Lee Kai-Fu on Entrepreneurship: “Trend Is Your Friend”

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.