James Chang

Date: August 10, 2014

Name: TYPEABC – The art and science of entrepreneurship, business and startup

Presenters:James Chang, Jerome Ng, and Vincent Yen

This presentation is another business mentorship seminar provided by TYPEABC. The seminar focuses on local business entrepreneurship startup experience. Moreover, the purpose is to provide insight for any entrepreneurs who are planning to startup a business.

James Chang, Founder of YOLO express

Chang believes entrepreneurs are no different from normal people except with different mindset. Mindset sets a strong start in any business startup.

Everyone has their own unique runway in their lives and there are four questions need to consider that can impact the runway.

• What type of entrepreneur are you?
• What is your martial/personal/family situation?
• How much funding can you acquire?
• What industry are you in?

Based on the statistic today, there are 2.7 million Canadian entrepreneurs and 1.1 million small business incorporated in Canada. However, 80% of them leave their current jobs for startup voluntarily. Two major groups are generation Y and over 50s.

People are not considered to be entrepreneurs because based on stats, 50% of small business fail, workload over 50 hours per week, and the income is unpredictable and uncontrollable. People are afraid because they do not know where to start.

Some of reasons people decide to be entrepreneurs are control lifestyle, change passion to income generating business, combine skills, personal circumstances and life changing experience moments.

How to evaluate an idea?

Chang suggests starting to develop a 30 page business plan. He recommends the Outside Impact framework that can help entrepreneurs to go through step by step to determine if their idea is permissible in the market.

The framework considers seven categories: opportunity, uncertainty, team, strategy, investment, deal and exit.

In opportunity, entrepreneurs need to consider what kind of industry they should target. They need to pick the market that their business ideas are suitable. They need to calculate business present value. Moreover, they are required to research if it is acceptable and their direct or indirect competition. In addition, they need to know the best time to launch their product and how fast competitors will response to the launch.

Entrepreneurs need to brainstorm the possible uncertainties and the market size. They need to create plan to handle any possible outcomes outside of their business plans. They need to seek for team if they have the right partners, dynamics or leadership. Create the right strategy is important to business plan because it will show the direction of the business in the future. Entrepreneurs need to know if their funding is sustainable or if it is necessary to seek for other investment options. Moreover, they need to know the expectation from investors and develop exit strategy.

After the startup, entrepreneurs need to start developing operations activities. Areas in operations they need to consider:

Production

Technology

Sales & Marketing

Finance & Accounting

Customer Services

Business license / Regulation

Insurance

Legal & Contracts

Partner or Hiring Staff?

Entrepreneurs can use these two questions to determine their need of partners or hiring staff:

• Do you need a partner that can create trust? Better communication? Share risk and wealth? Create in-house expertise?
• Drowning in daily task that need to divide up time management?

Chang emphasize it is important for entrepreneurs to find a suitable mentor or adviser because they can provide lifetime learning and growing on personal or career aspects.

Chang recommends every entrepreneur to always network. It is important to trust within and do not let doubters affect any decision-making.

“Be prepared to lose, so you need to be resilient, roll with punches”

“Courage to follow your heart; stay hungry, stay foolish…”

Jerome Eg, Founder of Venuespot

Jerome starts his entrepreneurship life from the inspiration of Steve Job’s video. He realizes many company are merging and he decides to take the opportunity to become an entrepreneur. After graduation, he starts to research and learn method of acquiring companies and other leadership courses online.

He realizes business starts by solving a common problem in the world and offering something in value to clients. Therefore, he decides to startup his business of Venuespot to help clients to find meeting room for their events.

Build something, measure and learn

Jerome needs to build something quickly and get it out of the market. He will receive the market feedback and change the product based on the feedback. He starts to build website to receive more feedback from clients. Furthermore, he receives feedback and builds it back to the system. It is a cycle.

Technical and Business

When company grows, Jerome needs a professional that can deal with technical aspects in business while he focuses on business. He finds a qualified candidate for his business, but the candidate refuses due to lack of insecurity of his business. He needs to demonstrate he can take care of business. One of the major business issues is funding. He seeks opportunity at 500+ startup for investment and able to get into acceleration program for training. He receives the funding opportunity and have the ability to joint force with the candidate.

3 Takeaways

Possible

Entrepreneurs need to understand that things around their lives were built by someone like them, and those people will retire. People need to step up and entrepreneurs should take this opportunity to continue to create more innovative work around the world.

Hustle

Sometime is important for entrepreneurs to go backwards and look for solution. Things are depended on each other (A depends on B, B depends on C, and C depends on A). There is no manual to find solution; therefore, it is up to entrepreneurs to figure it out.

It is a journey

Entrepreneurship is a long personal journey that requires long-term vision. It is essential to never give up in life.

“Success is not always clear as straight line”

Vincent Yen, Founder of AirG

Yen realizes his passion in entrepreneurship when he has no passion to continue education. He starts many companies but mostly all fail. After he created the company called AirG, he decides to change his path to help other entrepreneurs to start companies.

AirG is a company over 120 employees to mobile social networking, entertainment, and gaming company that creates platform for users. The business model is mobile micro-billing and cross-platform. The future trend is wireless because it is the only way in this generation to do everything.

Yen emphasizes that look at failure is a part of success. In addition, he designs the art of failing concept for startup entrepreneurs to understand the value of failure.

The Art of Failing

Concept 1: Plan to Fail

Yen believes failing is an art and it is something entrepreneurs need to master. By looking at the failures, entrepreneurs can have the chance to think about all possibilities that competitors can react from the business idea. This will also help them to seek direct competitor advantage about others players in the market.

Concept 2: Recognize Failure

Yen wants all entrepreneurs to know fail fast means fail cheaply. Allowing others to challenge the business idea can make or morph business idea stronger and better. Recognize failure can be helpful at the early stage because it can help entrepreneurs to spend time or resources on something else if they recognize failure early. Therefore, faster they fail, faster they can do other success.

Concept 3: Learn from Failure

There is no such thing as redundant failure because each failure is a valuable experience. Many entrepreneurs do not talk about failures and they will not understand why they fail. It is a cycle and they will make the mistake again in the future. Yen suggests entrepreneurs to learn from their mistakes and review their mistakes. Entrepreneurs need to learn what is working; nevertheless, they need to learn what is not working as well.

Concept 4: Do not Fail to Fail

Failure is a process and successful entrepreneurs do not afraid to fail. Keep on trying because by not trying, entrepreneurs are for sure 100% failure. They will learn nothing and the cycle will continue.