A Closed Door Investor-Only Roundtable On Country Investing Trends

Many in the web startup community are gearing up for Echelon 2011, due to take place this Thursday and Friday. While everyone’s having some snacks outside on day 2, I will be moderating a closed door invite-only, investor-only session. Here’s the list of investors from across the region that I will have the privilege of engaging. If you have any questions you think I should ask (and to which speaker(s)), please leave a comment on this post or drop us a note as I will try my best to incorporate as many relevant questions as possible, and post-event, SGE will post the insights gleaned from these cross-border investors.

Roundtable: Country Trends – What’s Going On?

For the first panel, these distinguished gentleman will join me at the roundtable to lead the discussion about investing trends in the various countries. Topics like which verticals are hot, what is a typical seed stage or series A company in that country (do they usually have paying users? what kind of growth in users is typical), any pending regulations that might affect startups etc.. Especially if you are trying to enter that market or simply to research a country, let me know if there are questions you want answered that might help you.

[Singapore] Andrew Khaw, Senior Director (Industry Development) of Infocomm Development Authority (IDA)
Mr Khaw oversees the Industry Development Division as well as programmes for the Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and the Digital Media & Entertainment sectors.

[Malaysia] Tan Swee Yeong, Angel Investor of ViC
His current portfolio includes start-ups in the mobile content space, internet marketing, mobile application development and online classifieds.

[US] Tuff Yen, President of Seraph Group
Tuff Yen founded Seraph Group to bring together successful business leaders and entrepreneurs to invest and nurture promising enterprises. Seraph is the only national angel investment fund group in the United States.

[Indonesia] Martin Hartono, Director at GDP Venture and Business Technology Director at PT DJARUM

[India] Amit Anand, Managing Partner of Jungle Ventures
Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Jungle Ventures, an early stage micro fund based out of Singapore

Building An Angel Group In Your Community

This second session will focus on building up the funding aspect of the ecosystem in a community. These three gentleman will each share what they’ve done in their communities and then we’ll branch off into discussions. The three key speakers for this section are:

Tuff Yen, President, Seraph Group, US [as above]
Meng Weng Wong, JFDI Asia, Singapore
Johnathan Lee, Virtuous Investment Circle and Cradle Fund, Malaysia
Wong Poh Kam, BANSEA, Singapore

[Singapore] Meng Weng Wong, JFDI Asia
Meng Weng Wong is an active angel investor in Singapore and a member of the board of directors of the Business Angel Network of South-East Asia.

[Malaysia] Johnathan Lee, Virtuous Investment Circle and Cradle Fund
Lee co-founded the Virtuous Investment Circle (ViC) is an independent not-for-profit angel investment group set up primarily to educate and grow the angel investment community in Malaysia.

[Singapore] Wong Poh Kam, BANSEA
Currently, he is BANSEA chairman of board directors and also director of NUS Entrepreneurship Centre.

Again, if you have any questions to direct to anyone on these panels, please leave a comment on this post or drop us a private note.