Courses & Events

What does Asia mean for Silicon Valley in 2013?

Tuesday, Jun 4, 2013

04:15 pm - 05:30 pm

---

By Riva Gold, M.A. Candidate, Department of Communications at Stanford University

“Every year, China graduates more than a million engineers,” says Yukai Chou, a gamification expert who has worked closely with China and Taiwan. “That creates a shift in the global workplace and economy.”

Without seeking advice from the East, one risks falling into “Silicon Valley think” around “how you start a company, which problems you think are worth working on, and what a good company looks like,” said David Brunner, Founder and CEO of moduleQ, a company that helps workplaces structure communication systems. Speaking on a panel of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs hosted by Professor Richard Dasher, Brunner said that today, more and more entrepreneurs in the Valley have been looking to Asia for investment and knowledge partnerships.

Thanks to developments in information technology, Brunner says it’s far more common for startups today to have global teams. At his company, employees routinely collaborate on Skype, work long distance across continents and seek investors and advisors from around the world. Today, “people are used to telepresence as a substitute for actual presence,” he said. The benefit is what he calls “a global expertise supply chain.”

Jim Nguyen, President of Kynded, a new product that rewards people for acts of kindness, said that many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs need to be cultural entrepreneurs to stay competitive. “We have to be attuned to people of different cultures and how they think and operate in order to get things from them,” he explained. The goal, he says it to build a two way investment bridge between Asia and Silicon Valley, which can open up new sources of seed funding.

For his own company, Nguyen was able to secure funding from Vietnamese investors. “It can be the quickest way to get seed funding assuming you have the language, personal and community connection,” he said.

In many cases, Nguyen says, overseas investors are looking for places to park their money in the United States because their local startups don’t target a global audience.

Particularly in terms of China, Chou believes the United States is losing out on some of these partnerships in recent years. “There’s a lot of investors from China who are very very wealthy but they made money through traditional business and are not very sophisticated with technology start-ups,” he explained. A few years ago, they were investing heavily in new American technology companies. But today, he says, “money is shifting back into China because they feel they’re more sophisticated now and have a bigger market.”

So is the rise of global entrepreneurship a threat to Silicon Valley?

“I feel like the biggest concern is really talent drain,” Chou said. Not just in Asia, but countries around the world have been aggressively recruiting entrepreneurs to go to their countries and start businesses. The United States, meanwhile “has been working relentlessly hard to stop entrepreneurs from working here,” he said.

Chou was offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in seed funding and free work space in exchange for returning to China.

Ultimately, this is a concern he believes the Valley needs to take seriously. “What makes Silicon Valley unique is not the infrastructure or buildings– it’s the people,” he said. “The Valley’s most basic and most important asset is its name as the place where entrepreneurs travel to support each other.  “If that reverses, where entrepreneurs all want to go somewhere else, then Silicon Valley is just a place with buildings and roads.”

To review this blog in Japanese, kindly click on the following link.