Edited at 3.50 pm SGT.
By Earl Martin Valencia, president and co-founder of the IdeaSpace Foundation
“How do we build a Silicon Valley atmosphere here in the Philippines?”
In May 2011, business tycoon Manny V. Pangilinan (or commonly known as MVP) posed this question to a idealistic 27-year old idealistic Silicon Valley based Filipino during one of his trips back to the Philippines. That person was me.
The Chairman of PLDT-Smart, one of the largest mobile operators in Southeast Asia, told me his 10-year old vision of democratizing access to capital to the best science and technology-based ideas in the country.
This conversation was the birth of what is now called the IdeaSpace Foundation — a non-profit organization that promotes tech entrepreneurship in the Philippines. Read more
Following JFDI.Asia alum TribeHired’s USD 560,000 funding round, the Singapore-based startup accelerator released some facts about the state of its first batch of companies. While JFDI’s efforts at transparency is commendable and should be emulated across the region, the numbers don’t mean as much without a benchmark for comparison. Read more
By James Chan, founder of Silicon Straits and principal at Neoteny Labs. This article was first published on James’ blog.
This is the second post in my “Term Sheet from Hell” series. The first post discussed liquidation preference and participation.
Last time round, we saw how liquidation preference and participation can combine to affect the entrepreneur’s prospective exit liquidity. I realised I missed out one important point after a reader emailed me to ask about it afterwards. There are indeed liquidation preference clauses where investors end up choosing to convert their preference shares into ordinary shares in order to get a better payout (i.e. 20% of $20M sale = $4M) instead of choosing to go with their liquidation preference & participation rights.
This is actually a much fairer way to implement liquidation preference, and would be phrased differently, i.e. “HIGHER of (i) liquidation + participation, OR (ii) conversion of preference into ordinary to receive pro-rata proceeds“, but is most definitely not what the Term Sheet from Hell had asked for. Read more
iJAM is being undermined by bureaucracy. In case you’re wondering, that’s Karl Marx and Franz Kafka in the picture. Image: Harold Groven
An intense debate has raged over the weekend about i.JAM, a government grant scheme for seed stage startups, among Singapore’s entrepreneurs, developers, and investors.
While much has been written about the topic by Jeffrey Paine of Golden Gate Ventures and Willis Wee of TechinAsia, it seems that venture capitalist Murli Ravi’s blog post was the flashpoint that brought the debate to a boil.
Plenty of focus has been placed on the i.JAM grant’s supposed salary cap, which states that “a founder shall be paid up to SGD 1,000, regardless of whether he/she is concurrently hired as company employee for purpose of the Project.”
Jon Yongfook, founder of PitchPigeon, was particularly miffed when he heard about the rule. He tweeted:
While many others echoed his sentiment, the reactions towards the salary rule was far more nuanced. Some believe that even if the SGD 1,000 limit is a hard cap, it shouldn’t deter entrepreneurs from applying for the grant. I spoke to a couple of iJAM incubatees on the condition of anonymity in exchange for their frank opinion. All names are changed to protect their identities.
“I have bootstrapped and I can maintain a relationship, pay bills and get by on $1,000. In fact I feel that is the one good thing about iJAM, it forces founders to go to market faster,” said Carl.
Another iJam incubatee, Kevin, went as far as saying that if the salary cap is stopping an entrepreneur from applying for the grant, then perhaps he or she shouldn’t really be starting a company. Read more
This article was written after substantial discussions with Bernard Leong.
Rocket Internet appears to be in transition. According to Business Insider, the clone factory has not been churning out copies of US startups for months, opting instead to consolidate its existing ventures and build on them.
With the Samwer brothers’ new USD 193M fund, we might even see Rocket Internet source for its own dealflow rather than copy successful US consumer internet companies.
As for its existing businesses, building them towards a public offering suddenly becomes a viable option — if done right, the Samwer brothers could end up becoming far wealthier than they already are now.
Rocket Internet is unlikely to go public with its entire suite of ventures. That would severely handcuff the company, curbing its ability to start new businesses without incurring shareholder’s wrath. Read more
By Murli Ravi, head, South Asia, JAFCO Investments (Venture Capital). This article was first published on his blog. Check out his tweets @murli184.
Singapore has a bunch of government schemes put in place to support R&D, technology commercialization, seed funding for startups and so on. One of these is the i.JAM grant scheme. (You’ll agree it’s a cool name because it starts with a lower-case i. And there’s a dot in the name. Yes, the JAM is all-capital but no, we won’t explain what the abbreviation stands for. If it’s an abbreviation. But I digress.)
This is a pretty decent scheme if you’re a budding tech entrepreneur. You can go and read all about it on the program website or here.
However, before you decide to take the plunge and become an i.JAMMER (er, corright spelling anot?), watch out for this: if you’re approved for this scheme, you’re allowed a maximum salary of SGD 1,000 (USD 800) per month. No, I didn’t miss typing a zero. Whaddaya mean you need money for rent? Read more
by Michael Cheng, senior software engineer at mig33
Coders show up in force at JSCamp.Asia in 2012. Photo: @veronism of JSCamp.Asia
I had an interesting conversation with a budding startup entrepreneur the other day. He asked me: “Why are computer programmers in Singapore perceived as a low prestige occupation?”
I imagine his statement stems from the fact that he had a hard time looking for a developer for his startup.
I paused for a minute as I had always felt comfortable and secure about my chosen profession. So that statement, at first, felt awkward. Read more
By Daylon Soh, founder of online creative goods store CuriousCatch and managing editor of Open Brief, a web publication on creativity and culture.
When Melbourne-based crowdfunding site Pozible launched in 2010, they were already already chasing the tail of the largest crowdfunding site, Kickstarter, based in New York City, USA. Yet in Australia, founders Rick Chen and Alan Crabbe were the first to introduce the idea of having the masses pledge sums of money towards creative projects via their website.
Other than working around heavy regulations set by the Australian Securities and Investment (ASIC), Chen and Crabbe had to gain the trust of project creators and build confidence amongst the general public to increase pledge support.
Events like “Let’s Talk Crowdfunding”, hosted at HUB Melbourne, become one way of building trust. “Crowdfunding was still a very new concept back then to Australians. We felt it was necessary to fund these events in order to introduce the general public to projects that were successfully backed and allay any concerns by backers and project owners alike.”
As of February 2013, the platform has helped funnel a total of AUD$8 million (SGD$10.2 million) across 1,300 successful projects since it was established in May 2010. It’s widely considered one of Australia’s most popular crowdfunding platforms working in partnership with prominent festivals within the Australian arts industry such as the Melbourne and Sydney Fringe Festivals. Read more
By James Chan, founder of Silicon Straits and principal at Neoteny Labs. This article was first published on James’ blog.
I’ll start my “Term Sheet from Hell” series by taking a closer look at its liquidation preference clause. There’s a lot of existing literature on liquidation preferences so I won’t be repeating the obvious. Instead, I’ll focus on how select clauses in this term sheet come together to make it unique to Southeast Asia, and positively molten.
If you want to get comfy with the basics of liquidation preferences, I suggest starting with two of Brad Feld’s posts here and here.
When reviewing a term sheet, I look at its liquidation preference after price (valuation). I won’t be commenting on price for this specific term sheet, but will discuss valuation more broadly in my last post of this series. Read more
Mark Twain was famous for saying that there are three kinds of lies: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
The adage certainly rings true in the corporate world, and even amongst tech startups. In a recent article, I wrote about how data abuse is becoming increasingly prevalent as numbers are used to give companies a public perception edge.
While data abuse may sometimes be unintentional, its impact should not be underestimated.
Consider the case of DoctorPage, a Singapore-based online doctor booking platform which announced yesterday in a press release that they have reached a milestone of 1,500 “bookable” doctors and dentists. Read more
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