CityU Seminar “What do you need to be an Entrepreneur?”

CityU Education Platform for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CePIE) arranged a seminar named “What do you need to be an entrepreneur?” on 27 Mar 2017.  It aimed to share some entrepreneurs experience to student for enhancing their knowledge on starting business.  In the beginning, Dr. Hongyi SUN (SEEM) briefed the purpose of seminar and introduced CePIE and tonight guest speakers.

The first speaker was Dr. Rocky Lam (Business Director, Vantis Consulting Group) and his topic named “Grow with your dream without boundaries”.  He briefed this experience on starting business to be an entrepreneur.  In the beginning, he employed only 6 people.  After 7 years, his company employed 120 people.  He focused on Cloud based Solution as “SaaS”.  

After introduced his company development and value-added services, he shared how to defining the dream.  He summarized the following points:

-          Start by asking yourself what makes you happy

-          Create a personal mission statement and think out of the box (Disruptive).

-          Re-examine your past goals

-          Consider what you can and can’t control

-          Reflect and then write out your dream as a manageable goal

Then he also explained how to accomplish the dream as follows.

-          Break your dream down into manageable project

-          Find out how others have accomplished your goal

-          Define the steps for each project

-          Commit to your dream by taking action on each project

-          Always know what’s next on your list

-          Use your missteps as a lesson

-          Be inspired and learnt from others

At the end, he showed a video named “Dream City” which come from Hong Kong Seek Road to inspire students.  (www.hkseekroad.com/activities.html )

The second speaker was Mr. Dennis Cheung (Director, DKJ Co. Ltd.) and his topic was “Creating and Building a Startup”.  He was also the founder of ShowMuse since 2014.  Mr. Cheung shared his startup experience to students. 

Firstly, he shared the process of Startup from Idea Generation to Business Model fine tune and then Execution, finally, it was real Start.  He shared what was a “Good” pain point that included problem big enough, happening frequently and No major player in the market.  Having a good pain point, you need a good solution.  A Good Solution if:

-          You can do it with existing resources;

-          You can find out resources to do it; and

-          Scalable in a short period of time.

For generation an idea, usually through four paths were Observation, Reading, Brain Storming and Chit Chat.  Dennis then mentioned about fund raising.  He said you needed to show them your assets (e.g. Business model and plan) and the next steps (your execution). 

After that he briefed the components of business plan.  Finally, he shared his experience to be founder who should think the following items:

i)                    Co-founder should share the same value, no financial burden and trustworthy

ii)                  Investors should have synergy and industry network

iii)                Team members should share the same value, no financial burden and good job allocation.

Dr. Eric Chan (Senior Education Development Officer, Office of Education Development Gateway Education, CityU) was the third speaker and his topic named “Protecting Your Idea”.  In the beginning, he quoted the book “Zero to One” that four essential characteristics of a Startup were “Proprietary Technology” (e.g. Google), “Network Effects” (e.g. Facebook), “Economies of Scale” and “Branding”.  He also explained IP using Bill Gate statement “Intellectual Property has the shelf life of a banana”. 

Then he used a video to brief different concept on protecting your idea through patent, copyright, trademark, etc. 

Finally, Dr. Eric Chan introduced different university support for startup with different programmes such as TSSSU, CityUE Fund, etc.

The forth speaker was Mr. Gilbert Joa (Co-Founder and President, Hong Kong Prime Golf Society (HKPGS)) and his topic was “Step by Step: A Lesson in Persistence”.  His company HKPGS mission is to provide a platform where members of the Society can cultivate friendships by meeting up regularly to play recreational golf, and by attending a variety of social events.

He briefed this experience and why come to Hong Kong.  Some fail experience was shared from his first trial on home automation that were no planning, no idea, no executive and no market.  He said most time you did not know what you are doing in the beginning.  Then he found the direction on Golf and persisted to develop it. 

Mr. Roland Yau (Managing Partner, CoCoon Ignite Ventures) was the last speaker and he presented topic entitled “Reigniting the Entrepreneurial Spirit in Hong Kong”.  Firstly, he briefed CoCoon which was a private incubator.  Their philosophy is that “we believe entrepreneurship is a life skill”.

Mr. Yau mentioned three activities they focused that were Education, Events and Investments.  They built network with universities globally and provided Students Training in Entrepreneurship Program (STEP).  

He said upto HKD 551M funding raised by CoCoon teams.  They had arranged 43 Pitch Nights, 120+ Experienced Judges, 199+ Pitch Teams and 5200+ audiences.  Then he briefed their investment range from early stage to growth stage.  

At the end, I took a photo with speakers, CityU cohort and professor for memory.

(Left: Dr. TW Liu, I, Mr. Roland Yau, Dr. Hongyi SUN, Dr. Eric Chan and Mr. Wilson Chan (Manager, Business Development Entrepreneurs Team, Cyberport))

Reference:

CePIE - http://www.cityu.edu.hk/CePIE/

SEEM of CityUHK - http://www.cityu.edu.hk/seem/