“If it’s a bad idea, then chances are that there won’t be competition for it” - An interesting and refreshing insight from a veteran VC, who believes in going contrarian.

Thanks to Wei Chong, Weijin and Yujun (notice the Weis and “Jins”?), a group of us was able to meet Gus Tai, an accomplished VC from Trinity Ventures and Hasan, a first-time entrepreneur for our Conversation Series session. It was meant to be a casual discussion that revolves around the topic of We were really grateful to our two guests since we don’t really see any immediate benefits for them to even travel to our humble NOC office (with only pizza+soda served) to give us their insights on the topic discussed.

It was a shame that we can’t get more people to attend the discussion because all of us are so bogged down with work, especially the 10th batch. Our business plan presentations and reports (50%) are due on 5th Dec, our GEL assignment worth 30% and coaching report (10%) is due on the 1st Dec, and there’s so many other interesting people that we would love so much to meet, and so many other things that we would love to do.

Musings aside, I like Gus’s style of GTD (A lingo for Getting Things Done). Only 1 out of 200 business plans were accepted by Gus, and he gave a very interesting insight into the way he handles business plans.

“I take 15 seconds to decide whether I want to meet the founders. If I can’t decide after 15 seconds - I will take another 2 minutes to decide. The rest of the emails are deleted.”

He gave us some glimpse about the life of a VC. It appears that the general VC spends 60% of their time meeting the companies in their portfolio, and the remaining 40% on upcoming business plans. I think that Trinity holds a pretty good policy that they need only to invest in 2 plans a year. It relieves the burden to make investment decisions based on a specific target, but more on whether a company is profitable.

Hasan brought a really refreshing touch to the discussion because we felt that we can connect to him better in terms of status. What can be more inspiring than meeting up with a brillant first-time entrepreneur and getting to know how he maneveur pass pitfalls and his tips and tricks in the way he handles his startup.

Hasan sees cold-calling more than a sales tool, but rather as a feedback mechanism to what customers really want. By calling customers, you can perfect your pitch, and through the knocks and bumps along the way toughen yourself against rejections. The best startups adjust their idea according to their customer feedback.

It’s interesting when I try to sum up the various thought process that goes through my head throughout the discussion. Gus shared with us the insight of an entrepreneur “showing passionate disinterest” in his idea. This oxymoron phrase is more clearly defined as the entrepreneur’s need to balance between to detach his ego from his idea so that he can accept feedback more receptively; and yet at the same time be passionate enough about his idea so that he keep trying and finding a way out.

I was so lucky to have meet 4 VCs today. My company just organized a lunch session between our employees and our board of directors, and the 3 VCs for my company gave really awesome insights into the way they handle the decision making process.

But on behalf on NUSEA, I would really like to thank Gus and Hasan for spending their time to come down to the NOC office to share with us their experience. I don’t think they will ever understand how much the interaction means for us!!

Our GEL assignment for next Monday was to produce a commercial for the course (to be uploaded on Google Video). The GEL course requires students from Stanford (the NUSEA students) and students from Kungl Tekniska Hogskolan in Stockholm to work together for weekly assignments!!

Here are the videos we’ve created!!

Atlantic Alliance

GapStream

Pluto

The Incredibles

Zing

Pangea Explorers

Initiatives

NextGen

Intercontinental Minds

Symphony

Enjoy!

Thanks to Ah San, the NUSEA team had a chance to visit the Oracle headquarters in Redwood City after our GEL lessons at Stanford. It was a timely visit. Tom Kosnik mentioned in our GEL class today about the leaders that we like to work for. And our class discussed extensibly about Larry Ellison, the controversial CEO of Oracle. Kevin Walsh has kindly agreed to host us for a company visit, and he shared with us what Oracle does, and an overview of their strategic developments in the new century.

It’s interesting to learn how Oracle branded themselves in the China market - 甲骨文. For those uninitiated, this item was actually the turtle shells that the ancient Chinese believed holds the keys to the future.

One of the takebacks, which was really relevant to us was how he manages his time. Being the CTO of the Oracle Asia Pacific Region, and the senior VP of Research and Development (Asia). His principle was to keep life simple, and he explained the problems in maintaining 2 houses (since he often flies around between Beijing, Singapore and Silicon Valley). He used to work 20-hours days when he was younger, only to realize that it is not a sustainable lifestyle. He came up with this quote:

“No matter how successful your business life is - If you lose the balance, you are not living a life.”

I have just learnt about what coaching is for the past two months and I would say that it has been quite a unique experience overall. The upsides of coaching is that it allows me to build cohesion amongst my two mates whom I carry out my coaching sessions with, so I can understand better their problems and also cultivate my sensitivity towards them.

Coaching is also a good way to reflect on how good I am in becoming a intermediate medium in solving other people’s problems. With friends, these problems are normally short termed and it is seldom that we coach each other about obtaining long term corporate objectives which align with the company vision, since we will only be working for a year.

In coaching, it is inevitable that we portray our “emotional inner selves” but this sometimes could get too emotional that the coach may find that he/she is not in the right position to comment. Also, the coachee tend to talk a lot about many other issues underlying the same problem and this could really dilute the definition of the real problem.

In coaching, we should focus and narrow down on the issue. Most of the time, I feel that problems are not well quantified and defined due to the constrain of time or due to circumstances that the coachee is “forced” to arrive at a conclusion which he/she is not even convinced herself. As a result, a solution is derived too hastily and may not always be the best way to solve the coachee’s problem. The aftermath is that the coachee would feel there is another reason which is the real cause of the problem.

My take on coaching: The coach is never to make decisions for the coachee, but to facilitate the coachee in making decisions to improve and move on.

Innovation goes hand in hand with entrepreneurship, and with this notion in mind, a couple of us set off to attend a pretty promising conference over two days during the weekend; “Roads to Innovation – International perspectives on the generation of ideas, technologies, and new business”.

Hosted by the NOVA, the Italian MBA Association, this conference “aims to disentangle the drivers of innovation in the economy and the role of universities, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and corporation in promoting new ideas and technologies, engaging distinctive policy makers, businesspersons, and scholars in the debate on the enablers of innovation in both technology-intensive and traditional services”.

Quite a mouth-full indeed; so many ideas and factors in one short sentence, yet amazingly, the organisers managed to pull it off, successfully achieving their aim through a series of 5 different panels that covered topics as varied as government policies, venture capital funding, high tech firms, biotech, power grids and washing machines.

The keynote speaker of the event was Mr. Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google. He broadly touched on the emerging trend and potential of user-generated content, especially with regards to YouTube, Google’s 70-20-10 policy (70% focus on core business, 20% creative initiatives, 10% others) , and free mobile phones. However, what stood out the most to me was not the content, but the manner Eric presented; he didn’t stand behind the podium, was full of hand gestures, humorous, casual and sincere – definitely the kind of boss I want to work for, and hopefully can become one day. Oh, and did I mention that Vincent and I actually ran after him when he exited the hall to get a photo, cool ya! J

Roads to Innovation 11/11- 11/12 Sat-Sun at Arrillaga Alumni Center Stanford

Naturally as a conference organised by the NOVA, there was a strong Italian presence in the crowd and on the panels. The first panel begun with a strong Italian flavour with mentions of European market liberalism, importance of reform within universities and capital investment. Personally, things got a lot more interesting when Paul Romer, leading US economist, brought up 3 factors that speed up the rate and scale of innovation –

1) Infrastructure and communication, technology building on technology
2) Synergising with other people, the need for scale and critical human mass
3) Institution and government policies

He even mentioned Singapore as a positive example where the institutions have been put in place to encourage innovation (contrary to what some of us may feel), and put down Singapore’s inability to create the next Google to the fact that we just don’t have the necessary critical mass. What do you guys think?
As the conference progressed, things just got more interesting - below are couple of thoughts and personalities that stood out;

1) Greg Waldorf, founding investor in eHarmony and CEO – Luck and timing is everything! Seize the right opportunities and ride the waves. Be open to failure, as long as you know the right decision was made.

2) Jeff Clavier, angel investor in Web 2.0 companies, French – Started off by saying “it’s weird that a French man is here speaking to a bunch of Italians after what happened at the World Cup. See you at the Euros”, not the exact words, but soccer fans will appreciate it. Excellent moderator, open minded and candid investor who doesn’t mince his words and is completely open about his mistakes.

3) Marco Milani, Indesit Company’s CEO, Europe top 3 producer of household appliances – “The fish dies from the head” (translated from Italian); the top management must be open to failure and innovation, or else innovation can never take off within a company.
Pricing on innovation; allow people to spend what they want to spend by providing unbundled pricing, i.e. separate the basic features from the add-ons, e.g. budget airlines focus on transportation, SIA provides a service beside transportation.

4) Diego Rodriguez, Director, IDEO - Think like a designer, be optimistic about making changes and improving lives. Do thorough market research by hanging out with real people. Ultimately make your team happy - Measure less, understand more, innovation will start taking place. Talk is cheap; nothing beats showing a prototype, and forget about PowerPoint.
During the event, I also had the chance to speak to freelance writer, Marguerite Rigoglioso, who wrote a more informative and well-written article. Without a doubt, this has been one of the best conferences I have been to. Thumbs up to the organisers - Andrea, Giovanni and team! Thanks guys!

5 Hours since Rainmakers Live! “The New Argonauts” ended. 0300. My last day as President of NUSEA. And I can’t seem to contain my post event excitement.

Meeting Professor AnnaLee Saxenian and hearing her speak was a dream come true. No one really knew the extent in which she impacted my life.

1 year ago
It all happened one year ago, after I applied to the NOC program, I took on the assignment to write a paper about Silicon Valley, what are the lessons that organizations and the government can learn about this region. That was when I first came across the terms “Regional Advantage”. I read about the rise of Silicon Valley and the stagnating of Route 128 back in the 1990s and I was fascinated by the story. Route 128 was in many ways, parallel to Singapore. AnnaLee’s story of stressing the cultural element in an innovative region opened my eyes to why Singapore might not be taking off as an entrepreneurial region.

I arrived, and I thought
It was then, my goal to come to Silicon Valley, and be consciously thinking about what makes Silicon Valley attract the top talent from around the world? How did they create a culture of cooperation and continuous learning? Can Singapore learn anything at all from the Silicon Valley story?

I started observing. I observed how mentors share their experiences with us. I observed how people behave in networking sessions. I observed how Starbucks is a place of ideas. I observed how there is such a strong sense of cooperation between companies and individuals. I observed how every profession in Silicon Valley can contribute to the success of the region. A lot of things I see happening around me reinforce all the descriptions and insights AnnaLee had about Silicon Valley.

The Secrets of Silicon Valley
The more I thought about AnnaLee’s words, the more hypothesis I formulated. I tested out these hypothesis, and when they are proven true, I called them “The Secrets of Silicon Valley.” And NUSEA really took off as an entrepreneurial organization because we discovered so many secrets of Silicon Valley. Does anyone question how Silicon Valley evolved?

The appreciation of the history of Silicon Valley made us acutely aware of the nature of Silicon Valley, and it was the basis of our strategic planning in NUSEA 6 months ago. There was a strong emphasis in connecting people, forging new areas of partnership and cooperation, being sincere, passionate and righteous in all that we do. All these outlooks and discoveries paved the way for NUSEA’s rise in Silicon Valley. The more we observed, the wiser we became, the more we leveraged on the collective wisdom.

Can Singapore become an entrepreneurial hub?
AnnaLee made an important point in the event just now. She mentioned numerous policy makers calling her to ask “How do we build the next Silicon Valley?” And the answer is, “You can’t”. It was perhaps 9 months ago in which I began to feel that Singapore may never take off as an entrepreneurial region. There is a strong cultural element of pride, lack of trust, fear of failure and competitiveness that restricts innovation and creativity. I was losing hope.