Martin Daffner has decades of experience driving innovation and building innovation organizations with firms like Procter & Gamble, Cisco and Avery Dennison.  Martin has developed significant expertise in building an organization's capability to consistently drive growth through innovation. This endeavor MUST include reaching out well beyond the walls of the firm. Having spent the last 10 years in China, Martin has created new capability development tools that leverage the entrepreneurial spirit and energy of start-ups and academia to help drive business growth.

Alex Duncan is the founder of KAWO.  In Alex’s own words, KAWO is “like Hootsuite but for the Chinese market”. That means KAWO is fine tuned to China’s unique social media landscape - covering Weibo, Wechat and the demands of its advanced 600 million social media users.

Despite the relatively later explosion in the Chinese social media scene, Alex is no latecomer - he’s been in Shanghai since 2007 when arrived aged 23 with a backpack, a few words of Mandarin and little more than a desire to have an adventure. He’s been there ever since.

This episode of ATP Stories is a unique insight into what it takes to establish a successful startup in China and the challenges facing foreigner entrepreneurs entering that market.

Karena Belin, Co-Founder of WHub, is a pillar of the Hong Kong Startup scene and passionate about technology, entrepreneurship and fostering the ecosystem. Deeply immersed since 2013, she has taken on engagements as speaker, mentor and judge at events and organisations such as the Chicago Booth GNVC, Google EYE, NexChange (FinTech), IFLR Conference, RISE Conference, Tech Open Air Berlin, Techstars StartupWeekendHK & Startup Next Pre-Accelerator, global Merlin YPO program and Poly U Entrepreneurial Mentorship Network.

Karena and her team are focused on making a difference in people’s lives.  WHub was originally started to solve a hiring and talent discovery issue in the Hong Kong Technology Startup ecosystem and quickly grew to be a centerpiece of the entire space.  Influenced by Simon Sinek’s New York Times Best Seller, “Start With Why”, WHub manifests its passion by building the tools necessary to support and promote tech entrepreneurship in Hong Kong.

The passion that Karena Berlin has for the Hong Kong Technology Startup scene is palpable throughout this conversation.

Podcast highlights:

Welcome Felix Tan, Managing Director of The Finlab, a corporate FinTech Accelerator which is a joint venture between United Overseas Bank (UOB) and SGInnovate

What are the key trends in the FinTech space today relevant both to startups and investors?

Felix has been in the Singapore startup ecosystem since the early 1990s. What has changed in the last 20 years? Where is Singapore heading and is it a better ecosystem today than it was back then?

Podcast notes:

Felix is the Managing Director of The Finlab, a corporate FinTech Accelerator which is a joint venture between United Overseas Bank (UOB) and SGInnovate, previously known as Infocomm Investments.  Felix was one of the pioneers of the Singapore startup and internet scene and started building funded companies as far back as 1995.  His two most famous companies were SilkRoute and ECNet, which we discuss at length.  The stories about the founding, growth, funding and ultimate demise of these companies is compelling and an interesting tale of being a bit too early.  Felix was a Computer  Science graduate and represented Singapore in the South East Asian Games in the sport of Fencing.

Steven Liew is accomplished on many levels and yet humble in his desire to continue learning and improving.  This helps make him perfect a fabulous partner for his co-Founder and wife Devin Tan.  Together, via an entity they have dubbed ‘Cosmic Cafe’, they mentor and invest in startups. They help entrepreneurs turn their ideas and visions into successful companies.

Steven and I talked about Angel Investing and how all of his combined experience and business exposure has allowed him to excel in this space as well.  Steven is thoughtful, considered and yet very comfortable with the early stage risk that he takes.  When you listen to him speak, you can understand how much he has thought about his own ideas, but also how open he is to learning more and getting better.

Listen as Steven and I talk about how he became an Angel, why he loves doing it and how the power of a strong network of Angels benefits his investing and that of others as well.

Edmund Lowell and I had a multifaceted discussion about all three of the entities in which he is involved.  FlagTheory.com, the SelfKey Foundation and KYC-Chain.  Edmund started a company while still a student at Northeastern University in Boston and that grew into FlagTheory.com.  Reading Tim Ferriss’ “The Four Hour Workweek” convinced him that he could run his company and live anywhere, so he chose Asia…When I asked him where he lived, he jokingly responded with ‘Seat 1A’…clearly a man that spends a lot of time on airplanes.  We had an amazing and very lively conversation on the blockchain and many things Crypto (Heck, it is the first installment of ATP Crypto so anything less would have been shocking!), including ICOs, Tezos, and the concept of Self Sovereign Identity.

Damien is one of 3 co-founders for Backers. Based in Hong Kong, Backers is a retail showroom that sells crowdfunded products.

One of the biggest challenges facing product designers is consumer knowledge. What do people really want? What works? What doesn’t work? Most designers don’t have the time, know-how or resources to source that insight “in the wild”. Most fly by intuition and their limited echo-chambers of personal networks. That makes producing any new product a high-risk endeavor.

Backers aims to help designers in that journey by taking products even from their pre-crowdfunding stage and placing them instore so real people can interact with them in the real world. This information helps designers significantly derisk the process and create a better experience for their customers.

Jonie Oostveen is the founder of Arto, an online gallery that brings the kind of discovery experience you can find at a music app like Spotify to the world of art.

Originally from the Netherlands but now based in Singapore, Jonie’s journey into entrepreneurship started with working at large mobile telcos like KPN before later being involved in more dynamic tech organizations (Spotify, Philips Ventures, Ebuddy and Miyowa). Even though these organizations had startup-like cultures, they couldn’t replace the challenge and thrill of running your own startup.

In this interview we talk about the problems he’s trying to solve at Arto as well as the challenges (and advantages) of being an older entrepreneur. Is a 41 year old startup founder more or less likely to succeed? Jonie successfully raised $500k angel seed to kick start Arto and is now seeking a further round of capital.

Surasit Sachdev is the Founder of Hungry Hub. Hungry Hub started as a platform for the management of restaurant reservations similar to Open Table.  Restaurants happily signed up for this free product / service en masse.  The only problem was that the team figured out that neither restaurants nor their patrons had problems managing or booking reservations and hence it was not possible to properly build a business around this concept.  Surasit was neither used to failing nor happy about it.

Real entrepreneurs are persistent and do not give in easily.  All of his experience in building Hungry Hub in Thailand and interacting with Food and Beverage outlets gave the team a bigger and better idea.  Listen to this episode to hear about his pivot and his thought processes around it.  Very interesting!

There are only 10 weeks left in the year, so let’s take a quick look at where we are with our Asia Tech Podcast project. We’ve recorded 167 podcast episodes, of which we’ve produced 113. While we averaged 4 episodes a week, the bulk of the content came in the last 3 months when we started ATP Stories and announced the Tour.

This week we’re looking at the latest data from our 2017 ATP Power Rankings 2017 - your votes on who and what has contributed most to the Asian Startup Ecosystem this year. On the individual front an early shout out to Bay McLaughlin, Casey Lau, Kyle Ellicott, William Bao Bean and Gregory Prudhommeaux who are leading the individual Award for contribution at this early stage.  We also discussed the remaining Award categories including Best City which is a straight shoot between Singapore and Hong Kong so far.

This week we also launch our new vertical podcast - ATP Angels Angels is a weekly show where Michael interviews Angel Investors in Asia, kicking off with our friend Ned Phillips, CEO of Bambu. In today’s episode, Michael shares some insights into the first batch of investors interviewed, as well as what he hopes to learn from this podcast series moving forward.

We also touched on an upcoming vertical - ATP Cryto. Crypto aims to cover all things Blockchain, Ethereum and Cryptocurrency. Warning: this podcast may get a little technical so don’t expect a 101. Crypto will be a podcast for crypto entrepreneurs about crypto entrepreneurs.