I attended the e27 Unconference 2009 at Biopolis on Saturday and was pleasantly surprised at the levels of both high quality entrepreneurship and interest in the new web/technology scene within Singapore.

The only loser in the whole day for me was the venue, although a fabulously impressive building the facilities let a little to be desired. The morning keynote was delivered without slides due to technical issues and late in the day there was the unmistakable whiff of blocked toilets engulfing the fourth floor, leading to much ‘mouth breathing’ and eventually abandonment!

However these issues aside I thought I’d share some unconference notes, taken ‘old school’ with pen and paper. As a rule I prefer not to take a laptop to a conference, I can use my iPhone to keep in touch if required.

Scott Rafer, Lookery

A) terrific opener from Scott Rafer (@rafer) presenting without his slides, which did not hurt him at all – it may have even improved it for me. I was familiar with MyBlogLog but not his latest startup, Lookery. He revealed himself to be somewhat cynical about the more ‘dreamy’, funded or unfocussed start-up ideas and provided some practical guidance to help on the journey to becoming a company that makes actual money.

Along the way, and in the subsequent panel, he provided the most entertaining quotes of the day for me.

His contended that Silicon Valley’s status as the only cluster of startups was coming to an end. London, Tel Aviv, Beijing and Shanghai are there now, and the future could lead to Bangalore, Buenos Aires and perhaps Singapore. His theory is that successful founders can create hubs by providing ‘better investment’ than the typical “parasitic” VC model.

He quickly defined his view of a successful startup as one that in 36 months is turning over $1m-3m USD a year. He also excluded Facebook: face it you aren’t likely to build the next Facebook or Google, create an actual business! He also excluded Friendster-esque startups, which have no benefit for the founders, who have all left!

He boiled his guidance to simple mathematics. Take a product generate $1-3 dollars per user and then aim at an audience big enough to to provide you with your revenue! What matters is teh size of the market you can target . Break the world into segments to target: English speaking nations, Europe & Middle East, Latin America, South Asia, South East Asia (analogous to the DVD region map!). Pick one or two and worry about the rest of the world later.

I enjoyed his take on the infamous German website copycats, “If you see something working well: copy it”. There is no such thing as new ideas only good execution. It’s the right thing to do, just change the 20% you need to to make it work for your users.

His final message was to “be late and be boring”, find one thing and do it well. If you’re late to market you can always compete on price or service, if you’re too early no-one may buy! Boring ideas can be successful businesses; directories, customer lists and analytics (‘counting stuff isn’t hard’).

My favourite section was in response to a question, Scott’s take that “even Google don’t believe in ‘Do No Evil’ anymore, they’re too smart” raised a few grins, only to continue, “Facebook have no such saying”. Zuckerberg is looking after #1 and if it’s not in the best interest of Facebook you will “get run over” but that actually made them more reasonable to work with – he spoke from his experience with Lookery who we initially intertwined with the early days of Facebook apps.

slides

Questions & Panel

The startup panel was full of entertaining tales, humour and good advice, well moderated by Benjamin Joffe of +8*.

On) the panel were Gang Lu (Openweb Asia,) Dr Lai Kok Fung (Buzzcity,) Wong Hoong An (HungryGoWhere) and Scott Rafer standing in for R Chandrashekar from Fusion Garage (in the US presumably on Crunchpad business!)

Some highlights:

Money

• It’s tough to monetise in a small country, aim at scale to make any real money. [LKF]
• Subscription services don’t really work with consumers but they can with business. [WHA]
• Virtual items seem to be a good way to monetise social networks, it’s being done in China and Japan successfully [LKF]

Users

• Silicon Valley is not as easy as it looks from outside, difficult to hold attention [SR]
• Use founders and friends initially, grow using SEO and affiliations [SR]
• Giving stuff away (both legal & illegal!) has been proven to work [LKF] not suggesting you do anything illegal of course!

Funding

• Don’t bother with government funding. A lot of effort and distraction, for not much. [LKF]
• If you ask who got Gov’t funding and then who needed it there aren’t very many! [SR]
• Will not deal with VCs early stage. Terms don’t work for founders. Angels are great. [SR]
• Cloud computing is the biggest competition for VC [SR] my quote of the day
• Late stage funding can be ok, if required to scale big [SR]
• Save your knees begging for other stuff! [WHA]
• Only take it if it helps with what you’re already doing well [BJ]

Survival and Promotion

• HGW survived being blacklisted by Google, but had to acquiesce to their demands. 50% of their traffic is from Google. [WHA]
• Try not to be too dependant on any single other company [LKF]
• This power due to dependance on traffic, is one of the reasons Google is scared of Twitter [GL]

MDA Debacle

The poor girl After government funding got a kicking on the panel, she had to stand up and give the standard MDA presentation, full of self justifying and aggrandising material that was much too dense, too complex and she lost the crowd. Then she got tough questions from the very intelligent people in the room, for which she had no real answers, and just looked like a rabbit in the headlights. She had a colleague in the room, but he didn’t seem to want to leave his chair.

Clearly it should have been a more senior manager from the MDA, in order to handle the tough questions and give a better account of the organisation. All in all, it did more damage than good.

My take on the whole thing is that it’s tough for (any) government to understand and fund technological innovation and balance that with a responsibility to justify themselves to the taxpayer, who’s money they are using. It is a good thing that the government knows to invest in the future of Singapore as an entrepreneurial hub, and from the conference it was clear there is a lot of local talent, but that they have no real idea how.

At the moment the MDA seems to be stuck justifying itself (and it’s huge 5 year budget) and not making itself useful as it could be to entrepreneurs. At best it seems to be a hugely expensive advertising campaign that Singapore is a good place to do a start up, but I’d be happy to be proved wrong.

The Afternoon

The pitches were interesting although for most of them I was not the target audience! But an awful lot of impressive technology and seemingly sound businesses were shown off. I left the conference thinking it’s about time I kicked my own backside into gear, maybe next year I should be up there…

Now to sift through the vast number of namecards I collected!