Archive for October, 2011

“Silicon Valley Comes to Malaysia” conference was a huge success, big thanks to the organizers Dash and Rebeca for bringing in Silicon Valley icons to Kuala Lumpur, namely; Jawed Khan of YouTube, Konstantin Guericke of LinkedIn, Jeff Hofman of Priceline.com, Jonas Kjelberg of Skype, to name a few (full list).

Failure is given, and it should be celebrated

Throughout the event, speakers and panellists have time and again reminded entrepreneurs that they have to take risks and prepared to fail, because they were told, for the first (few) startup(s) they were definitely going to fail.

As we know, failure is celebrated in Silicon Valley, but not so much in other parts of the world, especially in Asia. In most Asian countries failure is stigmatized, it’s especially true in Japan.

“From olden times, if you were defeated in battle you committed seppuku [ritual suicide by slicing the belly, also known as hara-kiri],” Mr Honda says. “That’s in our genes, so people don’t try if they think they might fail.”
Stigma of failure holds back Japan start-ups – FT.com

For this reason, it’s not an easy feat for us Asians to take risks and celebrate our failures…

Failures == (Hopefully) Learn How to Launch Successful Startup?

For me the whole message of failures and embracing failures sounded a bit like, to put it very bluntly – “i don’t care what you do, just go and try and learn it by yourself. I don’t have time for this. Surely after few startups you will know how to launch successful startup/product“. Continue reading →

TC Disrupt Beijing 2011 is around the corner, and Silicon Valley is Coming to Malaysia soon. Have you applied your product/startup for these conferences? I did… I have applied my Bloapp.com – free service that allows bloggers to convert their blogs into iPhone and Android apps in just 5 minutes. (yes android version is now live).

But the main question is – Does it worth to launch at these events?

Joel Spolsky has a long post on this subject, for TL,DR people (too long, didn’t read), he basically argues that if you have a decent product, then it’s worth to launch at these events. Otherwise it’s a waste of time for everybody.

As Openera posted on their blog, they didn’t have the expected results from TC Disrupt SF 2011 with their startup launch. It’s interesting to read. Make sure to read the comments section too.

How about you? Have you launched any of your products/startups at similar events? What was your experiences? Please share.