Asian stories for budding entrepreneurs

Chinese Canadian entrepreneurs share success stories

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What quickly became apparent was how few powerful technological advances have come from major institutions; they almost always start with one entrepreneurial person having a visionary idea. Therefore, entrepreneurs play a key role in business in Asia.

The difficulty lies in these young entrepreneurs getting finance to grow their business. In India, most entrepreneurs are self-financing, borrowing from family and friends as well as using savings. However, this is changing and venture capital firms are particularly backing young tech entrepreneurs.

Why is it crucial for companies and individuals like yourself to invest in entrepreneurs?

Business success is not just a question of funding for entrepreneurs, they also need advice and support from active investors that play a key role in nurturing the business. This is where firms such as Kohli Ventures, with a long-term view and the management expertise - essential in guiding young but highly creative entrepreneurs - can step in.

Limiting flexibility, specifically for entrepreneurs, can ironically stifle growth as the vision continues to evolve and adapt to the necessary changes taking place in the market.

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The burden of the day-to-day running of the business should be replaced with a senior management team who bring in the fully-fledged areas of expertise, which is what we do. How do you personally identify what makes a good entrepreneur, and who is worth investing in? From my experience, there are five characteristics that a successful entrepreneur must possess:. It is essential entrepreneurs have a steely dedication to hard work and I look for evidence of this such as meticulous planning and attention to detail.

Taking on calculated risk: Entrepreneurs must be prepared to take on the risk of not having a steady income as well as staking their own time and money. However, it is important they show understanding of the risks they are taking as well as determination about how to tackle them.

This is about commitment seven, days a year. An entrepreneur that has developed a concept that breaks the established rules has the attraction of no initial competition and exponential growth. They must show a strong vision of how a concept, product or service and the company behind it can grow rapidly. Of equal importance is being able to see how that vision might need to adapt to external market changes.

And making all this possible is the amazing growth in access to the Internet. There are almost three billion global internet users, two-thirds of them coming from the developing world and the number of global mobile-broadband subscriptions is around 2.

Most of these users in the developing world will be in Asia and they are mainly young people. The internet and the tech revolution is bringing this generation new business opportunities and inspiring stories of successful Asian entrepreneurs. Consequently, I look for entrepreneurs with companies operating in technology, particularly those in the fintech financial technology line of business, in areas that have the potential to disrupt existing business models and are globally scalable. Read our interview with Sze Ming Woo here.

The effects of a younger population are already bearing fruit across the region. This so-called demographic dividend, the benefit derived from an increasing supply of young workers, has seen many foreign companies looking to take advantage of a young workforce by moving manufacturing to Southeast Asia. Many of them already have, or see themselves having, their own small business at some point in their career.

It also means that there is a growing market for the products and services the entrepreneurs are creating. Another Singaporean tech firm, RedMart, an online grocery-delivery service, received a significant financial boost from Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. Vietnam is another exceptional case. We expect to see mobile and e-commerce platforms play a bigger role as important revenue channels.

Madanmohan Rao

To drive the message home, the report dubbed Southeast Asia: While the Singapore government is undoubtedly yards ahead of the rest in terms of providing finances and services to its entrepreneurs, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cambodia have all been commended on creating the ripe conditions for startups to prosper.

Read our interview with Quek Siu Rui here. Governments in this region need to realise that their role should be as gatekeepers and gate constructors. The entrepreneurial flow can then surge effectively.

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The nominal communist states of Vietnam and Laos are most likely the chief culprits of too much interference. Becoming an entrepreneur is not an easy decision for most people to make. However, the past decade has seen a Asians doing just that. Despite the growth of entrepreneurship during the past decade, problems remain. First, there is the undeniable fact that the region is not equally balanced. One only needs to fly from Singapore to Yangon to witness this in its crudest form.

Second, and by extension, the inequality of the region is sharply reflected in the quality of education governments can provide their citizens. Education has a snowball effect.

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