Global VCs want to see more ‘heroes’ in Asia

Venture capital is arguably the lifeblood of entrepreneurship. As much as a founder can pull herself up by her own bootstraps, it’s an extremely lucky (or successful; same difference) business that never needs the VC touch.

Good thing, then, that the VC touch is strong, as last week’s Kauffman Fellows Venture Capital Summit showed. Selected guests from the global VC community and fellows of the US-based, two-year educational and networking program gathered in Singapore to eat, drink, be merry, and discuss the current state of the industry.

Among the 200 attendees were representatives from firms like Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Google Ventures, and more. Local and regional venture capital was represented by firms like Vertex, NSI, Qiming, and more. The Singapore event was organized with the help of home turf firm Golden Gate Ventures.

Landing in Singapore

Singapore wasn’t chosen as the summit’s location just because the Marina Bay Sands hotel looks nice against the horizon. We at Tech in Asia are not the only ones who have written and spoken time and again about the city-state’s conduciveness to entrepreneurship and its access to capital, venture or otherwise. In the opening fireside chat between Singapore’s minister of foreign affairs Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, US ambassador to Singapore Kirk Wagar, and Kauffman Fellows CEO Phil Wickham, the minister reiterated the country’s virtues as a hub for business and innovation.

Singapore offers “plug and play”-type of convenience.

Dr. Balakrishnan, a well-known figure in Singapore’s tech business world, suggested that the government should take up the responsibility of laying down the groundwork for technology businesses to flourish. This would include ensuring that every home in the country has fiber lines for fast internet connectivity, leveling the playing field for entrepreneurs by providing support and making it easier to do business, and promoting talent and innovation through its education system. As Dr. Balakrishnan put it, Singapore offers “plug and play”-type of convenience.

“[The summit] was a reinforcement of a lot of our values – to look at non-traditional directions, to try to appreciate what’s happening globally,” Phil told Tech in Asia in a subsequent interview. “When in doubt, with all the different cultures and languages, operate at a human level. These great companies are built through culture and relationships regardless of where people come from. It’s a large reinforcement of those general concepts and there’s a lot of insights into what we should be paying attention to in Southeast Asia.”

The view from the Valley

A panel dedicated to insight from Silicon Valley VCs zeroed in on the current and future trends of the startup world.

Emergence Capital founding partner Jason Green said that a lot of Silicon Valley’s recent success stories have come out of startups innovating through the cloud, where older, more powerful companies like Oracle and SAP have failed to transition. A similar shift is happening in Southeast Asia with mobile, as users get online for the first time using smartphones instead of computers.

Shasta Ventures founding partner Rob Coneybeer said virtual reality (VR) is closer at hand than people realize, and it will be successful anywhere in the world where there’s the bandwidth for it. Y Combinator’s Justin Kan noted that some of the startup builder’s biggest successes, like Airbnb and Stripe, were actually pivots, where founders realized what people wanted and gave it to them.

According to the Silicon Valley VCs, the next space to keep an eye on is the internet of things (IoT). The panel agreed that regardless of vertical, investors must be mindful of things like unique business cultures in the markets they’re active in and that local markets need local startup heroes with success stories that trumpet entrepreneurship and foster talent.

Hello from the other side

Asia rising

While it took Tokopedia a while to get going because mobile development talent wasn’t abundant in Indonesia when the P2P marketplace started out, William explained that 75 percent of its current traffic comes through cellphones. Alexis, who got cosmetics estore Luxola acquired by global cosmetics brand Sephora last year, cautioned against putting all of one’s eggs into the mobile basket, however. It may be prevalent in the region, but it’s probably not the only avenue your customers use.