Thanks to Esther and Wee Li, a few of us will have the opportunity to have a lunch session with “Deep” Nishar - The Director of Product Management at Google. It will be interesting to see what we can learn from him! More on Nishar’s Profile can be found at the Silicon Valley Webguild site.
We recently concluded our recent RainMakers Live event, NUSEA’s biannual mixer. However, with so many mixers and panel discussions in the valley, it’s difficult for our event to stand out. We wanted to do something more than organizing an event and getting speakers. Already, NUSEA had our fair share of learning from experience of others - What we really need to do is not to just engage in passive learning - But to be involved in active learning and creativity. (Check out Mohan’s interview with Folksonomy) Therefore the main considerations we had when organizing this year’s event is:
“How can we come up with an event where participants themselves were an integral part of the show? How can we encourage active learning, rather that simply sitting down and listening to people who have “been there and done that?”
NUSEA members put their thinking caps on and came up with the idea of having an entrepreneurial game. Participants got a chance to be part of the event by actively getting involved in forming teams, brainstorming ideas and pitching ideas to other teams at the event. We further refined it by inviting a cool new startup, MINT to deliver a challenge to the participants at the event. We deliberately did not inform the participants about the challenge before the event and we wanted them to think on the spot. Participants had just over half an hour to come up with a plan for MINT. The top 3 teams will then pitch their ideas to the judges from MINT. The winning team will walk away with a $500 cash prize sponsored by MINT.
It was interesting seeing the different mixes of the teams and their dynamics. Most teams came up with elaborate sketches of their ideas, along with funky team names. The best part was that participants were actively engaged to think on the spot and interact with people they met at the event itself. We were really privileged to have Justin Ricaurte who flew down all the way from Seattle to join us!
The event was not big scale. No famous panelists. Nothing ordinary. Nothing fantastic. However, all of us had a great time at the event and we achieved what we set out to do, or more likely what we set out not to do and that is to not do “yet another panel discussion”.
NUSEA recently went to the Womens 2.0 napkin challenge, an innovative event where participants had to mail their business idea on a napkin. =)
The top 5 teams would pitch their ideas (this time with presentation slides) to a panel of VCs and industry experts, as well as a packed audience of eager entrepreneurs, excited to see the ideas.
The 5 companies that presented were:
• FindYourScene: A community website where people can find “their crowd” and post, discover, and rate social events.
• Laser-Seal: Exploits ground-breaking interaction between light physics and cell molecular biology to reduce cost and improve quality of surgical wound closure.
• QTstar: Video monetization and intermediary ad service company in China and the United States.
• O’Light: Cutting-edge OLED technology to lighting designs.
• (YOU)STYLEME: Online fashion community where men and women who have particular style needs can connect with other consumers who are style-savvy in a fun and engaging way.
All of them had solid presentations with well thought out plans. In the end, the 2 winning teams were O’Light and Laser-Seal. The audience choice award went to O’Light as well. More details on the event can be found here.
Winning Team: Laser-Seal
Winner and Audience Choice - O’Light
(Pictures courtesy of Women 2.0)
The takeaway I got from this was not so much on the ideas and how people were pitching it. I learnt that there were so many people out there who were passionate about their own ideas and willing to share it publicly to get feedback. Trust me - Coming up with an idea and making the effort to come up with plans is hard. But to pitch the idea in front of a large crowd and pitching it to a panel of critical and experienced entrepreneurs and VCs was no mean feat. That was something I believed NUSEA members and Singaporeans alike could greatly learn from. What we really need are people who are passionate about what they do and not be afraid of risking everything to go pursue it. Having an idea that is perceived as bad or “just won’t work” is fine. It’s the effort and the process of going through it that really counts. A true failure is one who never tried in the first place. In my eyes, everyone who took the effort to draw out their ideas on that little napkin and send it to the Women 2.0 team deserved a big pat on the back for making the effort and trying.
-Mohan Belani
The 10th committee has been sourcing for a way to manage the people we know in NUSEA. Apparently, handing over spreadsheets of contacts from one batch to the other is not very effective in building up our network. What we wanted was a solution that enables us to share our NUSEA network.
And as a result of all this, we’ve created a NUSEA LinkedIn Group for our networks! You can join in our group over here:
Wee Li’s in the process of fixing an appointment with Vipul Gupta, a Distinguished Engineer in Sun Microsystem. It’s another chance for NUSEA members to go over to Sun after our last visit. Looking forward to meeting Vipul soon!
SABA - the Singaporean American Business Association is holding its Vietnam Investment Seminar at the end of this month:26 April (Thurs), 5:30 -10pm
Hyatt Regency Santa Clara
Vietnam is fast becoming the most promising and exciting economy in Asia. It’s ability to attract investors is attributed to its inherent qualities of youth, tenacity, resource abundance and it government’s pro-business policies.
The influx of investors from Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Europe and U.S. into Vietnam over the recent years have driven its GDP growth rate to over 7% per annum, making Vietnam the fatest growing economy in Asia.
Join SABA at this seminar to learn more about the business opportunities in Vietnam and how you & your business can benefit from this Emerging Market!
The next NUSEA Elections for the 11th batch is scheduled on 11 May 2007 at 7pm PDT. Stay tuned to the blog to keep track of the new and upcoming committee members!
Evan Huang, CTO of XMLCities was kind enough to grace us with a visit this evening. Despite his status and achievements, he was humble and eager to share his experience with us. His focus tonight was on market segmentation and product positioning.
As we huddled around a table in the middle of the NOC office to enjoy a good spread of Vietnamese sandwiches, Evan began his story of his time back in Adobe where he and a couple of folks worked on several projects ranging from the very exciting array signal processing to plain telephony. It soon became evident to him that the telephony project, simplest amongst the plethora of cool projects his team was working on, turned out to be the most profitable project simply because there was a market for it.
Read: Technology is not the end all - there must be a market for it
Stories came one after another ranging from his unsuccessful venture in color OCR, which served its intended function well - perhaps too well as it soon caught the attention of software pirates who eventually destroyed his business model.
He also touched upon his version of a secret sauce for a web startup - collecting user information.
The key insight is that if one can somehow harvest information from customer visits, that information can be very valuable and not easily copied. An example of this is showing a user what multitudes of users before him/her think about a product. This is only valuable once there is enough traffic and another me-too site will find it hard to duplicate such information.
He wrapped up the sharing session by demoing/pitching his thumbdrive solution that will allow any computer to boot an operating system (Mac OSX, Windows or Linux) of your preference from the thumbdrive.
Users of this technology will not have to worry about key logging and viruses as the operating system booted from this device is encapsulated in a Linux Operating system, which are additional compelling reasons apart from the obvious portability and archival purposes.
All in all, it was a most interesting and enlightening evening.
The resumes of the new batch of NUSEA members are finally ready! This could be the largest intake of Silicon Valley trainees in the history of NUSEA.
It’s so exciting how the new batch are coming in, and it also signals that it’s our (the 10th batchers) turn to return home. Welcome to the 12th batch! We pray all of you get placed, and good luck to the 11th batches if that happens!
To the 12th Batch >> Set your goals, know what you want to achieve, and find out what your life mission is. The experience in the Valley is one that you can never live again, even if you were to work there after graduation. Being part of NUSEA distinguishes us from the people in the Valley.
Welcome!!