2015/03/24

Information about the speech

• Title: Volunteer Entrepreneur to Global Entrepreneur
• Speaker: Hank CY Huang / 黃經堯, National Chiao Tung University
  • Professor, Department of Electronics Engineering in NCTU
  • Director, NCTU Venture Lab

Introduction

• Qmote: The Water-Resistant Internet Remote for Smartphones by Qblinks — Kickstarter
• GoMore Stamina Sensor - The Athlete’s Wearable Fuel Gauge by GoMore — Kickstarter
  • Gomore

Contents

• Born to be Entrepreneur?
  • Actually... You are not sure until you try!!
  • It is the Attitude / Characteristics
    • If not following someone's steps
  • Passion
    • No more regular schedule
  • Open-minded
    • Listen to advices
  • Ownership / Responsibility
    • Remember, you are the founder
  • Be brave to solve a bigger program
    • Solving a problem that really matters
• To be Successful, you also need
  • A team with good intention
  • Innovation Eco-system
    • With Professional treatment
    • Good mentors
      • Can be your potential business partners
    • Good Investors (angels + series investment)
• For Investment (no mercy) - Business is business
  • You need to be clear of your value proposition (tough one)
  • Learn to find (or share with) your business partners
    • Technology, in most cases, takes only < 20% credit for the success
  • Why we will invest you? Are you aware of > 90% failure rate in startups?
    • Higher failure rates if just student-only teams
• NCTU
  • Venture Lab
  • Co-working space
  • Accelerator
  • Incubator
  • Asia Pacific Accelerator
• Suggestions for Entrepreneur
  • Identify a Suitable Innovation Environment to attend
  • Participate as Volunteer Entrepreneur if no business idea
    • Learn from startups and be parts of innovation eco-system
  • Learn to be Entrepreneur if a team can be identified and enjoy the process
  • Act as Global Entrepreneur by exploring global business opportunities and network.
  • "If u wanna give advices, be successful first, or your opinion is useless because it's not working anywhere."

Thoughts

At first, I thought he was going to talk about those two projects on Kickstarter because he said these two projects both are his students' projects. But, he just mentioned about them without any detials further then started to talk about those Contents and Suggestions for Entrepreneur above which I think all of those things he talked about actually can be found in most of books related to the entrepreneurship in the bookstores. Although I don't think I've learned something new, I can accept that because you know... this kind of speech always need to have such contents.

But, he showed about 5 associations in the NCTU which are helping students about their startup company or entrepreneurship in his slides, I thought he was going to talk about the details how these associations in campus will help students to make their startup dreams come ture or some kind of promote students to join these associations or make some introductions about these associations for letting students know more about them. But I was wrong, just more rules and suggestions from books.

At last in this speech, the speaker said something like “If u wanna give advices, u need to be successful first, or your opinion is useless because it's not working anywhere.”

It just made me kind of angry and don't want to ask any questions because I am “not qualified to give some advices” in his opinion anyway. If I am already a successful entrepreneur, why did I take a course called “Technology Entrepreneurship” which is supposed to teach you about how to become an entrepreneur? It's really ridiculous for me to heard about this.

I was going to ask him about:

• “Why you just kept talking about those things in the books? I wanna learn more about what would student entrepreneurs encounter in their startup business and how you help those students with their startup based on your experience, because I think those real experience is more valuable for us not those things in books you just kept talking in this speech.”

• “Why you kept talking about that we NCTU students is better than NTU students and know more about how to cooperate with other people without giving any improvement? As myself experience, I have some NTU friends who really know how to cooperate with their teammates. Also, I think NTU is a better place for students to build a startup because there are more and diversified departments in NTU while most of departments in NCTU are all science-related.”