Coffee Chat: All Things Entrepreneurship in Singapore [LIVEBLOG]

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

Dr. Lim Kuo-yi, CEO at Infocomm Investment (IIPL), tuned into his experience to assess if it’s too easy to get VC funding in Singapore, and explained what the government-backed funding agencies are looking for. Please read the full time-line to follow the chat…

Liveblog

#09:50: That’s it, folks. Thanks for tuning in. Next up is James Tan, who owns one of China’s top group-buy sites, 55Tuan.

#09:47: Lim says he’s excited about Game Ventures, a social gaming company, but won’t be drawn on saying which startups they’re thinking of investing. Hey, with 19 startups in line for our Startup Arena prize, one of those could even be presenting later this afternoon.

#09:44: Not enough graduates are coming out, says Dr. Lim, so that makes hiring difficult. The national army draft for two years also really complicates the issue. So companies and small startups need to be careful, aware that they can’t just put an ad in a newspaper to find talent.

#09:43: Are Singaporean uncreative? “No, we can be creative,” says Lim, with lots of musicians, artists, startup people, etc. That’s a reference to the criticism from Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder, who says that the city state citizens lacked originality. So that’s debunked then.

#09:42: Dr. Lim says there’s a good amount of self-awareness in the local government about what’s right to invest in. If mistakes happen and money goes down the drain, lessons are actually learnt.

#09:39: “The Singapore government is very clinical in the investments it wants to see,” says Dr. Lim, and the various agencies tend to specialize in what they’ll invest in. If a startup goes to the wrong agency, they’ll be guided to one that matches their area.

So, asks Willis, are we actually making it all too easy? Lim says no. Indeed, it’s getting harder now, “and it’s getting more deliberate in how funds are going out” to startups.

#09:38: A friendly reminder. Please refresh the page manually in your browser to see the conversation flow!

#09:35: Lim then goes on to talk about how some startups just come up with an idea just to get some money out of it, without being truly passionate about it. So he says experience is key to getting into the right entrepreneurial mindset. And so in those situations, he says “give the startups 50k [US$50,000]” and let them get the experience themselves. Our own Willis loves this idea.