A different perspective to Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem

My friend Jon Russell from The Next Web has recently penned that there are four issues challenging Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem: risk aversion, fear of failure, lack of big firm presence and immature ecosystem.

To his credit, he has spotted some inherent weaknesses of a diverse market fragmented not just by geography but also business culture. In a similar reflection, Michael Smith Jr from Spuul focused on the lack of enough big firms.

While there is a lot of hurrah with the arrival of 500 Startups to the region, there are several trends that might deter the growth of the ecosystem — the purpose of this article is to open a discussion on what these might be. Read more

Why startups should hire slow and fire fast

Seed-funded startups often believe in the fallacy of quickly ramping up their hiring to scale the company.

This thinking is prevalent because the investor expects you to grow the company with a business model that is expected to work right away. In all honesty, startups at the seed stage have not figured out how to do that yet.

In the book “The Startup Owner’s Manual” by Steve Blank & Bob Dorf, a startup is defined as a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model. Even if you have raised money to assemble a team and build a product, you should not go on a spending binge with the hope that the product will bring you customers.

The typical mentality is to “hire fast, fire fast”. But having learnt from my past experiences, I now prefer to hire slow and fire fast. Read more

Singapore’s DBS bank offers bank accounts for startups

Called the DBS Entrepreneur’s Account for Start-ups, the bank account offers certain services at no cost as well as discounts on a business insurance plan, reported Channel NewsAsia on 13 July. Read more

The Garag3 Innovation Friday (TGIF) – 27 May

Aarti Gumaledar from Yahoo! Corporate Development team will be here to share Yahoo!’s interest in investing and acquiring potential start-ups. Following are the event details. Read more

Echelon 2011 and Launchpad Satellites in Singapore, Malaysia

Echelon 2011 aims to help Southeast Asia’s startups get discovered. The main event will be held in June in Singapore, but there will be two Satellite launchpads in Singapore and KL (Malaysia) will help filter the startups.

Echelon 2011 will be a two-day, double-track event with an expected attendance of more than 1,000 delegates; a demo pit of more than 40 startups and companies; and workshops and fringe events. Read more

MDA, Singtel, NUS Join Hands To Incubate Startups With Blk71

“Blk71″ aims to be the next big thing for startups in the interactive digital media sector. An incubation programme set up by the Media Development Authority, SingTel Innov8 and NUS Enterprise, Blk71 is based in the west of Singapore at the new media hub, Mediapolis Phase 0. Space, events, funding are all part of the Blk71 equation.

According to the press release, it is “designed to allow startups to gain one-stop access to the resources they need to effectively develop and market their solutions to customers.” Read more

Latest Startup Jobs – 5 Jul 2010

If you are reading SGEntrepreneurs, you are probably already partial to startups, perhaps having founded one yourself or are working in one.

If not, why not consider joining a dynamic startup to see for yourself what it is like working with just two other people in your entire company?

If you are looking for a job as a developer, programmer, or you want something in business development, sales, or perhaps you are a designer and looking for creative jobs, check out these newly listed open positions at these diverse startups. Read more

TWIA #28: Echelon 2010 & Social Wok

The first of the special episodes, as TWIA is a supporting media partner for Echelon 2010, we bring together two special guests, Mohan Belani the lead organizer and his team from E27 Singapore who brings together the top web-tech startups within Asia to Singapore, and Guang Ming Yong, CEO of Social Wok to talk about the upcoming conference, the story of Social Wok and their experience from Unconference 2009 to TechCrunch 50. They also discuss their own thoughts on the topic of cloud computing. Update: Ming Yong, who is originally intended to be the moderator for the panel, “Changing Enterprise 2.0: Implications of Cloud Computing, Social and Web Services”, will not be able to attend. You can go directly to TWIA website or listen the podcast here in SGEntrepreneurs.
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Starting Up Start-Ups @ Neoteny Conference

For those who have missed the Neoteny Conference earlier this month, you should check out this interesting panel entitled “Starting Up Start-Ups” moderated by Sean Bonner (Founder, Bode Media), together with Rob Mee (CEO, Pivotal Labs), Andrew ‘bunnie’ Huang (Head Engineering, Chumby Industries), Joi Ito (CEO, Creative Commons) and Samir Patel (Co-Founder, SearchForce). There are some interesting insights shared during the panel and perhaps, it will be great to check out the video here: Read more

How To Handle Negative Media Coverage

Local entrepreneur, Leonard Lin has been making waves with his very popular game, BattleStations and has even been interviewed twice by us. Recently, he suffered a possible case of media coverage gone wrong. Read more