One of the stranger things that happened to me when I moved to Taiwan in 2018 was that a local magazine did a story on my arrival, and what it said about the “talent level” in Taiwan and on Taiwan’s appeal to “global talent” like myself. My friends here, who know better than to be so impressed, posted the article on Facebook, and shared it and liked it and commented on it, all of which was kind of embarrassing to me.
I also got to meet Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s now internationally super-famous Digital Minister, and we talked about AI investment, startups in Taiwan, and generally how excited I was to be here and how excited Taiwan was to have me. It wasn’t a long meeting, but it wasn’t a short meeting, either, and I was flattered to receive so much attention from such a high-ranking government official.
Over the years, I’ve learned as a startup founder not to take things personally when bad things happen to me or my company, like getting rejected by an investor, or losing out on that star employee I wanted to hire, or having an idea that just doesn’t pan out. It happens, and you just have to move on.
Likewise, I’ve learned over time not to take my warm reception in Taiwan too personally, either. I’m certainly proud of my career in tech, but, let’s be clear, no newspapers sent over a reporter when I moved to Tokyo in 2016. And I didn’t get any visits from cabinet members when I arrived in Seoul in 2017. And it’s not just that those cities are bigger, or that people have more important things to do than follow the local tech scene.
No, my arrival in Taiwan was interesting (at least to some people here) not because of me, but because of what it said about Taiwan, and in particular what it said about how well-positioned Taiwan is to become something of a major global talent hub, and a key player in the next next wave of the new new global economy.
“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” -- Abraham Maslow
When governments talk about making a place attractive for startups, they typically talk about building innovation centers, wooing big venture capital firms, starting scale accelerators, sponsoring meetups, and generally doing whatever anyone can think of to be helpful to any successful global startups they can convince to set up shop here.
What they generally talk less about are supporting early-stage startups, and, when they do, they talk about “angel investment” or “startup grants” or even an earlier-stage accelerator, and so forth. None of these ideas are bad, and I am in no way upset with, or criticizing, the existing Taiwan startup community, or the many many people here in Taiwan who are putting in tons of effort and money to realize the vision of turning Taiwan into a globally-recognized “Startup Island.”
I will, however, controversially claim that all of these government-sponsored efforts don’t get to the heart of the matter, which is that the local startup scene in Taiwan is not flourishing because there are not enough people doing startups. And, furthermore, I would claim that the reason that there are not enough people in Taiwan doing startups is that there is vanishingly little support for one particularly non-glamourous, but essential, stage of the startup journey, namely the time where one’s startup idea is too stupid and too half-baked to withstand any scrutiny at all as a business idea.
Anyone can invest in a startup with an accomplished founding team, an obviously good idea, a great business model, and a bunch of traction. But investors and government programs that focus on just those kinds of startups are doing the ecosystem a disservice by missing all the potentially great upstream founders that will, in the current environment, probably never even make it to that point.
If you ask a brand new founder in Taiwan what a new startup founder should be doing, many will tell you that they need to be making pitch decks and talking to potential investors. There’s a feeling here that the startup isn’t “real” until some investor blesses the idea by funding it.
These are typically pretty smart people, so indeed they succeed in finding investors willing to talk to them, and, in these meetings, they are given advice about what’s wrong with their current approach, how they might go after a more interesting market, how they might grow, or, god forbid, what related idea might be better to pursue in order to be interesting to that particular investor. In other words, they get ostensibly solid feedback on how to turn their idea into a real business. Which sounds good, but…
At the very least, this distracts the founder from writing code and talking to customers, which is probably what these founders should really be doing at this stage of their startup. At worst, it tends to change the idea itself at a premature stage into something that would be more appealing to investors, which, as a side effect, probably kills whatever potential the idea has to be an outlier of the sort that would be the breakthrough that the ecosystem would really hope to see. Just the other day, I was on a call with a set of “B2C” (business-to-consumer) founders, and it was striking how many of them were thinking about changing their ideas to “B2B” (business-to-business). And why was this? Advice from potential investors.
These passionate founders, I’d argue, did not need this advice. What they needed instead is something of a cultural shift, support for ideas that don’t yet make a lot of economic sense, and a way to stick with their ideas a little bit longer without getting a lot of unwanted scrutinies or outside pressure to change into something that fit the pattern of previously successful businesses. We can call this culture, “startup culture,” but it really is “founders culture” -- a culture where it is ok to be a very early stage founder with a bad idea, and where being a founder and starting a company is not something that *other* people do, but rather something that *we* do, or, best yet, that *anyone* can choose to do.
What most founders I’ve met have in common is that they all believe that the world could look a little different and a *lot* better if only they could change it or influence it in some way. It’s easy to roll your eyes when you hear someone say that they are not building a startup to get rich, but instead in order to “change the world.” Cynical people who are not startup founders look at the ideas that some of these founders come up with and think, yeah, right, how is your stupid ice cream delivery app going to do anything except put my favorite local shops out of business; can’t you work on healthcare or poverty or global warming instead?
What these folks are missing, however, is that the same mindset that thinks it is worth hundreds of hours per week to make some esoteric ice cream delivery app is HIGHLY RELATED to the mindset you need in order to come up with the next Google or Airbnb. Startup founders, it has been said, live in a future that is different from the world of today. Almost by definition, that makes them a little bit crazy, and it brings with it a bunch of maddening side effects that cause older folks and non-founders to think that they need to mentor those crazy ideas right out of that inexperienced kid’s head. It’s a noble instinct; older folks like myself want to be helpful.
But we’re not helping. Instead, we should be asking ourselves what it would take to create that cultural shift, to make Taiwan a place where very very early-stage startups and founders can thrive, not at the point where they become interesting to investors, but even earlier than that, all the way back to the first time they have an idea that something in the world isn’t working as well as it should, and that they might be able to build something that makes the future a little different, a little better. What can we do to support young entrepreneurs with lots of time and ideas, but no real job and no real money?
First, it needs to be ok to be a founder, even if your company is not knocking it out of the park and even if there isn’t a clear path on how to turn your idea into a successful business. That is, there needs to be a critical mass of people who are doing the startup thing, and it needs to be seen culturally as a relatively respectable thing, or even the preferred thing, to be doing for the best and brightest coming out of college.
There was a distinct shift at Stanford sometime after I graduated where doing a startup went from some risky, borderline crazy, poorly-understood thing to The Thing That You Should Do If You Are Good Enough. This had exactly the cultural effect that I described. The number of students trying to start companies exploded, and, because of this, the number of very high-quality ideas that came out of that population also exploded.
For Taiwan, what this means is that there simply has to be more founders, and the biggest source of potential founders in Taiwan are the people already here in Taiwan. Obviously, it’s a balance, but if I had to put my energy behind attracting a big-time US-based VC to open an office here versus taking that same energy and making it ok for 10 percent of the graduating high school class to skip college for at least a year to try a startup, I think the latter would have more impact. Trust me, if there are thousands of people here starting companies, and some percentage of those companies are great, the VCs will find Taiwan.
Second, being an early-stage founder needs to be supported financially. Again, I am not talking about angel investors. As I said, most angels outside of SF or Beijing (and maybe Tel Aviv) nowadays are trying to invest in *companies*, and they are trying to select good companies, “help” them and ultimately make money from these investments. That’s great. Angel investors of this sort play an important and vital role in any startup ecosystem.
But what I’m talking about is getting a nearly-impoverished founder through the period where their idea is too ostensibly stupid to attract any kind of investment. Like, “why don’t we rent out air mattresses at design conferences and make the hosts cook breakfast” stupid. But even less clearly articulable.
The availability of no-strings-attached friends-and-family money is a key feature of “founders culture”. Once it takes hold, there will be a lot of people who want to and will be able to be founders, and also a lot of people that were once founders who then became employees of successful companies that were once themselves startups. And then those employees and older founders will get stupid stinking rich from being in those positions, and then they will be well-positioned to shoot some of that money back to younger founders, with almost no strings attached, and the cycle will repeat.
This will bother a lot of people. It will seem SUPER UNFAIR that some college kid with an ostensibly bad idea is getting $500K US from his rich friends when hard-working and equally talented people are working in office jobs for far less.
But I am here to tell you that “dumb” money goes to bad founders all the time and that it’s a good thing overall that it does, and that even if the founder loses everything, there is a positive return on that investment, not usually in terms of dollars and cents but instead in terms of the cultural capital it generates for Startup Culture, which it turns out, benefits everyone who is part of this culture, including the people on the outside of the culture who think it’s stupid.
Sure, if the woman you write a check to turns out to be the next Steve Jobs, then you will make a lot of money. But the goal should not be to make money. The goal should be to build culture, and a big part of building culture is giving no strings attached money to early-stage founders, confident that, if there are enough of them, some of them will be successful, and confident that, if enough of them are successful, there will be even more no strings attached money for the next generation of founders, and the flywheel will be turning.
So buy a sandwich for that founder you know, and maybe write them a check. It doesn’t usually take much -- many early-stage companies focus on being “ramen profitable” (how much money do you need to bring in to sustain the business if the founders eat only ramen for every meal) -- and there is a wave of help ready to jump in once these folks get past those difficult first few months.
Beyond sustenance, it is human nature for people to seek some kind of external validation for what they are doing, either from an outside investor, or the government, or membership in some program, or… the sandwich you bought them and the check you wrote when they were just starting out.
Write the check! The life you enrich may be your own.
*For the Chinese version please check: 台灣有機會成為「亞洲矽谷」嗎？美國創業者在台灣：成為新創島的先決條件是「文化轉變」
執行、核稿編輯：林欣蘋
