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Welcome to episode 59 of Global From Asia podcast – Thanksgiving is coming up, I honestly forgot until I received 2 invites for turkey dinner from 2 friends – trying to decide which one to take up on the offer. These holidays coming up gets me a bit homesick to be honest, and my dad isn’t too tech savvy and still doesn’t have a smartphone, so I bought a tablet phone in Hong Kong last week for 1,500 HKD (about 200 usd), got pre-paid SIM card from China mobile HK for 40 HKD (5USD), configured it , setup a gmail for him, got wechat installed and verified it with the HK SIM card. Rushed off to the HK post to mail it that day to find out I can’t mail an electronic device with a battery. So I went to DHL and mailed it overnight for 400HKD (about 50USD) and he got it in about 48 hours. Just had my first video call with him and it was well worth it, especially for my son Miles to be able to see his grandparents on video. Gotta work on getting to USA soon to have a family reunion.Ok anyway ,enough of the soft family stuff now back to business, quite a few listeners have expressed interest in raising money for their business in Hong Kong at the early stages such as seed round or series A and I want to bring someone on to chat about this – Tytus Michalski an active Angel investor with his firm Fresco Capital, who is active at a lot of investor and startup events in Hong Kong and has been here for over 11 years. He shares some insights as well as some investments he has made as well as the thought process so let’s listen in from an investor himself,
Also, on the show notes I am giving away a free “cheat sheet” for HK investors with a list of firms and programs that I know of in Hong Kong and Mainland China you can use for your own fundraising, globalfromasia.com/episode59 – ok, let’s get started!
Topics Covered in this Episode
- Tytus, can you introduce yourself to our listeners today
- So how did you end up in Hong Kong?
- What is your take on the investor environment in Hong Kong?
- How about the startups, they seem to be “catching up” to the West steadily right?
- Where do you see the gaps and opportunities in the startup ecosystem
- What advantages and disadvantages do you see in the Hong Kong startup system?
- Can you share some cases of scaling startups in Hong Kong (ideally in your portfolio), maybe some of the struggles they faced and how they got past it
- There are a lot of Western entrepreneurs listening today, interested to relocate to Hong Kong and/or Asia to start or grow their business, what are your tips to these listeners?
- How can listeners reach out to you for more information, and are you open to be “pitched” by them?
People / Companies / Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Fresco Capital
- Focusing on just a few key metrics
- KPI – Key performance indicators
- Gowell – study overseas
- Thinking on bottom up rather than top down as far as the market
- Insight Robotics
- UAV – flying airplanes – Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
- Swire Group b2b accelerator – blueprint
- For lower value lifetime value of customers you need to have the on boarding process automated
- If you need to do full service sales, the value of the customer should be over 30,000 usd
- Contacting Tytus via the email on his website (but if pitching him, better to go through a vetted entrepreneur)
Episode Length 27:29
Thanks Tytus – I thank you for coming on the show – and I hope these tips and insights helped some of the entrepreneurs and business owners listening. Jon Buford also was on the show back in episode 15 and he gave similar ideas on raising money for your startup, as well as more into the structures and methods. But also Jon mentioned to get into the community in Hong Kong, meet people, have coffee dates, and these relationships can help you get plugged in. Investors don’t like to be pitched cold, they like introductions from reputable people in the community.
I also made that cheat sheet of some investment firms and investor programs in Hong Kong you can download for free by opting in below:
download the list of VCs in HK / SZ now
And last but not least , this week is the last week to get my early pricing for the book Hong Kong Supercharged – going into December and 2015 I will have a new package which will be a bit higher in price so check out the page on www.globalfromasia.com/hksuper and grab it while its hot! Thanks again everyone and enjoy the rest of your week, peace!
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