Bowei Gai: A Worldwide Crusade to Connect the Global Startup Community

When you’ve been co-founder and CEO of Snapture Labs, held the same titles at CardMunch, Inc. and are currently founder and chief ambassador at World Startup Report, you tend to attract attention when you enter the tech and startup community. And that’s pretty much what transpired when Bowei Gai decided to pay the Philippines a visit during his nine month mission to document and connect the global startup community.

For those not in the know, aside from the titles above, Gai is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, and previously was a product strategy manager at Oracle, iPhone hardware engineer and Apple TV systems engineer at Apple, implementation engineer at AMD and new business creation intern at Hewlett-Packard. Prior to founding the World Startup Report, he established mobile business card transcription service CardMunch, which would later be purchased by LinkedIn.

Gai was in town as part of his 29 country mission for the World Startup Report. The goal of course is to collect, analyze, and distribute information and statistics about startup environments and ecosystems.

Having never really considered the Philippines as a potential growth area for startups, Gai states he was encouraged to visit by a friend, though he may also have been convinced by the country receiving its first investment-grade rating from international debt watcher Fitch Ratings.

During a stay that was originally to last just a few days but ultimately stretched to a week and a half, Gai spent some time at the Makati headquarters of IdeaSpace Foundation, a business incubator, chatting it up with president Earl Valencia. It was IdeaSpace that sponsored the World Startup Report in the country recently, at the Microsoft Philippines office.

IdeaSpace is in turn sponsored primarily by Smart Communications, and also by several companies under the umbrella of First Pacific Company Ltd., Metro Pacific Investments Corp., and the Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) group. IdeaSpace announced recently that it had chosen 10 local startups to receive funding of up to PHP 5 million ($122,295), as well as six-month business incubation and mentorship with investors both locally and from Silicon Valley.

In an exclusive interview with Smart Public Affairs Group representative Cyril Bonabente, Gai stated that he was surprised by how small the local startup community was, especially given the size of the country, but that local growth was impressive, and promising. He also encouraged and lauded the efforts of IdeaSpace and Smart, stating that local startups were very lucky to have an eager incubator in place.

(Source: philSTAR.com)