Geeks on a Plane to Asia

I wrote those lines on the plane back from Singapore, which concluded a 10-days long study trip to Shanghai, Beijing, Seoul and Singapore with a group of web entrepreneurs and investors called the “Geeks on a Plane” (a name inspired by the famous crowdsourced movie “Snakes on a Plane”). This group, led by Silicon Valley-based angel investor Dave McClure, is made to study innovation outside of the US and create bridges with local internet ecosystems. In this column I will share what I find is the value of such trip.

Innovation outside Silicon Valley?

Anyone working knows about his own industry. The problem is that when asked about the latest trends and innovations, most people would come up with the same answers. This is what you get when reading mainstream media, attending most conferences and talking with peers. Eventually, all tend to agree and hardly anything disruptive or original emerges. While the world is looking at Silicon Valley, learning from the US in addition to their local market, the US is not looking much outside its own fish bowl. This is why such initiative provides so much value: not only entrepreneurs and investors get exposed to new ideas, but meet peers who address markets with original angles. It broadens their views and stimulates their creativity.

During this trip, we joined various events such as Ignite Shanghai, Mobile Monday, Startup2Startup, the CHINICT and Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC) in Beijing, Startup Weekend in Seoul and Echelon 2010 in Singapore. Just those events are already worth the trip!

The group also had a few cultural experiences such as visiting the Shanghai Expo (tip: lines are short at the DPRK and Iranian pavilions), the Great Wall, doing Tai Chi with a Beijing master and various parties and cocktails almost every night. I met many remarkable people and probably swapped over 200 business cards in just 10 days – you can do better at SXSW or other large events if you have your routine, but what about quality? In addition, the links forged between the two dozen members of our group will also be a long-lasting asset to all of us.

Some remarkable companies

We heard pitches from over forty startups at our various stops. According to the tech writer who was among us to report on the trip, the most impressive were the Korean ones. They not only displayed a strong command of technology and design, but were developing original ideas and showed a high team spirit. Have you heard of Chatroulette, the randomized video chat service that is now a playground for exhibitionists? It happens so that a Korean company named Wetoku has been offering a similar service before the US one was launched, but not only got rid of nudity and added useful functions such as recording and embedding in any website of the video conversation. While they are still in search of a strong business model, the service is already working well.

Another interesting example from Korea was FlyFan, which improved the online group purchase concept of Groupon.com (followed in China by companies like Meituan.com). It invites “power bloggers” to broker deals to their audience, solving the high cost of deal sourcing and scalability that Groupon has. Such concept works in Korea thanks to the sophistication of its online population and is likely to develop overseas only in a few years. Another company named PixelBerry displayed an impressive browser-based 3D avatar customization technology.

A few other companies caught my attention, such as Singapore’s Foound, a mobile-based service allowing users to organize and broadcast their plans to their friends, which was a significant improvement over the US-based startup Plancast. The company got a standing ovation following their pitch at Echelon. Another was a Japanese startup named Sidefeed that developed a low-bandwidth streaming technology for iPhone. Both had ambitions beyond their national borders.

What about Chinese startups? Despite the high level of entrepreneurial activity in China, the focus is still mainly on bridging the gap with foreign markets. Investors also support this attitude by funding models they are familiar with. I mentioned before my model of describing innovation with “5C’s”: Copy, Competition, Combination, Constraints and Context. One example of this is a company named Lashou that created a mobile service combining concepts of location-based service FourSquare and group couponing Groupon (see article on TechCrunch).

I am glad to share the new ideas generated by this trip in attempting to describe differences among national innovation ecosystems: there are three “missing C’s”: Collaboration, Culture and Comedy.

The first one, Collaboration, is the sharing of information, resources and best practices among entrepreneurs, investors and other professionals, and the continuous re-investment in the ecosystem. When asked whether he was mentoring other entrepreneurs, Wang Xing, a 4-times serial entrepreneur and CEO of Meituan, a leading group purchase service in China modeled after Groupon in the US, answered negatively. When asked about how he was planning to beat his competitors, he said humorously that the strategy was “Run, Forrest, Run” (quote from the movie “Forrest Gump”). Speed of execution is of the essence, and entrepreneurs are often left to fend for themselves.

“Culture” refers to the ability to tune to other cultures, which is a must to globalize services and products.

Last is “Comedy”, which stands for the ability to establish an emotional connection with users and rise above the level of bland technology or commodity. Those three elements are yet to develop in many markets, including China.

Things are changing in China as well: the two conferences we attended we both aiming at displaying Chinese innovative companies and sharing ideas with other countries. If most companies are still focused on the domestic market, it is a matter of time before they venture out. Some in the online gaming and mobile space are already making inroads overseas. The very concept of the “Geeks on a Plane” tour is being emulated as well: the Mobile Internet Great Wall Club, a Beijing-based global organization of mobile industry CEOs, has organized study trips to over a dozen countries in the past year and plans to visit over 40 in the coming year. Again, innovation is not only about technology

As the examples above showed, innovation can be in business models, service concepts or even variations on existing concepts. The most challenging seems to remain identifying the value created by emerging usages of new services and designing appropriate business models.

Eventually, the innovation that surprised me the most is not a high-tech one. It is an innovation in an industry that rarely stands out: air travel. Asiana had a team of in-flight cartoonists that offered to draw caricatures of passengers (mine is attached). Other flights had teams of magicians and nail artists. That showed how a mundane flight can be turned into an unforgettable experience, which is what separates a commodity from an outstanding service. What unforgettable experience are you working on?