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  • e27 eChelon – Post Event Thoughts

    Oct
    28
    posted by Sneha Menon on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 at 2:36pm Categories: Blog

    echelonA wise man once said, “It isn’t the capital that is scarce, but the vision”; On the one hand, we have people who’ve the wherewithal, but are lacking in the big idea department; and on the other hand we’ve people armed with nothing but ideas! Put them in a startup eco-system, we’ve one group of VC’s complaining about the lack of “quality” ideas and the entrepreneurs complaining about how clueless the VC’s are . How is it that we bring a synergy across these groups was what e27 eChelon was all about.

    We had David Cohen, serial entrepreneur turned angel investor talking about what are the factors that would lead him to invest in a company. He touched upon some fundamental differences between Venture Capitalists and Angel Investors and shared on what should startups keep in mind before jumping into the funding bandwagon. The key takeaway from this session was if you want money, ask for advice; If you want advice, ask for money. To find out more, here are his slides.

    echelon_david_cohen

    Next up, we had a panel session with two angel investors and two startup-founders contrasting their thoughts and an insightful discussion from the perspective of two ends of the spectrum. Ming Yong from SocialWok and Dennis Goh from HungryGoWhere discussed on how they approached angel investors and VC’s to take their startups to the next level. Along with these intense discussions, there were some light-hearted moments as well, with an audience member asking if the investors would actually invest in these companies barring the geographical distance and this was the reaction to that.

    David and Ming

    The post lunch session had Andrew Hyde touching on a whole range of topics ranging from the coolest startups to web trends observed universally. Some of the interesting sites showcased were BrightKite, Startupweekend, domai.nr, once.im, pinboard.in and many many more…

    Andrew_Hyde

    After this, we had a talk on new initiatives which definitely triggered some interesting reactions from the crowd. Meng Wong who founded Pobox and Karmasphere spoke about the cultivating hacker culture in Singapore by starting a Hackerspace in Singapore. He spoke of his experiences with some government agencies blocking social media and his thoughts on “artifically inseminating” the eco system here. If you are interested in finding out more about the Hackerspace, click here.

    Meng_Wong

    With all the talks and questions from the audience being along the lines of  ”Why some of the government institution were not helping the startups enough?”, Michael Smith, developer evangelist at from Yahoo had a good retort of why do you need their hand-holding support in the first place? We live in a globalized world where communication channels aka the web is open to everybody. Then , what is stopping entrepreneurs from launching their own web startup. He spoke about his background and his thoughts on the future of web. Yahoo Hack day is another interesting initiative undertaken by Yahoo in SE Asia to help developers tap into the networks of Yahoo.

    Michael Smith

    Following which, Kal from iTwin shared his nuggets of wisdom about the challenges of starting up, pitching at TC50 and suddenly garnering publicity and how to deal with it. For more of his iTwin experience, Click here.

    Finally we had startup pitching sessions by  MakeAffinity, Fame and buUuk with panelists being David, Andrew, Meng Wong, Hugh Mason and James Chan who gave their thoughts on the products and how they can improve on it.

    eChelon was great fun to organize, an amazing experience to meet loads of cool people from different backgrounds and we sincerely hope you guys had a great time as well. To check out the pictures of the event, Click here.

    As we mentioned during the event, If you want to be part of the eChelon brand, we are crowdsourcing our logo design to the community. Please help us come up with a great logo design that reflects the true nature of eChelon, to bring together the best and brightest from the startup eco-system and be part of eChelon history :)


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