Choose your beach head market wisely

Startups and movies have quite a bit in common.

Los Angeles, the Entertainment capital of the world. 

San Francisco Bay Area, the Startup capital of the world.

We know that to some extent but somehow it does not truly hit home.

If you produce an English movie in Singapore looking for worldwide adoration and box office revenues, it usually ends up with limited distribution (classified a foreign language film) and screened in film festivals with limited distribution outcomes. 

Sounds familiar?

How do you choose the right beach head market for your startup that you can readily dominate that makes sense from where you are and move on from there?

If there are essentially 3 types of major major markets, categorized as:

  1. English speaking - SF Bay Area as the hub
  2. Chinese speaking - Beijing, China as the hub (because China is indeed special)
  3. a) Rest of World (Developed) b) Rest of World (Developing) 

Then, starting out from Singapore with limited resources, capital, talent and rising cost is pretty challenging from the on set. Where is then your beach head market? What is your move, chief?

It goes back to the founding team especially the CEO and what his or her personal situations, ambitions, knowledge, connections lies. Some founders put the company ahead of themselves and consider what market is best for the company and go to where it brings the largest impact. Some founders go with what they are comfortable with and capitalize on the opportunity that they know they can achieve. There is no right or wrong answer here, that is why the startup game is incredibly hard.

If you have something game changing, or you are 1 of 3 companies in the world that do what you do, and/or you can demonstrate a 10x differentiation to your closest competitor or simply, you know something that no one else in the world knows, chances are there are only a small number of places that will understand you, appreciate your venture's risk reward profile and have the ready ecosystem that will surround you to make things happen. Go to where they are.

If your beach head market is not ready, changing customer behavior where early adopters are not abundant makes achieving escape velocity a lot harder. It usually takes more time than you think. If investors in that region do not have the time to wait for escape velocity to arrive, you will likely throttle down your ambition and iterate to fit a market that understands, engages and pays for what you have. 

Therein lies the rise of clones and me too companies. 

Trust me, they are equally as hard to start and run compared to companies with breakthrough ideas. However, if you have ambitions to solve local or regional problems using or applying solutions or products that people resonate with, where a lot of guess work has been taken out then interestingly timed products that will achieve traction will surface. However, these founders have to realize that because they have chosen this path, their markets maybe limited, with intense competition close by. They have to execute even faster. 

Achieving a break through idea is hard. Everyone is trying to do that on a daily basis everywhere in the world. Courage and genius are still needed to pull it off. 

Nobody says startups are easy. Choose your beach head market wisely. 

So what is the purpose or role of Singapore then?

Personally, I think for now, Singapore is a special enough place that helps stitch Southeast Asia closer together and makes it easier for entrepreneurs to do business in the region (i.e. Rest of the World - Southeast Asia). 

p.s. More on startup ecosystems coming up soon especially ours (Singapore). 
p.p.s If you like this post, please Like or Tweet it. 

First MIT Visit and Takeaways

I recently went to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts for the first time to attend a 3 days executive education program at MIT Sloan School of Management called MIT REAP, more here. More about the program in my next few posts but in short it has something to do with developing our startup ecosystem in Singapore.

Almost 26,000 companies are founded by MIT alumni that still existed in 2006. If they were a country, it would have the 11th highest GDP in the world. My first impression was that MIT churn out great technology companies from their licensed technologies, but that is not the case. Most of the 26,000 companies founded by MIT alumni, very few (about 10%) are from MIT-licensed technology. But don't get me wrong, there are still about 20-30 companies spun out yearly from MIT. It finally hit home after speaking to Dharmesh Shah from Hubspot that most software startups started by MIT alumni are not MIT-licensed.

After an informative and definitely transformative 3-4 days at MIT, here are my three takeaways with regards to startups that are associated with MIT and why they interest me:

1. People

A predominantly engineering university with a cluster of engineering disciplines creates tremendous network effects. World class in research, both in reality and in perception. I can feel my IQ rise as I wander around the campus, eavesdropping on conversations. No doubt, they have skills, some probably harbor world class skills of varying depths. Over the years, the history and performance of startups from MIT faculty and alumni further shaped those who enrolled, those who researched, and those who taught.

2. Culture

I ran into at least 4 professors who are entrepreneurs many times over or "have helped to start 12 companies". That is a pretty rare occurrence as compared to where I am from. The culture of collaboration, experimentation, and the courage to change the world seems to be within the culture of Cambridge and MIT. The desire to learn, improve and do forces everyone in the system to be better. It fosters "creative confidence" and the courage to explore paths to bring a product to market.

3. Collision 

The most unique thing that caught me that were constantly being emphasized, was the way the campus is constructed to encourage "collision" amongst students, professors, post docs, and alumni. The famous MIT Media Lab is designed and located specifically to create "creative collisions". They even conduct entrepreneurship classes at the Media Lab, see https://www.media.mit.edu/about/ventures.

To add on to the 3 takeaways above, the talent pool in Boston/Cambridge is one of the best in the US, the availability of early stage capital is second only to Silicon Valley and co-working/collision spaces like CIC it only helps to support more creativity and courage to start companies.

My conclusion is, with enough density of people with the right entrepreneurial DNA and skills colliding together in a supportive ecosystem, amazing things will happen. What does this mean for me or Singapore? Stay tuned to my upcoming posts.


Other references:
MIT technologies are readily available online http://web.mit.edu/tlo/www/industry/inquiries.html#SelectedTechnologies.
An inventor’s guide to startups for faculty and students http://web.mit.edu/tlo/www/downloads/pdf/Startup_Guide.pdf

Southeast Asia Series A Crystal Ball Report

I don't know about you, but if you are an early stage technology entrepreneur in Southeast Asia raising venture capital to fund the growth of your business, you will likely have no idea what the cross section of institutional Series A investors in the region are looking for. 

We are not talking seed or angel rounds, but professional fund managers managing other people's money.

What I found in the last 2 years of investing in Southeast Asia is there is a gap of knowledge of what metrics or criteria these fund managers are looking for before even perking their interest. 

Many founders will be looking at raising their first institutional round this year. In order not to get caught in a tail spin and getting sucked into doing bridge and/or down rounds, we at Golden Gate Ventures wanted to do a survey amongst most if not all of the Series A investors that we can hustle our way into.

If you wish to help refer investors please drop us an email at info@goldengate.vc.

If you wish to read our findings in a report, please leave us your email address below.

Thank you.

Leave your email here

Your startup life in 2014

A few words about Lunar New Year Resolutions (if there is such a thing) that I will lay down for myself and I hope you will like them too.

Back in 2009, there was a huge gap of qualified startup mentors that are able to help first time founders (especially) or serial entrepreneurs building product companies for the first time. The FTM (fuck this moment) came when I see too many sub-par quality companies funded and fail (a total waste of money) and hence sparked the creation of Founder Institute Singapore in 2010 with huge support from the IDA and Spring Singapore. Since then, we are crushing it, thanks for asking.

Four years later in 2014, the mentorship gap has narrowed considerably although never completely, we now have a new, and flourishing startup ecosystem that I am proud of. However, the evolution of founders has brought them to meet different challenges especially people management, setting a vision and direction, work life balance and defining the culture of their companies.

What is missing is the next step of founder coaching. Whether they come from the board, advisors, or fellow founders or even full-time executive coaches focused on startup leadership. Our fraternity should come together to help like-minded folks to plough through the good and mostly tough times.

Back in 2010, I gave away some internal secrets on how to build relationships in business (probably not much of a secret). I spoke about it only once publicly in a SMU lecture. Here are the highlights:

The way to build relationships with anyone in business is to know how to (in that order) take care of their:

  • Love/Family Life (especially Kids - their health, education and/or love life)
  • Physical, Mental Health (especially physical health - a thought, an action will change perceptions deeply) 
  • Money matters/Career (especially making them look good and proud of their achievements)

So taking a page above, in 2014, founders please:

1. Take care of yourself this year. Do not let your startup and milestones consume you whole. Slow down and look up at the blue sky once in a while and take a deep breath. Look at your love ones and be clear on why you are doing what you are doing.

2. Seek out a small fraternity (less than 5) of like minded founders that you can chat, update and share your journey with. Grab dinner with them once a month, create a Whatsapp/FB Group Chat, connect and share. Startup life is hard, period. You need an outlet and a sounding board.

3. Focus on your job at hand (money matters/career), have a personal life (love/family life), and have a side interest/hobby (physical, mental health). And lastly, workout (preferably in the late morning or early afternoon, a few times a week).

No matter what your situation is, founders are a different breed of people whom I have the good fortune to meet, train, (occasionally scold), and invest in. Stick together to help one another. Be blunt. Remember, there are people around you who is there to help, support and lend a helping hand. 

They do care about you no matter what you may think. Sometimes a text, a message, a nod will trigger a catch up that is long awaited. 

Sometimes just knowing that they are around is all you need.

Blogs I found that you might like to start with:

http://scott.a16z.com/2014/01/17/success-at-work-failure-at-home/

http://www.themonsterinyourhead.com/

Books:

Startup Life

(of course there are plenty more...)

Happy Lunar New Year to one and all. (This post was inspired by this song below, hope you enjoy it).