The Success of the First H3 Has Everything to Do with the Huge Hong Kong Startup Ecosystem

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The Joker once said “madness is a lot like gravity, all it takes is a little push,” and as we like to equate “madness” with “startups” – we decided to create H3.

Last week we held our first H3 event – something we’ve been planning for awhile but just never had the time to put together: put programmers, designers and product people into a room, mix with drinks and pizza and see what happens!

Any success that StartupsHK has had over the past few years, in terms of events and networking mixers, is really because of the amazing people that are inside the community. We feel extremely blessed to be part of this community and even from our Startup Saturday event in October to the H3 last week we know Hong Kong is going on the map because of YOU!

If you missed it, H3 is our new mixer event where if you are a hacker, hustler or hipster you can attend – and usually you are without a team – you are a designer looking to join a new startup, a hustler with a great idea or a hacker that is looking to put his/her talent into a new company – each one of these people are essential to the success of a startup and the point of H3 is to form new startups over the course of the evening with only color stickers to let you know what the other people specialize in.

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20 Suggestions
 in Preparing to Raise Venture Capital

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One of the great panels from Startup Saturday: Mobilliance 2013 was the Funding panel where angel investors and startups spoke about practical advice on raising venture capital. We also heard from Benjamin Qiu, counsel at the Shanghai office of Cooley LLP (a major law firm originated in the Silicon Valley).

Trained in SV for years, he also headed legal and VC fund management at Innovation Works in Beijing. If you remember, Ben was also the panelist on our past Startup Saturday: Mobilliance 2013.

Raising venture capital for your startups surely sounds a good road, but on the way of pursuing that there are just too much things to consider. Ben has listed 20 practical suggestions for early startups who are preparing to raise.

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A Hong Kong View of the TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 Conference in San Francisco

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I just came back from being totally Disrupted!

As part of my work with SoftLayer Catalyst I just spent 5 days at the biggest startup event in the world – the TechCrunch Disrupt conference from Sept 7-11 in San Francisco. A huge event that starts with a 2-day hackathon over the weekend and then culminates in a rapid-fire series of talks, interviews, panels at the conference with heavy pitching at the Startup Battlefield and most importantly the infamous Startup Alley.

Many HK startups ask me if it’s worth it to go to Disrupt at US$3000 a ticket; plus September is still peak season for flying; and the huge America’s Cup is on driving up hotel prices you are looking at anywhere from HK$40-50K for your 5 day trip there. What you get is a booth for ONE day and access to the conference for the rest. The place IS packed and you meet people from all over the tech industry: potential partners, investors and customers so the validation is great. But it is a gamble as you have to really throw everything into that one day.

I was happy to see one HK startup with deep pockets that got a booth – new startup FoodieQuest – a hot or not food app developed by the people behind Fluid and Nest. I spoke to Simon Squibb and Benjamin Hall and they both said they got some great feedback on the app and good face time with different types of people as well as a front page story on TechCrunch.com the day that Apple announced the new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c!

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