echelon 2010 Wrap Up Part 1 – The Event

So, what was echelon 2010 like for me? I’d say it was an awesome event, well planned with equally great people attending it. I think the overall theme was that Asia has a developing startup ecosystem that will support the needs locally and can expand globally. 

When I first signed up for the event, I never would have thought that I would have connected up with such a wide variety of people. I now have good contacts in Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore that I didn’t have before. On top of that, with the tie-in of Geeks on a Plane, I was able to meet up with a great group of people from the US as well. 

My highlights for the event: 

Day 1

• 
  Dave McClure’s opening keynote was the right message for the audience. (@davemcclure)  Slides from the talk http://slidesha.re/bFou2p “Startup 2.0: a Silicon Valley Story” My summary is that the focus on VC funded startup monsters is a broken model that is self-perpetuated. Especially here in Asia, we have an opportunity to develop a healthy lightweight funding model for startups that helps to create more smaller and successful companies that probably benefit the founders more. 
• Update: Dave using modern dance to illustrate how most people do development…
• The follow-up panel after this presentation was a pretty good selection from many areas, and helped to shed some light both on the current status of things in the region as well as how it compares to the established practices in Silicon Valley.
• in/set-72157624200299776/
  I spent the rest of this first day exhibiting tasksee.com and trying to catch whatever presentations I had time for during dead periods. I really have no idea of how many people I ended up talking with, I should have been a little more aggressive with getting people’s contact info or to get them to sign up on the spot. My guess is that I talked with at least 100 people that day, which was really good practice and gave me exposure to really see what parts of the service generally resonate with people. This will help me a lot while I develop the public facing website and keep on looking for new customers. 
• 
  The launch presentations were a mixed bag. Foound (@foound) was the big hit, pulling off a smooth pitch that included a prepared response which quoted one of the panel members. Only a handful of the launchees were actually launching right then, notably HK’s own Pandaform was one of them.

Day 2

• The second day was basically either talks/presentations by speakers or panels on a wide variety of topics. See http://www.amiando.com/echelon2010.html?page=356410 for the details on the whos and whats.
• I guess you could say the second day was a little more of the practical, and so more specific. Since I’m not to much into Social Media or Gaming there were some gaps in the program for me. 
• I enjoyed Vinod Nair‘s presentation on “How to Not Fail” which was generally just drawing from his past experiences and putting together a list of things to not do. Personally, I really could relate to his experience where at one point it was just him pushing his startup idea going for broke. 
• Noah Kagan‘s talk on “How to Pick the Next Billion Dollar Idea ” (see top photo) was entertaining and informative in a similar way to Vinod’s. Much of it was just helping to pass on what he had learned to help people avoid mistakes he had gone through.

It was great seeing the turnout from HK. We had four startups exhibiting at the show, and another two there attending. Including investors, we had around 10 people from HK there. 

So, many thanks to the crew at e27 for a great event. Special thanks to Sneha (@snehamenon) for doing a great job with connecting up everyone. 

Most photos courtesey @rampok

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