Together, both developments hint at rising investment confidence in the region’s e-commerce’s prospects.

Reebonz, in particular, is a fast rising player that has expanded far beyond its humble Singapore beginnings. The luxury online store recently opened a flagship outlet in Sydney. It has launched localized sites in New Zealand, Australia, as well as South Korea, and is currently shipping to 22 markets in Asia, Europe, and North America.

For entrepreneurs, the ascendance of both companies has several possible implications:

1) Investors could become more willing to invest in e-commerce or e-commerce related startups.

While uncertainty still surrounds how Zalora and Reebonz will play out, expect investors, especially in the earlier stages, to be more open about putting money into e-commerce startups. Those that funded the two companies are mainly institutional investors and venture capital firms — so smaller players with less cash might follow their link.

I also think that we’re just seeing the beginning of the institutional investor’s involvement with startups in the region. Singapore Press Holdings has been investing in and acquiring startups, and I expect that trend to continue. I think MediaCorp would soon follow their lead too. SingTel has already indicated that it is earmarking  a further USD 1.6B for startup acquisitions.  I believe going forward we’ll start to see even more large corporations emerge to make bets in the tech startup space.

2) Merely selling stuff online is no longer enough

Starting just another fashion e-commerce venture from scratch right now would be suicidal, unless you’re MediaCorp. Entrepreneurs will have to think hard about what verticals are untouched by e-commerce, and whether it makes sense or not to enter into these verticals. Prescription eyewear could be the next big thing here, and that is an area that is pretty much untouched in Asia. A startup from Hong Kong is attempting to sell buttons, 15,000 types of them, and that might work since competition in this space may not be as fierce.

There’s also probably a lot of opportunity in solving the problem of online fitting. One major variable cost in fashion e-commerce is the amount of money wasted on returned goods. Anyone that can fix this and license it to online sellers might have a lucrative business on their hands. A pre-launch Singapore startup called Get Fitted is already working on a solution.

3) Rocket Internet’s rise is good for the startup scene

Too much has been said about Rocket Internet’s evils and how they’re ripping off people’s ideas. In the Asian context at least, I think Rocket Internet’s involvement on balance is turning out to be a net positive. As mentioned, the ludicrous amount of money pumped into Zalora and Lazada generates buzz for the startup community here.

Rocket Internet is also turning out to be a bootcamp for entrepreneurs: Many Rocket staffers have left the entity to start their own ventures. It could also be a customer providing sources of revenue for cash-strapped startups.

Altogether, I think these developments represent a significant short-term boost for e-commerce startups in the region. Assuming Asia continues its upward trajectory in e-commerce adoption, there are still plenty of opportunities for up-and-coming enterprises to leave their mark.

The post What Reebonz’s and Zalora’s funding rounds mean for e-commerce startups in Asia appeared first on SGE.

There are funding rounds, and then there are funding rounds. Zalora, a Rocket Internet fashion e-commerce venture, has today revealed that it has raised a massive USD 100M in venture capital from Summit Partners, Investment AB Kinnevik, Verlinvest, and Tengelmann Group.

Most of the investors are Rocket Internet regulars: Summit, Kinnevik, and Tengelmann have bankrolled Lazada before, while the latter has funded Zalora once. Verlinvest, a new — or previously low-key — participant, is a Belgian investment holding company.

The repeat investments portends well for Zalora’s prospects in Asia, a challenging market with relatively low basket sizes, tough infrastructural challenges, and market fragmention.

It shows that investors are confident that the business, despite enduring a loss of EUR 70M (USD 90M) in 2012, down-scaling in Taiwan, and a number of high-profile staff departures, will be able to weather the storm and emerge as the dominant fashion e-commerce player outside of China and India.

The negative cash position should be viewed in the right context of a young business expanding aggressively, not a mature enterprise struggling in a sunset industry.

Image: io9

While the two Asian giants, which altogether have a population of 2.5B, have been hogging the headlines, the rest of Asia Pacific cannot ignored. The eight markets that Zalora occupies are no minnows, having a combined population of over 500M, giving the business plenty of potential to grow.

Zalora’s expanded spending aren’t just in marketing. In Singapore, it recently started a pilot project with 7-Eleven to allow shoppers to pay and pick up their goods at 19 convenience store outlet on the island. It also launched a print and mobile magazine documenting the latest fashion trends.

With an app development center, the island state is also the focal point of most of Zalora’s product development activities.

Overall, Rocket Internet’s enterprises appear to be shaping up nicely in Asia Pacific. While there are obvious flukes (Home24 being an example), companies like Foodpanda are also blazing a trial to become a leading online food delivery service in the region, receiving USD 26M in investments and absorbing competitor Singapore-Dine into its fold.

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The Buccaneer and the Power Mac G4 Cube. The resemblance isn’t coincidental.

There hasn’t been a pre-launch product from a Singapore startup that has garnered this much press attention for a long while. Simply put, people are agog about the USD 347 price point for an Apple-esque 3D printer that will be pre-assembled and calibrated right out of the box. In fact, some have been downright skeptical, believing the photos to be renders rather than real images.

But there’s no two ways about it: The Buccaneer – which is what the first product from Pirate3D is called — is going to arrive in homes in the United States and around the world. In fact, the company is prepping a Kickstarter campaign that will hopefully launch in the next few days — and they’re working with the crowdfunding platform to provide as much details as possible. I’ve even seen a prototype in action myself at the coworking space the Singapore-based team is working out of.

Of the myriad of 3D printers in the market, there has been quite a number in the sub-$1000 category: RepRap, Printrbot, Solidoodle, and Makibox, just to name a few.

But these printers either:

• look like prototypes themselves,
• need to be assembled by the user, or
• require some knowledge and experience with 3D design software

Pirate3D, on the other hand, is creating a truly consumer-focused printer that caters to the masses rather than the geeks and enthusiasts. In fact, as the startup’s co-founder Brendan Goh tells me, the Buccaneer is not just hardware. The team is working on software that lets users easily create 3D objects on their smartphones and send them to the printer.

It wants to make 3D printing as easy as playing with Lego.

Pirate3D’s mobile-centric, software-oriented approach is what really sets it apart from the Makerbots and Formlabs out there. While Makerbot does have software to manage its printers, it doesn’t want to step into Autodesk’s territory, instead choosing to partner with the 3D design software firm.

Still, how exactly does Pirate3D price its printers so cheaply?

There are two parts to it. First, it doesn’t plan to make much money on hardware.

Here’s as much as I can glean about its game plan: Sell tons and tons of printers on a lean margin, bundle it with a suite of easy-to-use design apps (even kids can use them), and hope to eventually make money off its software and perhaps some kind of marketplacefor goods or design files.

Their plan is vague for now, but for a young startup that just raised half-a-million in early stage funding, they have a little bit of time to figure it out.

Second, the company has found ways to dramatically lower the cost of manufacturing despite printing in batches of thousands.

Unlike other 3D printing companies, which design their own proprietary parts from scratch or rely on open source ones, Pirate3D uses available off-the-shelf parts that are already on the market and are being produced at scale. They’re essentially taking advantage of the high-volume, low-cost nature of large scale manufacturing without participating in it.

Pirate3D has not been shy about being inspired by Apple. The printer’s designer, co-founder, Tsang You Jun, is himself a big fan of Steve Jobs. The Buccaneer, with its minimalist aluminium and acrylic finish, strongly resembles the Power Mac G4 Cube.

Beyond the hardware, the team, like their idols, hope that they can build an ecosystem around their products and make money off it.

Their marketing campaign, which maintained a veil of mystery around their printer until recently, was a page out of Steve Job’s book. Even the name of the company recalls Pirates of Silicon Valley, a movie that famously portrayed the relationship between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Like any startup with lofty goals, what Pirate3D is trying to achieve does seem like a moonshot. Although they have an office in San Francisco, their team is still largely based in Singapore, which makes them somewhat of an outsider. This is evidently a problem on the Internet where any wacko can claim to have invented the greatest product, and the lack of public backing from a Silicon Valley bigwig doesn’t really help.

Which is why a Kickstarter campaign makes sense: If it succeeds, Pirate3D’s profile could be significantly raised and it could start receiving attention from investors in the United States.

I’ll be interested to see if Pirate3D’s business model works out. Selling a hardware product on lean margins is great for consumers in the short run, but it could be a challenge if retail distribution is what they’re after (since retailers take a significant share of the revenues).

Managing the supply chain and manufacturing process involves a steep learning curve, and these are things that the team, which includes Roger Chang and Prof Neo Kok Beng, will have to wrangle with as they begin their initial production runs before this Christmas.

While the three recent university graduates — Roger, Brendan, and You Jun — do possess some entrepreneurial experience and know each other well, this is by a long mile their most ambitious project yet.

They do have as good a chance at succeeding as anybody though, given their keen awareness of needing to build the company culture and right processes from the start.

All they need now is a little push from the masses.

Image: Pirate3D

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Of course, I didn’t know about her hottest woman alive label then. But that did not make me any less nervous: Maria’s accomplishments far outsize her petite stature. A Princeton University graduate and Fulbright Fellow, she worked at CNN for almost two decades, serving as the bureau chief in Manila and then Jakarta. She then became the news and current affairs chief at ABS-CBN, Philippines’ largest television network.

She possesses a deep understanding of terrorist networks, having authored two books on the subject. Her latest work, From Bin Laden to Facebook: 10 Days of Abduction, 10 Years of Terrorism, narrates the gripping story of how she led the crisis team that resolved the kidnapping of her news crew who were en route to interview the leader of Abu Sayyaf, a militant Islamist group from Southern Philippines.

Now, she’s on to her next adventure: Starting a new media company that is reimagining journalism.

Asia is not exactly the first place that comes to mind when you think about cutting edge journalism, especially when it comes to the convergence of technology, open data, and media.

For that, we typically look to the United States, where the New York Times unveiled Snow Fall, a groundbreaking multimedia journalism feature, where Forbes did the unprecedented by opening up its platform to outside contributors, and where media startups like Circa, Medium, and Storify are trying to reinvent how content is created, distributed, and published.

But if we look closely enough, media innovation is indeed happening right under our noses in Asia.

The seeds of Rappler

Maria’s decision to build a startup from scratch seemed uncharacteristic, especially from someone who has sunk deep roots into traditional news media. To understand why, we’ll have to look into the past.

Tired of doing breaking news at CNN, Maria sought a new challenge in the Philippines, that of professionalizing radio, online, and cable news in the country. But she found the task of implementing change at a large entity like ABS-CBN tiresome.

“It’s like trying to turn the Titanic. You waste a lot of time internally trying to convince other people. A small group can move fast. You have an idea today, you can move tomorrow,” she said.

Nonetheless, Maria planted the seeds of Rappler in the organization. She pushed an aggressive citizen journalism program, seeing that the mindset of traditional journalists were starting to change.

While previously elitist and snobby, Filipino journalists were starting to see the value in crowdsourcing their work. Citizens are frequently on the ground before a reporter gets there, and the recording capabilities of smartphones have drastically improved and fallen in price. Reportage is an expensive activity, and collaborate journalism has the potential to cut costs.

The media campaign, which ran during the 2007 general elections, combined broadcast media with the internet, mobile phones, and social media in an effort to push for clean elections.

But Maria later realized that there was only so much she could do: Managing a team of a thousand people is a time-consuming process. To truly innovate, she needed a new backend. She needed to change workflows, processes, and philosophies, and that was hard in a traditional news group.

“I’ve spent six years trying to implement changes at ABS-CBN that I could do six months in Rappler,” she said.

The concept behind Rappler reflects her fascinations with social network theory. Essentially, the theory views relationships as a series of nodes and links, with nodes denoting individual actors in the network and links portraying the relationships between them.

Maria brought up a counter-terrorism effort as an example of how the theory can be effectively applied in real-world scenarios.

From mapping cities to charting Twitter

Indonesia in 1998 was rife with Muslim-Christian violence, especially in the Poso region. After a time of relative peace, conflict was reignited again when in 2005, three Christian schoolgirls were attacked, leaving two beheaded and one alive but seriously injured.

Tito Karnavian, head of the police anti-terrorism force, was tasked with finding the perpetrators in Poso and bringing peace to the communities. But his efforts were stalled because the region had turned sympathetic towards Muslims and was largely anti-government.

He learnt the hard way that government action could provoke unrest. After trying to arrest a suspect, a mob retaliated by destroying a local police station.

Changing course, Tito began a painstaking effort to win the battle of hearts and minds. His team took over a year to map out the society of Poso with its nodes and links. Among the 80,000 Muslims in the region, they mapped out those who were diehard Islamist supporters, those that were neutral, and those that were pro-police and pro-government. Then they begin identifying the leaders in the three camps.

The next step is to break the solidarity of the Jihadist camp and gain the support of neutrals. The intelligence gathered was crucial in that they could find out who the leaders where and what tactics to use to engage them.

The whole campaign culminated in a massive operation in 2007 which led to the arrests of 20 agitators.

In a similar manner, Maria is co-opting social network mapping for different purposes: civil activism and business. The difference is that with social networks, mapping efforts can be supercharged and made more efficient since the data is already out there.

Another influence for Maria is a 2007 study by two Harvard professors which, using mapping and data visualization, concluded that social networks magnify emotions and behaviors like happiness, loneliness, and voting behavior.

She writes of the study: “They formulated the Three Degrees of Influence Rule, which states that emotions and behavior spread through three degrees in a social network. For example, if I’m feeling lonely, my friend has a 52% chance of feeling lonely. My friend’s friend (two degrees) has a 25% chance of feeling lonely because I do, and my friend’s friend’s friend (three degrees) has a 15% chance of feeling lonely.”

Based on the idea, Rappler developed the Mood Meter, an attempt at capturing emotions and spreading them in social networks. It’s a tool which the company believes can also be used to prompt massive action. It works like a sidebar widget that nudges readers to think about how they’re feeling about a particular story, and then prompts them to vocalize their emotions and share the story on various social networks.

All the data is then collected, collated, and then visualized in a mood navigator that summarizes how readers are feeling as a whole and what stories have influenced their emotions.

While the content of the data is fascinating, Maria cites other studies that show how documenting your emotions would cause the actor to think in a more rational manner. Hopefully, she hopes the Mood Meter and the exercise of visualizing emotions would improve public debate.

Rappler is also experimenting with data-driven story-telling. Using a mixture of algorithms and manual work, the website gathered information from Twitter and crafted it into a story about users’ reactions to the impeachment of Supreme Court Chief Justice Renato Corona.

In the recent senatorial elections, Rappler used voting data to create interactive infographics which broadcasted live results by the minute. While raw in execution, the coverage is rich in ambition that outshines what larger, more established news outlets throughout Asia are doing.

Having toys is fun, but earning money from it is better

Harnessing data for journalism and activism is certainly novel, but the missing link so far in many new-fangled journalism efforts is a sustainable business model.

Rappler has registered an impressive growth in readership: 3.7M pageviews in March and 16.8M pageviews so far in May due to the elections, making them one of the top ten if not top five news sites in Philippines. But they’re still in the red and are hoping to break even by this year or next.

Put simply, their business model consists of using strong, independent, journalism as a loss leader and a tool to collect data which can be sold to large corporations for business intelligence. Advertising and content marketing also feature prominently in their plans.

The team consists of a team of 50 to 60 people, a mixture of veterans and young digital natives. Maria takes up the mantle of CEO and Executive Editor, while Glenda Gloria, the managing editor, is an author and former COO of ABS-CBN’s news channel.

Rounding up the leadership team are experienced journalists like Chay Hofileña, Cheche Lazaro, Marites Dañguilan-Vitug, seasoned professionals with years of newsroom and authorship experience.

The presence of veterans ensure that Rappler’s content has a credible sheen, but it still needs a fast-learning young team to run the ground, get the scoop, and help the stories go viral on social media.

“Just give the 20 somethings an iPhone, add lens and mike to it, and they’ll be able to shoot and edit their own video faster than a TV station. These new tools give you a lot of room. Pros, on the other hand, will resist change. You need whole new people,” she said.

Independent journalism is an ideal Rappler is determined to uphold, despite the fact that the company has external investors. Maria herself owns the majority of the shares, and a shareholder agreement cedes decision-making power to the editorial team.

“You’re only as good as your stories. We can talk about anything and anyone. The two big networks (ABS-CBN and GMA) don’t write about each other. We can write about both of them,” she said.

Rappler is already generating some revenue through its community building and data gathering efforts. It has partnerships with telcos like Globe and Smart, electronics companies like Samsung, and even food enterprises like McDonald’s and The Chicken Rice Shop.

This year will be crucial for the company as it will determine if its business model, premised on strong content and community engagement, is viable.

On home ground

Rappler is a truly unique product that is tailored to the Philippines. Its large population of 94.85M, while small compared to Indonesia, still makes mass media a viable and potentially lucrative enterprise. Filipinos are social media savvy too: In 2011, Facebook penetration rate is at 93.9 percent while Twitter registered at 16.1 percent.

The company’s activist approach to journalism is also a product of its environment. The country has been marred by corruption including graft, bribery, embezzlement, and nepotism in both business and politics. The government, under President Benigno S. Aquino III, has been working to clean up the act. Rappler too has been playing its part with social media initiatives aimed at curbing violence and vote buying.

As the driving force behind Rappler, Maria has escaped the trap that many traditional journalists fall into: Sticking to old mindsets. Driven by a rare mixture of intellectual curiosity, executional ability and hope for a better society, she has managed to marry the old soul of journalistic ethics with the latest digital tools.

This entrepreneurial spirit is a fountain of youth, keeping her and the veteran team in lockstep with digital natives, who in Maria’s words, increasingly find themselves in a world where they are working for people who can barely comprehend what’s going on.

Sexiest woman alive? I’m sold.

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Of all of United States’ startup exports, Warby Parker is one that hasn’t really been replicated in Asia. The startup, which sells quality eyewear at a ridiculously low price point, has been a toast of the New York scene by disrupting the eyewear industry and in the process raising USD 50.3M in capital.

Warby’s innovation doesn’t lie in new-fangled technology. Instead, it break the dominance of an industry cartel that has been driving prices artificially high. By fashioning its own supply chain and designing its own glasses, it cuts out the middle men and offers eye wear at a low USD 95 a pop.

Four Eyes in the Philippines is attempting do the same. The company takes many of its cues from Warby Parker, right down to the sparse, white, and minimalist design on the website.

It also offers a similar home try-on program, which sends eyewear to consumers to test for fit and then return via mail. There are subtle differences though: Pick-up and drop-off options are available at physical locations, and while Warby requires consumers to pay only after they try on the glasses, Four Eyes collects payment beforehand.

On price, Four Eyes co-founder Pavan Challa says that the company provides both lens and frame at PHP 1,495 (USD 36), which is cheaper than the typical off-the-shelf cost that lies anywhere between PHP 3,000 to PHP 5,000 for more branded pieces. A standard pair of prescription lens alone could cost upwards of PHP 1,495.

At first glance, Philippines sounds like an odd place to start a Warby Parker. Why not do it in Singapore or Hong Kong, where cost of living is much higher?

Pavan responds that most of the founders’ expertise and assets are already in the Philippines. He himself has started Galleon.ph, which gives him an understanding of e-commerce in the Philippines. Meanwhile, Four Eyes’ cofounder Jiten Lalwani is in family eyewear business RS Corporation, which has been doing distribution and wholesaling for almost three decades.

The fact that Jiten is in the traditional eyewear industry puts Four Eyes in an interesting context, since the startup could cannibalize longstanding industry players if it succeeds.

While this possibility has prevented many larger corporations from innovating, perhaps Jiten is aware of e-commerce’s potential and views Four Eyes as a possible antidote that, while bitter in the short run, could prove to be rewarding in the future.

Whether Four Eyes succeeds or not, we can expect more similar startups to begin operating in Asia. It’s certainly a trend to watch out for this year.

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The program is unique in its global outlook: Held in English, teams can pick one week stints in either Singapore or Israel, with the Boston trip having a separate application process, depending on which markets they’re interested in.

It is forward-looking in how it aims to foster cross-border collaboration for Korean startups, situating itself as part of the trend of increasing porousness in the larger Asia tech ecosystem where startups in disparate parts of the region are increasingly connected to each other via networking events, cross-border partnerships, and tech media.

Singapore is pitched as a gateway into Southeast Asia with its strong business infrastructure and tax incentive programs. Startups will attend the Echelon startup conference and visit the country’s incubators and telcos.

The Israel trip, meanwhile, will see attendees work with the country’s patent office to utilize existing technologies for commercial applications.

Finally, the Boston leg will focus primarily on fundraising, US market strategies, and learning about Boston’s startup scene through working with incubators in the city.

Workshops will be held in Seoul once a month, covering topics like patent strategy, product innovation, global marketing, and user acquisition.

Starting in May, teams will go through the entire product development process in preparation for the fundraising leg in Boston in October. Two teams will even earn trip to Silicon Valley to attend TechCrunch Disrupt.

The entire program, which includes flights, accomodation, and travel expenses, will be sponsored by the SMBA, a government organization for SMEs, and KISED, a government agency for startups and entrepreneurial initiatives.

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One of the key drivers of Singapore’s hospitality industry is the Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Exhibitions (MICE) business. SGpad, an iPad rental service, is looking to ride on the growth in the MICE industry with Micepad, an app that enhances the conference experience for attendees.

With Micepad, an event organiser can easily customise and deploy a complete event engagement app by choosing the required modules and uploading content. One of the things I frequently do at events is to google further information about the speakers. Micepad eliminates the constraints of print and enables event organisers to provide more information to their attendees.

Another great feature of Micepad is the ability to distribute relevant documents to attendees. No longer will there be a need to remember that SlideShare link or hunt for a copy of the presentation on the Internet.

Micepad also doubles up as an audience engagement tool and comes with inbuilt discussion boards and live poll feedback features.

Kevin, one of the founders of Micepad, shared with me that the service has been adopted by leading financial institutions and software consultancies such as Standard Chartered Bank, SAP and Wipro to name a few (the other clients have their names withheld by NDAs). The team has implemented Micepad in Singapore and Hong Kong over the past few months and they plan to expand to other markets like Malaysia, Hong Kong and New York with the help of newly acquired channel partners over the next few months.

Having thrown away countless of paper collected at events, I can see the usefulness of an application like Micepad both to attendees and event organisers.

One of the key challenges of apps like Micepad is deciding whether they are meant to complement or substitute the traditional print materials used at events. If it is the former, then cost and functions will be important in adoption; if it is the latter, then availability for a wide range of devices is key (currently the full version of Micepad is available only for the iPad).

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I’ve met with dozens of folks over the past months who are interested in the Singapore startup scene. The questions they asked were often similar, so I thought I would take a crack at writing up my standard responses. For the record, this post is not meant to replace a good coffee chat, just to make those chats even more productive and interesting.

ORIENTATION

Q: How can I learn more about the scene from the internet?

A: There are three main blogs that cover the Singapore scene:

• e27 – Strong coverage across SEA plus tidbits from across Asia Pac. Highest volume of articles.
• Tech In Asia – Broad Asian perspective with good drill down on SEA and some good analysis.
• SGE.io- Lowest volume but strong on analysis and research pieces.

Jon Russell of the Next Web also weighs in semi-regularly on the SEA scene, and there are a few entrepreneurs and investors who blog semi-regularly:

• Bernard Leong – ex-Chalkboard. SGE.io co-founder.
• Michael Smith – aka Smitty. Ex-Yahoo. Now at Spuul.
• Jon Yongfook - Pitch Pigeon and various other projects.
• Jeff Paine - Founder’s Institute. Golden Gate Ventures Partner.
• Ray Wu – formerly of LSM, now of JFDI
• Andy Croll – CTO, ImpulseFlyer and organizer of Red Dot Ruby Conference.
• James Chan – Venture capitalist, Neoteny Labs & now Silicon Straits.

This list is not exhaustive i.e. I’ve probably forgotten some other folks who share regularly. For online discussions, the JFDI Open Frog list is a good place to start.

Q: How can I learn more about the scene at events?

A: If it’s startup events you want, then you’ve come to the right place. There’s something on almost every night, from user groups to speaker series, and most nights you’ll have choices. As many have noted, attending startup events can be a distraction from actually building a startup. That said, they can also be great opportunities for learning, networking and just feeling the buzz. So put your Startup Weekend t-shirt on and get on out there.

I won’t attempt at a comprehensive event index here. Just join The List and see what’s on that week. I will pimp my own events, namely Lean Startup Circle, which features talks from lean startup practitioners, and blinkBL_NK, which has nothing to do with startups but which a lot of startup people attend.

Editor’s note: Also check out SGE’s events calender and Startup Digest.

Q: How can I learn more by connecting with individuals?

A: The coffee chat is alive and well in Singapore. It’s a small town and people are generally happy you’re here and interested to get involved. Here are some great ways to get a coffee chat (with me anyway):

1. Say you are connected to a VC looking to do deals in the region
2. Say you are interested in angel investing
3. Say you are from Silicon Valley and have some sort of track record or meaningful affiliation
4. Don’t say anything special but do your research and make a clear pitch and targeted ask

I won’t attempt an index of people who you can hit up for coffee because finding those people is the fun part. I will link to this idiosyncratically awesome list of cool people and groups prepared by Michael Cheng of Mig33, which is as good a place as any to start. If you’re planning a coffee meeting, I highly recommend Meng’s 3rd Wave coffee map.

FUND RAISING

Q: How can I raise money in Singapore?

A: OK, so no one actually asks the question that way, but I am faking it to list two great resources that describe the funding scene:

• For a visual and comprehensive list of funding sources, check out Meng’s Map of the Money
• SGE.io has compiled a good list of venture capitalists in Singapore

Q: How can I raise 50K to 250K with a cool idea/prototype/MVP?

A: This is a real question and a popular one. Happily this pre-seed round is a sweet spot for Singapore thanks largely to government programs. Here’s a few relevant options:

• iJAM – 50K + potential for 200K follow on via iJAM Reload. Mix of grants and equity investment. Requires some local ownership. This program has its issues (see Jeff Paine’s open letter to the IDMPO), but it’s a ready source of funds and it’s not massively dilutive. Plus some of the incubators add real value, so it’s worth considering if you have at least one local team member.
• Spring Proof of Concept – Part of the Spring Technology Enterprise Commercialisation Scheme (TECS). Up to 250K as a grant and hence non-dilutive. Requires some local ownership. I don’t know much about this program beyonds that it is definitely active and that you probably have to do a lot of annoying bookkeeping to get your money.
• JFDI – Classic 3 month accelerator program. 25K in cash and a bunch of mentorship and training. They take equity between 6% and 20% depending on how they value your company. More info on deal structure here. This is not a great way to raise tons of cash, but it’s a great program to give your project intense focus and momentum.

Other pre-seed options include the time honored trio of friends and family, bootstrapping or a single angel investor. I make some comments below on the angel scene in Singapore. There are also some consultancies like Neo that will take a mix of equity and fees if they like your project.

Q: How can I raise 500K to 1M with a product, customers and perhaps revenue?

A: Again this is a sweet spot for Singapore thanks to the government. Here’s a few relevant links:

• Spring Proof of Value – A continuation of the aforementioned TECS scheme. Same structure as proof of concept but in this case it’s for companies that are further along and the amount can be up to 500K. Same upside of non-dilutive money and downside of bureaucracy and paper work.
• NRF/TIS – The single most important government funding scheme in Singapore. 589K SGD dollars, 89K of which comes from an incubator (i.e., an early stage VC) and 500K of which comes from the government. The incubator has a call option on the government money, exercisable within two years at a low interest rate if the startup becomes valuable. And yes that’s a sweet deal for the incubator. Angel investors or other funds can join NRF rounds on top of the 589K but without any government leverage so NRF rounds can go as high as $1M or more. See here for a list of incubators

The NRF/TIS program is the dominant mode for raising seed rounds in Singapore. It’s not unheard of to raise a seed round in other ways, e.g., e27 raised via a consortium, but it is unusual. If you are at the seed stage, you should be looking to NRF funds, both because they are doing most of the deals and because they should give entrepreneur friendly terms since they are investing other people’s money. On other hand, if you can raise a seed round without resorting to the NRF then you should do that since government money comes with strings attached in the form of bureaucracy and some specific deal terms, none of which are fatal but all of which are nice to avoid if you have the option.

Q: How is the angel community in Singapore?

A: The short answer is that it is quite good given the overall maturity of the market, and certainly the strongest in Southeast Asia by a wide mark, though also nowhere near more developed ecosystems. Here’s the three categories of angels you can meet:

• Exited angels – The biggest challenge for the Singapore angel community is that there are not a ton of exited entrepreneurs pouring money back into the ecosystem, because there have not been that many exits. There are some people, however, who fit this profile and are doing regular deals, e.g. Toivo Annus of Skype (not Singaporean but makes a lot of deals here) and Nic Lim from the Catcha Group. The supply of these angels has been negatively impacted by the NRF/TIS program, as some have put their money into NRF funds to get the leverage e.g. Jayesh Parekh who invests via Jungle Ventures.
• New school angels – This is my name for people who are young, are connected to the tech scene in some way and have money to invest, e.g., John Tan or Ben Ball. It’s a small group but does seem to be growing as the scene becomes more mature and gets more visbility.
• Old school angels – This is my name for the BANSEA folks, who are typically mid- to late-career corporate types, often with a finance background. BANSEA does organize some good events, but to be honest I don’t see their members doing a ton of deals right now.

Outside these groups there are oodles of high net worth people in Singapore who don’t really qualify as angels but who will occasionally throw 100K or more down on their friend’s project. As in all things, it’s who you know that counts, so in between all those pitching events you might consider spending a few evenings making friends at Pangaea.

Q: Is there really a Series A crunch?

A: First of all, it’s funny how often I hear this question from people who have not even launched their product. Some cart-before-the-horse thinking there. In any case, the short answer is yes, there is a gap between NRF incubators and the later stage VCs like JAFCO, Intel, Vickers, and Vertex, with only a few funds actively making Series A type investments e.g. Walden and DMP. In other words, just as in the US, there is a Singapore Series A crunch caused by an explosion in pre-seed and seed funding without a similar growth in Series A funding.

At the same time, there are not yet many Singaporean companies who meet Series A requirements of strong growth, a repeatable mode, a big upside and a team capable of handling the money. Companies who do meet that standard have raised recently, e.g. Luxola and Chope, and my guess is that Japanese and Korean investors would love to make more investments if they could find good deals. I also hear rumblings of European and American money heading this way. So unlike in the US, I think there is more potential for growth in Series A as money flows into Southeast Asia, and the bigger question for this market is whether the fast-track approach to ecosystem growth via government-backed seed funding can produce a bunch of Series A fundable companies.

Q: Is Singapore a good place to exit?

A: The short answer is no, though there has been some recent good news, and some past successes. There’s a few issues that make exiting from Singapore challenging, namely the lack of local trade acquirers and the challenge of jumping from Singapore into other markets (read: USA) where trade acquisitions are more frequent. But like the Series A question, I think this is also an issue of a young ecosystem that hasn’t produced tons of exit-ready companies. And I do believe this will change in the coming years. For a full list of Singapore exits, check out the SGE.IO list of acquisitions and exits.

STARTUP OPERATIONS

Q: I need cheap work space. Where should I look?

A: Singapore is a haven for co-working. SGE.io has produced a great co working map which lists most of your main options. If you’re working from home, I recommend taking a half time desk at one of the co-working spaces. It’s usually good value and then you can have a place to go but also flexibility to be at coffee shops or in your pajamas. If you want a full time spot for your company, Blk 71 rents are hard to beat at less than $2 psf vs. $5+ psf for a shop house, but you will spend a lot of time at Fusionopolis, which is not a good thing. It puzzles me that more startups don’t seek out funky industrial spaces like Inverted Edge (warehouse in Lavender) or Edencr8 (warehouse on Lower Delta Road). High ceilings and exposed brick are all the rage in New York and San Fran, so maybe that trend will trickle down in the coming years.

Q: I need to hire developers. Where should I look?

A: My advice – stop looking in Singapore. You cannot compete with the banks, most developers do not grok the value of equity and options, and in general it’s a small talent pool. Instead of searching where the light is brightest, buy yourself a plane ticket to Bandung, Cebu, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta or Manila (all direct flights BTW). Show up cold and do interviews or better yet run a hackathon or give a talk or somehow contribute to the local community. Grab the young freelancers or poach from the major outsourcing companies. Employ good devs remotely or pay them enough to qualify for an EP and get them to Singapore. Southeast Asia is massive and relatively easy to navigate. US companies are outsourcing in these markets but they can only do this via firms b/c the logistics of direct hiring is too difficult. You do not have this limitation. So leverage your competitive advantage! And after you’ve finished your recruiting trip, take a nice beach weekend in Boracay or Bali.

GETTING INVOLVED

Q: I’m a developer and want to work for a startup. How do things look?

A: You’re in luck. Thanks to all that seed money, everyone and their cousin is hiring developers to flesh out their MVP. Wages are not great, but also not terrible. Range is 4K/month for junior devs up to 7K/month for senior devs, with the high end of that range reserved for companies that have strong financing. There are very few architect or engineering manager jobs because most of the startups are too small to need that sort of engineering firepower and too poor to pay for it.

Q: I’m a business, maketing or product person who wants to work for a startup. How are my chances?

A: Sorry, not so good for you. The startups here are small. If they are solid, then they have a founding team that owns product and business. If they are not solid, there might be a space for you, but you might not want it. There are a few startups that have scaled to the point that they do need to bring on product, marketing, biz dev and analytics talent. These are companies like Property Guru, Bubble Motion, Viki, Mig33 and Reebonz. They do exist, and they do hire, but there are just not that many of them, and far fewer than there are talented internet people who in markets like Silicon Valley or NYC might end up working at startups. All that said, it just takes one job to keep you happy, so by all means have a look around.

Q: Where can I find out about good jobs?

A: As noted above, the concept of a good startup job in Singapore is a dubious one unless you’re a developer. A better term might be “poorly paid gig with high glory factor and a tiny chance of meaningful upside”. But if you insist, then you might start by checking out Startupjobs.asia. Better yet, if you have the risk tolerance then go get some of that seed money and be your own boss!

Q: I’m an investor from Europe/America/N. Asia. Where should I put my money?

A: One of my favorites! Irresistibly fun to advise people how to spend their cash. If you want to invest in Singapore, here’s my thoughts:

• Pre-Seed – there is still space for more angel investors to do 100K pre-seed rounds for promising teams because iJAM and Spring are slow and the angel community is not large enough to get to everyone yet.
• Seed – Do not waste your time, because the NRF/TIS incubators have it locked and will give more entrepreneur friendly terms than you can afford to because they are investing the government’s money. Find a way to work with an NRF/TIS fund or stay away.
• Series A – Yes, please! As noted above, this is a big gap right now. A Series A fund with 15M or more to spend can have a good crack at the NRF/TIS companies and anyone else who is scaling well.

So yes there are opportunities to invest in Singapore, but I believe the bigger opportunity is outside of Singapore, i.e., in Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila and HCMC, where the funding scene is weaker at every stage and the market size and growth rates are faster. The downside of these markets – besides the pollution, traffic and lack of transparent business practices – is that the startups are also less mature. But I think this will change, and in general an angel investor or venture capitalist can have a bigger impact both in terms of financing and mentorship. The valuations will also be much more attractive. If you do go this route, having a trusted local partner or advisor is highly recommended.

Photo: jjcb

The post Singapore Startup FAQ appeared first on SGE.

That’s dedication and effort. So, without further delay, I present you a handy guide to coworking spaces in Australia — 43 of them (also check out our map of Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam). To be clear, a coworking spaces should possess these characteristics:

• A shared work environment with residents that don’t belong to the same organization.
• Social gatherings, shared values and synergies.
• Building of a community through interactions and events.

Whether or not the listed spaces meet the criteria, I leave it to readers to judge.

Suggestions and corrections are welcome. If you’d like to be a curator for the map, even better — contact us and let’s chat.

View Co-working spaces – SGE in a larger map

The post A map of coworking spaces in Australia appeared first on SGE.

The last time I met Foodpanda Asia CEO Kiren Tanna, fittingly over lunch, the food delivery service hadn’t raised money and kept a lower profile compared to Zalora and Lazada, which combined have raised over USD 100M in funding.

On all counts, Foodpanda has a smaller footprint: It doesn’t hire as much, is a relatively younger business, and probably makes much less in revenue despite having a presence in eight Asian countries.

But to dismiss it as an inconsequential business would be a mistake: It recently raised USD 26M from Rocket Internet regular Kinnevik, Russia’s Phenomen Ventures, as well as Rocket Internet itself.

Foodpanda Singapore then announced a marketing partnership with RedMart.com, an up-and-coming online grocer, while FoodPanda Vietnam revealed that it will be delivering food for some prominent F&B brands, including Subway, NYDC, Gloria Jean’s Coffee, and Breaktalk.

The coordination of these news releases portray Foodpanda as an up-and-comer. While it’s easy to be cynical, that picture may not be too far from the truth.

Online food delivery is as old as … Facebook?

The online food delivery business, after all, has the potential to be high-margin and profitable. Grubhub and Seamless, both started deliveries between 2004 and 2005, are some good examples. Operating mainly in the United States, Seamless has grabbed USD 85M in revenue last year while Grubhub had some USD 60M in 2011.

Meanwhile, similar services are mushrooming in various markets around the world — Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Middle East, just to name a few. A competing service, Yemeksepeti.com, has raised USD 44M simply by serving Turkey and the Middle East.

Foodpanda’s business model is quite different from Zalora and Lazada. As any Rocket Internet executive will tell you, doing e-commerce at scale in Asia is particularly challenging, especially in emerging economies where basket sizes are small and consumers are cost-conscious.

These factors may have deterred Amazon from entering Asia in the first place, giving companies like Rocket Internet an entry point into the high-growth market. While Zalora and Lazada don’t have physical storefronts, this is offset by the costs of logistics and delivery as well as returned goods. There’s no price advantage to be had.

Logistics is an even bigger headache for e-commerce companies in emerging markets due to an immature transport infrastructure, which could in turn affect service quality and turn away customers. Indeed, Zalora had trouble with service quality soon after its birth, leading to widespread customer complaints.

Besides logistics, Zalora would also need to spend on cataloging , warehousing, and marketing campaigns. Marketing doesn’t just include advertising — to appeal to the masses, they’ll need to conduct photo shoots with models, spruce up the website, and engage celebrities as advocates.

Which explains why even though Rocket Internet’s Zalando and Tony Hsieh’s Zappos have surpassed USD 1B in revenue, their profit margins are pegged at a measly 4-10 percent, which, by the way, gives them less operating leverage, more fixed costs, and less room for forecasting error.

In terms of logistics, supply chain and inventory management, Lazada, which is like an online department store, has bigger problems on its hands. While fashion goods are fairly standardized and easy to manage, the Lazada team will have to handle different kinds of inventory, talk to different suppliers, and handle a whole lot more SKUs.

In spite of the massive operational headaches and small basket sizes, Zalora has set aggressive targets for its business in Asia. It expects to achieve profitability by 2015 with a targeted net profit in the 10-15% percent range.

While some has called it borderline delusional, it’s more likely that the Rocket Internet management are hard drivers that aren’t just gunning for small successes. The employees had better hope that the logistics situation improves, labor costs stay low, and middle class spending power will go dramatically up.

Less headaches in running Foodpanda

Foodpanda, meanwhile, has less moving parts. It doesn’t manage inventory, handle demanding fashion models, or receive returned goods due to sizing problems. It is able to do more with a leaner team.

Sure, it does some of the food delivery, but according to Kiren, Foodpanda Singapore handles only 25 percent of orders — the rest are carried out by restaurants themselves. While this means less control for Foodpanda, I think quality can be somewhat regulated by picking the right food vendors with a proven track record for delivery.

Kiren is unable to disclose revenue projections now, but he states that top performers in the online food delivery business register EBITA margins in the 30 to 40% range, and that is an emerging market example. Seamless and Grubhub, he anticipates, could have even higher margins.

He also shared that across Asia, Foodpanda has been growing at a monthly clip of 25 to 40 percent, with 15 to 35 percent of orders coming from the mobile app since it launched six weeks ago.

Besides transaction fees, it hopes to eventually monetize from advertising and food ordering analytics for partners. Along with other small revenue streams, these could potentially add up to 20 percent of Foodpanda’s income, which is what he’s seeing in international best players.

Overall, Foodpanda could be a surer short-term bet than Rocket Internet’s other e-commerce ventures, with its lower operating leverage and fixed costs. Asia is certainly rising, but whether or not it could rise enough to bolster Zalora or Lazada’s bottom line remains to be seen.

The potential rewards of cloning a Zappos or Amazon could be much higher though. Picture Zalando’s EUR 1B (USD 1.29B) in revenue versus Seamless’s USD 85M — even with a small profit margin Zalando’s net profits far outstrips Seamless.

In the minds of many, the notion of holding your own inventory, designing your own goods, and owning the entire supply chain seems to be the pathway to building a truly successful business. After all, by owning more assets and means of production, you put yourself in the driving seat rather than subjecting yourself to the whims of external forces.

In that aspect Zalora and Lazada might have an edge, but first they’ll need to survive the growing pains.

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