Re: [OpenFrog] What are the top qualities of successful JFDI businesses?

[Meng WONG]

I want to say I haven't forgotten this question – short question, long answer!

On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 2:45 PM, Aurie Philipchuk <aurie.ph...@gmail.com> wrote:

What are some qualities you guys have noticed from the top businesses who complete the JFDI program? 

I might not be able to give a better answer than PG: http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html But I can embellish around the borders…

The best founders are smart. Without exception, they have learned how to learn. I wrote about this elsewhere in Flooders and Extenders. Applied to startups and technology, that means two things.

In tech, that means they are at the forefront of some technical domain. They don't have to be a Tesla, hitting a target that no one else can see. They just have to be playing in the same sandbox, with all the same toys, as the other easily-bored kids. They see an Arduino, a Spark Core, or a Raspberry Pi, and they just know they have to get one and master it. They have to explore the possibilities. These are the people who tend to program in efficient languages like Ruby and Javascript (particularly with Node.js, it seems, nowadys), and weird languages like Haskell, in preference to banker languages like .NET and C#.

In startups, that means that once they've committed themselves to the path of entrepreneurship, they go out and learn everything they can, from reputable sources, about this new domain of knowledge and practice. New to them – they're in the deep end. But not new to other people – smart people have been trying to understand business, innovation, and entrepreneurship for decades. And the smart founders will go out and inhale the books and the blogs and try to discern what truths are available in this fuzzy domain, so they can, as Esther Dyson would say, make new mistakes.

So far I've talked a lot about tech, but many of JFDI's startups don't innovate from technical insight. They innovate from market insight. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to notice that the Airbnb model can be applied to things outside Airbnb. But it does take a certain degree of imagination, coupled with a certain amount of industry experience, to understand how flows of value can be restructured. The tech is relatively straightforward compared to rearchitecting a market.

All of this may sound discouraging to people whose school experience has convinced them they are not smart in these ways – design, imagination, creativity, self-directed learning, communication skills. People tell me that in Asia, children are still brought up to be factory workers, not thinkers and makers. I don't know what to do about that. Maybe things will change with time.

What can potential applicants consider when building their business to increase the chance of acceptance and success with the program?

If you're serious about building a business, as opposed to a science or art project, then I would recommend Steve Blank's How to Build a Startup, available at Udacity.

We offer our version of that Customer Development program, in our pre-accelerator program JFDI Discovery. That program welcomes all founders, whether they're starting a shoe shop or the next Google.

New intakes start every month: http://jfdi.asia/discovery/

The accelerate program is more selective. JFDI Accelerate selects for intrinsically high-tech, high-growth, innovation-driven enterprises, with the potential for venture funding and global scale. We don't want to invest in businesses that only ever become an SME.  I'll let Paul Graham have the last word here: http://paulgraham.com/growth.html

[Claudia NG]

This is brilliant, Meng. Thanks for the insight. 

[Meng WONG]

On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 6:00 PM, Meng WONG <meng...@jfdi.asia> wrote:

If you're serious about building a business, as opposed to a science or art project, then I would recommend Steve Blank's How to Build a Startup, available at Udacity.

In contrast to the Lean Startup canon, which is very good for new-market innovations, there is a leading alternative school of thought –

Southeast Asian and other "rest-of-the-world" markets face different challenges than the US.

Many, but not all, globally competitive innovations emerge from US startups serving US markets. For the past 60 years this has been true.

In the rest of the world the profile of the innovation landscape tends toward clones and adaptations for different geographies (think Baidu and Vkontakte). This is particularly challenging for pure Internet businesses, because in cases where the platform is limited only by language not geography, any market can use the US solution! Just look at Flickr, and at the success of Facebook in Indonesia.

Much of the low-hanging fruit, as it were, has been plucked already; it is an uphill challenge for any city to compete head-to-head with Silicon Valley on pure software/Internet B2C innovations – see Marc Andreessen's Drone Valley piece. But it can be done. If Skype can come out of Estonia/Sweden/Denmark, Viki can come out of Singapore.

The next layer are "hyperlocal" solutions, where some B2B element requires a sales army of boots on the ground – hence the possibility of Groupon clones, Grabtaxi, etc.

Much of this thinking was first captured by Oliver Samwer and then implemented by Rocket Internet.

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/04/features/inside-the-clone-factory

http://www.scribd.com/doc/87953603/America-s-Most-Successful-Startups-Samwer-1999