Startup Taiwan: Foreigners Business Guide

Fershad Irani, from Australia, is a website performance consultant, helping companies achieve their business goals through website optimizations. His core focus is reducing the environmental impact of the web, reducing their carbon footprint.

He has a bachelor’s degree in Business, Computing, Finance and Internet Business Technologies from the university of Technology Sydney. Fish left his job at one of the biggest tech companies in Taiwan to pursue his own passion. He is currently in Taiwan on an APRC.

Follow Fish - https://www.linkedin.com/in/fershad/
Check out his website - https://www.fershad.com/
The Green Web Foundation: https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/
Fish book recommendation - Susan Cain's book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8...SHOW LESS

Our guest for today is Linshuan Chu (or simply Linh Chu), from the US

Lin is founder of Webu, a social marketing app that allows users to push their Ad contents to local and global users for a flat rate of $2 across the industry. These Ads are shown to multiple social media channels that Lin and her husband created to promote content creators, freelancers and small businesses. Their channels where Ads can be shown, have a combined follower of 60+M. 

Our topic is the challenges of doing digital Ads on Facebook and Google, and how Webu is solving these challenges.

One of our failures from 2021 was that we never explained what www.startupintaiwan.com is all about and this video was from a crowdfunding pitch that never gotten light simply because we're a foreign company and all of Taiwan's crowdfunding platforms ado not cater to us and Taiwan doesn't have access to Indiegogo nor Kickstarter, which is rooted to failed banking systems here. 

Please visit our site and support by subscribing - it is our only way to continue this mission for now.

Our guests for today are the founders of MangaX, the grand champion at the recently concluded Dragon’s Chamber Taiwan!

We have Genevieve Murphy, from the US, Joe Huang from Taiwan. In this episode, they shared their experience at the recently concluded Dragons' Chamber Taiwan pitch competition. They also explain further what Manga X Technologies is trying to solve and how they work efficiently as a team with having Taiwanese and American founding team.

For our YouTube viewers we have the MangaX’s pitch at the end of this video, courtesy of our friends from EddyLive who livestreamed the event, and from Catapult, the fastest, easiest way to edit massive amounts of video. To clarify, we are not sponsored by them.

Our guest for today is Raymond Ko, a returning Taiwanese from the US

Raymond has 20 years of experience in cash, sales trading, Asian markets covering a strong mix of Asian-based and North American-based clients. He has built and managed a team of 11 traders and assistants in Taiwan.

From that hectic career, Raymond pivoted to a career as a freediving instructor and digital marketer.

He is currently based on the small island of Xiaoliuqiu off the Southwest Coast of Taiwan. Famous for its abundant sea turtles, the community there has been built on the wealth of the tuna industry, with the fishermen commanding 14% of global tuna market share at one time.

Our topic for today is about the business of freediving and Raymond’s quest to claim his Taiwan citizenship. 

t.Hub with Taiwan Department of Economic Development sponsored an event for Taipei International Startup Week 2021, and one of the panel discussions talked about metaverse. What is it and what is Taiwan's role in this industry?

The discussion was moderated by Mr. Volker Heistermann, Co-Founder, Mosaic
Venture Lab. The panelists are Bruce Bateman, Chief Innovation Advisor, LITEON, Luca Di Fiore, Head of Products at ADATA Technology, and  Sascha Pallenberg, CAO, aware The Platform and former Head of Digital Transformation, Daimler. 

Mark Pimentel is a high frequency quantitative trader & entrepreneur who moved to Taipei in 2018 after more than a decade of experience in New York and Chicago.

Pimentel co-founded Kronos Research, a multi-strategy cryptocurrency trading firm with about 140 employees across three offices in Asia, and trades $5-10B in daily volume. 

He is also building WOO Network, a cryptocurrency dark pool with deep liquidity and token-based incentive schemes. Their goal is to build digital asset trading infrastructure and improve market execution. 

How can Taiwan well position itself in the cryptocurrency market? What are its strengths and areas to improve for this industry?

Claudia Wild, from Germany, is a cultural chameleon & seasoned copywriter, content creator & translator. She has 9 years of experience writing multilingual content, running digital marketing campaigns & developing e-learning material. Multiple years of self-organized, remote work have made Claudia a digital workplace aficionado that easily adapts to any circumstances, honed her skills of working independently with little to no direction, and have led her to become well-versed and thrive in a digital workspace.

Claudia is a digital nomad – she was in Taiwan for more than a year on an Entrepreneur Visa and moved to Canada mid-2021. What made her move out? Is she coming back? 

Our guest for today is Mark Hsu, a Taiwanese-American entrepreneur & investor who has been based in Asia since 1996. Stanford graduate, Mark is currently running a portfolio of companies in education, e-commerce & internet-enabled services.

Our topic for today is funding options for startups in Taiwan. Mark explains that while Taiwan no longer requires a minimum paid-in capital, the reality is that government grants are heavily tied to paid-in capital.  he said, in most situations, the grant will be a discount to your paid-in capital.

As an investor, he also enumerated the pointers that he is looking for when investing in startups in Taiwan. He noted that he has funded a number of foreign startups.

For job postings, investment for your startup, visit Mark's company - https://www.11fleet.com/

For questions about starting a business in Taiwan, we have a created this new website - https://startupintaiwan.com/

We invited back Joseph Prosnitz from the US to talk about his experience as Taiwan Entrepreneur Visa holder who successfully applied for Gold Card.

Why did he apply for a Gold Card, are there some significant benefits vs Entrepreneur Visa?

Joseph is the founder and CEO of Stride 360 a company that helps people get the complete gym experience in their homes. Joseph built out the first version of Stride that switches between exercise bike and elliptical trainer to make his workouts easier, especially in the winter later expanding to include rowing and ski. The machine comes with an open social fitness platform to motivate users to maintain their stride towards a healthier life, pun intended.