A pioneer in the tech startup scene on Hong Kong’s startup ecosystem and its potential

A photo of Casey Lau.

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Casey Lau is one of the co-founders of Startups Hong Kong, the first startup community ever set up in Hong Kong. It started off as a simple meetup group for people in the city who wanted to learn about startups and early-stage investing.

Lau and his partner, Gene Soo, have always given generously to the ecosystem in Hong Kong. His work was actually an early inspiration for me because I didn’t see any sort of ecosystem in the city and is the reason why I spent a lot of time traveling to Silicon Valley to learn about early-stage investing and startups. Lau brought a lot of that culture over to Hong Kong and cultivated the local ecosystem.

He and his team have partnered with the organizers of Web Summit to bring Rise, a big tech conference in Asia happening this week. He has also launched his podcast recently called The Rise Cast.

Who is Casey Lau and what do you do?

Well, I do a bunch of different things. But I guess the thing that started it all off in the last few years and gave me some notoriety in the startup world was myself, along with three other guys, starting a thing called StartupsHK, a community of startups. It was seven years ago.

What happened was that one of the government facilities in Hong Kong called Cyberport held an angel conference in 2010 and invited a guy named Dave McClure. This was before he joined 500 Startups. I believe he was managing Facebook’s fund then.

So, he came to town and was onstage with a bunch of other Silicon Valley guys talking about startups and all these crazy stuff. There was an audience of about 200 people and everybody read TechCrunch. That was like the thing then and we’re reading about these crazy ideas on getting funded in Silicon Valley. We were like, “Oh man, we want to do that too.”

So at that conference, somebody asked him, “Hey Dave, what should we do once you guys from Silicon Valley go back to the US? You create this excitement among the audience here. What should we do?” And I’ll never forget this. Dave said, “You guys should get together, meet at a coffee shop, and start your own ecosystem.” And that’s the first time I heard that word outside of a science class.

So, we just did what he said and then that was it. We never heard from him again until a couple of years later. A bunch of us got together in a coffee shop and we started talking about startups. All of us were thinking of ideas. It was like a support group where we’d all sit in a circle and say, “Hey, I’m going to start up. This is what I do. These are the problems I have right now. Can anybody help me?”

What did you do before StartupsHK?

I guess the way that I actually got into all these was when I did my own startup back when startups were still called dotcom. I started when I was really young. You could say I was one of the pioneers in the original time, like the dinosaur time of the technology world. I had an ecommerce startup. It was called Actionace.com.

And when I first came to Hong Kong, I started a web design company before Flash was even out. So, we just worked on HTML websites. People wanted websites and they used to ask us after we built their website, “We just paid you guys a ton of money to make this. How are we supposed to make money off of it?” Amazon was starting out. We said, “You should start ecommerce. You should start selling things online.” That was our advice. And they’re like, “OK, how do we do that?” We’re like, “We don’t know.”

There was no Shopify or Facebook. There was nothing to help you sell anything online. I think Ebay hadn’t come out yet or was just coming out that time. So, we built an ecommerce engine. We were one of the first ecommerce sites based out of Hong Kong. We sold collector toys to the world and this was back in 1997.

What’s the current state of the startup ecosystem in Hong Kong? What are the challenges that still exist?

It’s come a long way and I think that a lot of the stuff that happened in Hong Kong have been thanks to expats coming into the market here. I think that’s something a lot of people don’t know.

How do you see Hong Kong as a competitive city for a startup, and where do you see opportunity for growth?

What’s one piece of advice you could give?

Do you have any goals, either personal or professional, for this year?