Discussion: The Asia Startup Wave (Live Blog)

We’ve got an amazing cast for our panel here this morning at Startup Asia. Here’s their names and titles just in case you don’t know who they are:

* Thomas Clayton, CEO and President at Bubble Motion (Moderator)

* Jamie Lin, Founding partner at appWorks Ventures

* Nobuaki Kitagawa, CEO at CyberAgent Ventures (Beijing) Co., Ltd

* Chris Evdemon, Partner, Innovation Works (IW)

* Casey Lau, Co-founder at StartupsHK, Community Developer for SoftLayer

* Sangeet Paul Choudary, Venture Advisor, former incubator

#11:28: All the guys are introducing their various markets. In India, the feeling is start in Asia and then go global, Sangeet cites the success of Inmobi and Slideshare for examples of this new trend. Jamie says you can hire Taiwanese developers very reasonably priced, $16,000 per year for a fresh graduate. Every year there’s at least 25 countries getting listed in Taiwan. In China we see a lot of companies not going public but in Taiwan it’s a more stable capital market.

#11:31: Casey Lau introduces the startup scene in Hong Kong, which he believes is very ambitious and strong in innovative solution that are not “check-in” related. He says Hong Kong startups are a bit arrogant in that they don’t want to enter China and they don’t want to enter Southeast Asia.

#11:32: Chris Evdemon says he’ll be covering China: “it’s the most exclusive rapidly growing and innovative region in the world at the moment”. Nowhere near at the Silicon Valley maturity but they’re catching up. Everything is going towards the mobile space, especially with the absence of Google. China went from 0 to 150 million Android users in 2.5 years. It’s super fast growth. Many of these startups are growing like we’ve never seen before. Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, etc. are formerly startups are now acting more corporate. They’re starting to do acquisitions. That’s huge. These large companies are competing with each other in every space in mobile and web. Baidu used to be just search, etc. but now they’re all competing in each other’s space. The question is now, where do I squeeze in between all these big giants? Now we finally start to see super angels, which is good for starting, and big guys are also going to acquire. That also leaves it hard for negotiation. But now, China is also becoming an increasingly localized, which makes it hard to start for foreigners.

#11:38: Thomas Clayton asks what’s the environment like for VC’s across the Asian region.

#11:40: The pool of venture capital in China is closer around $8 billion in contrast to the $1 billion in Japan. Japan and China have arguably the same GDP, but there’s more early stage capital in China.

#11:46: On the Indian VC side, there’s angel investing, but there’s a Series A crunch in India. Inter-funding has been happening where funds put money into two companies. If one company fails, they transfer it over to the other company.