This post is a part of our coverage of Startups in Asia (Singapore), Penn Olson’s first tech conference. Our full coverage of the event can be found here, for our RSS feed, click here.
Summary
Willis chatted with Steven Goh, the CEO and co-founder of mig33. The following is our live blog of their talk.
Liveblog
#10:45: If you do go down the venture route, you do need to think about what your exit looks like. You want to have a commitment to try to make that happen. But it really comes down to what do you want to do as an entrepreneur.
#10:44: [What is your exit plan?] We’re going to start by being fabulous. (laughs) For me personally, I’m only interested in building a company that I can IPO, though if something else happens along the way, that’s great.
#10:42: Forget about anything that looks like a Paypal [for online payments] in Indonesia. When you looks at digital advertising, I think last year it was 40 million and this year 50 million — that’s just too small.
#10:38: More than half of our daily active users are in Indonesia. Indonesia looks like bizarro China more than any other market. It’s flooded with Chinese handsets, low-cost Android handsets. It is a different market.
#10:36: So much of social networking is about conversational tools, even in your game experiences. You can’t have social games running in isolation. This is about making mig33 contemporary.
#10:35: We’re trying to build a better Weibo. We got one million daily actives, which is great.
#10:34: For a while we were very successful in chat, a parallel to the Tencent model. We’ve launched our mini blog and are building around that.
#10:32: Larger Asia is going to look like versions of China. Indonesia in particular. These markets are very successful in their own rights. When it comes to collection payments, stop looking elsewhere — your solutions are in your backyard.
#10:30: Steven talks about payment collection for virtual goods in developing markets, mentioned the “Amway model.”
#10:27: Raising money is only half the transaction. The exit is the other half. Ultimately raising is hard enough. Exiting is much much harder.
#10:24: Advice for entrepreneur: If you go the venture route, you want a minimal viable product, can show you have a product that people love which can scale — ideally one that can be viral. You need to show there is value in venture — that if a VC invests in you that you can accelerate and deliver return. If that’s not what you think is in the mix, there are other options, and that’s not a negative thing.
#10:19: Stephen says launched mig33 2003, went to Silicon Valley and two years (and three month) ago moved it back to Singapore. Says there is an ambient, experimental environment in Silicon Valley, ecosystem there is great — from angel funding to series A. That works well for SV. In Asia you have to remove the assumption that there is digital advertising industry here, because there isn’t.