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What is FOSSASIA? | Nerds of a feather flock together | Where is FOSS found? | Why you should go to FOSSASIA | Why you should care about Free Software | Why open source matters to Southeast Asia | Open Source is more than just software. Open Source Everything!

I've been doing a lot of traveling for nerdy reasons lately. A month ago it was BarCamp Yangon. This past weekend it was FOSSASIA in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I'll get back to writing about living in Vietnam soon, since I'll be traveling around the country.

What is FOSSASIA?

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BarCamp Yangon

Submitted by tomo on February 26, 2014 - 12:12pm

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Summary

Size matters. Size doesn't matter.

Yangon, Myanmar holds the largest BarCamp in the world. Or so they say, but who's counting? I can confirm that it's a two day affair, like BarCamp Phnom Penh (where a few of my compatriots were from) and of similar size to Cambodia's main and largest BarCamp. Even our homely one-day BarCamp Saigon is roughly the same in crowd size according to my eyeball count. The number of sessions, at around 160 over two days, is also about the same per day as are the popularity and attendance in the classrooms in which they are held. There were even many sparsely attended talks (such as my own!) But size isn't everything.

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My Vietnam Startup Report

Submitted by tomo on September 6, 2013 - 3:43pm

Last Wednesday night, @Bowei Gai of the World Startup Report made his stop on his year-long globetrotting tour to the center of the Vietnamese startup scene at Saigon Hub in Ho Chi Minh City. He gave a talk that had been honed over many months and included lots of interesting bits from startup scenes around the world, from the amazing size (trillions!) of Chinese e-commerce companies, to the equally impressive adoption of mobile payment in Sub-Saharan African countries (30%!). Later, in private, we heard of the incredible arrogance of French startup people and corruption around the world. But we were also humbled by the recent multiple-hundreds of million dollar exits of Nepalese technology companies. And perhaps secretly identified with the conditions of economic crisis under which Argentinean entrepreneurs had to run their businesses - 20+% annual inflation driving up business costs, a local currency constantly losing value leading locals to buy dollars when they could...

Bowei has been flying to a new country every few days to study a brand new local startup scene. Originally with the intention of writing up the local report as he was traveling, that was clearly impossible. And so it'll be at least a few months before we see his Vietnam Startup Report. So let me share my own thoughts while they're still fresh.

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On Vietnam banning chat apps

Submitted by tomo on August 28, 2013 - 5:30pm

Here are some random thoughts on the news of Vietnamese ISPs/ministries colluding to ban mobile chat apps like Line/KakaoTalk/Viber/Whatsapp. The story so far has been that Vietnam's mobile networks, losing more and more money from people using free chat apps instead of SMS (which senders pay a little money for in Vietnam) which is pure profit for them, would like to put a stop to this trend.

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Hacking Your First Hackathon

Submitted by tomo on June 8, 2013 - 2:13pm

Today I'll be speaking, mentoring, then judging at Keewi's Hack Day event.

Over a decade ago I joined a group of "hackers" in developing an open source ultra-secure UNIX operating system called OpenBSD. As the most secure OS in the world, it was designed to keep out hackers, as in crackers, those seeking unauthorized access to computer systems. But we were also hackers, a type of "artisanal" programmer. OpenBSD hackers are spread across the world and they gather themselves together periodically into one place to be super productive on a common goal over the course of several days. OpenBSD invented the hackathon, even coining the word itself.

I attended my first hackathon back when I was still in school, which I graduated from over 10 years ago. It was organized by our university's open source club, the only extracurricular activity I was involved in. We got permission to use one of the classrooms overnight and even got funding to buy a couple pizzas and pop. That was it. There were no corporate sponsors. There were no spectators watching us code except for our confused girlfriends. There were no headhunters or suits looking for geeks they could make use of. And there was no prize money because we were just there to see what hacks we could pull off in a night and then show each other.

Nowadays, hackathons are more and more common and are seen by corporations as something they can take advantage of.

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There is debate over the term 10x developer which is the idea that some developers are ten times as productive as other average programmers. This was popularized by some research which was subsequently refuted but the idea lives on. And if true, how can we all become "10x developers"? From the time I began taking programming classes in school, which is when I was first exposed to other people's programming abilities, I knew that skill level varied and varied greatly. In an arithmetics class, the best student might score 20 or 30 percent higher than the average. But there's no way to score 100 times the average as that level of ability isn't measured in class. But in a programming class, there will be a number of students who can't complete a working program in a given amount of time, and a student who is a slow coder but eventually gets something functioning is infinitely better than the student who doesn't. Those who can't typically don't go on to become career programmers, but they might need to pass the class for some IT-related business management degree and go on to become Excel wizards.

But among profressional programmers what is a good standard deviation in productivity levels?

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[Are you an investor interested in investing in Vietnam, especially in startups? This blog post comes from conversations with visiting investors from other countries and answering a lot of questions they had in common.]

For years, tech startups in Vietnam operated in a sort of vacuum, with no local ecosystem to help them.

Of course, this didn't stop them. Maybe there were even benefits with less scene distractions.

Now there is something we can call a scene, like a subculture of startup. There are wannabe entrepreneurs (wantrepreneurs), kids who dream of startups or want to experience working for one. There are serial events (Startup Weekend Ho Chi Minh City, the Start Me Up series, even Barcamp Saigon which I'm most personally attached to) as well as larger traditional conferences with international involvement. There are hackathons. There are training programs. There are incubators. There are angels and venture capitalists, although so few that finding appropriate investment among them is challenging for many reasons. There are online forums (in Vietnamese) and there is now coverage of the country in the three largest regional tech news journals out of Singapore (e27, SGE, TechInAsia) as well as local PR mouthpiece Action.vn.

And there are even some startups within Vietnam's startup scene!

(Though there is confusion about what is or isn't a startup)

What kind of startups you'll find in Vietnam

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What is a startup?

We're in the middle of a tech boom and it's become fashionable to either work for a startup or to be a startup. But what is a startup? How do you know that company offering you a job in exchange for a few years of your life is really what they say they are? How should you compare the hobby or side project you're working on with a "startup"? How is a startup different from a business? What kind of company would attract venture capital and what kind might get other kinds of funding, but not from VCs?

First of all, there's more than one definition of "startup". Paul Graham defines startup as "a company designed to grow fast". That definition says three things: a startup is a company, a startup has a plan, and a startup is about growth.

My definition has more words: "A high risk venture to flesh out and scale up an as yet unproven business model with an aim to reach a massive known market or an unknown or unknowable market."

Definition

A high risk [startups, unlike hobbies, are necessarily risky - nothing ventured, nothing gained]

... venture [usually a business, but this could apply to a team's activities within a larger organization - uncertainty is implied]

... to flesh out [as in an unproven business model, many blanks must be filled in by the entrepreneurs as a result of experimenting, trial and error, course correction]

... and scale up [scale is really key - without scale, you're just a local mom&pop, or all the hope and risk-taking investment dumped into you has no potential to garner large returns - more on scale below]

... an as yet unproven business model [a startup's business model doesn't yet exist as a known successful and proven model from the start, and when that model does become proven and successful then it's no longer a startup]

... with an aim [without or before an explicit and conscious effort to market and sell a product or service then it's just a research project]

... to reach a massive known market [this is where scale is required, where the risk has the potential to result in sufficient reward]

... or an unknown or unknowable market [early in the discovery stages, an entrepreneur may have a hunch that they're developing a product with a large potential market, but not feel out the depths of the market until later]

Google, Apple Computers, Intel, Ford Motor Company, Instagram, YouTube... in hindsight, these were once all startups. They all faced huge risks but eventually found themselves delivering products to massive markets and also successfully scaled up to serve those markets. And at the time, it wasn't clear at all how those business models would succeed or whether they would at all.

What isn't a startup?

But what about a research project at a certain university being taken on by a certain Larry Page? Surely, this research had the potential to become a massively-valued company used by much of the Earth's population. Was it a startup? Obviously not (not at that point in time, which brings up the thornier issue of at which exact point to call the genesis of conception of a startup). While the kernel of the idea was on a clear path to scaling the entire web, what was the risk? Whose lives would be affected if Larry had failed in his research? The time investment was no different from any other student.

What about the neighborhood sandwich (banh mi) cart? It's a risky business and who wouldn't like to sell increasingly more sandwiches month by month? The difference is that there are many sandwich carts everywhere trying numerous variations of the business model. But that business model is well understood. You could take your growing sandwich business to the bank and get a loan after quantifying a few common metrics of your particular variant. The banker would have absolutely no expectation of getting 1000% interest on their loan. Conversely, while not being a sure thing, the risk is more than manageable by competent parties. You're very likely to not lose lots of money, and you're extremely unlikely to huge amounts of money. [Franchise restaurants are more scalable. But they also fall within the bounds of relatively well-known rather than innovative business models.]

So what if you're bringing a new service to the market? You plan to offer a widget-configuring service around town, because widgets are the hot new thing right now. You see growth potential there. Except that you have no way to scale this business to other cities which are outside your driving range and all you're really doing is trading your time for money. When you're not working, you're not earning. And outside of cloning yourself you have no way to multiply 100-fold what you're doing.

What about a blog, like the blog you're reading now? Could you be reading a startup right now? No.

Hobbies are not startups. Hobbies can turn into anything but there's no intention of a hobby itself being a startup venture, otherwise you treat it as such and not a hobby. A hobby is never seen as a risk. Time spent on a hobby is the reward itself. With a normal business, you expect to get back what you put in plus some. With a startup, you hope to get back much more. With a hobby, you're not putting anything in and you expect to get just as much out.

Working at a startup will be exciting. It will necessarily move fast, and if you're doing anything financially promising at all, there will be the pressure from the threat of competition. You'll see lots of mistakes being made. It will be different. Traditional roles will be upturned as CEOs become janitors and developers do customer service. But it will be a chance for those young idealists to get their fingers in a number of fields they would have otherwise had to wait decades for. And best of all, you have the potential of becoming a billionaire. And that's what sets a startup apart from business as usual.

I have had some personal experience with startups.

Also, read about startups in Vietnam.

My Startup Experiences

Submitted by tomo on April 5, 2013 - 10:34am

I've been involved in start ups for over a decade now. During that time I've worked for companies in varying stage of development. Not all of them were startups. But how can you tell if it is or not?

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Boulder's big VC investor dude Brad Feld has a house in Kansas City now. He doesn't live there, even for just part of the year, but he owns it. He's letting YOU live there. For free. FREE!!! But should you live in Kansas City (a mid-sized town in the American southwest midwestern state of Missouri) to bootstrap your startup? If the rent is free?

Awhile back I talked about bootstrapping your startup in Ho Chi Minh City on the cheap. And what's better than cheap besides free?

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