Tough Little Juggernaut

Photo credit: CDC I think America is unprepared for COVID-19. The response looks horrible, from over here in Asia. For weeks, I have been writing about its race through China, Hong Kong, Korea and Japan. I post those thoughts on my personal Facebook page. For weeks, friends and family would write comments like, "Please stay safe," and "we are thinking of you." It's a decidedly American thing to believe that something "over there" is always going to happen to "those people" "over there." I don't think many of them have been thinking about the cost to lives this has brought, or the cost to business. My own immediate family in Taiwan, and my workplace, have been thrown about by this. For the first time in the ten years of the Accelerator, we had our opening day virtually. While other accelerators did public demo days (and could, because their founders have been in Taiwan for the whole time), I gazed at 28 teams through ...

Venture capital investing is the practice of behaving counterintuitively by going for the risky opportunities that seem impossible or untouchable to others, because they lack the network, the knowledge, or the advantages that mitigate the risks that come with this style of investing. Why can they do this? Partly it's because they invest in founders and spend lifetimes learning about them, collaborating with them, and understanding how they work. You invest in a founder who: 1. Mitigates risks because she is talented, resourceful, creative 2. Is surrounded by people who can eliminate risks by being extremely good at what they are doing 3. Is working in such a blue ocean area that nobody can come close to delivering risks against them . VC investors with powerful networks use those networks to build and collaborate with founders to make them really great. The business is the end result. The VC funds ensure the scalability of the high risk option, mitigated by people and...

Three years ago today, I was halfway through my first two week stint in Beijing, working on a project to develop a STEAM camp for high school kids. I met an engineer, who explained to a very rookie me about how engineering was in high demand in China. Here's an excerpt from my Facebook post about the trip : According to an early employee of Facebook who runs his own fund these days, the top two percent of the engineering talent of China is in high demand, not because they understand the theoretical underpinnings of STEM or design, but because they are boldly trying to build things in niche, hyper-focused areas of high tech, rather than work for companies that build huge infrastructure products. In many cases, this man told me, the efforts are not grandiose, but they are unusual technologies that deal with using AI and scans of the physical environment for weather, people, and security issues, and that teach the systems how to predict changes and news events, in some cases. Very ...

If you haven't seen Joker, you should, for reasons other than the brilliant cinema and the amazing Joaquin Phoenix, who I haven't enjoyed in a movie since "I Am Not Here" came out almost ten years ago or more. This movie was probably the best performance he has ever given. I'll leave it to the critics to talk about the cinema. I watched the film in a Hong Kong theatre, so my mind turned immediately to the context of the world around me. So much of what happens in the closing 30 minutes of the movie remind me of what is happening in a city that I've called home for almost 11 years. A protestor sets a row of ATMs on fire in Hong Kong during October 13 protest, image credit: South China Morning Post For nearly 20 months, Hong Kong has been engulfed in a political crisis . There are several reasons for the increasing tensions -- militarized police increasing violence against unarmed civilians; a government that seems to not be willing to discuss the deman...

Here are a couple of slides from a recent Google study called "Swipe Up and to the Right," showing massive numbers for mobile use and e-commerce in parts of Asia. While not all the same, these countries growing at different rates can give even the casual observer some food for thought about how mobile changes the way people work and live in cities. The first slide is one of my favorite. It shows that 50% of the Internet economy in SE Asia happens in these cities. But it also shows that only 15% of the population of these countries lives in cities. This means another 85% of people without the same average means, costs of livings, or access to technology or software are still outside of the scope of economic growth in the technology-empowered category. Then you have an eye opening slide from data collected in Vietnam. And if you are wondering what a person does on a daily basis with her phone, from waking up to going to bed at night, here's a very detai...

To be honest, I don't really recall what motivated me to learn the history or the methods of fundamental venture capital investing. And I don't even think it's accurate to think of venture capital investing as something of a traditional pay and return method. I seem to be entering into the field of VC at a time when venture capitalists are moving from an agency model, famously shaped by Andreessen Horowitz, to a financial advisor model. Ironically, also shaped by Andreessen Horowitz . Like many other would-be investors, Fred Wilson at USV has been an early inspiration to me. I don't think reading his AVC blog was what propelled me into wanting to invest, but it did motivate me to understand technology founders. I felt even back in 2007 that early tech investors and founders would shape the global economy like nothing ever seen before. I also think that Fred Wilson is a morally solid person , who understands the "why" of business. His partner, Albert ...