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Unconference 2009, My Take

18 May 2009

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I attended the e27 Unconference 2009 at Biopolis on Saturday and was pleasantly surprised at the levels of both high quality
entrepreneurship and interest in the new web/technology scene within Singapore.

The only loser in the whole day for me was the venue, although a fabulously impressive building the facilities let a little to be
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desired. The morning keynote was delivered without slides due to technical issues and late in the day there was the
unmistakable whiff of blocked toilets engulfing the fourth floor, leading to much ʻmouth breathingʼ and eventually abandonment!

However these issues aside I thought Iʼd share some unconference notes, taken ʻold schoolʼ with pen and paper. As a rule I
prefer not to take a laptop to a conference, I can use my iPhone to keep in touch if required.

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Scott Rafer, Lookery
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A terrific opener from Scott Rafer (@rafer ) presenting without his slides, which did not hurt him at all – it may have even
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improved it for me. I was familiar with MyBlogLog but not his latest startup, Lookery. He revealed himself to be somewhat
cynical about the more ʻdreamyʼ, funded or unfocussed start-up ideas and provided some practical guidance to help on the
journey to becoming a company that makes actual money.

Along the way, and in the subsequent panel, he provided the most entertaining quotes of the day for me.

His contended that Silicon Valleyʼs status as the only cluster of startups was coming to an end. London, Tel Aviv, Beijing and
Shanghai are there now, and the future could lead to Bangalore, Buenos Aires and perhaps Singapore. His theory is that
successful founders can create hubs by providing ʻbetter investmentʼ than the typical “parasitic” VC model.

He quickly defined his view of a successful startup as one that in 36 months is turning over $1m-3m USD a year. He also
excluded Facebook: face it you arenʼt likely to build the next Facebook or Google, create an actual business! He also excluded
Friendster-esque startups, which have no benefit for the founders, who have all left!

He boiled his guidance to simple mathematics. Take a product generate $1-3 dollars per user and then aim at an audience big
enough to to provide you with your revenue! What matters is teh size of the market you can target . Break the world into
segments to target: English speaking nations, Europe & Middle East, Latin America, South Asia, South East Asia (analogous to
the DVD region map!). Pick one or two and worry about the rest of the world later.

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I enjoyed his take on the infamous German website copycats , “If you see something working well: copy it”. There is no such
thing as new ideas only good execution. Itʼs the right thing to do, just change the 20% you need to to make it work for
your users.

His final message was to “be late and be boring”, find one thing and do it well. If youʼre late to market you can always compete
on price or service, if youʼre too early no-one may buy! Boring ideas can be successful businesses; directories, customer lists
and analytics (ʻcounting stuff isnʼt hardʼ).

My favourite section was in response to a question, Scottʼs take that “even Google donʼt believe in ʻDo No Evilʼ anymore,
theyʼre too smart” raised a few grins, only to continue, “Facebook have no such saying”. Zuckerberg is looking after #1 and if
itʼs not in the best interest of Facebook you will “get run over” but that actually made them more reasonable to work with – he
spoke from his experience with Lookery who we initially intertwined with the early days of Facebook apps.

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(slides )

Questions & Panel

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The startup panel was full of entertaining tales, humour and good advice, well moderated by Benjamin Joffe of +8* .

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On the panel were Gang Lu (Openweb Asia ), Dr Lai Kok Fung (Buzzcity ), Wong Hoong An (HungryGoWhere ) and Scott
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Rafer standing in for R Chandrashekar from Fusion Garage (in the US presumably on Crunchpad business!)

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Some highlights:

Money

Itʼs tough to monetise in a small country, aim at scale to make any real money. [LKF]
Subscription services donʼt really work with consumers but they can with business. [WHA]
Virtual items seem to be a good way to monetise social networks, itʼs being done in China and Japan successfully [LKF]

Users

Silicon Valley is not as easy as it looks from outside, difficult to hold attention [SR]
Use founders and friends initially, grow using SEO and affiliations [SR]
Giving stuff away (both legal & illegal!) has been proven to work [LKF] not suggesting you do anything illegal of course!

Funding

Donʼt bother with government funding. A lot of effort and distraction, for not much. [LKF]
If you ask who got Govʼt funding and then who needed it there arenʼt very many! [SR]
Will not deal with VCs early stage. Terms donʼt work for founders. Angels are great. [SR]
Cloud computing is the biggest competition for VC [SR] my quote of the day
Late stage funding can be ok, if required to scale big [SR]
Save your knees begging for other stuff! [WHA]
Only take it if it helps with what youʼre already doing well [BJ]

Survival and Promotion

HGW survived being blacklisted by Google, but had to acquiesce to their demands. 50% of their traffic is from
Google. [WHA]
Try not to be too dependant on any single other company [LKF]
This power due to dependance on traffic, is one of the reasons Google is scared of Twitter [GL]

MDA Debacle
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The poor girl . After government funding got a kicking on the panel, she had to stand up and give the standard MDA
presentation, full of self justifying and aggrandising material that was much too dense, too complex and she lost the crowd.
Then she got tough questions from the very intelligent people in the room, for which she had no real answers, and just looked
like a rabbit in the headlights. She had a colleague in the room, but he didnʼt seem to want to leave his chair.

Clearly it should have been a more senior manager from the MDA, in order to handle the tough questions and give a better
account of the organisation. All in all, it did more damage than good.

My take on the whole thing is that itʼs tough for (any) government to understand and fund technological innovation and balance
that with a responsibility to justify themselves to the taxpayer, whoʼs money they are using. It is a good thing that the
government knows to invest in the future of Singapore as an entrepreneurial hub, and from the conference it was clear there is
a lot of local talent, but that they have no real idea how.

At the moment the MDA seems to be stuck justifying itself (and itʼs huge 5 year budget) and not making itself useful as it could
be to entrepreneurs. At best it seems to be a hugely expensive advertising campaign that Singapore is a good place to do a
start up, but Iʼd be happy to be proved wrong.

The Afternoon
The pitches were interesting although for most of them I was not the target audience! But an awful lot of impressive technology
and seemingly sound businesses were shown off. I left the conference thinking itʼs about time I kicked my own backside into
gear, maybe next year I should be up there…

Now to sift through the vast number of namecards I collected!

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biopolis , business , e27 , events , unconference

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Andy Croll (/)

Web Designer & Developer
Networks (#networks)
Contact (#contact)
Writing (/#writing)

19 Jun 09

Adam Wiggins and Ryan Tomayko, Heroku on RailsLab (http://andycroll.com/writing/adam-wiggins-and-ryan-tomayko-heroku-on-railslab)

19 Jun 09

Offshore 'Sales' People (http://andycroll.com/writing/offshore-sales-people)

18 Jun 09

Setting Up a Company in Singapore as an Expat (http://andycroll.com/writing/setting-up-a-company-in-singapore-as-an-expat)

2 Jun 09

My First Hate Mail from Wen Kole (http://andycroll.com/writing/my-first-hate-mail-from-wen-kole)

28 May 09

Teaching Kids About the Internet (http://andycroll.com/writing/teaching-kids-about-the-internet)

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Links
1. http://www.e27.sg/unconference/2009/
2. http://www.one-north.sg/hubs_biopolis.aspx
3. http://rafer.tumblr.com/post/108944302/an-hour-without-a-net-the-slide-projector
4. http://lookery.com/
5. http://rafer.tumblr.com/
6. http://twitter.com/rafer
7. http://mybloglog.com
8. http://www.studivz.net
9. http://www.slideshare.net/rafer/e27-unconference-2009-rafer
10. http://twitter.com/benjaminjoffe
11. http://www.plus8star.com/
12. http://www.openweb.asia/
13. http://www.buzzcity.com/
14. http://hungrygowhere.com
15. http://www.fusiongarage.com/
16. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/10/about-those-new-crunchpad-pictures/
17. http://www.youngupstarts.com/2009/05/18/mda-misses-the-mark-at-unconference-2009/
18. http://andycroll.com/tag/biopolis/
19. http://andycroll.com/tag/business/
20. http://andycroll.com/tag/e27/
21. http://andycroll.com/tag/events/

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22. http://andycroll.com/tag/unconference/

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