hich I can share with you.

Years back when I was in Cambridge, a brilliant German inventor I know approached a friend of mine from the United States to do business development. They formed a startup and I thought that the technology was fantastic to make the next Google. This is what exactly happened. One day, the inventor came to me and asked me about business models in my area of specialisation. I was baf

Recently, we have been receiving a lot of applications for the funding commissioned by MDA. There are good and bad ideas. Of course, some of them will be getting “No, I am sorry to inform you that….” from us. it should not mean to you that it is the end of the road if we don’t fund you. If you believe in your idea so much, you should continue the search for funding. Even better, try to do a startup without funding, like some of our resident contributors, Cobalt Paladin, Design Sojourn, Weichang, Der Shing and myself have done. Through a few correspondences and meeting some self-proclaimed and crappy “entrepreneurs”, I have set up a list of reasons why they don’t make the mark. I have also placed some notes in this post to tell people what kind of entries will end up in our rubbish bin. Here are three reasons why we are ready to reject them.

1. One man show is bound to fail.

Despite how much we tell everyone that a team is important, some Singaporeans are still doing that. Usually when an entrepreneur tells me that he runs a one man show, three possibilities come to my mind: (i) he cannot inspire people to work with him, (ii) he cannot scale his business and hence his profit margins will be extremely low or (iii) he does not know how to grow his business. Good businesses require tight-knitted small teams and great business demands a vast number of good and strong teams. This is one problem I see with single inventors. If I keep trying to help them and gather people around them and they still do nothing, this demonstrates that they just cannot handle people. If you are still not convinced by my reasoning, here is a story which I can share with you.

Years back when I was in Cambridge, a brilliant German inventor I know approached a friend of mine from the United States to do business development. They formed a startup and I thought that the technology was fantastic to make the next Google. This is what exactly happened. One day, the inventor came to me and asked me about business models in my area of specialisation. I was baff

g, like some of our resident contributors, Cobalt Paladin, Design Sojourn, Weichang, Der Shing and myself have done. Through a few correspondences and meeting some self-proclaimed and crappy “entrepreneurs”, I have set up a list of reasons why they don’t make the mark. I have also placed some notes in this post to tell people what kind of entries will end up in our rubbish bin. Here are three reasons why we are ready to reject them.

1. One man show is bound to fail.

Despite how much we tell everyone that a team is important, some Singaporeans are still doing that. Usually when an entrepreneur tells me that he runs a one man show, three possibilities come to my mind: (i) he cannot inspire people to work with him, (ii) he cannot scale his business and hence his profit margins will be extremely low or (iii) he does not know how to grow his business. Good businesses require tight-knitted small teams and great business demands a vast number of good and strong teams. This is one problem I see with single inventors. If I keep trying to help them and gather people around them and they still do nothing, this demonstrates that they just cannot handle people. If you are still not convinced by my reasoning, here is a story which I can share with you.

Years back when I was in Cambridge, a brilliant German inventor I know approached a friend of mine from the United States to do business development. They formed a startup and I thought that the technology was fantastic to make the next Google. This is what exactly happened. One day, the inventor came to me and asked me about business models in my area of specialisation. I was baf

ady to reject them.

1. One man show is bound to fail.

Despite how much we tell everyone that a team is important, some Singaporeans are still doing that. Usually when an entrepreneur tells me that he runs a one man show, three possibilities come to my mind: (i) he cannot inspire people to work with him, (ii) he cannot scale his business and hence his profit margins will be extremely low or (iii) he does not know how to grow his business. Good businesses require tight-knitted small teams and great business demands a vast number of good and strong teams. This is one problem I see with single inventors. If I keep trying to help them and gather people around them and they still do nothing, this demonstrates that they just cannot handle people. If you are still not convinced by my reasoning, here is a story which I can share with you.

Years back when I was in Cambridge, a brilliant German inventor I know approached a friend of mine from the United States to do business development. They formed a startup and I thought that the technology was fantastic to make the next Google. This is what exactly happened. One day, the inventor came to me and asked me about business models in my area of specialisation. I was baf

he does not know how to grow his business. Good businesses require tight-knitted small teams and great business demands a vast number of good and strong teams. This is one problem I see with single inventors. If I keep trying to help them and gather people around them and they still do nothing, this demonstrates that they just cannot handle people. If you are still not convinced by my reasoning, here is a story which I can share with you.

Years back when I was in Cambridge, a brilliant German inventor I know approached a friend of mine from the United States to do business development. They formed a startup and I thought that the technology was fantastic to make the next Google. This is what exactly happened. One day, the inventor came to me and asked me about business models in my area of specialisation. I was baf

hich I can share with you.

Years back when I was in Cambridge, a brilliant German inventor I know approached a friend of mine from the United States to do business development. They formed a startup and I thought that the technology was fantastic to make the next Google. This is what exactly happened. One day, the inventor came to me and asked me about business models in my area of specialisation. I was baffled and told him that I was no expert of his industry. Then he continued to ask me what book to read about this. I told him to look up a few references. In the end, I realized that he did not trust my friend at all about business models. For every subject from financials to writing business plans, he had read every book. However, in the end, the business failed horribly. Luckily, my American friend did not suffer badly from the experience. Within seconds he quit the venture, a well-respected serial entrepreneur (and business angel who have done numerous technology startups and sold them to high bidders) in the Cambridge cluster called him and offered him a CEO job for the new startup. The moral of the story is trust which is cardinal to some of our Asian cultures. Remember, you cannot be the CEO, the accountant, the business development director, the public relations and the inventor all at one time. It’s impossible to work like that.

So, if you want to convince us, show us if you have a team of two at least, where the other person possess complementary skills to what you don’t have.

2. Derivatives vs Imitations

Some companies successfully did it through imitating what a successful big company do. For example, Baidu, the Chinese search engine took wholesale from Google. However, that can work if you can harness a domestic market as big as China, India or Brazil. Some founders try to do this in Singapore and find that their markets are so limited that it amounts nothing at all. As a matter of fact, Baidu is not really an imitation, but a derivative of Google operating in a niche market, namely the customers all writ