Startups Unplugged

Category: startup communities

Posts that include information about startup communities.

  • Facade Over Foundation

    Why Do We Want More Startups?

    I’ve never gotten a good answer to that question. Is it because people believe startups drive innovation? Is it because the successful ones create jobs? Is it because people are happier working at them? Most of the time it seems that we (meaning cities, regions, countries, universities, communities…) want more startups because it seems others do too.

    It’s a metric on which we are judged. But I don’t know that it is a good one.

    When it comes to the question of trying to duplicate tech hub success around the world, the most common first movements are to copy the facade, but not the foundation, of entrepreneurship.

    More Events

    When you copy the facade, you do the things that are noticeably associated with success. Associated, meaning connected to — but not necessarily producing — that success. While I’ve been ranting against generic startup events for years now (I call them startup entertainment), events are still the most common of these facades. The most popular and easiest to produce are still the pitch events. But, when we think about the value that these events often provide — getting startup people together to compete in a contest where they are judged by people who don’t understand their work (judges have had a only few minutes to get to know the startups) and in front of an audience of people who are not their customers — this is clearly a poor way to choose good companies. Anecdotally, I believe that this is true because the only pitch event I ever competed in (years ago in my first startup) we won. And I can tell you that we did not have a great business. We had to totally change the business in the months following the pitch event as we started to learn from our customers. However, I was the best presenter that day and that is what matters in an event. I have also seen judges “fooled” into awarding the better presenters, rather than the better businesses in events like these. After all, it’s a pitch competition, not a business competition. That’s facade over foundation.

    When you build foundation instead of facade, you don’t worry about looking like a tech hub and think of other things. For example, you might work on how you can support university students who are developing skills that would fuel their work (entrepreneurial thinking, programming, design, business, marketing and more) as they explore entrepreneurial options. You help take people who have the beginning of a startup and match them with potential customers. These are examples of activities that probably do not generate much attention or buzz by themselves. And that is just fine, if you make a difference in the quality of learning and future prospects, then the entire tech community gains.

    You also probably stop focusing on the words “startup” and “tech” and realize that you should just support businesspeople.

    Find Local Heroes

    Related to this is the question of playing to local strengths for tech hubs. These are often the strengths (such as manufacturing, finance, design, etc.) that specific locations have gained in their economic history. If you look at early stage startups, it often seems that there is no consideration to capitalize on these local strengths. In fact, I have often been surprised at how similar startups in very different markets can be. These similarities often have a good reason. One is that very early-stage startup founders have not been around long enough to have expertise in a local strength or to know others who do. Instead, they view the world though a startup culture lens and think of “building startups” rather than solving specific problems for their local customers. Another reason is that startup people often look to similar content as a taste-making guide. Another easy suggestion for you: don’t spend too much time reading tech news. Instead, read the news your customers read.

    When it comes to local strengths, every location has people who deeply understand the local situation, have built successful businesses and who, I believe, can be persuaded to guide the next generation of entrepreneurs. I often call these people “local heroes.” These local heroes can do much more for any location than a startup celebrity who briefly visits and who does not fully understand conditions on the ground. My suggestion is to cultivate your local heroes rather than trying to attract startup celebrities. The local heroes have an interest in making your community strong. I look suspiciously at anyone who prefers to hear a celebrity speak. It you’re really that curious, you can hear them give 10 different versions of the same talk on Youtube.

    I hope that these suggestions help as you build your own startup — or business — community.

  • Maxed Out Mentor

    There are a handful of startup world terms that I can’t stand. Sometimes that’s because the terms are confusing. Other times because they’re downright unhelpful. Other times it’s just because I’m preternaturally cantankerous. I’m not sure into which one of those my experience with the word “mentor” falls.

    To rethink these old issues, start with an old example. Remember the original mentor? That’s right. It was a guy named “Mentor” and he was helping Odysseus’ son Telemachus during the Trojan War. Go back and read all about it in paperback. That mentor-mentee interaction was probably very different from the casual way the word is thrown around today.

    In 2012 – 2013 when I was building startup programs in Hong Kong, I actively put myself out there to help young founders. Over that 12 month period, I had first time coffee meetings with 250 people. That’s five new people a week for a year (I didn’t track repeat meetings). The format was usually the same: 1) they contact me somehow (through a mutual connection or cold outreach), 2) we arrange a time to meet, 3) they introduce themselves and an issue they’re having, 4) I offer some suggestions or follow-up in some way. In most cases, this was a one-off conversation. The purpose of the meeting was the help during the meeting itself. In other cases, however, something else happened. From that group of 250, apart from the advice, I estimate that I connected 25 to journalists who then wrote about their startup, I connected a few to investors who put in money, and found jobs or clients for a few others. Overall, this was a very loose type of mentoring. There was no ongoing mentor-mentee relationship intended.

    When I moved to Los Angeles I initially started to do the same thing but time needed for work and family prevented me from meeting as many new people. Instead I preferred to focus on a smaller number of mentees over a longer time. Even so I started to run out of time. Then a strange phenomenon started. The less time I had, the more in demand I became.

    Like a stock character in a commedia dell’arte play I (or other mentors) suddenly become the last hope of the startup. From requests for meetings, coffee, to be interviewed for the (non-funded but very competitive) Incubator program I currently run, founders will bend over backwards to talk, even when I explain that they’ve got the wrong guy.

    Note that this is for solicited, not unsolicited, advice. (Kevin DeWalt wrote a good post on unsolicited advice where he explains why “[u]nless you’re asking for time or money you’re under no obligation to answer anyone who challenges what you’re doing.”)

    You can add lots of value if you only focus on people and situations where you are a fit, only give advice where you know what you’re talking about, don’t think that you’re running your mentee’s company, and reflect on your meetings to improve.

    Don’t Make Your Mentor Mad

    It’s rare, but I do get angry sometimes. It happens when I’ve put a lot into helping a founder and their company and they throw it away. I’ll give you two examples that bothered me in the last few years.

    1. I helped a young team over two semesters. I coached them extensively in raising money (they followed my pitch almost exactly and it paid off in a quick raise). Coached them through the metrics they needed to hit. Repeated again and again how to analyze their data. What happened? When I asked probing questions it was revealed that their CEO was showing me and others fabricated numbers. I tore him to shreds and he never spoke to me again. When there was a well-hidden ethical problem, what was the purpose of all of the other work I did?
    2. Another founder I helped raise money and get connected had the habit of spending much of his time on people problems. That is, he was not making tough people decisions. He kept people who weren’t producing and even hired new ones that didn’t produce. Over a long, painful period when nothing else of value happened in the company, he finally terminated some of them in a bridge-burning way. I reflected that the only way I could have known the extent of the situation was to be with the team as they worked. They were out of state. I should have spent more time on the rest of the team and not just the CEO. The founder’s bridge burning I chalk up to stress and miscommunication rather than malicious intent.

    Today, my regular work-related repeat mentor-mentee relationships involve around 50 startups. Add to that some percentage of students in the four classes of I usually teach per year (maybe 20% of the total class population of 150 people). My goal now is to go deep on a smaller set of companies where I can make a difference.

    More about that later. For now, mentors and mentees, be good to each other and be good to yourselves.

  • Hey Hong Kong Startups — You Know That List? It Doesn’t Matter

    Two years ago today I said goodbye to friends and colleagues, got on a plane and left Hong Kong. I had spent just a year in Hong Kong focused on working with the growing number of startups there by running AcceleratorHK and an earlier program called Startup Bootcamp. When I gave a farewell talk at Good Lab, I tried to sum up the year in front of what felt like the entire Hong Kong startup community.

    (You haven’t heard much from me because in the two years since I left, I got married, had two kids, wrote a book on the emerging startup community experience, became a professor of entrepreneurship at USC and now run the USC Incubator.)

    There are a lot of amazing things happening in the startup world — around the globe, around Asia and also specifically in Hong Kong. One thing that’s true the world over is how much groups like recognition. So when I saw today’s Global Startup Ecosystem Report I had to look it over. My new home of Los Angeles is doing well apparently, but what about Hong Kong? It was nowhere to be found on the list.

    I don’t care about things like this. For a few years now and certainly the year I was in Hong Kong I tried to strip away the unnecessary things that didn’t contribute. Strip away the lists, many social events, reports and you’re left with what’s actually happening and what actually matters. I’d say that my new home of Los Angeles and several other up-and-coming startup locations suffer from a different extreme. The community gets buzz, it becomes cool to do a startup and all of a sudden I start to meet new founders who tell me they “caught the startup bug.” That is one of my least favorite phrases to hear a would-be founder say. If you become interested in something entrepreneurial just because everyone else is doing it, you’re less likely to be serious and follow through. In fact, one of the advantages I believe Hong Kong had when I was there was that when I met people working on a startup I could assume that they were more serious than the global norm. To work on something as uncertain as a startup in a place with only partial support means that you’re probably serious about it. I even remember one of the early Startup Bootcamp members tell me back in 2012 that if he ever went out and met a girl he would never say he was working on a startup because what would be heard was that he has no job, no money and no prospects. Quite different from what you’d hear in a top 20 hub on the list.

    Still, there has been a lot of growth in Hong Kong in the last two years. There were several recent exits, including Taxiwise, Divide and AliveNotDead. There’s a new startup visa program, government and corporate funding from Google and Alibaba. The community, which when I left I had estimated to be several hundred startups strong on my old Hong Kong startup list now probably numbers several times that.

    So don’t worry, Hong Kong startups. It doesn’t matter if you’re not on this list. It doesn’t matter if Dave McClure didn’t mention you in his comments either.

    Just keep working.

  • Judging the Judges

    In the startup world, there are many occasions in which startups are judged and few (if any) occasions when the judges themselves are judged.

    I want to quote my friend and startup advisor Kevin Dewalt, who in a blog post wrote “We don’t need to be judges – the customers are the only judge that matters.” Kevin’s post references startup events in Asia but now that I’ve been back in the US for a while, I see many similarities in the way we can improve judging of startups. Here are some things I’ve done to try to be a better “judge.”

    • Before I judged at a Startup Weekend for the first time, I ran my own one-person Startup Weekend to try to understand what the teams went through. While I had mentored there before, I had never been a participant in the event. I find that if the judges have never been in the position of the people on stage presenting, they lack the ability to quickly understand what the presenters have achieved. That being said, I think that Startup Weekend (if followed correctly) has one of the best opportunities to produce good judge and judgment experiences.
    • Since then, I’ve judged at different events. I see that presentation skills can trump anything else even when we’re on guard and looking at the businesses behind the presentations. Again, to quote Kevin’s post: “As an Angel investor I really don’t care much about “pitch” quality – I care whether you’re solving a real problem for customers and can make money doing it.” But being a good presenter almost always gives you an advantage over the others. As a judge, I stay alert when I encounter this this skill.
    • I memorize the judging criteria. This is something that I have not yet seen many others do, which causes confusion during deliberation. There are two reasons behind this: laziness of judges and organizers who don’t provide judging criteria until right before the event. Excuse me if I sound upset, but I figure if people are going to work hard on their projects for two days straight (or in other situations for months or years), expecting to be judged by pre-set criteria, the least we should do is to know the rules and judge them according to expectations. Lack of clarity and familiarity leads to confusion during deliberations.
    • Knowing how to give feedback after a brief few minutes. Something I often see experienced people struggle with is giving feedback while judging. This is tricky because there’s usually only minimal information to go by and our individual biases run strong. I often see experienced people judging say why the team is on the wrong track, because they’re doing something contrary to the judge’s experience. Here are my favorite useless comments I’ve heard while sitting on judging panels:
      • “Look, I know this industry very well, because [famous name] pitched me [years ago] and this is not the way this works…”
      • “I’ve worked in this market for years and you don’t understand that [insert random specific factoid]. You ignored this, so I am penalizing you.”
      • “My employees could build this in a weekend.” This was at a more developed startup pitch (not a hackathon or Startup Weekend) so the comment was even more insulting. The entrepreneur was polite and handled it well.
      • “I would never invest in this.” Truth is it’s outside of the judge’s industry and he’s not an investor anyway.
    • When I interact with the teams, my hack to keep myself open-minded and available to learn is to try to only ask questions rather than make declarations. As in, “You didn’t mention talking to any potential customers when you built [your hack / project / prototype]. Can you tell us about what you did to validate that you have a real problem and a validated solution?” “What are the per user metrics?” “Why did you build this as a mobile app instead of a web service?”
    • Don’t try to look smart or to be the Simon Crowell of the panel. One of the oddest judging experiences I had was when I was on a panel of three — me and two others competing with each other to be the mean judge.
    • I never am tough on the teams with the explanation that “that’s the only way they will learn,” as I hear judges say. Too often, the toughness does not accompany real feedback that is actionable. Judges should preface (even tacitly) any feedback with the phrase “what I would do if I were you…”

    I would love to see a reverse judging event, where the judges are scored on following the judging criteria, giving actionable feedback and their relevancy. And revisiting the startups after a year to see which judges were right would be interesting also.

    If you like this post, you might like my book Startup Sacrilege.

  • You’re So Vain

    While we talk about lean startup and vanity metrics we also often send conflicting signals. Here are some examples that startup ecosystems create or enable. From what I’ve seen, vanity is the major culprit.

    The Events Problem

    Speaker Events. You don’t get any closer to your goal by going to hear a speaker, famous or not. Is this a good use of your time? Will there be other benefits to going that make it worth not working for a couple hours? Or do you feel good about being in the crowd and getting a beer afterward. (Yes, I’ve spoken at lots of events.)

    Demo Days. I’ve heard from a few startups that are pressured to demo something they’ve already determined has no future, but which looks good in front of an audience. This is the vanity demo day. Why? It’s there to make the program look good by making the audience feel that things have gone according to plan instead of owning up to the fact that many (most?) startups change direction. Presenting something that you know you’re not going to continue building is a waste of everyone’s time. I’ve worked with startups who have changed course right before their demo days and I’m fine with that… (I’ve run a bunch of demo days and have stayed away from the above problems but have heard it elsewhere.)

    Pitch Events. This is where a group of selected startups pitch to a panel of judges, after which one is declared the “winner.” There may or may not be a prize. That’s the format that I’ve seen time and again. The problem is, the judges are not given any opportunity to really evaluate the companies and perhaps are not the best ways of evaluating startups at all. (Would you want to be evaluated based solely on five minutes talking onstage?) The image that I like to show potential startups applying to these events: the performing seal. Does a startup really “win” an event or is the real winner the organizer of the pitch event? (I’ve judged at a bunch of pitch events.)

    The Celebrity Mentor Problem

    A very small number of famous mentors get a lot of attention, but realistically do not have the time or interest to advise every startup out there. Instead of looking to famous startup mentors for everything (a vanity metric in itself), what about those unheard of mentors who have deep industry knowledge in your field? Those who have worked with the same customers and markets that you are building for today? They might speak a different language than the startup people, but they also might know more about the problems you’re facing. Seek them out instead of going down the popular path.

    The Too Much Uneeded Information Problem

    Take the number of articles startup people read about their target market and customers and divide that by the number of “startup” themed posts they read in tech publications. Cry when the ratio is lower than three.

    The Sexiness Problem

    Yes, there is a problem with sexiness in startups. This happens when people feel better about repeating the phrase “I’m in a startup,” than they do about building something people want. This is a hard one to call out because sometimes the good feeling that comes from being in a startup is all people have to hold on to.

    Startups can be sexy — geek sexy. By geek sexy I mean that there is no actual sex, but we still feel really good about ourselves.

    Since you’re going to be serving your target customers and market for years, make sure that you love it. Following trends that show up in the popular press or investment community will leave you looking bored geek sexy.

    Worrying About Your City’s Place On A “Top Startup Location” List

    I spent a year in Hong Kong running AcceleratorHK and Startups Unplugged and saw the city get listed as the number one tech hub to watch. People celebrated. I also saw the city not get mentioned on a bunch of other top startup locations. People complained. Neither of these things matter much. Build helpful, supportive communities and you’ll get the recognition you deserve.

    Tech Ecosystem, Heal Thyself

    Different parts of the tech ecosystem can unwittingly be like doctors who advise low sugar intake and then are seen ripping open a bag of Cadbury Creme Eggs on the walk to the car. We preach lean startup but then make sure that startups are fed a high sugar diet of tech news, demo days, events and lists of celebrity mentors…

    Should this matter? Candy producers don’t set aside part of their profits to treat diabetes. So why should startup communities care about the misinformation of early-stage startups?

    I think it’s because these same communities’ reasons for being is to help. They exist because at heart, startup culture in most parts of the world is collaborative. People want successes. They want examples that go on to become bigger supporters of the rest of the community.

    So focus on the important. Are you learning? Are you growing? When you determine you need to change your business model, do you do it or stay attached to the original idea you dreamed up in the shower? How much time do you spend working on your startup and how much attending / reading / worrying about these other things?

    If you liked this post, you’ll love my book Startup Sacrilege.

  • When Does a Startup Accelerator Succeed?

    There’s a lot written about startup accelerators. At least, there’s a lot written by outside casual observers; very little is written about them from the inside. There are reasons for that. In my experience running an accelerator, I wouldn’t share much about the startups until after demo day (more about why in a later post).

    Before we go any further, let’s define “startup accelerator” as a program designed to speed up the development of a new business (usually tech), accepting applicants usually of early-stage companies for a defined length of time and granting a seed investment in exchange for equity. Accelerators usually also include mentorship from an internal team and external subject matter experts and concludes with a demo day where the companies show what they have built and discuss their future plans. If the startups want, additional funding is often planned to be raised at or after demo day.

    Major themes for the last couple years are that there are too many accelerators and that they don’t produce results.

    This begs the question “What makes a successful accelerator?”

    Success factors usually mentioned for accelerators.

    There are many different types of accelerator programs. They are usually measured the same way, but in reality many of them have different goals and have different factors of success. But the two most common ways accelerators are measured are:

    1. Funding raised by, or shortly after, demo day. This is a problematic measurement, especially for programs that operate where there are small local investment communities or where they focus on very early stage startups. I’ve also seen startups who are not even looking for funding post demo day. When did amount of money raised become a measurement of success for a startup?
    2. Survival rate after demo day. The question is who reports these numbers and where do they get the data. It is very easy for a startup to appear live when the founders have given up even if it hasn’t closed down. Plus, almost no one does the work to check on the numbers. For example, my old review of TechStars’ original published success rates (which seemed amazingly high when they first published them in late 2011) led me to lots of “zombie startups”. And those were just the ones I found. The great thing is that TechStars periodically updates their data. Now that I revisited that old post and compared it to TechStar’s results page, most of the startups that I listed as possible zombies on my old blog post are now marked as failed. At a minimum, the results from the most recent one year of their startups should be removed from the statistics. Those startups haven’t yet had time to fail or succeed. From the 25 startups I had in my first year running an accelerator and bootcamp, only one shut down, so that means my “success” rate is 96% if I measure myself the same way. That’s not a helpful way to think about a success metric.

    These factors have something in common — they are seemingly easy to measure so they become the standard of measurement. But they don’t really tell us what’s most meaningful.

    Instead, the focus should be some other qualities that are harder to measure

    Time and money saved not building something no one wants, but which would have kept the would-be entrepreneurs busy for months or years. I’ve seen a lot of startups that are really just a couple of guys with a hobby and a devotion to writing code to serve that hobby. How much do the companies at start point develop and where are they by end point? How far did people get over the program?

    Strength and involvement of the mentors. Are the mentors celebrity mentors, too busy to take time with the startups or are they perhaps not famous but dedicated to the success of the startups?

    Involvement of the accelerator with the startups after the program ends. Are there follow-ups? What’s the activity of the alumni network? What do the entrepreneurs go on to do five or ten years later?

    The accelerator’s success exiting from portfolio companies years later. Again, hard to measure because of the time lag and since the exit numbers are typically private.

    So, leave all that aside and decide what accelerator, if any, works best for you.

    Update to the above post…

    Rereading this post after years, I notice the following:
    – I have given up on using “accelerator” and “incubator” as distinct descriptors. The reasons are there has been extensive change in the way these programs work, at least at the edges (the mainstream is often still similar) and in general few people ever knew the difference between the two terms.

  • Startup Weekend Toolkit

    Here’s a Startup Weekend Toolkit I put together after mentoring and judging. It’s a lot of info, so it’s best to read this before you go since you will be busy enough (and sleep deprived) during the weekend, but these resources will save you lots of pain.

    Startup Weekend isn’t a hackathon or a business plan competition… So work on these activities instead:

    1. Customer Development. “Get out of the building” and talk to people. Learn from them. What hypotheses do you want to test? Do your potential customers support and reinforce your assumptions? What qualifies success or failure?

    2. Business Model. Express what you learned in customer discovery: Who is your customer? What is your core value proposition? What are your key activities? What are your revenue streams? What is your cost structure? Who/what are your key partners/resources? What are your distribution channels? What is your roll-out strategy?

    3. Execution. What did your team build during the weekend?

    4. Your presentation. Not being able to express what you did is the unspoken failure point of many teams. Start to practice on Saturday, not Sunday.

    Are you really building an MVP?

    Working with lots of startups, the most common error I see people who think they are working on an MVP is that they do not understand what an MVP is. An MVP is focused on getting validated learning. Write down your hypothesis and what will qualify as success or failure for you. See more about that below. Otherwise, how do you know if you’re learning anything?

    A sample hypothesis format:
    I believe that [customer segment] has [problem / need] and [a specific number / percentage of them] will do [action / use this solution].

    Hypothesis Formation to guide you as you build an MVP and then collect data. Read this brief article for guidelines.
    Questions to consider: What are your riskiest assumptions? What MVP will enable you to test your riskiest assumptions? What will you accept as validation that you are solving your customers’ problem?

    MVP case studies:
    Think about how Dropbox, Aardvark, The Ladders etc tested their services before building them out.

    Some techniques to build an MVP:
    – Landing Page — put up a landing page that leads the visitor to believe that the product has been built out. Then test user actions — do they try to sign up, do they try to buy, etc;
    – Mockups / Wireframing — these can be on paper, using tools as simple as powerpoint (where I like to hyperlink fields on the page and connect them to other pages to make it feel like a website), or more sophisticated tools like InvisionApp or Balsamiq. Give the user the feeling of using your product before you write any code;
    – Video — make a video to demonstrate what your service does before you build it. This could be as simple as text or basic images or screenshots with a voice-over;
    – “Concierge” — use humans to emulate what the software would do later on, if you were to build it;
    – Prototype — actually build a working version.
    – “Parasite” — this is the name I use for riding on top of another network (Twitter, FB, Skype) and using the users there as test subjects rather than trying to drive new users to your new service.

    Doing Customer Discovery Interviews:

    1) Ask about situations in which potential customers might be aware of the problem you’re trying to solve and then ask questions around that. This means that if you’re trying to solve the problem of finding cheap vacation travel packages, I’d ask “Do you like traveling?” and ask them to talk about that, instead of directly asking “Do you want to find cheap flights for your vacations?” (which is a question that forces them to say “yes, of course” — not that helpful to you).
    2) How do you solve this problem currently? or What do you do to make it less painful? In the above example, they might have signed up for notifications for cheap flights from online discount travel agencies. This will tell you about the competitors who are already involved in solving this problem. Not just the existing business competitors, but also ways that people deal with this problem by themselves.
    3) Can you describe this problem to me in your own words? They may have already told you about this without you having to ask them. Directly asking this also only works if you didn’t already force the issue by asking them if they have the problem. Otherwise they’ll just repeat what you asked them already. This may also give you keywords to put on your landing page and in ads.
    4) Are there other solutions out there that you’ve tried in the past? This will make you aware of competitors or other services addressing similar problems.
    5) What do you wish you could do to solve this problem (even if it isn’t practical)? This can be really powerful, especially if you find out that something they think is not practical is now practical for you.

    Cool things you could show:

    • Number of people you spoke to;
    • What you learned that was unexpected;
    • Actual purchase orders;
    • How you hacked the system to get it all done.


    Watch out for these things. I made this list by surveying past participants:

    • Mentor whiplash (getting pulled in different directions by different mentors);
    • Replacing customer interviews with online surveys (because you run out of time or are too hesitant to find interview subjects);
    • Hesitating to “get out of the building;”
    • Underestimating the time it takes to talk to people;
    • Building too much, testing the problem too little;
    • Not taking risks, not being creative;
    • Not practicing the pitch enough;
    • Thinking too much about the judging;
    • Team fighting, worrying about IP protection, getting distracted, no team balance, team too large.


    Practice your pitch. Pitch structure ideas:

    • Introduce yourself and team;
    • Introduce the problem, Show your solution;
    • Talk about how you got there: Customer Discovery work you did, your Business Model.

    And for what happened when I tried to run my own one-person Startup Weekend before I was a judge for the first time, read this.

  • No Dave, No Matter

    Dave McClure is on a tour of Asia that includes Beijing, Seoul, Taipei and Singapore but not Hong Kong. I’m already hearing people say that this is more evidence Hong Kong is not on the tech map yet. Some also want to bring people like McClure to Hong Kong — as if their visits would solve Hong Kong’s problems overnight.

    It doesn’t matter if Dave McClure ever visits. Don’t get me wrong, I like McClure’s work — 500 Startups investing in startups before they’ve found product-market fit, his willingness to be much more international than many investors. Believe me, Dave, if you do visit, your first drink is on me. Like you noticed in Taipei, there’s no open container law here either. But in Hong Kong we should work without thought of a visit from him or any other big name. And we should realize that there are many things we can do to help ourselves.

    It’s not McClure’s responsibility to grow Hong Kong, nor is it the responsibility of any other investor. It’s the responsibility of people in Hong Kong’s tech community and those who believe that .

    If you’re working on a new venture in Hong Kong, if Hong Kong is part of your strategy, if you believe Hong Kong must diversify itself beyond finance and real estate, then work to make it a success.

    There are many ways you can do this. Mentor students who have a startup idea. Even better, if you’re from industry, help convince the parents of these same students to let them give a startup a shot instead of going to work for a bank. Help make connections for a young entrepreneur. Sponsor an event. Come talk to me if you run out of ideas.

    But don’t make it Dave’s problem.

  • Can You Do An MVP For Your Life?

    I had to come to Hong Kong to go to my first Barcamp. The timing was perfect — I arrived less than a week before to run Startup Bootcamp so it was a perfect time to meet more people. And everyone in the bootcamp attended for at least part of the day.

    After attending a few Barcamp talks and meeting a ton of people I gave a talk of my own, titled “Can You Do an Minimum Viable Product For Your Life?” While we spend a lot of time talking about work, there’s obviously a lot more to life than that. If anything, we talk about work so much because it’s easier than all the other things that comprise our years on earth.

    Since we’re getting used to applying lean methodology to tech startups, could we do the same for ourselves? I spoke for about 10 minutes on the idea and introduced something that I did years ago as a way of validating which option I should take in a major life decision: I wrote in great detail about the decision and what it was like living with it. That process helped me understand what I really wanted and what it would be like to be in that role.

    Ideas flew in the discussion. Among those talking were Jeff Smith, Andrea Livotto, Andrew Tipton, and Nic Wang (forgive me if you spoke but I don’t know your name), giving the following list of ideas that I recall (in no particular order):

    • Play dress-up (Cool idea that really needs a better name): Go somewhere outside your network and practice “being” the person you want to be. That could include telling people that you are an architect / pastry chef / chaos-theorist etc and getting used to living with that persona.
    • During a vacation, try to work temporarily as the role that you seek.
    • Try to bring elements of the job / activities / life that you want into your life in small chunks.
    • Track your happiness, productivity, usefulness throughout the day to test what you most like doing. We get so absorbed in day-to-day activities that it’s easy to lose track.

    If you have other ideas or try one of the above, let me know the results.

  • Random factoid about Cluetrain Manifesto and URL longevity

    Here’s something I put together while on hold on the phone. Everyone remember “The Cluetrain Manifesto”? I came across a copy of the book a couple days ago, full of references to “electronic mail.” After the 12 years or so the book has been out I wondered what the longevity was of the URLs they mentioned. Of the 16 domains written about in Cluetrain (including a couple of joke domains which should have been set up at some point), nine are active. Of the active domains, seven are still up-to-date, two haven’t been updated in a while.

    I thought of doing this after the repeated experience of revisiting a list of new startup websites a year or two after seeing them launch publically. After 12 years, the Cluetrain domains (though only around half were small companies or startups) have held up quite well.
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