BlueSky Festival 2009 by Action Community for Entrepreneurs (ACE)
SPRING Singapore today announced the launch of an entrepreneurship training scheme for PMETs (professionals, managers, executives and technicians) at the ACE BlueSky Festival 2009. SPRING will set aside a total of S$500,000 which will be used to support up to 70% of course fees offered at participating local polytechnics under this scheme for PMETs who qualify.
The aim of this scheme is to equip PMETs (especially those who have been affected by the existing economic downturn) who aspire to be entrepreneurs with relevant skills to be better prepared to start and run a business. According to SPRING, the curriculum will adopt a mix of theoretical and practical components to provide an all-round training that includes sharing sessions with established businesses and entrepreneurs as well as mentorship and incubation opportunities. Courses are expected to start between August and September.
So if you’re a down-and-out PMET who happen to want to start your own business, watch this space. More details to be announced by SPRING at a later date.
Co-founders Anshul Jain and Ashok Patro of ThoughtBuzz.
How do we measure social media? That question may seem simple, but startup ThoughtBuzz was founded just to answer that question.
Singapore-based ThoughtBuzz was originally conceived in February 2009 by three guys – all with IT experience and with ages ranging from 25 to 29 – with the aim of providing users with a way to manage their profiles on multiple social networks. However, as co-founder Anshul Jain admitted, he and his partner Ashok Patro soon realized that such tools were already available and many were actually pretty good. “So we decided that this wasn’t the right way to go,” he remembers. “We then decided to shift focus to social media measurement when during our research we came across how increasingly important social media is to brands and companies.”
Measuring Online Buzz
According to its website ThoughtBuzz provides social media intelligence services through its flexible dashboard – with a list of features such as automatic sentiment analysis and demographic analysis – that allows marketing and communications professionals to monitor social media in real-time. “We help companies in discovering trends so that they can make use of them for their brands. Our user is anyone who wants to know what’s being said and written about them on social media.”
“Almost all companies make use of social media some way or the other, and they have no certain way to measure their ROI (return on investment),” he adds. “This is where we believe we can help them and provide them with a platform to measure the impact and success of their social media campaigns.” I’m not sure if I agree that all companies should engage in social media, but of course any tool that allows its accurate measurement is sorely needed.
Anshul says ThoughtBuzz‘s key USP is that it provides speed and relevancy of results. “We believe that though social media is an extremely good channel for connecting with consumers, it has its pitfalls. How do you identify spammers or collect only relevant data? These are some questions that we had to answer in order to differentiate our product,” he elaborates.
Anshul says to date they have slowly but steadily cultivated a group of interested clients who are beta testing their product and waiting for its launch. “Our product has also undergone significant changes since February 2009 based on the feedback received and we are hoping that we are our building a solid and relevant product in the market.”
He says that their main challenge is identifying the relevant factors for measuring social media. “Should we try to include everything or give what’s most important to our customers? How much customization to offer, how to present the data so that it’s useful are some of the questions that we face on an everyday basis.”
Starting up in Singapore
The founders decided to base its operations in Singapore because, as Anshul puts it, the country ‘greatly encourages entrepreneurship’. “People here are very forthcoming towards new ideas. Also this being a developed market, the quality of feedback is very high and this helps us in building a solid product.”
“The best part about entrepreneurship is you get to do what you want and how you want,” says Ashok. “You handle real clients and have real deadlines. If you win all credits to you and if you lose then also you are responsible. But the satisfaction you get after fulfilling the market needs and meeting the expectations of your clients is something which always pushes you forward.”
“We have made many business plans, financial projections and strategies as an assignment during our student life. Buts it’s real fun and challenging to actually execute them. After our MBA we were all charged up to do something of our own and try out the various skills and tools we have learnt during our professional and academic life.”
“ThoughtBuzz is the outcome of all these and our successful execution towards our dream of doing something good and useful.”
“Starting something is not easy. There is a lot to think about and it does take its toll on you. But there is nothing more rewarding than to see your own enterprise take shape.”
ad:tech Singapore may be over, but if you’re interested to learn more about the latest in social networking and marketing trends in the Asia Pacific region there’s the upcoming Social Networking World Forum Asia. Organized by Bristol-based events company Six Degrees, this two-day conference dedicated to all things social networking will take place in Singapore on 22nd and 23rd September this year.
Learn from some of the largest global brands who are using social media effectively in their marketing and public relations strategies, as well as hear from the regional heads of some of the most popular social networking platforms such as Friendster, QQ and MySpace on their plans for the region.
To register or find out more about the event, you can download the event brochure or call the booking hotline +44 (0) 117 321 8303. Alternatively you can register for the free exhibition-only pass here. Early bird registration ends 21st August. Readers of this blog get a 15% discount – just quote that you’re a reader of Young Upstarts.
You can follow news of the event on Twitter at @SocialNetworkWF.
Lior is one of the co-founders of Status Search, a social status search engine currently in beta that allows users to perform searches within Twitter and Facebook status updates. The founders are all 20-something entrepreneurs who have worked in successful Israeli start-ups (such as Aniboom and 5min) in the past. Status Search is Lior’s second startup – his first was Veedda in 2007. Lior was even once named as one of the “Most Promising Entrepreneurs in Israel” by TheMarker business magazine for 2008!
Status Search is currently in private beta, but you can sign up for an account at their site.
So how is the service different from, say, the search function you can find within Facebook? “Status Search is for anything you would prefer searching in your friends’ updates rather than on the web: books, vacations, flights, beer, a party, a job and much more,” says Lior. He explains that the basic philosophy behind the service is that there so much valuable information within social networks that a search engine for that information can be very useful.
“When we present people the option to search their friends status updates, they immediately see how they can benefit from it. People know search and the value they can get from it.” Lior adds that people who use more than one social network are those most likely to benefit from Status Search. He admits, however, that one key challenge is to educate the market about searching their friends status updates.
It has, after a month in private beta, signed up about 400 users that perform around 550 searches a day.
Lior says their business model revolves around partnering with big websites and portals who are looking to integrate their social search service and incorporate that functionally to their users, and do a revenue share with them. “We’re already talking with a few and looking to talk to anyone who is interested in offering this kind of search engine to their users,” he reveals.
Status Search is currently self-funded and is trying to reach profitability on its own. “We’re talking to some investors these days but we’re waiting for a good deal. We’re not in a hurry,” says Lior.
Piecehunters, an iPhone game developed by AzukiSoft.
You can argue that, as a child, Gibson Tang was already entrepreneurial. After all, his first experience at making money was when he sold answers to math homework to his classmates in Primary school. “There’s a thrill of making money from my own hard work,” he laughs. Now 33 years-old, Gibson is today the founder of AzukiSoft, a two-person game development outfit that produced the casual Piecehunters iPhone game.
Piecehunters is a gem-matching puzzle-type game targets casual gamers of ages from children to young, working adults. Gibson says Piecehunters will especially appeal to people who do not want to invest too much time and effort into a complicated game, yet would like something entertaining to fill their time. Development for Piecehunters started in September 2008, when iTunes was officially launched in Singapore. The game was finally submitted to Apple‘s App Store in March 2009. Currently there is the Lite version for free, and a paid premium version at the price of US$2.99.
Piecehunters: Puzzle-based game fun with combat elements.
In the Beginning
Gibson’s background is in computer engineering, and started off his career working in the Republic of Singapore Navy for six years. That stint with the navy was followed by a year in a local insurance company developing web-based applications, and later with a small local game company worked on mobile, Flash and PC games. “One day after a long day at work (at the local game company), I was on the bus getting bored (and) wondering why can’t I develop mobile games that can be played in short sessions for people looking to kill time?” Inspired, he started and incorporated AzukiSoft.
He took on a partner – with a background in business and finance – earlier this year who will work with him on a part-time basis. “Our backgrounds are as different as chalk and cheese,” he laughs. “But we share common ground in wanting to shape our own future by running our own business.” He declines to name her, however, revealing only that she is currently doing sales and marketing for a China-based company.
Gibson says he wished he had roped his business partner in earlier. “She has offered a lot of insight from a casual player perspective. I did not notice such insights since I have been playing hardcore games for so long that it has kind of clouded my view on how a game for casual players should be.”
“She is a non-technical person (who) likes to play simple games. I constantly have to modify my game so that it will be something that she likes to play,” he says. “Her business training has also contributed a lot to opening my eyes regarding the business side of running a company.”
On Customer Feedback and Development
Gibson admits it was a big culture shock moving from a pure Microsoft Windows development background to developing an iPhone game with an entirely new programming language and development tools. “I have never touched the Mac OS before,” he insists. In the end, he says, they’ve managed to product a game to be proud of and have come to appreciate the beauty of the Mac OS X.
“Piecehunters started out as a single player game, but midway through the development cycle we discovered that the game could have a social gaming angle to it,” Gibson recalls. “We launched it early in order to get customer feedback and ideas for potential social gaming features to be incorporated.”
Gibson is a strong believer in customer feedback, and a big fan of the “customer development” approach advocated by Eric Ries (author, entrepreneur and previously a venture advisor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers). “As a small startup, there are a lot of unknowns about the product viability, direction etc. So customer feedback will be very important in helping us to shape the direction and vision of our game to make it a game that casual players want to play.”
“Fire up iTunes, download my game and give it a try. Then drop me an email at my personal email address gibtang[at]gmail[dot]com if you have any feedback about the game.”
With this approach, Gibson says they have solicited a whole plethora of social gaming features from early testers which they plan to incorporate them into the game. “We intend to roll out new features and patches every week to keep the game up to date in line with player feedback, and grow a community based around the game.” Gibson says they have recently submitted their latest iteration of the game, Version 1.05, to Apple for review.
To date, Piecehunters has been downloaded some 5,000 times, at an average of around 1,500 downloads per week despite the lack of a marketing campaign. “We feel that we have hit the right spot… players who have downloaded my game have emailed me to feedback on how much they like the game.”
As a growth strategy, Gibson plans to extend Piecehunters over to other platforms such as Google’s Android and Facebook. He says this will help to increase the viral effect of the game as they use multiple platforms to help spread the word.
Gibson says he’s not daunted by the recession and is focused on its positive aspects, such as the lowering of commercial rental rates. “I may contemplate renting a small office space sometime down the road when I feel the timing is right,” he adds.
AzukiSoft is currently funded by Thymos Capital to the tune of S$55,000 for their game project. “The rest of the expenses are paid out from my own pocket,” says Gibson.
On Entrepreneurship
Gibson says he chose the entrepreneurial path as he prefers to be unconventional. “My first career choice was to be a rock guitarist in a rock metal band years ago, and I would spend countless hours and money on my guitar. Then I realized that I also like to play and analyze games. That was when I stumbled onto the game development path.”
He shares that being an entrepreneur is tough and he believes the best ones are those who firmly believe in teamwork. “No one can master everything, so an entrepreneur must be able to make up for those deficiencies by working with the right people,” he explains, which was a reason why he brought on his partner.
“Singapore’s push on entrepreneurship is a right move as entrepreneurship can be a potential growth factor for Singapore, plus my partner always wanted to have a product that she can proudly refer to as Made-in-Singapore instead of Made-in-China!”
“One thing about entrepreneurship is that sometimes, you just have to believe in yourself. When I decided to embark upon the game development career path close to ten years ago, there was no game development industry in Singapore. And yet I told myself that I should give it a try and after all, the worst thing that could happen is that I will fail. That’s it.”
“Being able to accept failure if it happens is important for an entrepreneur.”
I first came across online photo-hosting service Phlook.com at Unconference 2008. Founders Ng Wee Kiat and Justine Ho was pitching their idea to the audience but, at that time, I wasn’t sure if the World Wide Web needed another Flickr clone.
Wee Kiat assures me that a lot has happened since then. “During the Unconference 2008, our products were still very basic. In the subsequent few months, we continued to develop and fine-tune our products. Currently, any photos uploaded to Phlook will automatically be integrated with features that probably no other websites are offering,” he says.
Phlooking Around
Photo-hosting service Phlook.
Wee Kiat explains that the key benefit of Phlook is the interactivity that are available to photos uploaded on their site, which users can be easily be published on their websites or blogs.
“We were toying with the idea of online photo printing in the beginning, but then as we explored further, we realized working on the digital photos themselves would be so much more fun and useful,” Wee Kiat explains. “We saw photos and images on sites with doodling and captions written on them by the authors but viewers can only add simple text comments on another space. We felt that this limit the potential of interaction so we created photo interfaces where users just need to upload their photos and then simply by copying and pasting an auto-generated embed code, Phlook‘s interactive features will automatically appear with their photos right on their own websites.”
It’s easier to show than to explain in words. Below is the photo I took of some, ahem, very pretty babes at the Samsung booth during the recent CommunicAsia 2009. As you can see, Phlook adds a layer of interactivity you don’t get from photos embedded via Flickr. You can zoom in, zoom out, and even vote for the photo. Nifty.
30-year old Wee Kiat, a graduate of National University of Singapore (NUS) with a Bachelor and Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering, at first knew nothing about computing. “I was clueless about even basic HTML then, but I decided to pick up the knowledge during my free time.” His partner Justine, now 32, graduated with a Bachelor in University of New South Wales and a Master of System Analysis from NUS. The co-founders met when they were previously colleagues at a German multinational company.
“In a way, I was inspired after I started reading all the tech and web startup blogs such as Techcrunch.” These days, however, Phlook finds itself the attention of tech blogs and has been featured on Mashable, Microsoft StartupZone, and Widget Labs.
He describes the World Wide Web as a place where ‘nothing seems to be impossible to be created’. “Our imagination is probably the only limitation”, he muses. He’s glad, he says, to see the growth of web startup community in Singapore, and looks forward to seeing more successful local websites making a mark on the world map in the near future.
According to their site statistics, Phlook currently has more than 3,500 users. “It is always very fulfilling to hear directly from some of the users how innovative and useful they think our photo features are, especially after they discovered how easy it is to enjoy the same features right on their own websites,” Wee Kiat says. “The key challenge, I would say, is how to constantly keep innovating and understanding the needs of users.”
To grow the service, Phlook is reaching out to companies to offer its platform where these companies can host their ad-hoc photo sharing activities for photo competitions. “In fact, the current low in the economy has created an opportunity for us because while companies are cutting back on their spendings and we are providing a platform that they can organize photo contests as highly interactive marketing campaign at a fraction of the cost if they were to build their own,” says Wee Kiat. Just a few months into starting this service, they have hosted photo contests for companies such as HP.
Wee Kiat reveals that one of his regrets is that Phlook should have paid more attention to PR, marketing and promotions at the beginning. “Both Justine and me are very much developers. So when it comes to the aspect of marketing, it was another tough journey of changing mindset and learning from scratch,” he explains. “We are starting to better grasp this aspect, but if we have started learning and equipping ourselves with marketing knowledge and mindset right from the start, we may have saved ourselves some more precious time!”
Wee Kiat says there’s a special thrill and challenge in starting and running your own business. “This can never be experienced while working for others. My dad has built a successful career with his own company and that inspires me further.”
“One most important lesson I have learnt is humility. When thrown into a new startup where everything has to start from zero, it didn’t take me long to realized that I need to be humble enough to admit mistakes, accept failures and learn from them.”
Scott Goodstein, external online director for the Obama presidential campaign.
Thanks to the team at ad:tech and Upstream Asia, I had the opportunity – along with a few other bloggers – to have a quick chat with Scott Goodstein who stopped by Singapore to give a keynote presentation at the recent ad:tech Singapore.
Goodstein, the external online director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, was responsible for planning and implementing the now president’s online outreach efforts, Obama for America. Since joining the campaign in February 2007 Goodstein successfully employed the latest in social networking tools and mobile technologies to engage Americans, helping to drive the presidential campaign’s key objectives of canvassing votes and raising funds.
So what made Obama’s online and mobile campaign such a smashing success? If I had to distil the conversation about Obama’s online campaign with Goodstein into key takeaway marketing lessons, it would be this:
It had the 3Ms – The Man, The Manner, and The Message.
Goodstein admits that the online campaign wouldn’t have worked as well if the man in question wasn’t Barack Obama. “It really was about the message and the messenger. There is no way to deny that it was Barack Obama as a candidate, with the right set of circumstances and the right change message.”
That message of hope and change came at a time when Americans were sick of the status quo and, as Scott puts it, the most divisive time for American politics he’s ever seen in his lifetime. The message of hope, he says, was really where America wanted to be. “All of a sudden, there was a candidate who’s talking about something different, a vision.”
And the charismatic manner that Obama brought was refreshing, and indeed, needed.
It was about building, connecting and engaging communities.
Popular marketing guru Seth Godin, in a podcast interview with Accidental Creative, talked about communities – what he calls tribes – and how Obama did something really difficult in assembling a tribe who would otherwise would never have existed.
Goodstein tells a powerful story on exactly how the use of online networking tools allowed exactly that, the galvanizing of communities of voters and enabling them to connect with one another. “People would bring food to the long lines (of voters) because they saw it on blogs or heard it on Twitter, because (the voters) can’t get out of line,” he recounts. “This encouraged those, the people who haven’t yet voted, to look forward to the voting process.”
Another great example of this can be found in Clay Shirky‘s recent presentation at TED, who spoke about how Obama’s online campaign allowed conversations to happen between Obama and his supporters. Convene, not control, your communities – as Shirky puts it.
“Businesses have to willing to engage in a two-way conversations in a unique way and can no longer just send out a press release and put a radio or TV spot one way… it’s a tough thing for businesses.”
It told a story that was consistent and authentic.
Goodstein shares that it was an effort to make sure that the online campaign was consistent with the overall presidential campaign. At one point, he says, they had to stop people from changing the content on the campaign website. “The front page of Barack Obama and his family photo, we just put it right there. At the end of the day, that’s what people wanted to see. Two of our opponents changed their websites all the time, buried the basic information (people were looking for).”
“Hillary (Clinton)’s campaign did some things that didn’t really ring authentic (to the American public). They did a lot of spoofs and things that were scripted, but didn’t ring authentic to the conversation.”
“Our videos were either speeches (of Obama’s) or videos about the movement. It fit our image and who Barack Obama was.”
It supported the big picture.
One of the comments Goodstein made really struck was how his online team viewed themselves, that they were but a part of the greater whole and did not work in isolation. “We saw ourselves as a service organization. Our job was to be of service to the finance department, the field department, and the communications team.” They were regularly in touch with the other teams, for example, running down to the policy people to ensure that messages were consistent throughout.
“We didn’t do technology for technology’s sake,” he states.
It set the right goals.
Goodstein was very careful to not put a return-on-investment (ROI) target on essentially a new initiative. “Social networking hasn’t been around or used that long on political campaigns. To put that type of false commitment on an ROI on it, to me, didn’t make sense,” Scott said. “Basically as long as one made enough money to pay for the program, anything else on top of it will be gravy.”
Instead, they created a list of goals that they wanted to achieve and where they wanted to be, as opposed to using existing ROI methods used for traditional outreach methods such as direct mail.
It assigned the right amount of resources.
Scott points out that many underestimate the amount of resources that is needed in a campaign. “Campaigns at the end of the day are about time, people and money. If it’s costing you time and people and even if it’s not costing you money, you’re probably still not spending your time and people wisely.”
“For the people who say that all the social networks are free, sure, but consider the number of staff and amount of training that goes into it to make sure that we’re really running it as an embassy of the campaign.”
“We trained a small army of volunteers on how to answer questions, so that the answer that you got off on a MySpace page, YouTube, a text message, email or call will essentially be the same… that takes a lot of training.”
Goodstein with bloggers at ad:tech Singapore: (Left to Right) Bjorn Lee, Daniel Goh, Bernard Leong, Scott Goodstein, Mohan Belani, Dorothy Poon, Daryl Tay, Saurabh Pandey and Shalabh Pandey.
You can read more about the session with Scott Goodstein from the other bloggers present:
The Infocomm Singapore booth at CommunicAsia 2009.
CommunicAsia – one of Asia’s premier exhibitions on communications and information technology – isn’t exactly the place to find Singapore startups, being more of a stomping ground for SMEs and MNCs to network and solicit business.
So it was a surprise when I ran into a few familiar faces there. Most of the other startups, were sequestered in Hall 3 under Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore‘s Infocomm Singapore booth:
Goh Yiping (centre) of Human Network Labs.
The first I ran into – Goh Yiping of Human Network Labs. On the final day of the exhibition, she had the opportunity to share with Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports (MYCS) Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, who stopped by for a short chat while touring the booths.
OrSiSo‘s CEO Thorben Linneberg was not at his booth, due to an unfortunate bike accident last week. I hear it wasn’t too serious. (I’ve previously covered OrSiSo here.) Get well soon, Thorben!
I finally had the chance to say hi to Phokki‘s Sean Seah, whose startup had a booth there. I’ve previously featured them but have never met Sean face-to-face. Sean – a really decent chap, and I found out Phokki‘s not his first nor only startup – even introduced me to guys from Juzz4Security, whom I plan to feature in an upcoming post. Other startups who had booths there included MyWobile and iTwin.
A few other startups even participated in the founding of Mobile Alliance. But I’m sure I’ve missed out on some of the rest.
I’m hoping to see more local startups at CommunicAsia next year!
Founding members of the Mobile Alliance, with various representatives from key partners.
A number of Singapore’s mobile software companies announced at CommunicAsia 2009 the formation of Mobile Alliance, the country’s first mobile software association that aims to drive strategic programs to position Singapore as an attractive base to develop new mobile services and market them globally.
The founding members of Mobile Alliance include various Singapore-based startups, such as Human Network Labs, Bak2U, buUuk, MobiQuest, Stream Media, tenCube and ZingMobile. Boudewijin Pesch, managing director of Acision in Asia Pacific, was selected as President. “By adopting a collaborative approach, Mobile Alliance is focused on generating greater synergies and incubating new opportunities within the mobile ecosystem in Singapore,” said Pesch.
The competition seeks to find new technology-oriented ideas from aspiring college and university student entrepreneurs around the world, and will select sixteen finalists on June 19, 2009. The winner, who will be announced on June 30, 2009, will receive a minimum of US$250,000 seed money as well as receive professional feedback and mentorship from both DFJ and Cisco.
3. E-Thermnity, which designed a baby milk bottle that changes color according to temperature, and
4. Zimplistic, which designed Rotimatic, an automatic chapati machine.
They will compete with business plans from 16 other countries around the world including China, India and Vietnam. Competition finalists will be selected on various criteria including the quality of the management team, technical innovation, addressable market size, competitive positioning, barriers, capital efficiency and financial projections.
This is the first time the competition is aimed at a global market, made possible by DFJ’s Global Network and Cisco TelePresence, which allows live, face-to-face network communications experience that enables the finalists from around the world to present their business plans in real time to a joint panel of DFJ and Cisco executives based in San Jose. “We believe that technology has no borders and that there are talented entrepreneurs everywhere who want to change the world, and we look forward to partnering with them,” says Tim Draper, DFJ‘s managing director.
The Rotary Youth Social Entrepreneurship Challenge 2009 (RYSEC) is looking for new youth-driven ideas on socially responsible businesses! Organized by the Rotary Club of Singapore, SYINC, Volans and a group of passionate individuals (which includes an experienced team of entrepreneurs and non-profit founders), RYSEC hopes to inspire social entrepreneurs and are looking for social enterprises that are profitable, bring fundamental value and which will create sustainable change.
RYSEC promises to provide all participants will undergo extensive training and mentorship programmes by the best and most experienced people they can find in Singapore, and winners of the competition will join in an all-expense paid internship at an international non-profit organization as well as be awarded a cash prize. So if you are between 15 to 30 years old, based in Singapore, meet the eligibility criteria and have a great idea for a social enterprise, do check RYSEC out.
RYSEC opened for submissions last week and applications end on 27 July 2009. You can email the RYSEC team at info@rysec.sg for more information.
TheMobileGamer's CEO Alvin Yap (centre) with two from his team.
Alvin Yap, CEO of Singapore consumer technology startup TheMobileGamer (TMG), admits that he has always been a dreamer. I am pretty sure that, at some point, he must have dreamt of being a successful entrepreneur. Having studied entrepreneurship as a business student in Singapore’s Ngee Ann Polytechnic, he had always wanted to start and run his own business.
“I enjoy looking at business opportunities and analyzing them,” says the 23-year old web entrepreneur.
Try and Buy Mobile Games
Asia Pacific-based TMG‘s flagship product is GameMo, a free mobile application that allows users to find and try games for mobile devices before buying them. It also works as a kind of social network for gamers – score updates, challenging fellow gamers etc – which, of course, encourages them to play (and pay) more. GameMo targets, as Alvin puts it, users of “the under-served Nokia, Samsung* and other full-featured phone users who are not pampered with apps like the iPhone”.
“We found that currently, when (users) wish to purchase a game, (they) have to pay S$4 to S$7 before trying it or knowing enough about it. With such a set-up, it is no wonder great games do not get downloaded enough,” Alvin explains. “Like all quality content, users should be able to trial it before making the purchase decision.”
Refining and Restructuring the Idea
The idea for TheMobileGamer (TMG) started when he was serving his compulsory national service in the Singapore military. He roped two partners and enrolled in Start-Up@Singapore, where they emerged as youth champions.
“After that, we started fund-raising and that is where we met our current investor (Nicholas Chan of Azione Capital),” recalls Alvin. At that point of time, Alvin was also running Fusion-Ads, which deals with mobile advertising through the delivery of in-game advertisements within free games. “He commented that our original idea would stretch the business too thin. We reassessed our situation and decided that we would pursue separate directions, with me focusing on mobile advertising with Fusion-Ads and my other two partners continuing with TMG.” That later changed when his other partners had to juggle their studies alongside their work at TMG, so Alvin was again pulled back as its full-time CEO. The company now has a young team of six – aside from Alvin, there is COO Vincent Wang (23), CFO Casper Peh (23), CTO Chua Khim Teck (25) and systems architect Leong Yew Wai (25).
TMG took some six months of “gruesome” R&D before GameMo is finally ready, and will release its beta later this month. “Developing the product and business model has been no small feat. We may not be the most cutting-edge techology around, but we are solving a very real need… we had to constantly review and restructure out plans and product to serve those needs,” Alvin explains.
Fusion-Ads’ technology is also being integrated closely with TMG‘s gaming platform. This way, by driving TMG forward, both companies grow. TMG would really be Fusion-Ads’ first deal, he adds.
Funding and Growth
TMG was initially funded through Media Development Authority (MDA) of Singapore‘s micro-funding scheme since August 2008 as well as some support from Azione Capital. Prize money won from a couple of business competitions were also put back into the business.”Our team started on this once we’ve graduated, hence we are a little thin of savings,” Alvin admits, adding that MDA has been very supportive.
“The current economic landscape has definitely affected us one way or another,” he laments. “Funding-wise, it is hard to get money these days and our cost control has had to be highly efficient. We have to squeeze the most out of every dollar, yet in a way, I think this is good because it forces us to grow and be more creative.” TMG is currently looking toward SPRING Singapore for its next funding round.
Like most consumer web startups, TMG is looking at social media marketing and word-of-mouth to help grow awareness and member subscription for GameMo. TMG recently participated at UnConference 2009, showcasing GameMo at the startup-focused event to build initial interest. Despite it not even being launched yet, regional expansion is already in the works – TMG has planned collaborations with partners in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and Taiwan, amongst others.
Views on Entrepreneurship
“Entrepreneurship rocks,” Alvin exclaims, his passion evident. “It’s great to see young people taking a step towards fulfilling their dream and overcoming obstacles while doing so.” He believes that entrepreneurship will be the true driver to job creation and help pull the economy out of recession.
Alvin has been extremely active in the youth entrepreneurship scene, regularly giving talks to students (such as Startup Story at the upcoming BlueSky entrepreneurship festival) and encouraging them to strike out on their own. He shares three pointers with young aspiring entrepreneurs:
1. Get started. “Do not wait for things to happen. Entrepreneurs are self-starters. Start writing your business plan, start doing your research and start meeting people. Get yourself going.”
2. Get a mentor. “We all have something to learn. Get someone who has been there, done that and is willing to share with you. What to look for in a mentor? Find someone who will tell you if you are wrong!”
3. Get your feet wet. “Go to trade shows, get an internship in your industry, start learning critical skills. The faster you get deep into it, the faster you will learn and the more prepared you are when opportunities strike.”
Finally, Alvin adds that aspiring entrepreneurs should not be afraid to fail. “I always believe victory makes you a winner but recovery from setbacks makes you a true champion.”
Captain Jean Luc Picard, from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but of course.
I must confess – I’m a huge Star Trek fan, and have been following Gene Roddenberry’s cult science fiction franchise since my college days.
If you believe that Star Trek is for geeks, think again. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry – the latest Star Trek movie has made more than US$300 million at the box office to date. It has influenced American pop culture, even challenging ideas of human moral and ethical issues. Social, cultural and financial impact aside, Star Trek has inspired real-world technological innovations. Arguably, the ubiquitous cell phone of today can be considered an early form of the Star Trek communicator and the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology used in medicine could have been based on Dr. McCoy’s medical table.
The latest Star Trek movie got me thinking: Star Trek has some amazing lessons about entrepreneurship! Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the introductory phrase before each Star Trek episode:
“Space… the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”
This is possibly one of the greatest vision and mission statements you’d ever hear, and also makes one helluva elevator pitch! So let’s see how this famous line can apply to entrepreneurship:
Space… the final frontier. (Defining your market)
The more successful entrepreneurs aim for the largest, most suitable market for their big idea. Whether you believe in the concept of addressable markets or not, entrepreneurs rightly need to understand their potential markets.
Good entrepreneurs know that they cannot prepare for every eventuality, but instead of feeling constrained by their limited resources they look at everything that come their way as opportunities.
These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. (Plan for the long haul)
Every entrepreneur I speak to tell me that entrepreneurship is a journey. They know that the road will be long and hard, and rewards may be long in coming. So while they take things one step at a time, they keep a long term view for their business.
Entrepreneurs also know that the current business they’re in is simply a vessel upon which they ride the waves of entrepreneurship. You know, there must be a reason why the spaceship in question is called USS Enterprise!
Its continuing mission… to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations. (Explore, learn, and adapt)
Entrepreneurship is an unending learning experience. Entrepreneurs discover themselves in the process even as they learn the skills on how to run a business.
Challenges may come at them in all shapes and sizes, but true entrepreneurs learn to deal with obstacles and emerge better people.
To boldly go where no one has gone before. (Challenge your boundaries)
This is all about having the courage to face the unknown, and to go beyond the physical, mental, social and perhaps cultural boundaries that may limit the entrepreneur. Of course, it can also refer to entering totally new, untapped markets.
So what are you waiting for? As the good Captain Jean Luc Picard rightly points out, go ahead and “make it so”!
*This blog article first appeared as a contributed post on Qvisory.org, a non-profit online advocacy and service organization that supports the health, financial well-being, and career goals of young adults from 18 to 34 years old.
The annual BlueSky Festival, a festival which celebrates entrepreneurship in Singapore, will kick off on 10 July this year! Organized by the Action Community for Entrepreneurship (ACE), this year’s festival starts off with a conference that focus on entrepreneurship, business growth strategies and inspiring stories that enterprises and individuals can learn to enhance their market position in these challenging times. Distinguished speakers include Mr Bo Fishback, Vice President of Entrepreneurship at Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and Dr Eric Yong Xu, co-founder of Baidu.com, amongst many others.
2. Incubator for Disruptive Enterprise and Start-ups (Ideas) Fund
The National Research Foundation (NRF) and Innosight Ventures has announced a S$10 million Incubator for Disruptive Enterprise and Start-ups (Ideas) Fund to help fund Singapore-based startups that offer disruptive products and services. The fund hopes to incubate 25 start-ups over the next three years.
The Socialwok team: (Left to Right) CTO Navin Kumar, CEO Yong Ming Guang and COO Vikram Rangnekar.
Socialwok plans to make small-to-medium sized companies a lot more social in the way that they work. Developed by the team at Singapore-based Voiceroute, Socialwok is an on-demand enterprise social platform that lets organizations collaborate more effectively within and outside of their business processes and manage social media interactions with the world better.
Voiceroute itself was started in mid-2007 by a group of friends with lots of open source experience, who built a simple-to-install, entirely open-source unified communications IP-PBX suite (IP telephony, mobile, unified messaging, basic contact center) called the Druid Unified Communications Server (UCS) for organizations. Founded by CEO Yong Ming Guang, COO Vikram Rangnekar and CTO Navin Kumar, Voiceroute has attracted some 390 paying customers worldwide, including the Building Construction Authority of Singapore.
Making Enterprises More Social
The idea for Socialwok came about on the observation that, as Ming puts it, “if social networks like Facebook and Twitter were so effective in helping us communicate with our friends, then why should we continue to depend on the inefficiencies of CC or BCC emails to collaborate at work with colleagues?”
The key benefit of Socialwok, Ming believes, is that it allows organizations to harness the ease and power of rich media and feeds to improve collaboration and communication. Think Facebook + Twitter for business – the ability to easily share information, discuss ideas and thereby helping to bring products to markets faster. “With Socialwok, organizations can do this not only within the company but also with their customers and suppliers. No more unread emails and miscommunication,” says Ming. “It will also help to improve the transparency and accountability of business processes.”
“We are targeting small-to-medium knowledge intensive organizations and businesses globally. Verticals include law, finance, technology software, education and government,” says Ming. Since Socialwok‘s unveiling on 16 May at UnConference Singapore 2009 (where I met them), it has seen hundreds of organizations worldwide – from small IT shops to large MNCs – signing up. This isn’t much of a surprise: the software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise solution doesn’t require installation of any software, no upfront license fees nor annual maintenance fees, making it perfect for small businesses.
“We created Socialwok (to be) focused on increasing the operational and online marketing productivity of organizations, (which helps businesses) save and make more money without the hassle and inefficiencies of traditional collaboration software.” This, Mings says, is even more critical in times of recession, with an environment of slower growth and caution by businesses and investors.
Challenges and Opportunities
One key challenge for Socialwok, Ming admits, would be to drive a high level of adoption within an organization for using such enterprise social solutions. He’s probably right – not many companies would be totally comfortable with the social tools, such as instant messaging and collaborative information sharing, that their employees would suddenly be empowered with through such a solution. He’s counting on leveraging social media marketing to get the word out to the small-to-medium enterprise market and encourage the adoption of such tools. Ming says they’ve gotten a reasonable amount of success through social media marketing on Facebook, Twitter, blogs as well as strategic marketing to key tech evangelists.
Like most web applications in its space, Socialwok plans to grow an ecosystem of third-party developers and professional services around its offerings as part of its roadmap for growth. It’s still a question if developers would be keen to create interesting applications on its platform, considering that the allure and potentially larger reach of consumer platforms over an enterprise one.
Ming seems optimistic on the customer adoption front. A lot of Socialwok‘s UI technology was created and borrowed from Voiceroute‘s Druid, he says, hence a lot of Druid’s enterprise customers are potential customers for Socialwok.
Voiceroute was bootstrapped from the start with money from the founders. An internal angel round in 2007 was raised and and its operations are currently sustained with revenues from Druid. Socialwok is currently participating in Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad.
On Entrepreneurship
“A startup is a team sport. Choose your team very carefully,” Ming says, sharing his experience in a startup over the last two years. “The team has to be passionate about the mission and other members (in the team), and always have an eye on the ball. This has to be sustained in good times and bad.”
“Difficult and painful decisions will have to be made, (so) be strategic about it.”
“Plan for a marathon. Have fun during the journey.”
Anyway, back to business. So how do the startups at UnConference 2009 compare to the startups from last year (pictures here)? Let’s take a look at the ones that presented themselves to a judging panel that comprises of Lookery‘s Scott Rafer, Reza Behnam of IDG Ventures Vietnam, Dan Neary of Skype, and Tahn Joo Chin of Hina Singapore:
2359 Media
One of Singapore’s first application developers for Facebook and the iPhone, 2359 Media also operates an advertising network for native mobile applications. Presented to the audience was SG Malls, an iPhone application that helps users navigate inside Singapore malls and includes store directories (for all 90+ of them!).
Mickey, Wenhan and Hong Ting from 2359 Media.
Countspin
CountSpin features live falling-price auctions on consumer fashion and lifestyle products such as luxury watches and jewellery. Price drops every second till the available quantity is sold out, providing an interesting online retail experience and generous discounts. Countspin was covered in a previous post.
Jay Gupta of Countspin presenting during the startup pitches.
eJamming AUDiiO
eJamming AUDiiO is an online subscription-based social network for musicians that allows them to collaborate, create, record and play together online in real time – with a near-zero latency feel on each musician’s instrument. Musicians meet, then create or join live jamming sessions with up to three other musicians anywhere in the world. With JamCastLive, musicians can netcast their live eJamming AUDiiO sessions over the network to fans anywhere in the world. One of the most promising startups present that wow-ed the panel and crowd especially during its live demo. They could do with a better name, though.
eJamming presents, sings and plays into the audience's hearts.
Frenzoo
Frenzoo is the first-ever 3D fashion virtual world, where users (most likely target audience of female tweens and teenagers, none of which were in the UnConference audience) can design and dress their avatars in interactive, animated 3D. The company works with consumer fashion and lifestyle brands, such as Goods Of Desire and May May King and brings their products to 3D virtual life. Founded by CEO Simon Newstead, Hong Kong-based Frenzoo is bootstrapped with funds from the co-founders and creators of Skype, Ambient Sound Investments. You can find out more about Frenzoo in an interview with SGEntrepreneurshere.
Genkii
Not the sushi joint. CEO Ken Brady of Tokyo-based Genkii presented the company’s vision of bringing 3D virtual world technologies to mobile devices, and highlighted Sparkle, the first virtual world for the iPhone.
Human Network Labs (HNL)
Near-field communications service provider Human Network Labs (HNL) uses a disruptive location-based technology platform for the precise location of nearby objects and people. The platform operates via a peer-to-peer wireless network and does not require any infrastructure such as Internet access, mobile service provider, WiFi or GPS. Another startup that impressed, and Twitter was abuzz with the potential applications of such a technology.
iTwin
The iTwin is a novel consumer device that consists of two identical, separable USB parts which allows them to be plugged into different computers to establish a secure connection between both machines. Files can then be accessed on one computer from the other and vice versa, through Bidirectional File Access over the Internet. Many of the audience were intrigued by the device, and if iTwin can overcome various security issues, the device will have tremendous potential.
OrSiSo
OrSiSo is a next-generation social networking tool that integrates multiple social network sites and instant messenging services to help a user manage their online lives. OrSiSo‘s platform is built around an aggregation engine, an integrated instant messaging platform, as well as an engine that automatically determines the usefulness of a particular piece of information to the user and which adapts accordingly to user behavior, for a rich browsing experience direct to the desktop or mobile. Read an interview with CEO Thorben Linneberg here.
SocialWok
Socialwok is an on-demand enterprise social media collaboration platform that provides small-to-medium organizations with a single application platform to manage all their social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feed interactions) and leverage social messaging to help distributed mobile employees collaborate more effectively within and outside of the organization. It’s unlikely that a small company would allow its employees to participate in social media during working hours (especially Singaporean ones), but Socialwok CEO Ming Yong seems convinced.
***
I personally thought that the other startups that were exhibiting at the UnConference 2009 but did not pitch were somewhat left out by the post -event coverage in many other blogs. So here’s a shoutout to some of them:
CareerAlbum
CareerAlbum is a social career platform that allows jobseekers to easily put together online resumes, multimedia portfolios, and professional networks to manage their careers. CareerAlbum also provides a comprehensive online suite for corporates – companies, headhunting firms – to hunt for talents, run marketing campaigns, events or competitions. It’s hard to see them beat entrenched players like JobsDB or Jobstreet, but you never know.
The team from CareerAlbum.
Elevyn
Kuala Lumpur-based Elevyn is a social entrepreneurship site with a heart – it is a platform for communities, NGOs and entrepreneurs to set up online shops that support a worthy cause. A percentage of the sale of every item sold through these online shops goes directly to fund a chosen cause. You can read a previous interview with Mike Tee of Elevynhere.
Ffffoundtape
An audio social bookmarking service, Singapore-based Ffffoundtape lets you discover “missing” MP3s around the web, bookmarking it for later listening, and make playlists to share with friends. Since there’s no transfer of data involved, there’s little chance for Ffffoundtape or its users to get their pants sued off for copyright infringement.
Herwan of Ffffoundtape.
Foldees
Kuala Lumpur-based Foldees is the greeting card version of popular online t-shirt design site Threadless. Foldees.com solicits greeting card designs from the public through various competitions it runs, which it then prints and sells. You can also read a previous interview with Lau Chak Onn, founder of Foldees.
Foliohouse
Currently under development, Foliohouse is positioned as a community that is targeted at professional and aspiring digital media talent. Foliohouse will take the form of a social network site, jobmatching for the creative industry as well as feature competitions across digital media genres. A Phokki wannabe, perhaps? Hard to tell what their USP will be until they officially launch.
The boys from Foliohouse.
JKonnect
A web platform that promotes event sponsorship as an effective and viable means of marketing, JKonnect enables companies to aggregate and compare event sponsorship opportunities based on their characteristics (target audience, demographics etc) to generate a better ROI for their sponsorship dollar. The platform can also recommend event organizers suitable sponsors to approach based on their compatibility with the marketing and promotional needs of the companies. It is currently under development.
JK Thng of JKonnect (right).
Klout
Klout measures a Twitter user’s influence across the social web, and discover people who have the most influential online networks and carry word-of-mouth. During a demo, I saw the names of those who influence me the most on Twitter, as well as those I influence, plotted on a graph. Very nifty, and I can see how this service will help those in the social media and marketing space. Read an interview with Jonathan Chua, a co-founder of Klout, over at SGEntrepreneurs.
Kevin and Aung from Klout.
Mobile Sorcery
Mobile Sorcery provides MoSync, an integrated collection of tools for application development for mobile, handheld devices. MoSync is a cross-platform tool that allows the easy porting, updating and creation of applications from one mobile platform to another (Windows Mobile, S60, Java, Android etc), which can radically cut application development time and cost across different mobile platforms.
SmartLoans
SmartLoans is the first-of-its-kind, free-to-use online mortgage comparison service for the Singapore market that allows users to easily search for, compare and enquire about home loan packages available across eight different Singapore-based banks. It utilizes advanced web technology to intelligently filter, calculate and tabulate results to a single page for easy comparison. SmartLoans was covered in a previous post.
Vinod Nair of Smartloans.
TheMobileGamer
TheMobileGamer (TMG) aims to makes mobile gaming truly mobile. Its free mobile application GameMo, allows users to try mobile games out before they pay for them, direct from their mobile devices. It is also a gaming social network.
The team from TheMobileGamer.
Interviews with Klout, Ffffoundtape, TheMobileGamer (TMG) and SocialWok are on the cards. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to talk to every single startup present at the UnConference this year. If I have missed you out, please drop me an email and I’ll be more than glad to give you a shoutout.
For more on Unconference 2009, you may want to check out:
The Gothere.sg team: (Left to right) Dominic Ee, Toh Kian Khai, Kuan Chih Yuan and Ang Jun Han.
Dominic Ee, Toh Kian Khai, Kuan Chih Yuan and Ang Jun Han are avid football fans, but that’s not what keeps them up late at night. They are the team behind one of Singapore’s most promising startups gothere.sg, a location-based service provider whose map and directional search engine is steadily becoming the quintessential service for finding your way around Singapore.
I first came across gothere.sg when I saw them in a startup pitch at UnConference 2008, and they were one of few startups present that stood out in the crowd. I managed to finally grab hold of Toh Kian Khai, gothere.sg‘s Director for Business Development, at this year’s UnConference for this interview.
Kian Khai, an FC Barcelona fan, tells me that the team was initially inspired to start gothere.sg when they were looking around at the other online navigation websites available to help commuters in Singapore, and thought that they could make a better service. “We wanted to improve the whole user experience of locating services and traveling to destinations,” remembers Kian Khai, a graduate from the National University of Singapore with an honors degree in Economics.
He says that his partners have been instrumental in putting the gothere.sg‘s core services together. “(Director of Technology) Dominic developed the infrastructure and is responsible for conceptualizing new products and research of the latest technologies. (Director of Engineering) Chih Yuan handles the technical requirements of projects to deliver results to clients, while (Director of Products) Junhan looks at creating innovative products and overlooking the development of new products as well as the improvement of existing products and services.” In case you wanted to know, Dominic supports Italian Serie A team Inter Milan, Chih Yuan is a fan of English Premier League side Newcastle FC, while Junhan backs its rival Arsenal FC.
Learning From The Best
The gothere.sg team believes the site’s user interface is their best unique selling point (USP), and it’s obvious that the guys have learnt some lessons from Google. After all, one of the reasons for the search giant’s ascendence in its earlier days was the fact that its user-interface was clean and simple and thus user-friendly, compared to the clunky crowded home pages of its key competitors. It’s the same with gothere.sg.
“We love our user interface, and many of our users love it too. It’s the ease of use that keeps people coming back. We would of course like everyone living and visiting Singapore to use our services,” says Kian Khai.
The key challenge, he says, for any startup is to get its brand name out there, and in order to do that you need a good product and a good marketing plan. “Currently, we are targeting net-savvy people between 15 to 35 years old. I believe they will be our ambassadors to the rest of the population who do not use the Internet as much.”
Finding the right partners and building more content are key parts of their growth strategy. “Hungrygowhere.com is one of our partners who provide their content on our website, and we are looking for more partners to provide their content through us,” says Kian Khai. gothere.sg recently released its Gothere Maps APIs, which will allow developers to build other interesting applications on its maps. “We will be promoting both the free and paid version, over the next few months,” says Kian Khai. “We have always wanted to bring our services onto the mobile platform as we believe our services is even more useful for people on the go.”
“We will not forget our users, so we are also looking at further improvements to the site.”
However, Kian Khai laments that it’s increasingly difficult to get potential clients to spend during this current recession. “Even before the recession, we have been very careful about our operating costs.”
When asked about the lawsuit the Singapore Land Authority slapped on Streetdirectory.com in early 2008 for copyright infringement, Kian Khai assures me that it won’t happen to gothere.sg (they don’t build their services on SLA maps). “A lawsuit is always a potential risk for any business, it’s definitely detrimental to any company’s reputation and resources, but I do not see us getting involved in one.”
A Journey, Not Just A Destination
Kian Khai relates that their journey to date has been nothing short of exciting. “From the initial launch, to the redesign, launching our own maps, and getting ourselves mentioned in the Budget speech, these were major milestones for our company,” he says.
“Starting your own business is a lot of hard work. Passion, perseverance and diligence will bring you a long way on this path,” shares Kian Khai. “We took this road knowing the risks but we dream of having our own company, making useful products for people out there. We’re still very grateful to the people who (have helped make) it possible.”
gothere.sg‘s success to date is nothing short of amazing, considering the fact that they started out without any support from any of the local startup funding schemes offered by the local government (the founders have personally invested $80,000 into the business so far).
“(But) we’re in the process of applying for funding from some government agencies,” says Kian Khai. The four co-founders are running the show and have not hired any staff yet.
Someone in the industry shared an interesting story that emerged regarding that Budget speech. gothere.sg was apparently involved in talks with a government agency for months, but without any result. Soon after getting mentioned by Minister of Finance Tharman Shanmugaratnam, gothere.sg received a call from the self-same agency inviting them back for immediate renegotiations.
Kian Khai sounded genuinely surprised when I tell him that many in the startup community consider them as hometown heroes. “Heroes, really? We’re pretty surprised to hear this but I think all startups deserve a pat on the back,” he answers sheepishly. “We have benefited from other startups’ advice and experience so we look forward to contributing back to the community some day.”
The truth is that gothere.sg has really done well despite all the odds against it, and it’s no wonder that the site has garnered the groundswell of support that it has gotten so far. In fact, I will argue that they help Singapore find its way around in more ways than one – they are a shining beacon, and a perfect example of how entrepreneurship in Singapore can be.
eJamming presenting during Unconference 2009 startup 10-minute pitching sessions
How it has grown.
UnConference Singapore, organized by e27, is literally growing from strength to strength. Last year’s UnConference featured just 17 startups, but Saturday’s event saw over 31 startups from 10 countries participating in what must be Singapore’s biggest and most highly-anticipated annual event for the local tech and web startup community.
Not only has the event grown in size – over 400 delegates compared to almost 300 in 2008 – but the quality of startups that participated and pitched on Saturday has also risen. Bangkok-based online collaborative music platform eJamming and Singapore-based RF location-based technology provider Human Network Labs, for example, were startups that were extremely well-received by a judging panel and the audience.
The event was kicked off by a keynote from Scott Rafer, CEO of Lookery, and followed by a panel discussion on “Innovation in Asia: Where is it heading?” with Rafer, co-founder of OpenWeb AsiaGang Lu, co-founder and CEO of Buzzcity Lai Kok Fung and Wong Hoong Ann, founder of HungryGoWhere.com. Despite it going off in a tangent due to some of the questions posed by a generally excellent moderator in Benjamin Joffe of +8*, the session went well and provided some insight into some the panelists’ experiences in the web, tech and mobile spaces.
The biggest letdown of the entire UnConference, in my opinion, took place during the session after the panel discussion, presented by the Media Development Authority of Singapore.
First, it didn’t help that many in the audience had seen that chest-beating presentation – the role and supposed successes of the agency’s Interactive Digital Media (IDM) Research & Development (R&D) Programme Office’s in helping to fund and guide Singapore-based startups – many times before in previous events. So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that members of the audience started leaving just five minutes into the session (it is an UnConference after all, and people have the right to). The speaker, a relatively junior MDA executive, knew she was losing the crowd, and began to fumble.
If she had managed to get any attention from the crowd, it was of the wrong kind.
[ Picture removed by request.]
Yes, the crowd was distracted by her legs that were just covered by a very short skirt. Not just pulses and heartbeats; even Twitter was aflutter. What would you have expected from a mainly-male geek audience in the consumer tech and web space? The lady seated next to me remarked that the speaker would have done better if she had “dressed a little more appropriately”. I trust my fellow delegate’s judgment – she was there at the UnConference to seek funding for her online fashion content publishing startup.
Long legs aside, the key gripe would have been the fact that MDA seemed wholly incapable of defending its own programmes. It was obvious that she was clearly outmatched and overwhelmed by a knowledgeable audience. At one point, co-founder and CEO of Buzzcity Lai Kok Fung stood up and challenged her about their role as a facilitator in connecting Singapore startups to larger, established companies such as Singtel as she claimed in her presentation. He argued, some will say rightly, that if a startup had a great product, Singtel would listen whether or not MDA was in the picture to facilitate any exchange. After some half-hearted defence by the MDA representative, Lai finally relented and remarked “I apologize for doing this to you, I should be taking this up with (MDA deputy CEO) Michael Yap instead”. I couldn’t but help notice some members of another government agency present (seated in the same row as me) rolling their eyeballs.
UnConference 2009 is a once-a-year event when many of the best startups from Singapore and the region gather to share knowledge. It is also attended by those who finance startups – business angels, private equity fund managers, venture capitalists and the like – that the startup scene is eager to pursue, as well as educators, regulators, technology and web professionals and yes, aspiring entrepreneurs. In what must be considered a poorly-delivered presentation by a junior executive who isn’t empowered to answer and defend the agency’s role in the scheme of things, could MDA have erred by badly underestimating the nature and importance of UnConference, and the quality of its delegates, in the Singapore startup scene?
Another question that begs asking: Is the agency fast enough to adapt and keep pace with the extremely fluid startup scene in Singapore? It has been almost three years since the IDM R&D Programme Office was set up in October 2006. Despite the many tweaks to its programmes over the past three years, some industry observers have privately commented that it may be losing its plot. Take for example, iJAM is a joke – I can’t put it any better than this poster.
There is already talk that some local startups, attracted by better terms and cheaper costs, are strongly considering moving their operations to Malaysia. MDA’s IDM R&D Programme Office needs to seriously relook into its programmes, otherwise we may soon start to see a deluge of startups (and we don’t have many of these to start with in the first place) leaving our shores. Bear no misconceptions about this – members of Malaysia’s MDEC were present at the UnConference actively courting the startups.
UnConference 2009 presented a perfect opportunity for MDA IDM R&D Programme Office to stand up and be a thought leader in the local startup community. It didn’t. All the more’s the pity.
Matt Wilson, founder of Under30CEO.com, created the world's No.1 Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization and was named National Student Leader of the Year.
Young Upstarts focuses on people who are trying to change the world with their ideas, products and services. To do this Generation Y has to be resilient. Society shuts us down, so we have to surround ourselves with other go-getters. Entrepreneurs aren’t afraid of failure; they are afraid of what others are going to say. Finding the support system brings us one step closer to going out and doing what we love. Go out and make a difference, it’s the Young Upstarts way.
*This is a guest post by Matt Wilson. Matt is a young entrepreneur and co-founder of Under30CEO.com, a social network for other young entrepreneurs. His mission is to lead people to go out and do something they are passionate about instead of falling into the rat race and playing by corporate America’s rules. Under30CEO‘s newsletter allows anyone to ask a business question and get answers from real people in their inbox or Twitter feed. He also runs a video podcast interviewing business experts who give lessons to business owners.
Gaurav Dhobal and his mates Naman Arora, Rahul Tyagi, Aditya Thakur and Ujjwal Singh Grover were at a live event listening to a very young college band. The band was performing an original composition, and the friends were amazed by how good the band was. The music rocked, and the crowd obviously loved them. That set them wondering – how many such good musicians remained undiscovered?
With that in mind, they conducted some research and found that while there was plenty of musical talent around, there wasn’t a proper platform to showcase them. So they made a business plan and, lo and behold, proceeded to win Indian Institute of Technology Bombay’s Eureka International Business Plan competition in 2006. Tempostand was born – to give that platform for budding, talented musicians.
Its target audience is mainly producers of fresh, new creative content and people interested in such content. “(But we hope to be) more than just a distribution platform for their work, we (also) want to be an agent for their economic empowerment,” says 25 year-old Gaurav, who graduated from Dhirubhai Institute of Information and Communication Technology in 2007 along with Naman, Ujjwal and Aditya. Rahul, also 25, is an Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee graduate. “We have a revenue sharing model with the artists and our efforts are to open up new revenue streams for them.”
Engineering A Musical Platform
They may all be engineering graduates, but at least one member of the team knows music – Aditya, 23, is himself a musician and has been part of a rock band for five years. 24 year-old Ujjwal is, however, the techhead in the team, while Rahul and Gaurav handles marketing and finance. Naman, 24, looks after public relations.
Tempostand was started when they were in the final year of their graduation, so their college dorm in the Indian city of Ahmedabad was their office by default. Later they shifted to Gurgaon in Delhi simply because, Gaurav says, “it has a more vibrant music scene and houses major corporates”.
Tempostand is totally bootstrapped and do not have any funding to date. Its current business model relies on two revenue sources – advertising and services. “Our online events, a kind of an online version of a reality show, are a big draw for sponsors and forms a chunk of our advertising revenues. We also create targeted events for companies,” Gaurav reveals. “Then there are some new services like Musical Expressions, which allows anyone to get very personalized musical products as gifts or for different occasions.”
Today, Tempostand‘s greatest achievement is that its name has become synonymous with independent music in India. Its growth has been organic, attracting over 500 artists to work with them and more are added each week. “It’s not just about capturing (an audience),” says Gaurav, “at Tempostand an artist is recognized by his work and is not just another profile.”
But the team doesn’t intend to stop there. “We are planning to foray into other creative fields for example we recently launched our poets portal TempoPoets. This is in line with our bigger vision to become the ‘Republic of Creativity’ where Tempostand serves as a launch pad for new creative talent. Some new tools for music distribution are also planned for the coming year.”
On Entrepreneurship
“I love working on new ideas and so in a way starting something of my own was always on the cards. ‘Doing’ as opposed to just ‘thinking’ is what I believe defines entrepreneurship,” Gaurav shares. “There is no perfect idea to start with; you make it perfect by working on it.”
“And of course the most important thing is you should enjoy whatever you are doing.”
SUPERMODELME.tv - Thin and lights get on your thin-and-lights.
Aspiring Asian supermodels are primed to hit the next thing closest to the big screen – on your computers. Singapore-based Refinery Media, a multimedia production agency has announced the launch of online reality show SUPERMODELME.tv – where ten models from across the Asian continent including Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and India will compete to be Asia’s next hottest face on runways and magazines.
SUPERMODELME.tv will debut on 16 June 2009 and be broadcast online twice a week, stretching over 20 episodes. The online reality series will showcase the ups and downs that aspiring models encounter in their professional careers – from dealing with the thrilling and glamorous but unforgiving demands of the fashion industry, to the bonding sessions or brash disputes with the other models. Oone model is eliminated each week until the winning model is chosen out of the final three contestants.
SUPERMODELME.tv will incorporate new online broadcast technologies such as Hyperspot, where users can have access to information on the brands, prices and stockist locations of the model’s outfits, and even the makeup and the names of their stylists, with a click of the mouse. Another is SubStream, a web-based subtitling technology that will allow viewers to easily switch from English to Mandarin subtitles while they watch the program.
Helming SUPERMODELME.tv is Refinery Media founder, Karen Seah, who is a successful, established entrepreneur in the lifestyle and entertainment scene with several notable nightclub and restaurant outlets under her belt.
Let’s all cross our fingers and hope it doesn’t turn out to be another mindless bimbofest like S Factor.
Buying a suit can be a frustrating experience, as Heikal Gani found out. Sure, you can put that down to the typical male’s lack of fashion sense, but Heikal realized it was more than that. He was buying his first suit for a conference when he recognized that like him, many other consumers were confused, intimidated and discouraged by offerings of traditional suit designers. With this thought in mind, Heikal recruited his best friend Kyle Vucko and founded online menswear retailer Indochino.
The best pals initially met while studying at Canada’s University of Victoria – 28 year-old Heikal was doing a double major in psychology and political science while Kyle, 23, pursued a commerce degree. It was during their time in university when they wrote a business plan for an online menswear business a few semesters before graduation.
“Our initial idea was to focus on a certain category of consumers who wants custom-made suits but realized that customers in general have a common pain point that it’s hard to get a well-fitting suit, with great style and even greater prices,” says Heikal, who is originally from Singapore. “We received a nod for angel investment soon after, and we decided to put school on hold and started our clothing venture. It was the best decision we ever made as students!”
A Fitting Unique Selling Point
Heikal reveals that Indochino‘s unique single proposition to their customers is encompassed in their tagline, ‘we suit anyone’. “Men are generally frustrated by the textile industry – not being able to find suits that are well-fitted, well-styled and affordable. Indochino is able to custom make suit for any man, anywhere in the world.”
“In addition, we have a great policy of giving free alterations just in case the suit needs tweaking at the local tailors. We also give free remakes and accept returns.” Needless to say, their target market are men who want to look and feel great in clothing, especially the 25-35 year-old five suit per week banker or office professional who needs to “look like a million dollars but makes a bit less than that”.
“That being said, we really are focusing on making fashion and suits in general easier to buy and fit in for all men,” says Heikal. “This means really focusing on offering products that customers really want, and making the whole suit purchasing more simpler and accessible to the individual. We are also constantly expanding our style book or fashion resource section on the site and this is really helpful not only for our current clientele but anyone who needs styling advice particularly on formal wear or suits.”
“At the end of the day, Indochino is a client-focused business.”
“Recession has been a bonus for us. People are looking for value and people who used to only buy US$1000 suits are trying us out. They generally have been surprised by our quality and turnaround speed. We have also seen our sales ramping up for the past six months and correlated with the tough economic times.” The single largest purchase ever made on Indochino‘s website was a guy who was so happy with his first purchase, he bought ten suits at US$3265 to fill his wardrobe. Perhaps he wasn’t planning to dryclean them too often.
Suit tailor in China.
Indochino is a registered entity in Canada’s Victoria, British Columbia, but its operations – website management, customer service, suit production, for example – is mostly based in Shanghai, China. Despite China’s, the Indochino team doesn’t think that China’s dubious reputation with product quality issues around the world affects their business. “(Doing) business in China is great! Very dedicated and hardworking staff, talented and ambitious people,” Heikal insists. The company currently has 8 full-time staff.
Indochino is funded to a total of US$300,000 to date via angels and a venture capital firm. Its angel investors are the co-founders of Abebooks.com (one of the top 100 e-commerce companies) and a German investment firm, Acton Capital.
Entrepreneurship Suits Them To A T
When Heikal and Kyle first set out on the path of entrepreneurship, they, like most people, loved the idea of personal independence. “A few months with Indochino, boy, we realized, we did not think it through!” Heikal laughs. “The amount of work and hours that goes in are extra challenging, but these really are the only downsides.”
“The blood, sweat and tears are all soon forgotten when more and more consumers are responding to your business.” The lesson they learnt? That you can achieve anything if you put your heart, soul and mind to it.
“We feel very lucky to be able to do our own thing, at this age, building a fast-growing company against the backdrop of an exciting metropolitan city in Shanghai.”
Trendwatching.com‘s latest briefing “Innovation Jubilation” contains some great insights into innovation, and looks at over 50 interesting ideas to help spur your thinking about your new (or next) venture.
Ideas I really like include FreePaperCups – paper cups with advertisements on them given to corporate customers to stock their pantries – and Hotel X, which outfits its rooms with refurbished furniture purchased from ordinary consumers. Save the environment, benefit consumers, and provide a new service? Sounds like a great idea to me!
Trendwatching.com‘s sister site Springwise.com is also a fabulous resource for new business ideas. If you’re in the business of creativity and ideas, you’d do well to have both sites in your RSS feeds.
Billy Jinks - 20-year old CEO of Lexani Limousines
Billy Jinks is the president and CEO of Lexani Limousines, a leader in Arizona’s transportation industry since 2004. Lexani Limousines is a full-service chauffer company that serves the Phoenix and Tucson metropolitan areas, and features a diverse state-of-the-art fleet of luxury sedans, executive SUVs, limousines and coaches. Its client base range from business professionals and high net-worth individuals to corporate and hospitality accounts.
What is interesting, however, is that Billy Jinks is just 20 years-old, and Lexani Limousines was started when he was only 15. So while most of Billy Jinks’ peers dream about owning a car, the young man has a whole fleet of them – 27 to be exact.
Starting Young
Billy had always wanted a career in the transportation business. As a five-year old, Billy developed a strong interest in limousines after riding in them to accompany his father on regular business trips to New York. When he was seven, he spent time with a family friend who owned a transportation company. Billy helped stock limousines with water bottles, and the limo drivers would tip him a dollar or two. Billy would attend limousine trade shows, developing more knowledge and insight into the chauffeuring industry than most adults in the business.
Billy Jinks, in his early teens, inside one of his limos.
All this while, Billy would learn about the business and how to run a business – so much so that many adults in the transportation business who spoke to Billy would comment that he knew more about limousines than anyone else they knew.
The turning point came when Billy was 15. He somehow convinced his parents to use their credit to sign off on a commercial loan to help him purchase his first limousine, and established Lexani Limousines LLC in 2005.
“I’ve known the ins and out of the limousine industry for years, so launching Lexani Limousines at an early age seemed like a natural fit,” says Billy. “Since I always knew this was the career path I would take, I decided to get started sooner rather than later to build a strong future for myself.”
Defying the Odds
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, only about five to ten percent of new small businesses survive its first five years. In addition, only two percent of small businesses across the United States have an owner aged 25 years old or less. Which makes Billy’s success even more startling.
Since its inception in 2004, Billy has since grown Lexani Limousines with a first-year profit of $73,407 to a US$3 million business today, doubling its revenue growth every year for the past four years. As president and CEO, Billy manages 37 employees, secures new business and handles the day-to-day operations for the company’s two offices in Phoenix and Tucson.
“I think our biggest achievement is that we are still in business in this economy, and have doubled the fleet from last year and are already doubling our revenue (this year). We have also been ranked number 2 in Arizona by the Arizona Business Magazine,” Billy says.
The biggest problem that plagued Lexani Limousines was, unsurprisingly, the price of oil. “Gas prices were a challenge. But just like everything else, we have learned and changed the way we do things to accommodate the higher prices.”
And interestingly, none of his clients ever complained about his young age. “Most of our accounts don’t really know about my age until after they work with us. The ones that do know are surprised at first, but once they see our vehicles and the service we provide, it tends to be the last thing on their mind.”
Lexani Limousines' Billy Jinks with two of his limos.
Striving For Perfection
Billy attributes his success to hiring quality drivers and support staff, keeping vehicles immaculate by washing and detailing them everyday and ensuring the best customer experience possible on every transport. Billy has even been known on the rare occasion to complete a pickup himself if a driver is unavailable at the last minute.
“I think being personally being involved in daily operations and keeping the small company mindset. Attention to detail and perfection is key.”
He shares that Lexani‘s key selling point is closely related to its slogan, “Perfection Has Arrived”. “All of our cars are different from the competition. We offer a very unique fleet and customize our vehicles – none of them are stock from the dealer,” Billy declares proudly.
Billy sees his job as both a career and hobby. “Honestly, I chose this path because it is what I like to do. It is truly what I enjoy. It just is a plus that it happens to be a major career and business. I have learnt many things, such as responsibility, financial things, importance of relationships, building credit, etc.”
TheFunded.com's Founder Institute early-stage incubator model can work in Singapore.
I’ve often argued that one of the reasons why the startup community in Singapore is spluttering is because of the fact that we don’t have a good platform where successful and experienced entrepreneurs can help guide our newbie startups.
There simply isn’t any incentive other than the feel-good factor for veterans to contribute back to the startup gene pool, after all. Or is there? Perhaps we can learn from TheFunded.com‘s latest initiative.
U.S-based online community of entrepreneurs and founders, TheFunded.com, has started The Founder Institute, a seed-stage incubator and mentoring program that will teach new and seasoned entrepreneurs on best practices for starting and building next-generation high-tech companies. Every semester, The Founder Institute will recruit 25 renown startup CEOs to mentor program participants and drive its curriculum. For example, its first four-month semester has a list of mentors that include Mahalo‘s Jason Calacanis, Trip Adler of Scribd, Scott Heiferman of Meetup, and Adify‘s Russ Fradin.
But the most interesting part of the The Founder Institute‘s program is its unique economic model, where all the participants of the program is able to share in the equity upside of the entire semester. What does that mean? In short if one company in the program does well, all the companies – including the mentors – will stand to benefit. It’s a great way to spread overall risk. The program also has in-built provisions to protect participating founders, such as a “Class F” common stock and clauses that penalizes a company if its board of directors ever decides to kick out the founder some time down the road.
I’ll stick my head out and argue that this model has the potential to be far more successful than any of the current incubator programs being run in Singapore right now, including MDA’s existing iJAM Microfunding scheme. Instead of he current dubious directive of tapping on “expertise” of recommended venture capitalists and other advisors, at least a The Founder Institute-like program gives startups access to real and seasoned entrepreneurs instead. Sure, Singapore’s entrepreneurial pool won’t be able to provide 25 successful mentors each semester, but that is not an insurmountable problem.
The Founder Institute‘s inaugural Summer 2009 semester will be held in Silicon Valley, and participating founders can access the sessions online as well. The application deadline is May 10th, 2009, so do sign up if you’re interested. Alternatively, if you’re an experienced startup CEO you can sign up to be a mentor here.
Eddie Chau, founder and CEO of Brandtology. No guesses why he's smiling.
Online intelligence service provider Brandtology today announced that it has received a capital injection of S$2 million from venture capital fim Walden International.
Founder and CEO of Brandtology Eddie Chau says that the additional investment will help fuel the company’s expansion into new markets in North Asia. “Our next focus growth area is in North Asia as we see increased demand from clients requesting that we compliment their digital marketing strategy to listen to the social media scene of what is being said of their brands in the local language,” says Chau.
“For example, China alone has about 298 million Internet users of which 91 million users actively participate in forums and 105 million users update their blogs regularly, as reported by China Internet Network Information Center. Companies can either tap on these resources to strengthen their brands with their digital marketing strategy or face the consequences of ignoring a tsunami of negative posts on their brands in this social media space,” he adds.
Brandtology has recently expanded globally with offices in Australia, Malaysia and the People’s Republic of China – Shanghai and Hangzhou.
The problem with online conversations these days is that there is too much of it. It’s exacerbated by the fact that social media has gone into overdrive and beyond the tipping point. Case in point – even Oprah’s on Twitter now.
So how does one even begin to monitor online chatter and derive from it useful, coherent data? One Atlanta-based company, Psydex, believes it has the answer in its online news service portal Psyng.
Psyng, pronounced “sing”, basically scours newswires, Internet feeds, TV closed captions, blogs and other sources of web “chatter” to deliver instant analysis and alerts on global news events as they happen. It helps brokers, journalists, brand managers, and others see real-time statistical patterns and trends in news media, social networks, human behavior and financial markets. Founded by CEO Rob Usey and CTO Don Simpson, Psydex consists of a core team of computer science and semantics experts aged from 38 to 44 who are spread across continental United States in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and North Carolina.
“There is a media revolution underway and Psydex has the technology and services to change the way the world looks at news,” says Rob. “Because our system indexes and analyses both mainstream media and emerging social media sources we are effectively measuring and tracking ‘thought contagion’ in real time.”
For example, when US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River in January, Psydex’s algorithms detected—within seconds of the incident—unusual chatter levels well before the news was broadly disseminated.
Spotting the Gap, and Filling It
Rob and Don has worked with each other for more than a decade. “We’re a well-balanced group. I’m more of the ideator. Don, meanwhile, is more of the left-brained type,” explains Rob. “We’ve both served as advisors to IBM, defense contractor SAIC and the federal government, focusing on the intersection of human language and computer science.”
Rob, whose core experience lies in large-scale computing, semantics and data mining, says both he and Don have been obsessed with semantics and computational sciences for as long as he can remember. “In the late 90s, we saw how easily stocks and commodities could be measured and tracked over time and decided it should be just as easy to do the same for thoughts, ideas and news. In particular, we thought the concept of time and discourse analysis could be better applied to news and chatter… to better predict human behavior. After all, that’s what traders and investors really want to do, right?”
When they first started the Psydex project, they identified two major weaknesses with traditional search services: the inability to search the real-time Web, and to search for content using a semantics-based approach.
“Instead of using traditional ranking algorithms, we developed semantics-based algorithms coupled with statistical analysis to predict what people are being told and thus what they are thinking about. And instead of searching the ‘slow’ Web, our developers went to work building code that searches the ‘fast’ ubiquitous communication mediums — such as instant messages, Twitter feeds and blogs.”
“We believe our key USP is reducing the time for man and machine to understand and respond to critical news events. For professionals who make a living off of information, time — even seconds — equates to money. Since we search the real-time Web using more accurate methodologies, these professionals can have quicker, more relevant results at their disposal.” Psyng is the result of various patent-pending technologies developed after decades of R&D experience at leading computer companies and with large-scale government intelligence programs.
“We’ve solved some of the really hard problems with analyzing semantics across both archived and real-time unstructured data streams. Our novel approach is based on proprietary, grid-based semantic algorithms and a temporal search and discovery engine,” says CTO Don. “Psydex is the result of decades of experience working on some of the most challenging intelligence problems on the planet and learning where traditional approaches fail.”
“We’re targeting professionals who thrive on real-time intelligence — people such as traders, investors, journalists and risk managers. As for who is currently using our services, several hedge funds are receiving our low-latency feeds,” Rob reveals.
“No one, to our knowledge, does exactly what we do. But we do have major competitors at different levels. On the search side, we compete with Google and Yahoo!. On the information services side, we compete with Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Relegence and Dow Jones. We also partner with some of these companies, including Dow Jones. In addition, we partner with The Associated Press, AOL and several other firms.”
When subscription-based Psyng was launched (on 21st April 2009), it registered several hundred users in the first day alone.
The Search Isn’t Over
Psydex was initially funded through its work with the intelligence community, but has recently raised funding to the tune of US$3.5 million. “Our newest investor, which led our Series A round of venture capital, is a large public company. Due to contractual obligations, we are not allowed to mention its name right now.”
Rob admits that it had been extremely fortunate to have gotten funded in a down economy, and getting major hedge funds using its services.
He says his goal is to establish Psydex as the brand for the fastest news analysis on the planet. “That may be bold, but I believe we can achieve this. As for our strategy, we are building partnership channels, making our APIs available to third parties, selling our news feeds, and getting integrated in sales trading desktops. We’re also building a growing army of ‘Psyngers’, or independent journalists, to our network.”
There are plans to extend to more messaging services to allow Psyngers to receive alerts and notifications and submit observations.
On Entrepreneurship
Psydex is Rob and Don’s second major startup. Their first, KnowledgeX, an early provider of data mining and social networking services, was sold to IBM in 1998.
“I do not believe entrepreneurship is something you can learn,” Rob says. “I naturally went down this path because I’ve always had an unconventional view of the world. I’ve also always been a little rebellious. Basically, I’ve struggled learning conventionally and wanted to figure things out on my own.”
Relationship management is critical for startups (Image: Sourcejuice.com)
A recent conversation over beer with two friends – one a local venture capitalist and the other works for a Singapore startup that is currently expanding its operations to other countries in the region – prompted an interesting debate over the importance of guanxi for startups.
“Guanxi” (关系), which directly translates to English as “relationship” or “connection”, actually means a lot more than that. It is a concept that revolves around the dynamics and influence of personal networks and business relationships, and is an important and integral part of Chinese society. In fact, many business commentators will tell you, without guanxi you cannot do business in China.
Likewise in Singapore, a country with a large Chinese population and strong business dealings with China, guanxi will be a critical factor in deciding the success or failure for many local startups. The simple truth is that most young founders starting their business for the first time will not have the luxury of an extended personal and business network, nor do they have the requisite experience to fully leverage upon those relationships.
So it’s not just a case of what you know – it’s also who you know.
Managing partner of California-based North Venture Partners, David Brody, equates guanxi to a form of social capital. “Social capital can be very useful when used the right way. Build yours by identifying people that share your vision, have expertise where you don’t, provide you inspiration and can ultimately lead you to achieve things.”
Think of guanxi as an intangible asset that can bring great value to any startup. Nicholas Chan of local private incubator Azione Capital describes it this way. “Guanxi is like grease, it makes things smoother and a lot less noisier.”
The Value of Guanxi
And having good guanxi has its rewards.
“For funding, guan xi is 80 percent of everything,” Jeffrey Paine of private investment firm Battle Ventures explains. “If management is the major component for evaluation, then guanxi with the founders or the founders’ guanxi with their former employers and business partners matter a lot. One thing we do is we perform reference checks on management team we don’t know very well. Hence guanxi does matter a lot to a startup’s probability of raising capital.”
Says Chris Mottau, David Brody’s colleague at North Venture Partners, “I personally would not be where I am without the relationships I have developed over the years. My current work at North is the direct outcome of one such relationship, I was plucked from my position at an early-stage startup to come help North develop better and more meaningful relationships with entrepreneurs.”
Bernard Leong of private business incubator Thymos Capital tells of an example of how what goes around comes around. “I funded one company and helped the founders for an iPhone app from the start. It came back a virtuous cycle when the founder recommended his friend another interesting deal to me. By accessing his work attitude, I also know the quality of people he recommends.”
“Some start-ups grow fast via relationships through family and relatives in soliciting deals and getting partnerships to give the company a head start. Some relationships bring initial investors to the startups as well,” he adds.
Building Guanxi
So how do you build your guanxi? I’ve condensed some of the advice given by the VCs I spoke to into the following five points:
1. Be Humble.
Because of their intense passion for their product or idea, startup founders sometimes let such unbridled feelings overrule their senses and hence can come across as cocky, aggressive, or worse, downright rude. All venture capitalists I spoke to stressed the importance of humility.
Chris Mottau says, “Most entrepreneurs looking for funding are entirely too aggressive. Obviously they all think their company is an outstanding opportunity, but trying to jam it down an investor’s throat by means of every technology platform available is off-putting.”
“Almost all my deals are done via referrals or via my spotting of passionate individuals on the field,” says Nicholas Chan. “Rejects tend to be either too cocky or too intelligent for their own good, always expecting the investor to bow or beg them to be invested in.”
“Do not be arrogant. If you are seeking investment, do not piss off any investor, because word gets around and comes around,” says Bernard Leong. “Even if you do not want the money from (a particular) investor, you should politely tell them that you will keep them in mind, otherwise, the next time you go to them, be prepared for a no.”
2. Build Trust.
In fact, one of the investors I spoke to related a particular incident in which a startup who approached him for funding had taken his termsheet and went shopping for a better deal. “Never again,” he had said. As you can imagine, any trust between the potential investor and the startup is irrevocably broken.
“As startups, relationships are mainly based on trust,” says Jeffrey Paine of private investment firm Battle Ventures. “Startups have to have a culture of being humble, and focus on over-delivering. Talk less, do more.”
“Do not try to test the patience of the other party, be truthful and be confident to sometimes say ‘I don’t know'”, Jeffrey adds.
Azione’s Nicholas adds that trust is of utmost importance between startups and their customers and investors. “The wise customer (and investor) knows that a long term working relationship is based on the fundamentals that they are able to fully trust the startups they work with.”
3. Do your Due Diligence.
“They should do due diligence on the people who they are cultivating relationships, i.e. try to find out more about the people they are trying to cultivate a relationship”, advises Bernard Leong. “They should also be sure of why they want to set up this particular relationship, from investment to partnership.”
“Always maintain your standards, even if it ruffles the feathers of many,” adds Nicholas Chan.
On the flip side, David Brody advises some entrepreneurs to sharpen their bullshit radar. “The investment capital space is unfortunately crawling with unsavory characters. Avoid taking a long and expensive ride on the scam tram. If someone says they “know how to find you capital” but and they haven’t shown you any credible evidence that they know how, ask them how they intend to do that. Your business is your baby and shouldn’t drain time working on developing a relationship with someone that isn’t offering up transparent communication. Use your instincts. And if you follow these principles, your social capital will hopefully take the form of large bills, not small coins.”
4. It’s About Give-and-Take.
“Be honest, earnest and think of what they can offer of value to others first before asking for anything. Just as a typical boy-girl relationship involves sacrifice, it is about wanting to give of your best to ensure that the other party is totally and completely convinced of your goodwill and good intentions,” Nicholas says. “This is a two-way road; if the startup can see that the other party is only seeking to take and not to give, they must also know their worth.”
Bernard Leong agrees. “In every relationship, there is a give-and-take situation. If you are only taking and giving nothing to people who help you, it is not a good way to set up a relationship,” he says.
5. Be Patient.
North’s Brody shares that it is important to remember that real social currency is not created by getting a stranger to add you as a friend on Facebook or a connection on LinkedIn. “Strong relationships and trust are built over time, over multiple email exchanges, phone calls, and cups of coffee.”
“Investors are busy people. Use good judgement and be respectful of someone else’s time. Tip: don’t treat investor’s like “one night stands” that offer up nothing more than a fat check. If you’re an entrepreneur, don’t “rush to raise”. What you probably need more than anything is valuable feedback and insights on your business and economic model. Use these learnings, become more “fundable”, and the money will come. Be patient. Don’t burn a potential fruitful relationship by coming off as a irrational stalker.”
6. Be Human.
Ultimately, it’s all about being human. “If you don’t have any EQ, don’t waste your time. Just look at the number of failed ‘technopreneurs’ who only know how to program but does not know how to be human,” Nicholas Chan says.
Additional Reading Resources
Here are some recommended reading and resources with advice on “guanxi” for business and startups:
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