Startups – Page 10

August 27, 2018August 29, 2018

Reflections for the morning

A purely functional approach to solving a user problem tends to lead to an overall disjointed user experience. A purely experiential approach to solving a user problem tends to lead to an unruly infrastructure that becomes harder and harder to maintain overtime.

The discipline is to explore the different alternatives to tease out the intersection that best satisfies form and function at each crossroad of a product’s development.

The second order constrain is the trade off between time/resources and variants explored.

The third order constrain is the utilization of time to build capababilty to translate resources to number of variants to be explored.

Time is thus the highest order constrain to building a strong solid foundation. Trees that grow taller and has denser trunks tend to have a longer time maturity. A by-product is their fire resistance. The sequoia tree avoids unnecessary extravagance but conserves all its energy to grow quietly, adamantly and deeply to achieve a majestic presence overtime.

August 25, 2018August 25, 2018

Insights from Vibhu

Orkuts’ growth was driving by recruiting influencers to their platform and paying them to generate content
- Influential writers for news columns
Initial community that gets seeded drives the DNA of the community that crystallizes around it
It is possible to have two drastically different communities on the same platform
- Brazil community on Orkut was focused on something else
- India’s community on Orkut was focused on sharing code and resume
Google does not understand social networks. Seeing from the functional perspective, pieces of code that serves as social proofing will appear as inefficient, unnecessary and redundant thus removed
The nuances of UX is not often appreciated by the engineering community

August 20, 2018August 20, 2018

Insights from Steven

Region trending towards offline single app platforms
Trouble shooting due to Null pointer exception is a nightmare
syncing of data between front end and backend a problem
everything based on socket connections
language like ELM which is a string typing language is superior to ReactJS
Google functions abstracts DevOps scaling tasks from startups – each function returns an API
Singapore government embraces technology
- GovTech department reports directly to prime minister’s office
- best practices Agile, Scrum and Standups
- Agile teams are farmed out to various Government departments
- Enticing to work for government
- Start grooming in house engineers as opposed to outsourced solution practices
- stem bleeding of technology knowledge and know how
Education
- government shifts focus from producing workers to producing entrepreneurs
- Demand for creativity has increased
- stronger emphasis on Arts, Music and Physical education by using only qualified teachers

August 20, 2018August 21, 2018

Learnings from QiXiang, Vivian and Angelina Wu

China has transited from cash to mobile cashless
- Alibaba – ecommerce
- TenCent – Small Vendors
China development bank has seen decrease in number of transaction and deposits
Chinese government want to ensure control of financial is not usurped by the two big tech
- Past legislation to ensure every wallet user of Alipay and TenCent has a corresponding Chinese bank account
- Policy of TenCent pay is more lenient hence easier for new user with no bank account in China to onboard
Singapore government is throwing hurdles on Chinese payment to buy time for DBS to catch up
- matter of national security concern
- Chinese governments have preference to want to own their own infrastructure
Chinese development bank
- branding considered prestigious in China
- branding is lost on Singaporeans
- lost 1000 Chinese speaking Singaporean employees last year
Mobile payments in China
- payment process has became ubiquitous
- even vendors in remote region of China have adopted
- crime rate has gone down significantly
- crime has increasingly became more sophisticated and require specialized knowledge

August 12, 2018August 20, 2018

Insights for one on ones with Friend said in Singapore

Countries are starting to feel threatened by a centrally controlled Chinese economy that works
- one belt on road
- tight coordination between government and companies
- relationship was good until 2008 before which US helped China grow rapidly
Trump’s tactic as a strategy to consolidate control in the government
- of lowering tax rates for bringing back funds to US
- tariffs on other countries to drive up USD exchange rate
- VC might consider doubling down on existing companies
impact
- Chinese economy slowing down
- Chinese merchants extracting money from companies and laying low while tsunami passes
- US companies implicated
- most Singapore companies not thriving
- increased occurrences of suicide in Singapore
- Port activities slowing down in Singapore, potentially moving to Tuas Area
- will last for next 7 years
- demand for entertainment/tourism will increase to stave off feelings of aimlessness
- Tired looking grab driver
On transition period for next four years
- high risk and uncertainty
- foreigner disadvantaged in US with Trump as president
- be wary of entering into legal agreement overseas
tech trend
- when everybody going high tech
- Time to go really low tech
- focus on cash flow and avoid liabilities
- Go into farming and buy a piece of land
- Uber caused a lot of accidents in Singapore hence banned
NUS school of computing requires students to have triple AAA in their A levels before they could even be considered for admission

Contacts

Thomas Gorissen
Peter Gwee
Jim Ellis
Dad
Garis
WenKang
Mr Khoo

August 10, 2018August 10, 2018

Learnings from Patrick and Brian on building a SAAS based startup targeting other startups

SMB’s have high churn, therefore you can’t build a big SaaS business in that market. Right? No…

Patrick Campbell of ProfitWell (formerly Price Intelligently) (a must follow btw) recently published some great benchmark data on churn (http://bit.ly/2vS877E).

The data showed higher churn correlated with lower ARPU customers (likely smb’s). A common conclusion from this is you have to shift up market to build a big business. This is wrong.

Churn, while critical, is a one dimensional view on a business. To fully understand the business you need at least a 3-D view (acquisition, monetization).

So what do you need to build a big business at the small end of the market?

1. Mission Critical Value Prop – Think Gusto and payroll. An easy way to pay employees is not a nice to have, it is mission critical.

2. Low Cost, High Scale Growth Loop – Some form of a low cost, high scale growth loop like virality to make up for the SMB’s that do inevitably churn.

Combine the two and you get an amazing business like Dropbox, Slack, or SurveyMonkey.

If you don’t have these two things, that is where you need to shift up market to where your value prop does become mission critical (think analytics) and/or you can support a higher cost growth loop.

References

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6433046247216680960

August 6, 2018August 6, 2018

Insights from visit to Singapore

Economy and startup structures

In an economy with limited size, startups are forced to enter into multiple small niches before becoming sustainable
In a sizeable economy, startups can focus on scaling within one single niche to achieve sustainability before branching
Given much overhead is incurred during the branching process, startups operating in the latter economy can achieve scale at a much faster rate.
To the extent a company can benefit the coffers of the ruling government of a territory, it experience lubrication on the legal side of its operations

August 5, 2018August 5, 2018

Kenji and Johnson – Learnings in trading patterns

Volume always precedes price movement
A drastic increase or decrease in price movement without corresponding volume is not sustainable
Discussions on the following platforms can be used as raw materials
- SeekingAlpha
- Yahoo finance
- investor village
Bloomberg news costs USD1000 per month but is not real time and mainly editorial
private investors that are not hedge fund managers will want this product if it exists

Useful resources

Laughing at Wall Street

July 27, 2018July 27, 2018

Friday morning coincidence

I was driving to Edmodo this morning when SIRI recited to me the section of the book on the Muses and the higher spiritual planes. I was stopped at the intersection just shortly after SIRI mentioned the vision the author had of becoming one with an eagle during his meditation when I saw this giant bird with a great wing span landing to perch on lamppost that I was about to drive under.

I was the very first time I saw such a bird in this parts of town. Must be a coincidence.

I wonder if Seth Godin’s recommendation of this book was resultant of similar experience he had when reading this book