This is a highly recommended book even for those who are thinking about their own career strategic inflection points at this moment of time.

A strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can equate to an opportunity for a company to rise to new heights or tumble down to collapse. While it is obvious that strategic inflection points are likely to be caused by technological change, they can also be caused by competitors when they deliver more value or become more efficient.

A strategic inflection can be deadly when it is unattended. We have seen how big bookstores like Borders fell because they did not see the threat of the Amazon Kindle. A similar insight can also be applied to one’s career.

Though a very short book, Andy Grove drove home the point about changing rules and how leaders in companies have to find their way through uncharted waters.

He narrates the story of how Intel navigated through the changing computer industry brought about by the personal computer revolution in the 1980s. While the present generation may not recall the days of the 386, 486 to the Pentium chip, he explained how the industry has dramatically changed from 1970s to the early 1990s, with his thoughts on the Internet (at its nascent stage) in the 1990s.

Using those examples, he explained  how companies need to steer clear of strategic dissonance. Using data, he shows that the demographics of customers can change and how this could lead to a strategic inflection point.

He also reckons that the timing for a resources shift towards new technology has to be just right, not too early or too late. He also noted that the strategic change has to be clearly communicated to rest of the company.

The last chapter about managing an individual’s career strategic inflection points is an addition to the original book. Andy Grove, advocates having a mental fire drill that lets you spot incoming threats or red flags which might harm your industry, build the relationships around, find the right timing to make the transition, and get in shape for the change. It sounds simple, but given how most people prefer taking less risk and staying comfortable in their own domains, they probably would not see the problems arise until later.

Of course, this book is a good read and I do recall many successful entrepreneurs and investors in today’s world citing the title of the book as a lesson for them to be wary of their competitors, navigate into new territories and change the landscape of the industry.

Andy Grove is right: “Only the paranoid survive.”

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.

Here are a set of a common questions that I often get in my day-to-day communication with people who are thinking of starting up and people who have already started their own companies.

1. Pre-Founding Situation: ”I have a great career at company X, should I quit and launch a start-up?” or “I have done some research on the idea but I am not sure if the market is receptive to my idea or my perceived situation may be unfavourable to me.” Even with the data that might back the venture, you might be caught in a hesitant mode because of family reasons.

2. Founding Team Issues: Here’s one which I know that it might have implications for start-ups seeking funding: “Should I launch the business myself or try to attract co-founders?” or “Should I ask my friends, family, acquaintances, co-workers or strangers to be my co-founders?”

Even you manage to overcome that, the next question is the role of each co-founder and his or her area of responsibility which probably intersects each other early but will become more specialized when the company grows. Then the next problem is about how a team should make decisions in the midst of facing a tough call that might affect the company in the long run. Of course, the most sensitive enquiry I often get is how the team should divide equity and financial rewards among the founding team.

3. Beyond the Founding Team: This is the part which both the growth of the start-up and gaps in the founding team’s abilities or resources will require them to add non-co-founders and people who might be able to scale their company, which brings a few dilemmas on hiring, dealing with investors and founder-CEO succession.

What Wasserman did in the book is collect 10,000 case studies of founders from various industries, and help to decipher how some of them might have a great story to tell but made decisions that are very absurd or not logical during any of the three stages of the companies.

He broke the problem down in a similar way to how venture capitalist Brad Feld did in his book “Venture Deals”: Entrepreneur seeks to balance between wealth and control, two important aspects of the business. Put simply, do you want to have control over the business or make a lot of money? The follow-up question to that is what kind of trade-offs can you make in the process?

The way the author distills decisions into a matter of wealth and control is, in my opinion, brilliant. The principal case studies used by the author are: Tim Westergren with Pandora Radio, Evan Williams with Odeo & Twitter, Genevieve Thiers of Sittercity and other founders. In each chapter, Wasserman organizes each founder’s dilemma and set up a framework that helps the founder to find an answer with the issue involved.

The most contentious and sensitive chapter is in the reward dilemmas in the form of equity splits and cash compensation. One of the things the author showed in the book is that natural inclinations about equity splits are wrong and counter-productive.

How does one circumnavigate these difficult and tough calls? There is an inherent conflict to how the founders’ contributions (relative or absolute) can never be precisely defined or measured while their equity stakes & cash compensation are specific down to the decimal point.

The key is that founding teams need to avoid potential disastrous consequences of early and static equity split. They need to devise a good compensation plan that one, reflects each member’s past and expected contributions and motivating each co-founder without seeming unfairness to the others, including future employees.

For some, it may be hard to read every page of this book. My suggestion is that you should use this book as a reference and look at the section whenever you faced one of the founder’s dilemmas in the process of your entrepreneurial journey.

Author’s note: Check out the reviews of “The Founder’s Dilemma” by Brad Feld & Eric Ries.

Also watch this video from the Kauffman’s Foundation which summarizes this book really well:

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.

Two clusters of economies in Southeast Asia, based on mobile and Internet penetration rates

Glancing at the mobile and internet penetration rates in ASEAN countries, we see two prevailing trends (see slide 4 of the presentation provided below).

But before that, it’s important to note that the internet penetration rate is constructed based on the number of broadband internet subscribers divided by the total population, while the mobile penetration rate is calculated using the number of mobile subscribers (mobile phones are not distinguished as either featured/WAP phones or smartphones). As a result, mobile penetration rates are usually more than 100 percent, which just means that most users own more than one phone.

Taking into consideration the ratio of mobile and internet penetration rates, we see two clusters forming: The digital economies of Singapore, Brunei and Malaysia share very similar behaviour where smartphone ownership is becoming significant in the cities, while the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam represent emerging digital economies where smartphone penetration are relatively low but the consumers uses social media with low mobile rates without knowing that they are accessing the Internet.

Looking at Cambodia, which may represent a potential digital economy of 53 million people, one can conjecture that it is heading in a similar direction as Vietnam or Thailand. As for Myanmar, the infrastructure must be built first before a digital economy can arise.

Missing elements in the Southeast Asia Ecosystem

I have indicated in my talk that there are at least three missing elements (and they may be more). Let’s start from the first issue: the lack of series A funding in the region of US$0.5M to US$2M. The reason why most investors avoid this funding range is because it’s a risky stage where a company can grow into a proper and sustainable entity or go south if they cannot find sustainable revenue streams.

As a result, most companies which can potentially grow will not be considered by investors. However, seed funding is readily available because the quantum of investment is low. To get a better chance of obtaining funding in this range I talked about, the company has to leapfrog and generate significant revenues quickly, otherwise it is very tough to move forward.

The second issue is the dearth of talent to scale the company. If we match founders from Southeast Asia to Silicon Valley, the difference is not that wide apart. The real difference is in the management team with people who are formerly from big companies that can help to scale the company. We read often from tech blogs about the movement of people from one big tech company to another, but this phenomenon is very rare in Southeast Asia. The reason is that most start-ups cannot afford the lifestyle of these executives and the opportunity of exits are very minimal.

The last issue relates to most VCs in Southeast Asia: A lot of them are former financiers and not really business operators by experience. We cannot fault them for their backgrounds, but it does have an impact on how they assess companies.

To be blunt, a former banker constructs a company’s valuation by profit and loss. If Facebook was started in Southeast Asia, they can never survive. The reason is that they did not generate any revenue or profit until their pre-IPO investment round. Of course, Facebook was a bit bet and the odds of finding companies like it are really small.

But I am seeing good signs in Singapore where we have people like Meng Weng Wong (co-founder of JFDI Asia) and Batara Eto from East Ventures who are former entrepreneurs running venture incubators and are investors as well.

Photo: WhizKris

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.

To put it simply, here’s what SOPA and PIPA seek to do: the laws will be enacted “to minimize the dissemination of copyrighted material online by targeting sites that promote and enable the sharing of copyright-protected material, like The Pirate Bay.” If the act is enacted, a few steps will be taken to limit access to rogue sites:

(a) bypassing the “notice and takedown” method of copyright infringement on internet services (for example, the Pirate Bay) and require the Internet service providers, or ISPs in short (in Singapore: M1, Starhub and SingTel) to police content uploaded by users or prevent users from uploading copyrighted content,

(b) require ISPs to change their DNS servers and block resolution of domain names of websites that host these illegal content (i.e. movies or TV shows),

(c) require search engines to modify search results to exclude websites of such nature,

(d) order online (including mobile) advertising services (Google AdSense, InMobi) and digital payment services (Paypal, Square) to cease business with websites of such nature.

The reason why most major internet companies oppose to the act is simple. SOPA and PIPA changes the liability rules around copyright infringement. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 in which Singapore has signed on a stronger version (during their free trade negotiations with the US) states that companies are protected from charges of “contributory infringement” on content uploaded by users as long as the company follows up with the process of removing the content which infringes copyright when an alert process is signalled.

Here’s how it works in real life: suppose a user of the ISP uploads a video that infringes copyright, the ISP will be alerted by the relevant authorities to remove the content. SOPA changes the former arrangement, and now user-generated content sites like YouTube or Twitter have to worry about copyright due to contributory infringement when a rogue user deliberately uploads content to these user generated content sites.

The burden of reviewing every blog post, tweet and video submission is impossible to manage for any company. This is similar to the situation in China, where video sites such as Tudou have to hire people to monitor content uploads 24-7 to ensure that no sensitive political content is uploaded.

SGE‘s opposition against SOPA/PIPA legislation is not focused on freedom of speech arguments which have been brought forward by many digital advocates. You can read about these elsewhere. Our concern is that such legislation has profound implications to our economy.

First, the legislation breaks the internet architecture and subjects our ISPs to undue stress of monitoring all forms of user-generated content. The current procedure that the ISPs use to remove illegal content is sufficient to protect copyright. However, if SOPA or PIPA legislation is enacted through the Singapore parliament, the ISPs would have to waste resources to monitor internet traffic.

Second, the Singapore government has devoted a lot of resources to nurture in our country the next Facebook and Google or sites that might create great impact like Wikipedia or any user-generated sites similar to YouTube and Twitter. By allowing such a legislation, innovation within the local tech and creative content industry will be reduced. Think of a young, talented pianist applying for a top music school and producing a YouTube performance of a song which is well known. The pianist can get sued for copyright infringement even if the content is being re-mixed.

Last but not least, Singapore is currently the digital hub for most of the large MNCs (Google, Facebook and Microsoft) for the whole Southeast Asia region. All these companies are mostly anti-SOPA, and by enacting such legislation, it may force these companies to relocate their companies’ SEA headquarters somewhere else. That will mean that our economy will slow down and lose the jobs created by these companies.

For all of you who want to help out, please go to the Facebook page of our Law Minister and register your objections in a respectful manner so that we will have not such a legislation knocking our doors. It may be good to check out this post by Xu Si Han who initiated the call to me and the rest of the tech community to step in and declare a resounding no to SOPA/PIPA like legislation.

Lastly, this is not just a Singapore problem but a Southeast Asia problem at large. If Singapore passes such a legislation, it’s very likely that everyone around the region (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines and Brunei) might follow suit. Hence it might make the whole region less viable for the investment that will transform the region to be like China and India.

All in all, SGE does not support SOPA/PIPA.

References:

[1] ChannelNewsAsia, Healthy IP environment contributes to creative economy.
[2] K Shanmugam Sc Facebook Post
[3] Tim O’Reilly: Why I’m fighting SOPA
[4] Joi Ito: Why we need to stop SOPA and PIPA and Ethan Zuckerman, MIT Media Lab opposes SOPA, PIPA.
[5] Cato @ Liberty: SOPA: An Architecture for Censorship.

Image: Andréia

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.

Author’s Preface: I will include elements of a previous course which I have taught in Nanyang Technopreneurship Centre as well as some advice which I used to dispense via my role as an entrepreneur-in-residence for INSEAD Business School. I have refined the presentation slides and notes after teaching that course for four semesters over the past two years. Note that the content I have done up for this course is under Creative Commons – No Commercial, Share-alike and Attribution.

One important thing that I want to stress even though I have worked as an academic in the past: Entrepreneurship is a contact sport, and it’s easier to teach as a practitioner because you encounter a lot of challenges and issues from starting a company to managing, maintaining, growing and exiting from the company. My original intention is to change the course name to “Technology & Business” (and it’s not possible) as I am not a fan of teaching entrepreneurship but more of providing a toolkit for the students to use whether they are advancing their career or starting their own businesses. Do bookmark this post as I will update it from time to time.

My Course Slides:

Talking Points

• Course objective: My aim is not to teach anyone to become entrepreneurs. The success rate of any start-up from an investor’s viewpoint is 1 out of 10 based on anecdotal evidence, which means that 9 other start-up ventures will fail. So trying to convert you to become an entrepreneur is not the wise thing to do. The important thing I want to dispense through the course is to help you understand and learn the process of building startups and companies. The business plan assignment will provide you some basic understanding on various aspects of a business: Marketing, business strategy, financials and intellectual property (specifically for technology companies). The best takeaway is that you should learn to make all the mistakes about something as fast as possible. Simply put: Learn to fail fast.

• What defines an entrepreneur?: Different people have different perspectives of what an entrepreneur should be. In some cases, they are defined by the success of their businesses, and in other cases, they are defined by how their products or services have added value to everybody’s lives. Entrepreneurs also accept the inherent risks of their enterprise and are accountable for their success or failure. Unfortunately, some people do call themselves “entrepreneurs” but are totally off the mark, for example, companies who use Ponzi and pyramid marketing schemes to cheat consumers or lend money illegally (loan sharks) do not add any real value.

• Window of Opportunity and First Mover is not an advantage: While most investors like to emphasize on the first mover advantage of technology companies, note that many successful technology companies are not first movers. For example, Google was preceded in the search business by AltaVista and Inktomi (which was acquired by Yahoo! for US$20M instead of buying google for US$1M). Similarly, Facebook was not the first in the business of social networking. Before Facebook, there was Friendster (which was acquired by MOL Malaysia) and MySpace (which was acquired by News Corp). What made these businesses successful was that they learnt from the first mover’s failures and innovated to deliver greater value.

Videos

Video 1: Michael Pritchard’s LifeSaver in TED 2009

Lessons learnt from this video:

• Articulation of the problem and opportunity: The speaker discussed the problem of clean drinking water and used examples of a developing and developed country to illustrate that there was no good solution when a calamity struck. He also described how existing solutions have not achieved what they were meant to do.

• Describing technology simply: While the LifeSaver bottle solution has many features, the speaker only focused on one aspect of the technology: the 15nm pore. He explained it simply, describing how the filter is small enough to stop bacteria and viruses from entering. He could have explained how the entire bottle works but he chose to condense the solution to a simple feature so that the audience could understand him.

• Explain why his solution is better than traditional solutions: The speaker made a comparison with traditional solutions of delivering clean water, for example, people within the disaster area would make long trips to carry jerry cans filled with water from one location to another. He focused on how his solution made people’s lives easier.

• Product Demo and Authority: He was able to do a demo with the solution (as seen in the video). What’s more, he drank the water from the bottle and also passed it to Chris Anderson, the organizer of TED who is a well-known personality and got his endorsement that it’s safe.

• Provide vision on how to implement the idea and exact amount to fund the solution: He gave a plan of how the solution can be scaled and the amount of money required to solve the world’s drinking water problem. The amount was stated as 20 billion for worldwide implementation, but it was very clear to the audience what he was asking for.

Video 2: Thulasiraj Ravilla: How low-cost eye care can be world-class in TEDIndia 2009 – Aravind Eye Care Center

Lessons learnt from this video:

• Aravind Eye Care Hospital was founded in 1976 by Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy. The existing management has laid out a vision of what the Aravind Eye Hospital aspires to become in the future.
• The hospital evolved itself not just as a healthcare service giver but also as a social enterprise that deals with the blindness problem in India. It treated 2.4 million poor Indians over 30 years.
• Interesting Features: Eye Surgery facility that runs 24 hours with doctors focusing on surgery and nurses focusing on pre and post eye care. Free surgeries for the poor and also a top class R&D centre on eye treatment.

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).

But overall, it is still the second most competitive economy in the world, behind Switzerland.

This means that while Singapore is a great place to do business, firms here have not quite caught up with the world’s best when it comes to improving their own processes and developing more innovative products. Government operations, on the other hand, have been on the cutting edge of technology, scoring second globally in government procurement of advanced technology products.

The survey gathers over 13,000 valid responses from 142 economies, for an average of 98 respondents per country, and captures the respondents’ perceptions of their countries.

These findings are somewhat in agreement with INSEAD’s own Global Innovation Index, which ranks Singapore highly for investing resources into developing innovation but penalizes it for the creation of knowledge and the production of creative goods and services.

In fact, when comparing the dividends reaped with the investment made, Singapore ranks an inefficient 94th.

Despite this blemish, there’s a lot of good news for Singapore. The Global Competitiveness Report compares the country quite favorably against other innovation-driven economies. It’s just that Singapore falls short of its own lofty standards.

But the government has only just begun to recognize the important of innovation, and they are now earnestly encouraging firms to innovate by pumping in money to support entrepreneurs and increase productivity in the workplace. Time will tell if these measures have been effective.

Photo: Nattu

Special Interview on Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystem with Brad Feld from onsuccess on Vimeo.

For full transcript, click here.

Article thumbnail: TechCocktail

This has been brought to you by SGE and Onsuccess. Onsuccess is a media enterprise for start-ups and ventures in Korea. Onsuccess introduces innovative Korean start-ups and ventures to people overseas through media partners and inspires readers by sharing interesting business ideas and trends from all over the world. Furthermore, Onsuccess holds various events, offering actual chances for Korean start-ups and ventures to meet other start-ups, venture business partners and investors abroad. They publish in both Korean and English.

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.

Most of these start-ups had credible solutions targeting large, fast-growing markets, had raised one or more rounds of venture funding and in every case was led by a passionate and committed founding team.

Why then did so many of these businesses fail? Indeed, why do most start-ups fail?

In Silicon Valley – the poster child for entrepreneurship – the majority of Valley start-ups tended to be IP heavy, product companies. Most failed since new product development took up too much time and money and often the products didn’t work. In some cases, the market either wasn’t ready or turned too quickly, and poor execution killed the rest.

The Asian picture is different. Most start-ups here are relatively low-tech with little IP. Many target high-growth consumer markets with either a novel business model or follow a copycat approach, localizing Western success stories (think daily deals websites like Beeconomic or Deal.com.sg).

Still others tend to be service businesses. Capital requirements are relatively low. With non-existent product risk and only limited concept risk, execution turns out to be of overarching importance.

What is execution anyway? It’s the day-to-day stuff that keeps the company moving onward and forward towards the Founder’s vision. It’s where the rubber meets the road, where strategy meets tactics and where pies in the sky confront realities on the ground. Ultimately, it means having the right people at the right place at the right time doing the right things.

I believe 60-70% of the outcome of any business venture is attributable to people, 20-30% to external factors such as market environment and the rest to dumb luck. Time and again I’ve observed that the degree to which a founder is self-aware and willing to stretch himself/herself and evolve can make all the difference between success and failure.

This is especially true in Asia, where most business founders are first-time entrepreneurs and not battle-hardened by past experiences. The smaller pool of entrepreneurial CEO talent also means that founders continue to run operations long after the start-up phase.

Here’s a very incomplete list of dos and don’ts for first time entrepreneurs to minimize their chances of failure:

Do delegate and know when to let go.

In the early days you’re forced to wear different hats and be all things to all people. As the business grows, hire competent professionals and step back from day-to-day operations. For instance, as a technical founder, sales may not come naturally to you, yet you have to don a sales hat, meet customers and close the first few deals.

But as soon as the time is right, hire hungry and competent salespeople, incentivize them and let them loose. I’ve seen many founders continuing to micro-manage sales and other key functions long after the business has hit a certain level of maturity. Entrepreneurs love to talk about how scalable their business model is but don’t often realize that a controlling behaviour limits internal scalability.

Actively delegating and creating an inclusive decision-making process is one of the most empowering and liberating things you can do as a leader.

Don’t course correct every few months.

Make a plan and stay with it. Yes it’s hard. After all, nimbleness and agility are your assets, but you also need to give your team the time and space to execute. Some young start-ups get into a “throw it all at the wall and see what sticks” mentality which seldom works.

Agree on a direction, set clear milestones and be patient. If things aren’t going right, then understand why, and chart a new plan after getting your team’s buy-in and communicate this to all concerned. Nothing demotivates an organization more than constantly shifting strategy and direction.

Don’t expect everyone in your company to share your passion.

People are motivated by different things. Outside of your core team it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to have the same degree of excitement and passion regarding your vision. Everyone is different and people change.

As a leader it’s your job to understand what makes each of your team members tick and find a way to link your vision to what’s important to them. This is especially true as your business grows and your 51st hire may be more interested in a good income and stable job and care less about changing the world.

Do create your own leadership style.

Photo: Tony Hue

Many young entrepreneurs are rightly inspired by famous technology leaders like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Larry Page. However, some take the role-modelling too far and try to mimic someone else’s leadership style and attempt to create a culture that resembles a far-away Silicon Valley company.

Nothing wrong with a little inspiration but the only management style that’s going to work for you is your own. Understand your strengths and weaknesses and grow into your role as a leader. Create your own distinct style of leadership and shape the culture of your company the way you want to – and in a way that’s appropriate for the realities of your operating environment.

What works in Silicon Valley rarely works in Singapore, Bangalore or Shanghai. Every company succeeds for a different, and sometimes hard to quantify, reason. There’s more to learn from other people’s failures than trying to ape someone else’s success.

Do self-reflect.

Your ability to change and stay one step ahead of your business is the single most important factor for success. Being an entrepreneur is a lonely job, venture-funded company or not, and the pressures of the business and meeting the expectations of various stakeholders leave little time for reflection or personal development and can lead to a situation where the business has grown but you are playing catch-up.

What worked from a start-up phase to a million-dollar revenue base may not help you get to a $20m top-line. Understand your strengths, weaknesses and appreciate that you – just like everyone else – have blind spots. True leadership has less to do with managing or motivating other people and more to do with managing yourself.

About the author

RJ Sridhar is the founder of Radical Shift, a Business Coaching practice based in Singapore, and works with entrepreneurs and small business owners across S.E. Asia and India. Prior to coaching, RJ was a venture capitalist with JAFCO Asia where he invested in several early-stage and high-growth businesses across the region and actively worked with management teams to scale their operations. Previously RJ developed technology products and held operational roles with industry-leading companies in Silicon Valley.  He also spent a couple of years on Wall Street as an equity analyst covering the technology sector. RJ has a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from The Ohio State University and an MBA from Duke University. His other interests include meditation, writing, running and travelling. RJ is a member of the Singapore Institute of Directors, a Business Mentor at Singapore Management University, a Mentor with Mentor Square and is also a member of the International Coach Federation.

Top photo: Terence Lee

About Sean Bonner from Bode Media & Neoteny: Sean Bonner has been involved with media, online and off, for the better part of the last 16 years. He has been featured in GOOD, Wired, Playboy, Salon, Forbes and others, been included in Yahoo!’s Best of the Web, and has spoken at conferences, events, and coffee shops around the world. As co-founder and CEO of Bode Media Inc, Sean helped create Metblogs, the worlds largest network of local media blogs.

As a consultant, he has helped The Groop, Jack In The Box, LAPD, Suicide Girls, Obey Giant, Shopzilla and others interact with their customers, clients, and fans online. He also speaks frequently at conferences covering blogs, media, networks and grassroots journalism. Recently he’s spoken at IzeaFest (Orlando, FL), SXSWi (Austin, TX), Roboexotica (Vienna, Austria) and Re:Publica (Berlin, Germany).

Sean is well connected to the startup scene in Asia as one of the guys behind Neoteny Labs, a venture fund and incubator which opened its doors in Q1 2010. Neoteny Labs aims to find and grow some of the most interesting technology startups in Asia and the Middle East. It is one of seven technology incubators chosen to participate in the S$50 million National Research Foundation (NRF) Technology Incubation Scheme (TIS).

As an event organizer, Sean brought Neoteny Singapore Camp 1 (NSC1) to Singapore which brought together a fascinating mix of entrepreneurs and investors, sharing possibilities over a 2 day event. Check this out for an interesting discussion around startups from that event. He also brought BarCamp to Los Angeles, produced the first art exhibition comprised solely of phonecam images, ran art auctions and benefits for the West Memphis Three. Sean has also been a guest blogger/contributor for BoingBoingVideo and hosted the iPhone game review show iPhun.

He is one of the founders of Crash Space, a Los Angeles hackerspace and is the creative director for the brand R5315T. Prior to all this, Sean helped build the groundbreaking contemporary art gallery sixspace exhibiting artists such as Glen E. Friedman, Shepard Fairey, Coop, Chad Robertson and others. He also ran a record label and produced several records by Hot Water Music and Less Than Jake to name a few. He’s also managed a design firm, worked as Sr. Designer for Playboy.com and Creative Director for Victory Records.

In the real world, you need about two weeks to work out the stage from ideas generation to execution. Here is how I will break it down for you using 2 weeks:

• Day 1 – Day 4: Sketch your ideas within the first four days on the industry you focused. Try to brainstorm without constraints and work out all possible ideas you have. The key is to make sure that you have enough ideas to be eliminated in the next stage.
• Day 5 – Day 7: From the list you have brainstormed, decide on the top 3 ideas which you think will succeed.
• Day 8 – Day 11: Do your market research, surveys and reading secondary data on your industry. One important thing is to make sure that you end up getting the final idea. Make sure you talk to people in the industry whether they are from an MNC and start-up.
• Day 12 – Day 14: Focus on the last idea you have eliminated and work out the timeline and milestones so that you can get a prototype to market within 6-8 weeks from this date.

So good luck in generating your ideas for the start-up. :)