At WIT*e last week, at least two young executives took me away from my beer and chicken wings to pitch their ideas to me. One had an idea that would use Facebook and social sharing and another had a meta-search angle.
Both, in their mid-20s, were working for major corporations and were looking to strike out.
In Australia, I know of two other industry peers who are working on their start-ups with both due to be launched soon. One is in the deals sector (someone at the HSMAI breakfast yesterday said, ‘they are popping up like mushrooms’) and the other, a meta-search model.
So that’s in the six hot categories identified by Abacus’ Brett Henry in his talk at WIT*e – Henry, by the way, has himself invested in three travel start-ups, one of which disappeared into thin air, he said, but two of them were still going.
In India, someone I know is also working under the radar right now to launch his own start-up after years of working in major corporations.
Then over the weekend, I popped into the Start-Up Weekend which was being held at the Microsoft office in Singapore. I ran into one of the chaps who run the event and he told me his plan was to have a Start-Up Weekend in every city in Asia.
The “global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities” is running one in Seoul May 13-15, Tokyo and Jakarta May 20-22 and Ulaan Baator, Mongolia, May 25-27, among others.
In the offices, four teams had been at it for the past 24 hours, crunching their ideas into a pitch due to take place at 5pm on a Sunday. Out of the four pitches, one was a travel idea – hence my visit. The entrepreneurs had heard of our WIT Bootcamp and wanted some input into their idea.
When I walked in, there were eight guys (where are the women?) working furiously away at their laptops (mainly Apple, where are the PCs).
They looked like they hadn’t slept, which they hadn’t. I can’t share their idea here because it wouldn’t be right but suffice it to say, it did send a tingle down my spine. It offers a new way of searching that could be fun and new – critical of course is the execution and when they get into it, they will find lots of obstacles along the way – but hey, who said anything worth accomplishing would be easy?
I am chuffed with this flurry of entrepreneurship activity I am seeing in online travel in Singapore.
In his interview during his visit to Singapore to be a judge at the Stanford Global Entrepreneurs Challenge, Guy Kawasaki said this, “Singapore has based its educational system on the expectation that its graduates will work for the government or multinational corporations (MNCs), neither of which prepares one for entrepreneurship. In America, if you work for a large company for a long time, people ask why. In Singapore, if people leave a large company, people ask why. This is a huge difference.
“In addition, the Singapore leadership has been visionary and strong and as a result have developed the strategies and tactics for the growth of the country from the top down. As a result, the educational system has encouraged the society to learn and pick up knowledge and facts but not necessarily to be creative, which is a key factor in entrepreneurship.”
He then compared Israel to Singapore, “Israel has five million people, six million entrepreneurs, and fifteen million opinions. Singapore has five million people, six entrepreneurs, and one opinion.”
Kawasaki was of course being deliberately provocative – you have to say such stuff for people to notice you “as a visionary”.
But I feel things are changing. There may not be an obvious Sim Wong Hoo (Creative Technology) emerging yet but there’s lots of gurgling activity below the surface and that is not obvious – lots of small companies doing lots of stuff that create an eco-system all their own.
There’s a new-found respect for entrepreneurs especially in the technology space, thanks to platforms like e27, and I am seeing that fever spread to all industries, including travel and tourism.
The travel entrepreneurs I have met in Singapore are a blend of both foreign and local. Daniel Quadt behind Guide Gecko is hard at work building up his “travel guides by travel gurus” company. He wants to empower travel writers to get published and to get paid for their content. That ain’t a bad mission, I reckon.
The local team behind Come Singapore, which pitched at the WIT Bootcamp, is still hard at work building up their business and from the look in their eyes when I met them at WIT*e, they ain’t giving up their dream of empowering travellers to Singapore to discovering their home island in a free and easy way. And I think their idea is taking place at the right time in Singapore’s tourism story
Forget Boundaries, another team that pitched, has built up a formidable menu of longtail content in South-east Asia, one of the hardest nuts to crack. Hats off to their tenacity and perseverance.
And what the locals may lack in creativity (as Kawasaki says it) and perhaps flair and style in public presentations, they make up for it in earnestness, belief and a determination to succeed, that often leaves me in awe.
I don’t recall being that driven in my early 20s to start a business. And so to all the 20-somethings and older who dream of a start-up in travel, come be part of the WIT Bootcamp this year (Oct 17) and go forth and create. Create a business, jobs, wealth and spread it around.
