Just in case you missed it before and want to get an instant snapshot of the Hong Kong Startup Community, StartupsHK co-founder and Community Development Manager for SoftLayer’s Catalyst program in Asia-Pacific Casey Lau – will be bringing his talk to General Assembly for the 4th time this year.
We asked Casey a few questions about his talk and why it’s so popular:
What’s the talk about?
It’s basically the last 3 years of running StartupsHK distilled into the main points in 60-minutes. I cover how basically this second generation of startups started, the places to be, the people to know, the startups causing the most noise in the community, the cultural challenges, the investment strategies and where everyone is.
Who comes out to the talk?
It’s an amazing mix of people, each class has been mixed with new startups just starting here in Hong Kong, startups who have moved to Hong Kong from places like Russia, Europe and the US to new angel investors and venture groups starting out looking to see what’s happening here and how they can get involved.
What is one key take away that people get from the talk?
I think people are usually surprised at how deep and big the community is here in Hong Kong – we at StartupsHK are only one piece of the giant ecosystem that’s been building – we have hacker groups, entrepreneur groups, UX groups, mobile specific groups, social media groups – all helping to grow the ecosystem here and to help each other succeed in this exciting industry.
I work with General Assembly and host them at The Hive to do this talk every 6 weeks – so I will do this again probably sometime in November.
How do people keep updated with all that’s going on in Hong Kong’s startup community?
First I tell everyone to join our various social media channels – like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – these 3 form the core of what we do because people are there from all over checking in to see what’s happening here. Our newsletter is also very popular to keep abreast of all the events.
Hopefully from there they are able to splinter off to the areas of the startup community that most appeals to them – whether it be more information on social media or open data or user experience – I’m very happy to see all these groups come out and share so much with the community.
All this is shared in our communal calendar which most groups fill out so there is one unbiased calendar that anyone wanting to meet up to learn more can drop into which is found here.
