I saw @Paolo post a pitch event recently, and a couple weeks ago at MeetTaipei.tw there was the latest Dragon’s Chamber event. I have heard from different people that there are many start-ups looking to come to Taiwan given what has been happening in the rest of the world. And, just yesterday, I went to yet another co-working space in Taipei.
Do you also see traction building, even for ARC holders? Or is Taiwan still simply too small to support a genuine start-up scene?
Fact is most Taiwanese will have good ideas but unless they have rich families it will never happen.
It’s extremely hard to get loans, or if you did get a loan you need immediate success as the payments are high, so without immediate payoff you are not making any payments and the loan will be repossessed quickly. And it’s not like America where you can bankrupt and be good 7 years later. You are blacklisted from loans of any kind following bankruptcy.
If you saw someone open some trendy coffee shops it is likely they have rich families.
I watched a short doc on ShenZhen’s attempt at being the new Silcon Valley of entrepreneurs a while ago. On it, a kid from Europe developed some sort of robot that was copied and produced before his unveiling day. The Chinese that were interviewed said that is the nature of designing and manufacturing and it was encouraged. Could this be why there would be a sour impression of getting anything done in Asia?
I’m in startup mode here and in Japan. There’s plenty of money looking for good investments in my experience. I recently passed on US$100,000 from an investor because I didn’t want to lose control too early in the process. They’ve invited me to touch base with them again later.
What I hear from both investors and business visa officials in Japan is there’s a dearth of good startups. Most of them are copycats with little or nothing in the way of new concepts with the potential to be the next big thing.
That depends on the kind of investor. For early stage - angels - many are happy to sell off to the next level.
There is also social impact investing - from institutional investments to startups - that do not necessarily care about scalability. They have other intentions, and sometimes, it is simply that something cool should exist if it can sustain itself
Taiwan is rich in resources for startups – as is Japan – and coupled with the fact that there’s a quality startup vacuum Taiwan is actually a great place for a startup with legs. I’m surprised more U.S. and European entrepreneurs haven’t discovered this yet.
People have been starting up forever in Taiwan.
It’s called opening a business.
I strongly suspect 90% of ‘local startups’ are folks just quitting an existing business and setting up similar themselves, which may or may not diverge in the future.
There’s always been plenty of money floating around to invest in potential businesses, the issue rests more on the amount of control and fighting that tends to happen afterwards. Most of the larger and relatively successful businesses I’m aware of have been funded by wealthy family members, they like to keep that control. Thry limit scale though because they are almost always unwilling to merge with other successful companies which will dilute their control…Except the famous example of Hon hai?
As for the start up scene as we know it in general. I can’t comment much. Taiwan doesn’t have the market to sell your product and it’s highly monopolised already so it’s kind of a BIG negative on that side. Production is the obvious positive.
Lack of vision. Yep,few aspire to global dominance. One guy I know just wants to keep total control after systematically kicking out all other shareholders and directors. A real pity we could have been a global company.
Another start up I know the founders aim was to be a listed stock company in Taiwan. That wasn’t very inspirational to me. Also he was unwilling to give me any decent share allocation to join his company so he wasted my time which made me quite pissed off in the end. What early stage company isn’t going to give decent shares to hire key staff…Taiwan !!
Taiwanese companies seem to struggle badly going regional never mind global. Only standouts I know recently are all the bubble tea chains…Phenomenal successes.
The goal of many Taiwanese businessmen is just to get recognized (like listed in the stock exchange). Apart from that, there doesn’t seem to be much will to succeed doing something actually good. A lot of copy and paste crap going on. Even my neighbor’s CNC shop is essentially a copy and paste business. He takes parts from a motorcycle, finds aftermarket parts made in the US or the EU, copies them, then sells them at 1/5th the price the part is sold for in Taiwan. He said he made good profit doing this as he is a 1 man company, with 2 VMC churning out parts by the hundreds.
Can we have actual inventions where a Taiwanese makes parts that are able to compete with parts made in the USA?
Taiwanese already makes high quality parts so surely we can do better?
@GooseEgg we’re getting there! We just need to keep pushing the boundaries of what ARC holders can enjoy in Taiwan, while being responsible and productive members of the society. This is the original intent of the event, to keep showing that we are making a difference.
Tech entrepreneurship died in the 2000s. China is now the hot place.
In the 80s and early 90s it was:
Go to the USA to get a PhD.
Work in Silicon Valley, gain experience and contacts.
Go back home to Taiwan, start a business making computer components for American companies.
Now everyone wants to work for TSMC.
Or make actual usable things, and not just parts? If you look at Taiwan’s export profile, there’s an inordinate amount of unfinished goods. That’s because if you have to do consumer marketing, engineering and marketing will start fighting.
Yea in America they can make a juice machine you have to pay subscriptions for, and the thing is poorly engineered (as in not built for a cost, overbuilt for what it does), and predictably it died.
Taiwan is ready. But there are concerns.on both sides. I havebt accepted investment yet, for same reasons as above. not interested in losin control as a lot is r and d related and that would be slashed.
To be fair alot of.investors may not have faith in many startups cause mnag startups cant hack it in the end, for many reasons. So if they invest they require more cotrol than an actual capable person that works hard and is intelligent is willing to give up.
However there is a huge surplus of money in taiwan being literallythrown around. Deepnds on your goals. For our various brands, we went the slow route but maintain all control and can develop new ideas without a bunch of meetings with morons in the financial sectors. Its very hard work though.
And yes for arc holders, it seems to have opened up lots and.looks like it will continue to do so. If the CKMT doesnt get elected nex time, things will be looking good for non chinese foreign investment and startup i think.
The world is awash in money looking for somewhere to go. It’s not about the money, it’s about the terms. In Silicon Valley, if you have a good idea and/or team, you can pretty easily raise a $100,000 seed round for a small minority stake in your company. And if you actually have a business with traction, you can raise a seed 2-5x that at a very reasonable valuation.
Hell, before I was legally able to drink, I raised at a million dollar pre-money valuation for a startup that had less than $30,000 in revenue. And the market was way less frothy at that time.
In Western startup hubs (Silicon Valley being the top one), investors focus on getting on the right ship and helping guide it to a lucrative destination. Investors are pretty fair with early-stage startups, either because they’re smart or they quickly learn they can’t compete for good deals if they offer shit terms.
From what I’ve heard, investors here worry more about how much of the ship they’ll own at the outset rather than whether or not it’s the right ship. Generously, you could say investors here are more conservative. Less generously, you could say they’re stingy, greedy and driven by a scarcity mindset. I personally think it’s more the latter.
Here’s a piece from someone at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who knows what he’s talking about. If you read the whole article, it’s clear he knows Taiwan’s economic history inside and out.
Still, the net effect of these changes has been that Taiwan’s ecosystem has fallen a few steps behind the United States, Canada, and other global technology leaders. Bluntly put, a new generation of Taiwan-based technology startups has yet to emerge. Indeed, while Taiwan now has a vibrant and flourishing startup scene, few of these firms have agglomerated around new or fast-growing areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
PWC’s 2018 Taiwan startup survey starkly illustrates this gap. Of Taiwan-based startups surveyed, 70 percent had been founded by first-time entrepreneurs but just one-third of these had educational backgrounds in engineering (13 percent), science (7 percent), or information technology (13 percent). Nearly 60 percent of all Taiwan startup founders have backgrounds in the liberal arts or business disciplines. Nearly twice as many startup founders have backgrounds in marketing (14 percent) as in all of the sciences combined.
