinese who have built great products that serve the China market well?

Perhaps this is just an Asia thing. An interesting thing about this continent is the amount of respect we have for the westerners. And sometimes I find we have far too much respect, to the point that it borders on a lack of self-confidence on our part.

There’s no problem with idolizing or learning from the best, but it is disturbing to listen to an entire discussion about creating a Steve Jobs in China. There’s no way China (or any other country out there) can do that because Jobs came from a very different culture and had gone through certain experiences that made him who he was.

As ridiculous as it may sound, at one point, the moderator even asked Lee how he has dealt with his kids’ education and questioned if they could be the next Steve Jobs. Lee laughed and said that they are not entrepreneurial sort of characters.

Exactly.

From my interpretation, I believe Lee is essentially communicating that a Steve Jobs can’t be bred, made, or trained. You can’t create or anticipate a genius entrepreneur.

No one would have the balls to say, “Okay, we can just throw in some U.S. education, put in some cash for entrepreneurs, and inject entrepreneurship courses to create/train a Steve Jobs.”

Everything has to be organic because it is the passion that drives an entrepreneur hard; and passion is developed naturally.

Steve Jobs said the following at his 2005 Stanford commencement which pretty much sums up everything:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.

So yeah, create your own legacy, folks.

An audience member snaps a photo of Lei Jun during his keynote address

Saturday night saw an unprecedented collection of geeks at the Great Wall Club in Beijing’s mobiTalk event, as Chinese angel investor and Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun spoke about angel investing and then engaged in a dialogue with geek on a plane and 500 Startups founder Dave McClure.

Lei Jun’s Keynote

The evening began with Lei Jun’s keynote address, which primarily covered his philosophy on investing, although he did speak a little bit about his company Xiaomi and their phone at the end of the presentation. Mr. Lei, who has been remarkably successful investing in Chinese tech companies, played down his success, saying that the knowledge he offered companies came mostly from his many failures, and also suggesting that luck has played a big role. “85 percent of success is luck,” he said.

That said, Lei did have some tips for potential investors. On thing he stressed again and again was to consider the direction of the market, suggesting investors look five or ten years down the road and consider how a company fits into that picture before deciding whether or not to invest. He said it was easy for companies to create a good product, but timing makes all the difference. “Doing the right thing is easy,” Mr. Lei said, “[but] doing the right thing at the right time is very, very hard.”

Mr. Lei also said that personally, he invests only in markets and people that he’s familiar with. This might seem obvious — why would you invest in a person or business you don’t understand? — but Lei takes it to the next level, saying that once he’s chosen to invest in someone, he might follow them through multiple failed projects, so long as his faith in the person remains intact. “We’ve already lost the money anyway, must we also lose a friend?” he asked rhetorically. That might seem unwise, but before you scoff at him, remember that Lei Jun has a lot more money than you do (probably) and most of it came from his successful investments.

Regarding who to invest in, Lei says he looks for companies with passion and the confidence to go big. But of course, the team and the details are important to. “Having a dream is not enough,” Lei Jun said. “Lots of people like to daydream.” He also noted that Chinese companies may need a bit more help from their investors than Western ones, saying that sometimes the relationship between an investor and a startup felt like the relationship between a parent and a child.

Mr. Lei’s speech appeared to be presented almost entirely off the top of his head. He did not use notes, nor did he appear to have memorized anything more than an outline. His passion for the subject was clear, especially when near the end he began to talk about Xiaomi to illustrate his point about market direction.

He said that his belief in a smartphone like Xiaomi as the direction the market was headed came when he saw the first iPhone, which he loved but he said his friends all stopped using because it didn’t have the “forward text message” feature so widely used in China. Nevertheless, Lei Jun was convinced by the iPhone that the smartphone would eventually entirely replace the PC even in terms of things like work, and he began thinking about how a phone could fill new roles like, for example, how phones could serve as office tools that are even more convenient than say, word processing software. Those thoughts are now manifesting themselves in his company’s software, like MIUI, their Android-based OS, and Miliao, their chat app, which Lei Jun suggested could work well as an office tool too, although these products are still in early iterations and will be improved with further development and streamlining.

His belief in mobile e-commerce as one of the next big market directions led him to market and sell Xiaomi exclusively through the web, a move which he says helps them keep the phone’s price down. Touting the phone’s speedy 300,000 preorders, he said the approach has obviously been successful, although later in the evening he ducked a question from an audience member about how the online-only sales operation would handle repairs and other issues if problems arose with the phone. In response, Mr. Lei spoke about the company’s website, the promises they’ve made, and how he’s confident they will meet or even exceed them, but his answer was glaringly void of specifics.

Lei Jun snaps a photo of Dave McClure with his Xiaomi handset

Investment Discussion: Dave McClure and Lei Jun

After Lei Jun’s keynote, the format shifted to a moderated discussion/Q&A, with Dave McClure fielding most of the questions and offering some strikingly frank responses. Lei Jun took clever advantage of his relative silence at one point in the discussion to break out a Xiaomi phone and use it to snap a photo of Dave McClure as he spoke. It was a clever gesture, a sort of subtle, live-action viral ad for the phone that did not go unnoticed.

Asked about China, McClure said that Geeks on a Plane had come to learn about the market and entrepreneurship, of course, but that really what was important to them was meeting new people and the cultural exchanges that take place when two cultures meet. When asked about the differences, he joked that “[Chinese entrepreneurs are] most likely smarter and more aggressive than us” — Lei Jun grinned at that — and that the pace of innovation was faster in Beijing than in Silicon Valley. “There’s [sic] less rules here,” he said, adding that at least from an entrepreneur’s perspective, that probably isn’t a bad thing.

He said in terms of investing, his emphasis was less on finding companies with huge potential and more on finding companies with the potential to achieve success in smaller, easier-to-capture markets. Focusing on smaller, specific communities allows companies to fine tune their products, and ultimately the internet is such a gigantic market that there’s plenty of money to be made even in going after a niche.

McClure also said he felt entrepreneurship has become “too sexy” and investors need to work to find people who are looking to solve problems and not just appear on the covers of magazines. He described real entrepreneurship as generally being “not sexy,” “painful,” “boring as shit,” and “full of failure.” If you’re just looking to make money or get famous, he said, “Fuck it, go do something else. Don’t be an entrepreneur.”

When asked about the copy-to-China phenomenon that has seen a number of tech copycats emerge in Asia when new services are invented in Silicon Valley, both McClure and Lei Jun agreed that this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s not innovation, McClure said, but there’s success to be found there, and anyone seeing such a huge, empty market would be stupid not to try to take advantage of it. Lei Jun also felt that copycatting wasn’t necessarily a bad idea, especially if you can be the first company to do it in a new market.

When asked what they look for in companies, Lei Jun spoke again about his belief in mobile e-commerce as a good direction. McClure was more guarded, saying that he preferred to keep his favorite things to himself but that he would not invest in social games or group buy platforms, and that currently he likes educational games for kids. Ultimately though, he says investors shouldn’t care about what’s trendy, and instead look for what has the potential to make money. “Money is sexy,” he said, “money will always be sexy.”

He also noted he looks for companies with hustler-hacker-hipster leadership, by which he meant teams that have a sales expert, a tech expert, and a design expert, because he believes all of those facets are important in the current market.

M-Stars is a group of mobile- and service-related companies, ranging from music content distribution to mobile payment and advertising. Some of you might remember Adstars, an Indonesia-based mobile ad network which we covered last month, with over 500 million monthly impressions.

Italo started his career as an entrepreneur in 1998. After the dot-com bubble, he started his own VoIP Service provider startup in Singapore and subsequently moved on to mobile-related businesses in 2006. That’s when he joined M-Stars as CCO.

We were eager to learn more about Italo’s story and experience. We think you will enjoy it too.

1. Could you briefly introduce yourself?

I started my first company in 1998 (around the first bubble era) — Indoitalia.com. The company unfortunately crashed along with the entire dot.com bubble burst in 1998.

And then I join Nawala Networks as a COO, which started as an webhosting company, ISP and developed into VoIP service provider company. Within three years it became one of the leading VoIP telecommunication service providers in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

In 2003, I setup up my own VoIP Service provider in Singapore, Digitalbridge Communication Pte LT, which has been supporting Asia’s biggest names in the telecommunication industry such as Maxis, Celcom, Telecom Italia, PT Telkom Indonesia, etc.

Voice business started to saturate in 2006, and then I decided to move to the mobile value added service (VAS) business. In 2006, the founder and CEO of M-stars, Joseph Lumbangaol, convinced me to join M-Stars as Chief Commercial Officer (Joseph started M-Stars in 2000). In 2006 M-Stars was in process of expanding more on mobile VAS services, such as advertising, music label, social media and mobile payment.

Since then we started to launch a new business unit, on mobile advertising in 2008, a digital music label in 2008, music social media in 2009, and revamped mobile payment in 2009. Currently some of the business units are already being spin off to become a sister company of mstars group, such as Adstars for mobile advertising, drM for Digital Music Label, Popmaya for Music Social media, and Poploud for voice-based social media.

2. What is your family and educational background?

My father is a professor in a university, my mother is a great Italian mom with exceptional cooking skill. My brothers, sisters and me have been raised in a competitive environment. I was a swimmer until I joined the Institute Technology of Bandung as an Industrial Engineering major. It was then I quitt swimming, and focused on my study.

3. What inspired you to become an entrepreneur?

I love challenge, I love to create business, and I want to create my own path.

4. I realized a lot of your companies are mobile based. Can you explain why?

Mobile is the only reason for you to start a Internet business in Indonesia. Why ? Indonesia is a ‘mobile country’, because the [majority of] Internet users in Indonesia are on mobile.

Any Internet gadget that fits into your pocket — that will be the future. There are three reasons why Indonesia is a ”mobile country:’

• Indonesia has the cheapest mobile Internet rates, because of the telco price war.
• GPRS-enabled handsets currently are affordable for even low-end social economic [customers] because of handsets made in China.
• For Indonesians, mobile is a social status. You’ll notice most Indonesians have a very high-end GPRS-enable mobile device.

5. You’re based in Indonesia. Are there plans to expand your business abroad?

For sure we want to go global, but the Internet business opportunity in Indonesia is so huge that we need to be focused on the Indonesia market first. I truly believe, that Indonesia is going to have a very important role in Internet industry in the world for the next ten years.

6. What are you most busy with now?

I’m currently managing the commercial direction of all business units in M-Stars group — especially for Adstars, to keep leading the digital and mobile marketing service with new innovative products. We have the benefit to innovate our mobile product for the advertising industry based on our 11 years of experience in the mobile business. M-Stars is connected with all mobile operators in Indonesia, and has been working with them in many kinds of businesses.

7. Do you plan to invest in other Indonesian start-ups?

Yes, but the objective is not investing to a new business, but more to synergize with our current business unit or sister company in the group. Currently we already have ten business units/companies in the group that collaborate with each other.

8. Do you have any key figures or statistics to share?

We’ve been achieving 170 percent growth from 2009 to 2010, and it seems like this year we are going to attain a higher growth rate. Its been a wonderful three years for us.

9. Do you have any future plans to share?

We’re actively focused to enhance our group of company products. We are also going to launch new services in mobile advertising, mobile banking, and in the education center.

You may remember last May when we covered Start-up Weekend Tokyo, and the many great ideas that sprung forth from the three-day event. This weekend saw 2011’s second Start-up Weekend in Tokyo, this time at Mixi HQ in Shibuya.

QLive, the winner of the previous SWT event, was put to good use as a way to gather and vote up the best questions in real-time to ask those pitching. And there were indeed some great ideas put together over these three days. I dropped by on the final day to catch the final pitches. Here are the groups that presented, as well as the select few that won awards

Start-up Intern

‘Let our start-up help your start-up.’ This was the call of the first group to pitch at SWT this past weekend. This group proposed that many young graduates in Japan when trying to enter the work force only know about large internet companies like Gree or Mixi. Many of them are not aware of the opportunities that exist in smaller start-up ventures.

Paul of Start-up Intern presenting

What Start-up intern proposed was a solution to connect interns with start-ups. In order to educate potential interns/employees about their start-ups, founders would create a video to explain what they are about. There would be user testimonials as well so that an element of peer-evaluation would come into play when deciding whether a start-up was a good place to work or not.

As for the revenue model, start-ups would be charged an annual fee to get listed on the website.

Website: StartUpIntern.org

Cooking DJ

cooking dj

Cooking DJ is a service that attempts to make cooking fun again. The team calculated that many of us could spend as many as 22 days per year cooking. That’s almost a month, so we should do our best to make that time fun. How do you make cooking fun? The Cooking DJ team proposes that we do that with music.

The application will take a recipe for a certain dish and break it up into smaller mini-processes (e.g. boil the water, or sautee the onions). Cooking DJ provides songs that are the same length of time, so that when the song is finished, you know that you can move to the next step. The team mentioned the possibility of product advertising (food products specifically) as a part of the business model.

The team was the winner of the ‘One to watch’ prize as voted by other participants, as well as the overall prize as voted by a panel of judges.

RemembAR.me

The winner of the ‘Most Innovative’ prize this weekend, RemembAR.me (the AR = Augmented Reality) is an app that aims to help you in the unfortunate event that you’ve forgotten someone’s name. Say you’re in a crowded room, and you see a face you recognize, but you just can’t put your finger on where you know them from. By holding up your phone’s camera and viewing the room through the app, RemembAR.me will scan the faces and compare them against people in your network (Facebook, in particular). If all goes well, it will tell you who that mystery person is. You’ll ‘never be embarraseed again,’ it proclaims.

As for monetization, as I understand it, is the ‘freemium’ model that the group compared to that of Dropbox. Larger networks and more people to scan would cost more than for example, if you only had 100 people.

Website: RemembAR.me

I'm being scannned!

MyLive

The MyLive team proposed an interesting concept for the concert industry, with its service measuring demand from fans about which bands they’d like to see. Targeting indie music fans, and people outside of major cities, MyLive would give music lovers a chance to vote for their favorite bands. When an artist emerges as ‘popular,’ then a live event is arranged and tickets are sold using a Groupon style system.

StartZaps

StartZaps is a website that catalogues start-ups, allows you to compare similar services. The group said that StartZaps would be a third-party objective review, and from the looks of the site design, each startup listing would show a number of similar services underneath (much like alternativeto.net). When a user finds a start-up they like, they can ‘zap’ it, thus adding it to their ‘My Zaps’ page.

The mock-up that we saw showed that start-ups could be tagged (e.g. music, business, Tokyo) and you could also view how many times they had been shared on Twitter, or how many times they had been ‘Zapped’ on StartZaps.

2kenme

Everyone has a favorite date restaurant. But finding a venue for a second date is more difficult. 2kenme (read Nikenme) helps you find one by sharing evaluations for restaurants, diners or bars with other people, it aspires to give you lots of great options to entertain your companion

Nikenme was the winner of the ‘biggest surprise award’ for SWT.

Plastee

Plastee was unique out of all groups that presented in that it managed to swing a profit over the course of the weekend. The T-shirt creation service managed to sell team shirts to practically half of the other participating groups, as you can see in our photos. What Plastee aims to do is to combine great design with a social, on-demand service.

Targeting amateur designers on platforms like Pixiv or DeviantArt, Plastee would serve as a way to aggregate and rank what users deem as the best designs to go on a shirt — and when a certain design reaches the right threshold of votes, then it would be printed. The service would allow for login from other social services, encouraging users to share their designs among friends.

Jamap

Jamap uses a sort of flash marketing concept that helps restaurants to call potential customers during slack hours. This service is very similar to that of 2kenme.

In hierarchical Japanese work culture, when office workers are drinking with their bosses and colleagues, it’s often the youngest guy among them that has to find a second diner after the first one. Of course on such short notice, there is no reservation and no planning. To remedy this sort of problem, Jamap helps communicate the location of a nearby restaurant along with the number of seats available.

Website: jamap

amigoo

The service allows users to share what they want to do, and then come together in groups and do that activity with others who share your interest. Similar to meetup.com and its Japanese equivalent ATND.

Famemo

Famemo is a social networking site for families. The name is a combination of ‘family’ and ‘memo.’ Younger, more savvy Twitter users can add a specific hashtag to their tweets to determine what messages are visible to their parents. Since some seniors might have some difficulty with smartphone applications, there are plans for a feature phone interface as well.

Mazeuta

This is a service for creating original music from the contributed lyrics of multiple users. One person posts some lyrics, and a notification is sent to Twitter. Then another user posts the next phrase in the sequence, and so on until the song is complete. (Note: I don’t completely get this one, so if anyone can explain further please let us know).

Train-i

Train-i (or Train eye) is a service that helps users see ads on the walls of crowded trains when their field of vision might be blocked by fellow passengers. I’m not exactly sure how this works. It appears to be a sort of AR application, though I don’t know where they would be pulling ad information from. But the function of letting you see the train map (or how close you are to your stop) seems useful.

Website: train-i

[Written with contributions from Masaru Ikeda who was emcee for the event]

My journey as an entrepreneur started when I was about ten years of age. Back then, at elementary school, I was getting just SGD$0.50 per day as an allowance. My family was poor and I didn’t have the cheek to ask for more. To survive, I shared food with my friends but always tried to eat more than my deserved share. I also borrowed money and soon enough got into debt. It was sad – but the situation forced me to think outside of the box. I needed to escape the cycle.

The solution? Together with my brother, we caught grasshoppers and sold them. It was an innovative business model (from a kids perspective, anyway) and it inspired other boys to hop onto this money-making bandwagon. We could sell each grasshopper for $0.50 to $2.00, depending on its size and the color of its legs. The red-legged ones could be sold for a lot more than the blue-legged ones. And when we improved our gear, we started catching spiders and praying mantis to increase our “range of products.”

As you might expect, our school was not pleased and eventually banned all kids from catching insects, putting an end to our business. It had been a fun ride though.

So that’s how I got my first taste of entrepreneurship. After that, I couldn’t really stop. It’s been pretty tough, but a lot of fun too.

So what’s your reason?

We asked our Facebook users and here are the replies so far.

]]> http://www.techinasia.com/entrepreneur-story/feed/ 8 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/startup-execution/ http://www.techinasia.com/startup-execution/#comments Mon, 01 Aug 2011 01:08:21 +0000 Willis Wee http://www.techinasia.com/?p=45364 Read more »]]> We have a lot of copycat start-ups in Asia. There’s no way to hide that. To some, we’re not as innovative compared to the westerners. But seriously, is the idea really everything?

I don’t think so, especially not in Asia. There are just too many successful start-ups whose ideas are ripped off from the west but are then implemented in the east. Perhaps those successes are partly because the ideas are still fresh in their region or local market. But without good execution, ideas are just a concept on a piece of paper.

Consider this: We have seen a very sudden boom in Groupon clones in Asia. And while some of us find the notion of clones annoying, there’s no denying that a few of those have emerged as winners. Nevermind if the idea isn’t cool or if it is copied from someone else… Some of these clones ended up getting acquired and some made money. Their financial objectives were met.

Consider the prevailing belief that many Asian start-ups aren’t unique. Some individuals scoff at Asian companies (for the record, even Asians at times scoff at Asians) and look down on the booming tech start-up scene here. It irritates me because ‘the idea’ seems to be the only factor used to judge the founders’ abilities. But in reality investors don’t just look at the idea. They invest in people who can turn simple ideas into profits.

Being part of this growing ecosystem, we get asked the same question as well: “What’s the difference between Penn Olson and other tech blogs in Asia?” My answer: “The execution.”

In this world, there are only two roles that you can play: You’re either the leader or the follower. Speaking in a general sense, many Asians (myself included) tend to be followers. But is there shame in that? From following successful models, we learn how to innovate through execution.

The market forces us to do so because it is so different from the West. Localization itself can be a form of innovation. Baidu and Google have the same product concept but vastly different in product localization tactics. The same can be said for Sina Weibo and Twitter, Dianping and Yelp, Jiepang and Foursquare, GeoSocials and SCVNGR.

As I’m sure you already know, the idea of online social network isn’t unique to Facebook. The starting idea behind Facebook isn’t unique, and I bet Mark Zuckerberg himself didn’t know from the start that it could grow to become such a powerful social network and advertising platform. Zuckerberg and his team had the right vision and executed it well (or at least, so far). In short, his execution brought him success, not the idea.

Here are three points and suggestions as my conclusion:

1. Whether you are an investor or a journalist, the next time you look at a start-up, don’t just look at the idea. Try to understand how the founders execute the idea and aim to make it a success. That’s the real driving force of a business.
2. If you’re a copycat start-up in Asia, don’t feel ashamed about it. But don’t be blatant about ripping off ideas either. Instead, execute it well and innovate while you localize the ideas.
3. Ideas are important but are not everything. Creating a start-up isn’t only about being innovative. It’s about filling a gap and building a sustainable business out of it. It’s the cashflow that essentially determines whether a start-up lives or dies.

[Image source]

He is now staying in Singapore, and I had an opportunity to interview him before he left Tokyo last week. (Thanks to Hiro Maeda for arranging the interview.)

Why are you doing this world interview tour?

What is the main objective of the tour?

Which countries are you expecting to visit?

]]> http://www.techinasia.com/japanese-man-travels-world-seeks-global-entrepreneurs-nomad-workers/feed/ 0 http://placehold.it/350x150 http://www.techinasia.com/hillary-clinton-bali/ http://www.techinasia.com/hillary-clinton-bali/#comments Sat, 23 Jul 2011 16:47:01 +0000 Willis Wee http://www.techinasia.com/?p=44386 Read more »]]>

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, giving her keynote speech at RES in Bali earlier today. Photo taken by @marissapattan.

A spirit of entrepreneurship is brewing in Indonesia, and U.S Secretary Hillary Clinton’s motivating speech today – at the Regional Entrepreneur Summit (RES) in Bali, Indonesia – has pushed that spirit to a higher level. The crowd seemed star-struck by Clinton’s appearance – flashes from cameras didn’t stop throughout her entire speech, and the atmosphere was awesome.

Clinton shared that entrepreneurship is very much in the blood of most Americans. Clinton’s father, for one, is an entrepreneur who provided food, comfort, and security to her family. On a macro level, Clinton says that entrepreneurship is very much the foundation of the U.S economy, pointing to a number of successes that were born in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurship isn’t just all about tech, she explained, noting that bricks-and-mortar businesses are also a part of the whole entrepreneur ecosystem.

So the solution, in Secretary Clinton’s eyes, is simple and clear: Indonesia’s economy can prosper through entrepreneurship, with the United States acting as a guiding hand.

Hillary Clinton at the podium for her keynote speech at RES in Bali earlier today. Photo by @ratyning.

“Talent is universal, opportunity is not,” said Clinton in her RES speech. It’s the same in Indonesia. Clinton said that there are over 75 million Indonesians who are below 20 years of age, and more opportunities are needed to help them realize their potential. How? By giving access to capital. Mrs Clinton stated:

Indonesia is one of the five countries that the United States will support through angel investors.

The crowd responded with cheers, turning to Twitter to pass on the news.

So it now appears that Indonesia will have even more funds for entrepreneurs. It’s a good time to start-up now, as there are many problems to solve in the country. Take the money and start working, entrepreneurs!

[Image sources: Large image of Mrs Clinton from Twitter user @marissapattan; smaller image from @ratyning]

Eric Schmidt addresses the crowd at the Regional Entrepreneur Summit in Bali

“Entrepreneurs never give up.” That’s the opening line Google chairman Eric Schmidt said in front of an Indonesian crowd at the start of his keynote in the Regional Entrepreneur Summit (RES) in Bali, Indonesia. Schmidt thinks that Indonesia can be the next Brazil. “Indonesia has grown so quickly… at a growth rate that Americans will die for,” said Schmidt. “You know what I mean.”

Schmidt explained that Indonesia has a loud democracy, a flourishing society, and an integrated media. With so many people on Facebook and Twitter, Indonesia is indeed a huge social media nation. But Schmidt asserted (albeit in a somewhat tongue in cheek manner) that Google is number one in the Indonesia, not Facebook or Twitter. And of course the crowd laughed.

Despite a high number of web users, Schmidt says that Indonesia has a lot of room for growth. He points out that the country only has 18 percent Internet penetration but believes there will be a web explosion in the country soon.

In some way Indonesia is sort of similar to the United States: a homogeneous market, a large population, and it’s very connected. Schmidt says that a new generation of entrepreneurs will rise in Indonesia — and that’s pretty much what is already happening right now, with so many great start-ups that have mushroomed over the years.

Schmidt points out an example stating that an app built by an Indonesian who used to study in Japan recently hit the top 10 most-downloaded app list in the U.S. Well, that seriously sounds familiar! The app, which we covered only recently, is Hachiko by Touchten.

All in all, Schmidt is very optimistic about the tech growth in Indonesia and Asia – “Asia is the future, not the U.S.,” he said.

To fill in the school holidays, telecommunications company Indosat is holding the IM3 Mobile Academy 2011 program to seek out the brightest and most talented teenagers throughout Indonesia. In auditions in 30 locations across the nation since May, 150 high school students have been selected to attend the Mobile Academy camp for five days.

“Through this event,” explains Devimaz Gusmal, Division Head of Brand Maintenance at Indosat, “participants can self-learn, sharpen their talents, and develop their hobbies into something ‘profitable’ through online media.”

For five days the Mobile Academy participants will be guided in sharpening their skills and talents. They are encouraged to develop their hobbies and interests to devise creative concepts for potential online entrepreneurs. They will also participate in various workshops, fun games, and meet with Indonesian public figures and celebrities. At the final event, the participant judged to have the most potential will win the mantle of an Ambassador for IM3 in their respective regions, and with that will get scholarships, cash, fully-paid holiday packages, and a few of the latest gadgets.

Twitter Battle

Each participant is also encouraged to use Twitter to share their camp experiences with the hashtag #im3academy. The committee will select the most interesting tweets, also taking into account the number of tweets and followers that the participant has. The winner will be the ‘Young Nonstop Online Stars King & Queen,’ winning BlackBerry devices and a free vacation to Singapore as bonus prizes.

This IM3 program has proven a successful and popular event since it was first held in 2008. This year is the fourth Mobile Academy, and the number of participants is growing annually. Recently Telkom also held an entrepreneurship coaching program, so it’s promising to see this trend in youth-oriented events continue. The Indonesian start-up world should have a bright future if these initiatives to foster growing talents keep coming.

via Chip

As part of the Global Entrepreneurship Program, GEP Indonesia will host the Regional Entrepreneurship Summit (RES) in Bali in July 2011. The summit will be attended by Google’s chairman, Eric Schmidt, who is one of the keynote speakers at this conference. Schmidt will speak on “How Entrepreneurship Can Change the Future of a Nation.”

Eric Schmidt will represent Google, clearly a company that has experienced great success in the entrepreneurial world.

As the topic for this year’s conference will be “Entrepreneurship – The Next Big Chapter,” Schmidt will be encouraging entrepreneurs in emerging nations to develop and contribute to both local and global economies.

This is consistent with the vision of the Global Entrepreneurship Program of the U.S. State Department, led by Hillary Clinton (who will also be a keynote speaker) to promote business growth in emerging economies.

This ASEAN RES in Bali next month is a continuation from the first Entrepreneurship Summit convened by President Obama in Washington in 2010. This conference will focus on ASEAN, and Indonesia’s recent rapid development in digital entrepreneurship, which makes it a suitable choice for hosting the event. As Indonesia’s trade minister Mari Elka Pangestu stated, this summit aims to be an entrepreneurial catalyst for the nation. Hopefully more and more young companies in Asia can take action and develop their entrepreneurial efforts after being inspired by such events.

You can catch the full RES program list here.

Source: Jakarta Globe

To encourage the growth of entrepreneurship in information and communication technology in Indonesia, PT Telkom is launching the “Indigo Fellowship” program. This program invites the public to channel their creativity into digital work, and turn it into a business. The Indigo Fellowship competition has been held since 2009 and has already successfully nurtured digital talents to grow into new businesses.

This year there were about 500 participants in the competition. Indra Utoyo, the director of IT and supply at PT Telkom explained:

Interest to participate and submit digital creative works continues to increase. It shows that the development of technology and information is much needed, in order to facilitate community activities in a more easy and practical manner.

Telkom has designated US$3,800,000 for the Indigo Fellowship 2011, this coming from its total US$27,380,000 budget for developing partnerships and fostering community. These funds will be used create a business incubation and venture capital program named Indigo Venture for competition winners this year. The winners will also receive entrepreneurship guidance from the Telkom Group.

We have written before on why Indonesia is an up-and-comer on the tech start-up scene. Initiatives like this one only serve to solidify the nation’s growing reputation as a country to watch out for in the years to come.

via Antara

• Kauffman Foundation is one of the largest foundations in the United States devoted to entrepreneurship.
• Kauffman FastTrac is a hands-on program that gives entrepreneurs the tools to plan, manage and run their companies. Participants will work on their own business ventures throughout the program.

The program has generated numerous success stories which has helped many entrepreneurs achieve success. Here’s a video overview with a little more information about the program.

This program is made possible by US Market Access Center and IDA. We were also told that this is the first time that the Kauffman FastTrac program will be conducted outside of North America,  giving entrepreneurs in Singapore and Asia a chance to take part in the program.

We don’t have the exact dates for the program but we’ll update you when we learn more. Send an email to ida_startup@ida.gov.sg if you’re interested to learn how to build your own start-up with Kauffman FastTrac.

Unlike big corporations, resources are usually limited and the future uncertain. The advantages, however, are that a start-up gives space for people to create, to be independent and offers a greater sense of work satisfaction.

An article written by Issie Lapowsky, coupled with several experts’ opinions, contains insightful tips on how a start-up should go about attracting talents. For sharing and personal learning purposes, I have summarized Issie’s article as below.

1. Face-to-Face Interaction

“I’ve done a lot of placing people into positions, and I have never used a job board as a way to do that,” says Rich Sloan, co-founder of StartupNation. ‘Personal [interaction] is so much more powerful and important to me.”

Connecting with people face-to-face brings relationship to a higher level.  It allows you to observe what normally can’t be seen if you were to hire via online platforms. There are many ways to go about doing this:

Start at your local Chamber of Commerce, which should list information on industry events happening in your area. Don’t stop there, though. Research local industry groups and associations. “Every type of business has their own meetings,” says Martin Zwilling, founder and CEO of consulting group Startup Professionals. “You’ll find people who know your business and are looking for opportunities.”

Of course, if you have the time, you could create you own networking events. Meetup.com provides the perfect platform to help you get started.

2. Use the Internet Wisely

LinkedIn isn’t the only online platform that is good for professional networking. There are also other sites dedicated to matching qualified applicants with the right employers, including Startupers, VentureLoop and Startuply. You can even try InternshipIN to find people while they’re still in school.

When you register for these sites, ensure that your profile reflects the spirit of the company. It will help to attract the like-minded people who admire your company’s persona.

3. What to Look For

“There are certain kinds of people who thrive in an environment with the risk profile and anarchy of a start-up,” says Sloan. “Start-ups demand great working relationships. There can be no issues.”

Cultural fit is equally as important as what’s on a person’s resume. Zwilling recommends looking for people who are results-oriented, people who can tell you what exactly they’ve done in their careers. You need to know that people can produce when given that responsibility.

He also recommends looking for someone who is “attracted to the promise of a big win.” The road may be rough at first, but someone who’s ready to see your business through and can tell you why it’s worth it to them is someone you want on your team.

4. What to Offer

According to Sloan: “People get involved in a start-up for three reasons. One, they like creating, being part of something new. Two, they want to participate in the upside. Three, they want to live a meaningful life, and the closer you are to the success or failure of a business, the more meaning and purpose you feel.”

If you can provide them with all three, they’re in for a good run with you. Apart from these, it’s also important to be truthful about your start-up financial situation and business strategy. You wouldn’t want your new hire to face any surprises during the first few weeks.

5. Always be on the lookout

Don’t lose recruiting momentum just because you’ve filled all current positions. “Even if you don’t have an opening right now, eventually you’ll have an opening, and you need to get people interested, so by the time you’re ready, they’ll want to join you,” Perrault explains. “If you’re not recruiting all the time, you’re not doing it right.”

Catch the full article at Inc.

[Image credit: thinkpanama]