SGEntrepreneurs » venture capital

TWIA #30: Jeffrey Paine from Founder Institute

SGEntrepreneurs — Sun, 09 May 2010 19:04:08 +0000

The second of the special episodes that line up for Echelon 2010, we have Jeffrey Paine, from Founder Institute and also a managing partner at Battle Ventures. We speak to him regarding the opening of Founder Institute and how the course has been ongoing in Singapore for the past few weeks. As Jeff is moderating the panel “Mentorship, Investment and New Funding Models” in the coming Echelon 2010, we discuss with him on the issues which he might cover and also his thoughts on the current trend where the micro venture capital model is becoming a new wave in creating start-ups with low cost and high effective return. You can go directly to TWIA website or listen the podcast here in SGEntrepreneurs.

About Jeff Paine: Jeffrey Paine loves ideas and entrepreneurship. Assists founders in honing their business strategies, by partnering with larger industry players, customers and gaining exposure to prospective early stage investors and acquirers. He spent the first eight years of his career in early stage venture and private equity in the US, North and South Asia. He then co-founded a China market entry advisory firm which was then merged with a China mid market private equity firm and subsequently co-founded Generation Origin, a venture advisory firm based in Palo Alto (advised by Pitch Johnson of Asset Management Company). He left Generation Origin in 2009 to set up Battle Ventures- a venture advisory and investment company based in Singapore and the Bay Area, Lotus Entertainment (SE Asia)- a Pan Asia feature film production and distribution company, and is behind 2 stealth consumer Internet and mobile companies.

He currently sits on the board of Endeavor Capital Partners Pte Ltd, Rediffusion Pte Ltd, TheMobileGamer Pte Ltd, and the organizing committee of the Zayed International Humanitarian Award in Abu Dhabi.

Why Entrepreneurs should not pay Investors to Pitch

Bernard Leong — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:23:22 +0000

Recently, I read that Angels Den from Europe has landed in Singapore. In their proposal, they are charging startups S$1499 upfront to pitch, and takes a 5% success fee. It also prompted response from local blogger DK that entrepreneurs should not pay investors to pitch. My stance is that entrepreneurs and start-ups should not pay investors to pitch and here are my opinions on this issue.

Probably, as an investor and entrepreneur myself, I have never believed that you should pay consortiums or groups of angels and venture capitalists to pitch. It is totally contrary to the spirit on how the entrepreneurial ecosystem should work. Sometime back, Jason Calacanis, CEO of Mahalo and also host to “This Week in Startups” took on angel groups in US, for example, Keiretsu Forum, Angels Den and Tech Super Club. According to Jason Calacanis, get entrepreneurs to pay for pitching is ridiculous. As a result of taking on these groups, Jason Calacanis led the beginning of an Open Angel Forum to provide a new model for entrepreneurs to pitch for free against these groups.

It is not in my place to offer any opinions about Angels Den, but I will state my opinion why entrepreneurs should not pay investors to pitch.

Renowned Business Angels and Venture Capitalists who created big companies don’t do that: Ask the famous business angels like Joi Ito or famous venture capitalists from Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark Capital and etc, you do not hear that they require the entrepreneurs to pitch. Instead, they are ready to buy the entrepreneur a meal or drink and spend the time to listen to the ideas of the entrepreneurs. These are the same angels and venture capitalists who produce Google, Facebook and Twitter. None of the top notched companies pay angels to pitch their ideas. Consider another argument, entrepreneurs are trying to set up companies with limited resources and financing, and yet these groups make them pay to find investment. In fact, a lot of entrepreneurs and developers enjoyed the free Neoteny Conference organized by Joi Ito last year. The people who attended (including myself) even learned more abut term sheets and valuation. Try to make a guess how much it cost to get Joi Ito to talk about start-ups and new venture financing: Absolutely Free! and I did not add the free lunches and coffee breaks too.
Even agencies Singapore Government make it free for entrepreneurs: If you have recently watched the iMatch conference, where MDA organized entrepreneurs in Singapore to pitch in front of an international consortium, you do not hear the Singapore government will tell you to pay for pitching. In fact, they enlisted the services of the incubators in iJAM and several business angels to help the companies to prepare their presentation for the investors. It’s probably one of the things I praised the government agencies like SPRING and MDA are doing with the iJAM and TECS schemes.
If you fail many times to get an investor, you will end up losing more money doing this: Here is a way to think about this. If you pitch your idea and the investor did not respond to you, it just means that he or she has no interest to invest in your company. Your job is to iterate from the reason to why the investor did not think that it’s a good proposition to invest in your idea. If you are serious about your start-up, you will put your own money to make it work than to spend the money to pay some middle men to get you investors who may or may not put money into your company.

I will leave the entrepreneurs to decide whether to engage with these groups. Ultimately, in the ecosystem, there must also be a natural selection to decide the weak and the strong. Perhaps, having these groups help to make that distinction.

TWIA Episode 8: In Hackerspace SG with Wong Meng Weng

SGEntrepreneurs — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 11:51:49 +0000

In a special episode during the Neoteny Conference, Daniel and BL sat down and talk to Wong Meng Weng, one of the co-founders of Hackerspace SG. We discuss the story of Hackerspace SG and how it happened, the current state of entrepreneurship scene in Singapore, and also one of the interesting topics which Meng Weng opened the discussion in Neoteny Conference – If we are to create a Y-Combinator clone in Singapore what are the features should we adopt?

References for this podcast:

Copying Y Combinator – WHY and HOW by Jed Christansen
Paul Graham, founder of Y-Combinator.

You can check out the podcast in the TWIA page.

Executive Summary Workshop – Ideas, Innovation and Purpose – 24 Oct

SGEntrepreneurs — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:30:44 +0000

Yes, it’s back. The third installment of the workshop is here. What is an idea? When does an idea become an opportunity? What is innovation? What is the purpose of innovation? Is entrepreneurship merely about tangible, monetary outcomes? Can starting a business lead to satisfaction in one’s life? How does one begin a business? What is the most fundamental requirement in starting up a venture: Guts? Money? Education? Team?

This Executive Summary workshop aims to not merely guide participants in the technical requirements of preparing an executive summary; far more importantly, it gives you a better understanding of what entrepreneurship is about, and how you can build an enterprise that is sustainable is every sense of the word. The workshop will also highlight important points that investors and “judges” look for in an executive summary. In short, it will help you to propel you idea further with a clear purpose!

Facilitator

The Executive Summary workshops will be facilitated by Dr Bernard Leong, who is co-founder of SGEntrepreneurs.com [yes, that's us]. He is an investor for early stage Interactive Digital Media companies as a partner of Thymos Capital. He has been a judge on business plan competitions at NUS, NTU, INSEAD and was formerly an advisor to Start-Up@Singapore business plan competition.

Event Details

Date: Saturday, 24th Oct 2009
Time: 1-7.30pm
Venue: 100 Victoria Street, Level 5, Imagination Room, National Library Singapore

RSVP here.

Expected number of participants is 60 and attendance is only by RSVP.

For more information on the Ideas.Inc competition organized by Nanyang Technopreneurship Centre, NTU and SPRING, please go to the main site.

Walden International Invests S$2 Million In Brandtology

Gwendolyn Regina T — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:37 +0000

International venture capital firm, Walden International today announced its first investment using Seed Ventures IV Pte. Ltd, a S$20 million (approximately US$13.3 million) venture fund as the vehicle. This was set up under the Singapore National Research Foundation’s (“NRF”) Early Stage Venture Funding Scheme. This S$2million (approximately US$1.33 million) investment in Brandtology Pte Ltd is Walden’s first under this new fund.

About Brandtology

Brandtology provides business and brand online intelligence services round the clock from its 24×7 Command Centres. Manned by trained specialists, Brandtology enables organizations around the globe to make timely and informed strategic decisions. Brandtology’s Digital Conversation Management System (DCMS) is powered by an intelligent opinion mining and ticket-processing system which aids organizations in listening to online digital conversations generated from blogs, forums, micro-blogs, news sites and other social medium. Brandtology serves a multitude of industries and public sectors in functions where online intelligence matters. Brandtology’s proprietary technologies, coupled with proven processes and trained specialists, enable clients to improve their brand equity, to increase revenue and to gain competitive edge. For more information, please visit www.brandtology.com.

About Walden International

WI is a leading international venture capital firm that provides investors access to cross-border, IT opportunities with the advantage of an unrivalled pan-Asia network since 1987. The firm’s funds total over US$1.9 billion in committed capital. WI’s investments include Creative Technology (SGX: CREAF SP), Mindtree Consulting (BSE: MTCLIN), SINA (NASDAQ: SINA), Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (NYSE.SMI and HKSE: 0981.HK), and WebEx (acquired by Cisco). Over the past 20 years, WI has been an active player in the Singapore venture capital scene and has invested in approximately 60 Singapore companies. For more information, please visit www.waldenintl.com.

A Map On Venture Capital In Singapore

Bernard Leong — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:20:53 +0000

In a turbulent and challenging climate now, it is unlikely to find funding via the traditional venture capital route. Wong Meng Weng, one of the Singapore entrepreneurs who have made his mark in the Valley (and now back in town) has recently created a map on the venture capital companies in Singapore. He has also presented this picture in a talk “Funding WTF” via the recent Barcamp Singapore 3. For those who are planning to seek venture capital funding, this might be a good map to look and get some perspective.

Looking at the map with the stage of company growth (y-axis) plotted against the actual amount of funding (x-axis), one can simply break up the fundraising in a few stages. For the sake of discussion, it might be good to just look at seed and early stage.

Seed stage investors: In this phase, the first stage is to look at seed stage investors which is mainly friends and family, followed by angel investors. The amount is usually not big but enough for the entrepreneur to jumpstart a product. The iJam incubators also fall into this category but specifically for the interactive digital media. One important thing to take note. Usually a sum of 50K-100K can only last you for three to six months of survival time. The alternative strategy is to bootstrap your start-up and it is more painful to control cashflow (but the rewards will be great if you succeed).
Early stage to Series A: This phase will bring in the BAF Spectrum angel investors, Innosight, Sirius Capital followed with the new NRF venture capital entities. In Singapore, it is usually hard to get these guys to invest. The dose of reality that I often tell some entrepreneurs (who thinks that I am being mean) is that these guys don’t fund unless you have a working business that is a spinning profit 10 times more. Yes, it does not sound like an early stage investment. Strangely, unknown to a lot of people here, the venture capital situation in Europe is similar. The venture capitalists do not like to invest in potential companies but companies which are already making money. This is the biggest missing gap in Singapore when it comes to growth financing and presents the highest risk from the perspective of the investors. In fact, it is every entrepreneur’s dream to break the chasm for this funding.

In my own humble opinion, I predict that it will be extremely tough to find any money within 9 to 15 months due to the current financial crisis unless your track record in creating companies of value have been in the seven digits mark. Perhaps, it may be good to go back to the lesson about what it means to be entrepreneurial. To be entrepreneurial is to take the path which no one takes or dare to take. The key to succeed is to be the exception rather than to be norm. Hence finding a bootstrapping strategy to organically grow your start-up is not a bad idea after all. That’s where I recall a good quote from Scott McLeod in TED: “Learn from Everyone, Follow No One, Look for Patterns and Work like Hell”.

Source: Meng Weng’s blog. :)

Entrepreneurs’ Basic Etiquette with Potential Investors

Bernard Leong — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:30:24 +0000

A couple of incidents for the past year recently made me ponder about the way how entrepreneurs in Singapore, or generally Asians handle their potential investors differently from their western counterparts. Perhaps, in terms of Gladwell’s “Outliers”, the cultural legacy could be the major fact that contributes to their behaviour. Since raising money in such difficult times is so much more challenging, it may also be good to provide some thoughts for those who are optimistic and willing to give it a shot. Sometimes, it’s not their fault to sound that way but they have made it so difficult for the investors to really say yes, for 99% of the time, they really did not know what the other side is thinking. I decide to summarize a few general cases for them so that they don’t make such amateur mistakes. This post is originally published from BL’s personal blog.

Do not sound arrogant to investors you meet: I understand that ego is part and parcel of the trait of an entrepreneur. However, there is a base line which each investor have with arrogance. Arrogance can deter an investor away easily. Never make the investor feel that they owe you a living or some entitlement. If you made it sound that your investor owes you a living, it is almost certain that he or she will never put a single cent in you. The problem with arrogance is the following: if you do not sound humble even dealing with him, how can he have the faith to entrust that sum of money with you? It also means putting checks and balances on you can be a pain for the entrepreneur to manage. I have seen very experienced investors turn down good deals because they know that they will incur more pain and depression dealing with an arrogant prick.
Do not tell the investor that you don’t need money: The most common mistake that an entrepreneur made is to tell the investor that you don’t need money. Oftentimes, you don’t need it when it is offered to you and when you really need it, the person who offered the money will say, “Good luck with your ventures” which implies that he or she is not going to put money in you. It is alright to be polite to say that you are planning for future investments and tell the interested party that he or she will be informed, rather than outright tell the investor that you don’t need money. I have a story where a company was offered US$10M for 10% equity when the product was launched. They really did not need the money and told the investor that they don’t need it. In the end, when they are in cashflow problems, they ended up selling the company for a much lower price.
Do not tell the investor that you are just checking them out: This is something that I learned the hard way in Asia, and I bet no business school actually teaches that. I once hear an interesting innovation by an entrepreneur in a business plan competition some years back as a judge. The entrepreneur was queried about the business model and the technology by the judges. After minutes of probing, we realized that the technology is not ready for consumption and we ask the entrepreneur why he took part in the competition, and he said that he was checking the investors out. The funny part is that when the judges discussed the team, we all agreed that they should be the lowest scoring team because they violated the cardinal rule of telling investors that they are “checking them out”.
Do not ask the investor to share his contacts or share the privileges his portfolio companies receive with you: I often think that it is just basic etiquette that when you reject someone for investment, you should not ask for more. I have the unfortunate experience of being asked to share my contacts with investors or the privileges of the link-ups my portfolio companies have to China and other parts of the world. It happened with many people who I taught that they are professional enough to realize that it is not appropriate to do that. Let me put it in another way, if you made so much effort to build these contacts as an investor, will you share it if there is no value proposition for your business and even worse, you need to account to the other partners in your firm? Actually, when I was living in Cambridge and visiting Boston to meet potential investor, I was told by mentors and experienced entrepreneurs that there is a basic etiquette. Of course, some young entrepreneurs in Singapore think that they are being smart to squeeze something out from the investor, which backfired on them practically all the time. If you ask someone for something without reciprocation, you will not expect that someone will give it to you. Not to mention that there is the professional reason that the investor has to keep his core competitive advantage to run his funding business. That being said, if you meet up with one of the investor’s contacts by your own merit and ask the other person to refer to you for reference, that is allowed and completely appropriate. In fact, some businesses ended up getting funding just on that account where the investor did not get directly involved.
Do not press your investor or even tell him how to conduct his business: Never try to press your investor to give you money and tell him how to conduct his business. Even if the process is taking a long time, you should not lose patience and demand an ultimatum from the investor. That is just suicidal and if not stupid. Perhaps, it might be easier to share with you the other side of the story. Every investment an investor makes, depending on the stakeholders who they need to account for, they need to ensure that every stone turned and every page flipped so that their money will gain returns from the opportunity.

I am not advocating the entrepreneur not to negotiate and suck up to the investor without principles. The essence is that there are issues which are negotiable. The equity stakes and some aspects of the term sheet can be debated and argued. If you don’t think that the valuation is fair, you can always walk out. Here is the part which I find it ironic when I do my deals. The shortest deals I have concluded within a span of a month is inversely proportional to the potential of that deal. In fact, those companies are the best in my portfolio that has potential for greater heights. Sounds strange, partially because the entrepreneurs made none of the mistakes above and in fact, have done another company before this venture. Hopefully, it might help those to bear this in mind when approaching potential investors.

Article photo courtesy of paulsynnott

The Third State of Our Blog

Bernard Leong — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:10:20 +0000

A few days back, Gwen and Weichang notified me that our blog is finally reaching our third birthday and our official birthday is 18 July (the day which we registered the domain). Hence it is that time of the year to have the third state of our blog. Believe it or not, our blog has already made it to the third year and we are still growing. Instead of really talking about things which we did this year or not, I like to use this third state of the blog to open up how SGE has maintained its position over the years with her partners, and the many more things which we hope to do within the two years or more.

In the last year, SGE has more or less transitioned from a start-up blog to a normal group blog that services the community. We have streamlined our focus towards the technology entrepreneurship and remains committed to market the events organized by different communities, from our partners: E27 (Garag3), The Digital Movement, Singapore PHP User Group (which will transition to an official society soon), and many others that helped to service Singapore like the Start-Up@Singapore competition. With the rising tides of social media, we are beginning to bring Tech65, the Geek Goddess Show and E-Conversations to bring the elements of audio and video which gives a different feel for our audience. Our Facebook group has already surpassed the other groups on user numbers now at 1000+, and we have passed a quarter of a million unique visitors and half a million page views over the course of the year. We do hope that we will hit the tipping point sometime in the future and reach a million unique visitors within the next two years. Yes, we have made an April Fool’s day joke out of TechCrunch and organized an event with one of TechCrunch editors last month too.

Yet, deep in our hearts, we still think that we are far away from where we really want to go. Let me tell you a few things that people have often asked during community meetings. Why do SGE not have their own events? The answer is that most entrepreneurs (including ourselves) have too much things to do, and we thought that it is better that we can help with the content and bring the awareness of events online organized by our partners. After all, if we are not good as practitioners, then what we say on this site would not be so credible. Speaking of which, one of the co-founders Weichang was recently featured in Zaobao for graduating with his honours in physics, overcoming his cancer illness and have started three businesses successfully on his own.

We consolidated our core competency that we are committed to content and not the rest. We have started publishing press releases for innovative tech companies and venture capital because we are filling a gap that traditional media (like Business Times) do not want to go. We are not against simple businesses by removing their comments because they are often spamming the blog with their advertisements. Sincerely, we want this to be a forum to discuss business issues and not an advertising platform. Other than committed to quality of content, we also want to ensure that the quality of comments and the way how the rest of community view the blog: credible and professional. We believe that this strategic focus is right, otherwise, the government bodies (ACE, SPRING) will not have added us to their resources links. That’s what separates us from the “me-too” sites who failed to replicate what we do.

We don’t want to rest on our laurels and continue to believe in a win-win approach. We work with our partners and groups in Singapore, particularly in helping people to be aware of events and bringing together mainly on the entrepreneurship in the tech sector and service those who happens to be in the niche business of entrepreneurship.

When we first started, no one believed that a business blog like this can create impact and value for the community. In fact, I was ridiculed by some in NUS and government officials that starting a blog like this is the dumbest idea possible. Today, we see people like Prof Wong Poh Kam, director of NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, have followed our lead to start blogging about issues in entrepreneurship and the government websites have acknowledged our presence here.

That is what entrepreneurship is all about: the determination and passion to start something against what others think and in the process convince the detractors that your ideas are correct. So, we have succeeded in a way as a small enterprise (thankfully to a group of contributors and partners who some of them have made it on their own as entrepreneurs) and remained the pioneers of the journey even if the rest who followed after do not acknowledge what we have done.

So what will we like to see in the next two years? In fact, we do have some thoughts and ideas about how we should move forward.

- A new theme design for the site: Yes, we know that our present theme has been stuck here for almost one year two months. We like to have more features for the site to allow more interaction among readers.
- Working with groups beyond the shores of Singapore: In fact, we are slowly reaching out to the other Asian countries around us, particularly our neighbour across the causeway. So, watch this space.
- More content on how to start a business: We really hope to have professionals and practitioners writing for us and see the need to help young entrepreneurs to grow. We have seen all the nominees for Asian young entrepreneurs in Business Week all have done their interviews in SGE, and we hope to see more out there.
- A possible gathering?: Actually, the founders (Gwen, Weichang and I) hope that we can amass the resources someday to hire an event management group to do an event someday. We thought about it but we usually end up not moving forward because maintenance work for the site is too much to do. In case you do not know, Weichang has spent time to do the backend maintenance like upgrading the site and ensure that our bills to the hosting server are paid while Gwen is busy with her editorial work behind the scenes.

Personally for me, I hope to pass to on the baton of my current role within the next two years and be a chief evangelist for the site, where new people can come and move this blog or site to the next frontier.

We thank all our friends and partners, and many out there for their growing support to our site, and we wish everyone well. As entrepreneurs, we want to remain optimistic and hope that something will grow in the future here in this little red dot.

Yours sincerely,
BL
on behalf of the founders of SG Entrepreneurs

The Difficulty of Developing Venture Capital in Singapore

Bernard Leong — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:20:47 +0000

Recently, over a supper conversation in Holland Village, a friend made an interesting observation about entrepreneurs in Singapore, “Actually, there is entrepreneurship in Singapore, but the Singaporean entrepreneurs are not here but in overseas. The market here is just too small. If you are successful in business, you should be now in China, Vietnam or Cambodia.” What he is saying is that if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you have to set up shop in other markets. Making a few dollars in Singapore is easy, but a few million is pretty difficult. By now, if you are planning to set up a business in Singapore, you have to accept the fact that you must go global on the very first day. I thought about this for a while and come to another conclusion as to why developing venture capital is extremely difficult in Singapore. In that process, I want to sketch out an alternative model that might mitigate some of the issues involved.

Is venture capital really possible in Singapore? You can take a look at the directory of investors in the Singapore Venture Capital Association and come to the realization that we might have many funds here, but most of them are sourcing their deal flows out there. So, why is developing venture capital in Singapore so difficult? Here are a few reasons why this is so.

The Wimbledon Effect: Have you watched the Wimbledon tennis tournament which happens in London every year? Usually, you don’t see a lot of British players winning the tournament. The lack of British winners made the public lament about the Wimbledon effect, i.e. you can have the biggest tennis tournament here in London with strong organization and culture, but you don’t have home-grown players that can win the grand slam. Singapore suffers from the Wimbledon effect, that it is an ideal base for financial services. A lot of them park their funds here, but they move around the region to do their deals. The problem is that there are really very few deal flows that can entice the investors to look around.
The horizon of Asian vs US venture capital: Notice that I did not include Europe in the equation. In some sense, Asian venture capitalists are similar to the European counterparts. They thrive in deal flows which have a very short time horizon and little risk. In the US, if you heard about the new space tourism industry in New Mexico, you might be wondering why venture capitalists are making such investments to start an emerging industry like commercial spaceflight for people. It’s the type of risk appetite that US investors take for their investments. The appetite for risk is directly proportional to the amount of booms and busts in an economy. In other words, if the risk is higher, you get bigger booms and busts (like the biotech/dotcom boom and bust periods in US). Since Asian investors want to do deals which are very safe, it is not possible to pursue venture capital in Singapore. If you want a good example, take a peak on how the Singapore government pursues the biomedical drive. You will realize that it’s incremental and still stuck at a 50-50 situation of success (predicted by the World Bank). The horizon is important, but of course, I am not saying that we should be investing all the money in the emerging industries.
“Markets, Markets and Markets!”: If you ask someone why Starbucks cafe is so successful, you will hear the three words muttered to you, “The secret of success is boiled down to three words: location, location and location.” Applying the same reasoning infers that our domestic market is too small to grow anything substantial. Other than the food and beverages business (even the successful ones are moving out of Singapore to open new markets), it is not easy to set up something here and gain a lot of traction.
Lack of innovators: This is my favourite criticism towards students who are involved in entrepreneurship societies. I am seeing too many engineers wanting to do business models but lack of innovators who want to do real technology and innovation. Somehow, I can’t fault anyone on this. It boils down to culture, and it is not seriously not easy to create innovation. It requires people to think out of the box and most importantly, the government expects creative destruction without any anti-establishment views.

So, does that mean that it is impossible to do venture capital deals in Singapore? The answer is yes, and we have to accept that the deal flow is small. In fact, most entrepreneurs in Singapore are more successful in raising capital from friends, family and fools than from business angels and venture capitalists combined. So, I want to sketch out a variation of the venture capital model but add a component that is not really new in fundraising. The best way to help technology start-ups in Singapore is to do it via the micro-financing model. The IDM initiative follows this model (which I am currently involved) but due to its constraints as a government initiative, it is unable to exploit the full advantages of micro-financing given the way how the contract and conditions are structured. I have to be fair and say that it’s the best that they can do. Now, I want to push the boundaries a bit further. If you do a fully private micro-financing model and add another component from the model which made Israel successful in both venture capital and entrepreneurship.

Singapore is similar to Israel in terms of market size. How did Israel do it differently from Singapore? Actually, if you examine their model, l closely, most of their technology entrepreneurship came from the military that has shifted into the commercial space. That’s the first step and then using the free trade agreement in 1986, Israel shifted the entrepreneurs into US with the advantages of the Israeli enterprises being US companies that open up their markets. So, with these ingredients in place, I might offer an out of the box solution (which I believe that the think-tanks have been talking but none really voice it out). Let me specify my solution in the IDM space (given that I am in this space).

Suppose we are able to open up the technology space from the military for commercial uses (as in not weapons, but technology that can be transitioned from the military space to the commercial space), we adopt a micro-financing model that is fully private and places less conditions than the current MDA one, coupled with the bilateral free trade agreements we have, we might be able to open up a space for venture capital activity.

Editor’s Note: The article is originally published in his blog.