Asia Startup Lessons

  “Scale” is perhaps the most overused word in the startup lexicon. It is splashed across tech media and ushered across every incubator, accelerator and plush venture capital office from Silicon Valley to Singapore. When I began my startup journey I admit that I had to look it up on Wikipedia. I had to make sure I was using “scale” in the correct context as I had splattered it across 99 pages of my 100-page pitch deck (90 pages longer than it should have been by the way). Scalability is fundamentally important to any startup. Your systems, operations, and sales need to be scalable to grow a healthy technology business. However, does your market give you unlimited potential to scale your users? If you are an ambitious startup founder in the Asia Pacific, you do not have to look further than China and Japan. With over $15 trillion in GDP, $13 trillion in domestic market capitalization and over $50 trillion in consumer wealth, these two geographies dwarf every other market in the Asia...

  Having spent over a decade building companies in Asia, I can testify that it is f**king hard. In the beginning, ignorance is bliss. You allow your sexy PowerPoint slides to seduce you into believing your big idea is flawless. Your projections are up and to the right and you feel invincible. You sleep great at night and have the energy and ego to believe you will change the world. It's not until you quit your job, realize you have no health insurance, absorb the fact that VCs don't respond to your emails, and that you only have $2,000 left in the bank when reality sets in. You have been totally unaware of how misguided and flawed your plan really is. You are not sleeping quite so well… but you are resilient. You put your head down and execute. There is nothing glamorous about losing track of day and night, writing code, structuring a company, lawyers, tax law, or fundraising. But you persevere. To this point, I could be describing the challenging journey of any startup entrepr...