Female entrepreneurs are rare. According to the New York Times, only eight percent of American venture-backed tech startups in 2010 were founded by women. The most common explanation given is that women are generally unwilling to bet all that she has on something that contains high risk, knowing at the back of her mind that she has other traditional heavyweight roles to fulfill such as raising families.
But more often than not, what (both) women (and men) need is support and encouragement.
Steve Wozniak was the technical wizard behind Apple's early success.
Here’s a typical problem. Your background is in business and you want to do an Internet company because the cost of starting up is extremely low and you think that you have a great idea.
The unique challenge of finding good technology people is endemic not only in Asia. It happens everywhere, including Silicon Valley. While Google, Facebook and many notable technology companies are putting in top dollar for the best engineering talent, most founders in start-ups don’t have that kind of resources.
The challenge of finding the best technology talent is exacerbated in Asia, since these people are viewed as a support arm and is something that can be outsourced to programmers in India or China.
Here are some considerations as to why you should or should not find a technology co-founder.
Although the case studies from this book are already outdated (as it was written in 1996), the lessons learnt and the concept of a strategic inflection point together with its implications for the high technology industry by Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel Corporation, are relevant for today.
This is a highly recommended book even for those who are thinking about their own career strategic inflection points at this moment of time. Read more
The process from starting to managing a start-up is a daunting process for any entrepreneur. In that journey, founders from different companies face a challenging set of questions which they struggle to come up with answers for.
While browsing through the Kinokuniya bookstore on a Saturday, I came across this book “The Founder’s Dilemma” by Noam Wasserman, which has the extraordinary nature of combining scholarly research and practical advice on dealing with a couple of sensitive issues from founding team dilemmas to division of equity and other financial rewards among the founding team.
Highly recommended for those who plan to embark or are already living the entrepreneurial lifestyle, it can serve as a guide to very tough situations for founders to evaluate the best possible way out. Read more
Malaysia's digital economy is similar to Singapore and Brunei.
Recently, I was invited to speak on entrepreneurship and consumer Internet trends in a private event hosted by Penn Olson during Startups in Asia, which happened from 2nd to 4th February.
In this article, I will highlight additional perspectives to shed greater light on the ideas presented during my talk, which gave the audience a better grasp on the consumer internet space in Southeast Asia. Read more
Recently, a comment from our current Singapore Minister of Law, K Shanmugam hints at the possibility of enacting laws that might be similar to the two pieces of legislation currently being debated in the US: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and a sister bill the Protect IP Act (PIPA).
There has been strong resistance against both bills not just from many technology entrepreneurs from the start-up space but also from multi-national companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook.
The aim of this post is to explain what SOPA and PIPA really means for us and why we are not supportive of such legislation for economic reasons if our Minister of Law decides to propose it as a bill in the very near future. It’s not just a Singapore problem but a Southeast Asia problem if it gets passed thru in Singapore. Read more
This first post of a multi-part series touches on the definition of entrepreneurship, the different forms of entrepreneurship, how countries measure growth of entrepreneurship activity, and the first toolkit: How to identify ideas and business opportunities.
I will also provide some interesting case studies, for example, the Aravind Eye Centre for social entrepreneurship. This series is based on the “MPS 812: Entrepreneurship” course I have been teaching in the School of Physical & Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. This post is republished from my blog.
Depending on who you ask, Singapore is either one of the most innovative countries in the world or underperforming in that aspect.
The 2011 Global Competitiveness Report by the World Economic Forum clearly thinks Singapore falls in the latter category. While it scores highly for lack of corruption, government efficiency (1st for both), and infrastructure (3rd), it lags behind for adoption of latest technologies (10th), measures that support sophistication of companies (15th), and capacity for innovation (22nd). Read more
Onsuccess interviewed early stage investor and entrepreneur Brad Feld on July 14 regarding entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Brad shared much from his own experience and gave some insightful comments on entrepreneurship in Asia. Read more
As a former venture capitalist I’ve been privileged to interact with numerous entrepreneurs in South Asia and play a small role in some start-up ventures. A few of these succeeded and went on to become large companies while many others failed.
Some ended up as lifestyle businesses – the living dead in VC parlance – and continue to chug along never quite realizing their original promise.