Silicon Valley Comes to Malaysia #SVC2M

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-upsFT.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