Recently, I did a talk at JFDI, a Y-combinator-quality incubator for South East Asia, where I shared how it is like to be an entrepreneur.
A lot of people tend to think: Being entrepreneur is about having a $1B+ home run in the first try. But it’s almost never the case. The best way to describe the life would be through an analogy of playing poker.
Why poker? Well, it is one of those few card games, where you are not playing against a bank/dealer, but rather amongst the players themselves. Winning a hand is not just a matter of having the best card, but also how you play the hand (since having the best card may not necessarily lead to a win). Read more
Grow fast, die young?
Does that have to be the mode for every fashion label, asks Carl Thompson, Co-founder of TradeGecko. Meet the former fashion label owner-turned digital entrepreneur who’s set himself a 100 day target to save small fashion labels worldwide.
Five years ago I launched Crowded Elevator, a fashion label in New Zealand. We started with a few boutique t-shirts and within a year we were wholesaling to over 50 retailers across New Zealand and Australia. It looked like the world was waiting for us. Then we died.
Wholesaling is no easy business. It takes a lot of time managing each section of the sales cycle. The administration required to manage inventory, orders, accounts, stockists, manufacturing and errors is completely overwhelming. If you don’t have the systems in place to handle such a workload the administration will kill all passion and ultimately the business, as it did for me. Read more
As someone with a creative background but interacting on a daily basis with local entrepreneurs and startups, I’ve found an interesting dialogue that often repeats itself: creatives looking to connect with entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs who have a lack of creative talent within their businesses.
Why should these communities connect more?
Here’s 5 reasons:
1. At the bottom of it, both creative professionals and entrepreneurs value idea-creation and execution. Having this common denominator guarantees a meeting of minds.
2. Entrepreneurs often have the ideas but not necessarily the ability to execute them. Creatives do what they do because they have great execution skills. What better match could be made?
3. It’s not just about creating business opportunities. It’s also about collaboration, cross-pollination, prototyping and making better products together. What’s stopping the Singaporean startup scene from growing, is the creative thinking and processes that are tacit in the day-to-day practice of creatives,
4. At the end of the day, creatives and entrepreneurs are in the same business ecosystem. It is in the enlightened self-interest of both sides to ensure that the other succeeds. With great creative contributions to businesses, businesses can take their products and services to a higher level. And when businesses do that, they’ll call on the creatives to help realize more product offerings, and the cycle continues.
5. Because we can have more fun together. Who knows what will happen when creatives, hackers and entrepreneurs get together in a meaningful and engaged way?
At Relay Room, we’ve come up with a concept help increase interaction between the creative and entrepreneur scenes:Creative Mixer.
Creative Mixer brings together creatives, hackers, entrepreneurs into a single space to redefine creativity. The first event, held on 15 Dec 2011 at Smartspace, saw a whopping 88 people attending. At each event, we invite eight speakers to enlighten us with bite-sized presentations on creativity across their diverse fields.
Because we believe in collaboration between entrepreneurs, developers and creatives in design, photography, film, architecture, animation/illustration and writing, we would love to have you join us, to create a new, synergistic community of “creative entrepreneurs”.
Creative Mixer 2.0 is happening on 28th March 2012 at Sinema Old School. Registration can be made at www.flickevents.com/creativemixer. More details at www.creativemixer.co.
About the author
Sarah Cheng-De Winne is a media & performing arts professional. She is also the Business Development Manager of creative agency Relay Room.
Professor Dr. Wong Poh Kam here provides an overview of role of Venture Capital and Angel Investors in teh-startups scene in Singapore. It has been republished here with permission. A more detailed version of this will be published in the Annual SVCA Directory 2011/12
High-technology entrepreneurship has been identified as an important driver of Singapore’s knowledge-based economy, and increased policy attention has been given to encouraging the formation and nurturing of high-tech start-ups, especially those with significant intellectual property (IP). To this end, in 2010 the National Research Foundation (NRF) engaged me, as director of the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, to conduct a study of high-tech start-ups in Singapore. While the survey covers many aspects of the high tech start-up dynamics, including characteristics of the founders, their sources of technology and funding, growth strategies, performance and challenges, this blog highlights some salient findings on only one aspect of the survey: the performance of start-ups that have received funding from venture capitalists or angel investors versus those that did not. Read more
“Design can never be complete because design solves people’s problems, and people are constantly changing,” said Kevin Fox, a product designer of Mozilla Labs, in concluding the Rainmakers LIVE! 2011 mini-conference in Silicon Valley. Read more
Filed under Contributors Corner, Special CommentaryTags: AOL, Bagcheck, Garry Tan, IDA, inDinero, Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore, Jason Putorti, Jessica Mah, Kevin Fox, Luke Wroblewski, Mozilla Labs, Posterous, Rainmakers LIVE!, Rainmakers LIVE! 2011, Surveylicious, Votizen, Y Combinator
This Thursday, the Startup Roots Speaker Series will have as speaker Derek Sivers, founder of former president of CD Baby. One of the people behind it, Neoteny Labs’ James Chan, had a chance to interview Derek Sivers by email.
James Chan writes: Read more
Surveylicious is a mobile geo-location survey platform which allows businesses to collect customer feedback in real-time. It was one of the tech companies selected by the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) to visit New York City (NYC) for a week, from 9 to 13 May (related talk from NYCEDC in March). The purpose of this trip was to give companies a chance to learn firsthand about NYC’s business environment, to meet with NYC business leaders and to learn more about available resources for expanding their ventures to the city. Read more
Angel investor and professor Dr. Wong Poh Kam here provides an overview of the angel investing scene in Singapore. An extended version of this article will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming book on Angel Investing in Asia, edited by John Lo.
As in other newly industrialized economies in Asia, business angel investing in early stage start-up companies has been relatively new in Singapore. This is due to the fact that the phenomenon of high tech start-ups is itself relatively new in Singapore, having really taken off only since the late-1990s as the Singapore economy began its shift towards a knowledge-based, innovation-driven economy. While business angel investment deals are known to have existed in the 1980s and early 1990s, they were mainly in the traditional trading and manufacturing sectors, as was found in a study of 29 angel investors. Read more
In an interview with AsianScientist, Asia and Middle East early stage fund, Neoteny Labs‘ Joichi Ito speaks about his new role as the next Executive Director of MIT Media Lab.
When MIT announced last week on April 25 that Joichi (‘Joi’) Ito had been appointed the next Executive Director of the MIT Media Lab, it sent ripples through the technology world. Read more
If you belong to the camp that believes in business plan competitions, there are three main ones in Singapore: Start-Up@Singapore National Business Plan Competition, Ideas.Inc and the Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition. Here’s two side-by-side comparisons of the three, with prize money, timelines and dates. Read more
