Being a competitive sportsman for the better part of my growing up years, the dream of competing at the Olympic Games was a natural one. Three knee injuries later, that dream has evolved to perhaps attending the Olympic Games (one that is firmly within my control).

TiE Con represented somewhat of a similar aura for the entrepreneur in me. Being there as an attendee this year can be likened to being a spectator at the Games. You are present; you can feel the atmosphere and recognize the importance to those battling to secure funding or connecting with speakers. But you somehow your life’s work does not hang in the balance like those ‘competing’.

I think my one-year here set me up decently well to work the crowd and to connect with speakers. But the contacts made – while extremely valuable would not be the highlight of TiECon for me.

Two speakers – both very aptly speaking as keynotes were what blew me away. The first was Naresh Goyal, Founder & CEO of Jet Airways. His story of going from a baggage handler in a small Indian airport to the owner of India’s first privately owned airline was truly inspirational. It might have happened in a different time, but his story was a clear reminder that success, in every definition of it, is a direct function of hard work and perseverance.

The other memorable speaker was John Wood, founder of “Room to Read”. “Room to Read” is a non-profit social enterprise that aims to bring literacy and learning to children in all the rural parts of the world. His goal is noble, like many others, but his methods and philosophy is truly exceptional and unlike any other I have seen. He believes in maximizing the donors’ dollar – more than 80% of donations go directly to the children (a staggeringly high statistic for a non-profit). More importantly, he believes these children need to be helped today and now. He answers to this belief by benchmarking his non-profit with one of the fastest expanding corporations in the world – Starbucks. In the last 3 years, “Room to Read” has opened more local language libraries around than world than Starbucks have opened coffee joints. How’s that for scalability and walking the talk? John reminded me of something I lost site of for a while – that one man can exact change in the world.

So while TiE Con was meant to be about contacts, business and understanding entrepreneurship better. It turned out to be so much more than that. It was about fanning the flames of passion and an awakening to closely held yet recently marginalized values in life.

Times are crazy but when the World starts spinning at its regular speed again, I do believe these lessons would be the ones I will carry with me through beyond my remaining time in the Valley.

When I first heard about the ABC 2008, I thought it would be the perfect fit for what I am trying to achieve here in the Valley - get a global perspective on successfully doing business in Asia.

It came at the end of an extremely intense period of finals, case competitions and the like. But it was well worth the trip up to Berkeley on last Saturday afternoon.

I missed the morning sessions but heard the Keynote by Stephen Pratt, CEO of Infosys Consulting, was extremely insightful. I think it would be useful to find out if transcripts or recordings of the session are available online.

The second keynote by Laura Tyson, Professor at Haas, was much more than what I expected (and I expected a lot!!). She provided an amazing analysis of how China and India are shaping as business and investment opportunities.

Some keypoints I pulled out of Dr. Tyson’s session include:

1. China vs India’s Growth
China has been a great investment opportunity not only because of their double digit growth, but the fact it has sustained this growth for close to 30 years. When compared to India, who really only started its push toward this new phase of economic development in the 1990s, it had a good 15-20 years head start.

2. Concerns with China’s Economy
Dr. Tyson pointed out that China does have some fundamental concerns related to the political situation as well as it huge over dependence on trade, and particular trade with the US.

China’s trade balance surplus with the US has been likened to each (poor) Chinese lending every (rich) American about US$4000. Now that’s something to ponder over, huh?

Check out this article that is related to it: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/fallows-chinese-dollars

The currency controls also means that the Yuan is severely under valued at this point. A good opportunity to invest in the RMB, maybe?

Check out also:

- “China as a Fragile Superpower” the book by Susan Shirk

3. Cisco’s Decision to Base its “East HQ” in India

Recently, Cisco opened it’s Globalisation Center East in Bangalore, India. In discussing Cisco reasons for picking India over China to situate this state-of-the-art facility, Dr, Tyson framed nicely the competitive advantage India seems to have over India. They include:

- India being the largest free-market democracy
The fact that India transition so seamlessly through a rather unexpected elections turnout really underscored the health of democracy and socio-political climate (albeit its many other issues) in India. This truly lends for stability and investor confidence.

- large skilled & English-speaking talent pool
India’s ’subsidiary official language’ is English and the urban workforce is very proficient in the language. Coupled with the technical education of the Indian institutions makes this very appealing to tech companies like Cisco.

- reasonable IP protection system & courts that are active (to some extent)
One big draw back China had for Cisco (and other research intensive companies) is its poor IP/copyright protection infrastructure. This is a relative strength for India. Also, the judicial system and presence of courts to file for action against IP violations in India also lends to a perceived lower risk of investment

- a growing middle class of more than 100m (still not where China is though)

Challenges for India included it’s poor physical infrastructure, the fact that 70% of its population are still rural, the more pronounced poverty situation and the restrictive labour laws.

All in all, the ABC 2008 was a very engaging and enriching session with its relevant speakers and panel sessions. It is definitely an event I feel should be on NUSEA’s calendar every year.

I also picked up a prospectus for the Haas MBA…So that’s a new possibility in itself too.

Hello everyone! I am Gundeep!

Last Friday, I along with Yujun and NUS Entrepreneur Association organized garageTalk – an event meant to connect global leaders, altruists, students and entrepreneurs.

The event kicked off at 6:30pm with light dinner. The food area was filled with 80 people from different backgrounds and different parts of the world. Standing at the corner of the room, I felt satisfied to see old classmates meeting each other, entrepreneurs sharing ideas with budding entrepreneurs, employers meeting potential employees and like-minded people sharing ideas and inspiring each other.

Then at 7:30pm, Tom Kosnik, one of our Stanford professors for Global Entrepreneurial Marketing shared his vision of GLEAN (Global Leaders Entrepreneurs and Altruists Network) with everyone. During his talk, I realized the diversity of the in garageTalk and how each one of us could contribute to other people’s life to make world a better place. Following Tom Kosnik’s talk, we had 3 entrepreneurs, Julian, Dev Ramnane and Michael Pierantozzi talking to us about their entrepreneurial lives. They ended their talks with different challenges each one of them was facing in their respective companies. The thing that inspired me was Michael Pierantozzi’s quote, “Leaving a big company and starting your venture is like jumping out of an aeroplane and building a new one on your way down.” Indeed, starting a company is a challenge but one needs to take risks in life to be able to start next Google or Microsoft.

The event ended but the 3 challenges posed by the entrepreneurs were still roaming in my mind. I also met other like-minded people who were willing to help me for the next garageTalk.

Indeed, the event was PRICELESS for people who had come with an open mind. I could see new friendships forming and partnerships nurturing. It was great organizing such an event and meeting people of different genres.

Domo! Alvin Lai desu!
Look! Our dear Shao Shao having a wild time in the Vasquez household! Smile until sooo happi!

Here in Silicon Valley, National University of Singapore (NUS) students on the NUS Overseas Colleges program work full time at high technology startups and take courses at Stanford University in a bid to experience and do entrepreneurial things like start startups, organize events and pursue their passions (ok that was a mouthful :D).

6 of us rent a nice place called Vasquez Court and we soon became the Vasquez household. Our dear happy friend Shao Shao (Shaorong)’s a guest today and from the looks he’s so happy to be here!

Okay enough messing around, here’s what really happened.

What started out as a simple invitation for a group of GEM students became a big gathering where people invited more people and their GEM classmates, to the point it became like a big meetup. We had nice Singaporean dishes and we got to meet and make new friends!

I personally met GEM classmates who work in Google and Microsoft and even people who are really excited to pick up Ruby on Rails! How cool is that!

We should do this often man! Ok, nuff said! Pictures!

See everyone so on pose and pose! Especially Bernard damn gek seh Eugene’s like tickling Weichong’s tongue, Shao Shao posing like Farmer brand peanuts and Gavin’s forking his nose and both Zai Zhuang and our teh ping hui looking pretty.. Hmm..

Our nice Chinese friends, huan yin guang lin!

Cool dudes!

I can’t wait for the next gathering!!! :D

The Singapore American Business Association (SABA)
brings us this very interesting seminar about.. ok the blog post title is pretty self explanatory..

At the center of the limelight would be  Patrick Yam, who’s the CEO of Sensei Partners LL, a Menlo Park, CA venture capital firm, who has a pretty good history in the finance realm, check him out!

In short, this seminar would touch on:

• Validity of historical investment myths
• Return on Location (ROL) – which refutes the popular contention of the “on-hour” rule of venture capital investing

Patrick would proceed to elaborate why ROL is “an answer to better venture capital investing today and beyond”.

Check it out from SABA’s website!

Domo! This is Alvin Lai, your new host for the NUSEA blog. I just took over as VP of Media and publications of NUSEA barely a week ago and this is my first blog post! I hope to learn from all you dear readers, please feel free to provide feedback and comments!

You might notice a slight change in writing style here, as I believe in writing in a very personal and candid manner, which makes for interesting reading (I hope :D). You can find out more about me, and how I view blogging and the what’s in it for both of us (dear readers and yours truly) at my blog, Alvin Lai, An Introduction.

Back to the main topic!

Today, we are very very fortunate to have Farzad Naimi, the very charismatic CEO of LiteScape for a sharing session with us. Check him out from the Litescape Executive profiles page.

Personally, I like to take down concise salient points, like after I read a very insightful Paul Graham essay or the famous Steve Jobs Stanford commencement ceremony speech. In doing so, they serve as good reminders and triggers for future reference and reflection.

The only drawback would be that it might be difficult for readers to understand the context, well don’t worry, just ask! Comment! We can make this better as we go along.

Here goes!

Leverage existing affiliations – working for VISA.

How you find the japanese call center? An existing pain point for VISA – most if not all ideas come from pain points!

Are you a tech person? How you balance tech and business?

Passion not really with engineering.

Bootstrap, slowly 20%, 30% open up to investors. want flexibility!

Success == feel good about yourself.

Finding/building right team – takes time

Expose yourself to business models, see the full chain
Had basics MBA, finance, economics - very useful.
Opportunity work with others CFO CEO

Entrepreneurship is an attitude. Failure not in vocabulary!

All humans are open, just approach them from the right angle, especially if it matters for you

Treasure people around you - They might be your lifetime mentor, take them seriously!

Pay attention to details, single flower example – employee saw pretty flower, he gave him flower, brighten up their whole day, deadline seem like nothing.

Singapore government – very rare positive approach attitude towards entrepreneurship.

View people as a resource, need examples to push forward change in Singapore.

Starting startup, plan a deadline, give yourself 2 years, see what happens then.

Starting startup – best to do it yourself, you learn best. The wave experience, go up and down, startup experience a prerequisite for joining other startups.

Bad blood relations – admit need courage, learn from it and emerge stronger, good character building, with sincerity.

Exit at pre IPO – else golden handcuff, wanna remain liquid.

Team Leadership
Loyalty, experience, they know u can do it, trust and feel good about you.

NO mediocre team, might as well not start – Farzad meant that given a choice of starting a team with lousy people, he’d rather not start at all. Thanks Alastair for pointing this out!

Tom Kosnik as advisor, 5 min coffee also good.

Crossroads, bleeding, just abandon the idea.

Some startups are chaotic in nature. Agile!

Write things down! They force you to think! Sounds familiar huh!.

This is an experimental blog post in terms of content and presentation style, tell me what you think!

*Update*

Thanks to dear Ryan for suggestions for improving the blog post:

• adding an intersting banner image to catch attention
• embolden key points for easy reading
• search engine optimizing tips

Thank you Ryan!

*Update 2*

Here’s our dear friend Derrick Du Wen Yu’s contribution and reflection of the mentorship session. Apparently he has taken away quite a bit here!

3 Shining Characteristics of Farzad that Helped Him Become a Successful Entrepreneur

Humor

Many people ignore the contribution of humor when talking about an entrepreneurs’ success. Humor can help diminish team’s stress; Humor can help glue the team members together; Humor can help build up nice relationship with contacts. And humor can help you to become a good sales person —-as an entrepreneur, you are selling every day. Analytical skills and technical skills are important for entrepreneurs, and humor can make those skills more powerful.

Pursuit for happiness

“Happiness exists in the process of pursing it” For every start up, Farzad exits at the pre-IPO stage; for him, the process of building up a new thing is more fun than getting the great finance return from the 18 month handcuff IPO.

Trust

Farad trusts his team, his friend and his partners. “I don’t believe you will do it, I don’t think you will do it; I just know you will do it; this is my language of success” quoted from Farzad. Because of the trust, his
subordinates follow him, investors bet on him and customers buy from him.

But do not trust people too easily, Farzad also has the experience of being cheated, when he bought a Ferrari from an acquaintance. However, if that happens, take it as an individual case only, not making the statement like “I will never trust Chinese/Japanese/Korean… people any more”

Awesome Derrick!

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”.

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!

It was my second day in Silicon Valley and off I went to visit Logitech, one of the premier companies in personal peripherals for computers. Guerrino De Luca, CEO of Logitech shared with us the company’s business and personal experiences as a CEO.

He told us about some of the key factors a company should keep in mind before venturing into a new business were firstly, to understand customers’ needs and secondly, to have one’s own cost-saving model to face competition. He illustrated it with one of the key challenges Logitech faced in 1998-2000 in the scanner market with the launch of hand scanners. The popularity of standard printer-like scanners which were cheaper than Logitech’s hand scanners increased tremendously. And henceforth, Logitech felt that they should have known the market well and been ready to face competition at that time. He even shared with us the new fields Logitech is exploring into which are mainly digital music and home. He said that the success of the company depends on having right people at the right places and all of them from engineers to marketers should participate in the innovation of the product.

Being an Italian himself, upon being asked he told us that being Singaporeans, we all have a high success rate in setting up companies or finding a job in global environment of Silicon Valley because of our ability to speak two languages. This skill enables us to think deeply in various matters and gives us an edge over Americans who know just one language.

With insightful questions and answers the visit ended with a group photo with the CEO. There was a lot more to the trip and those who missed can actually see a broadcast which would be posted on NUSEA’s site soon. That’s all from my side. This is Gundeep saying Chao!!

Upon reaching the Sun Microsystems headquarters, we saw many interesting new technologies that were show casing around us. Fred, the Senior Group Manager and Strategic Account Development for Asia Pacific Sun Microsystems brought us to the briefing room and gave us a welcome speech. Next, Andrew Barty, the Finance IT Director, gave us some insight about Sun’s Corporate Vision and Strategy. He wants this to be an interactive session and many of us asked him interesting questions regarding Sun’s strategy and business model. I was particularly interested in how Sun Microsystems make money by giving away free software. When Vipul Gupta, the Distinguished Engineer in Sun Microsystems explained and demonstrated to us the upcoming technologies of Sun, it intrigued many technology enthusiasts among our NUSEA members and caught all our attention.

A loud applause followed when Scott McNealy, dressed in casual jeans and a shirt, entered the discussion room. It was amazing to get to see Scott McNealy, someone whom we studied in our Global Entrepreneurial Leadership course at Stanford in person.

Scott wanted the topic to be of interest to the audience, and he chose not to give a talk but to conduct an interactive Q&A session. I learnt from him how insecurity could lead someone to work hard and not let our goals stop us as our goals would change over time.

I have learned that very good ideas are controversial but correct. They are controversial so that not many people could think of it and differentiation leads to price difference. Instead of crushing the competitors, we saw how Sun could benefit by partnering with them instead.

He then shared with us his involvement in the Global Education and Learning Community (GELC). Curriki, a non-profit organization, aims to provide open source textbook and classroom experience to poor families who were not able to afford K-12 education for their kids. It was an awesome discussion and at the end of the session, we gave Scott a souvenir from Singapore, as a token of sincere appreciation for his passion and willingness to share with us.