Strategy

The centre of the tech startup universe is moving from the USA to Asia

A string of data and opinions have been released in recent days that support the view that the global tech startup ecosystem centre is shifting towards Asia and Australasia – where population growth and performance are increasingly leading the world.

These new data points reinforce our long held view that global tech startups will increasingly be created and executed from Asia and Australasia (indeed anywhere with electricity, internet and a desire for education and entrepreneurship) because of the largest population pool, growth rates, capital and increasingly education and thriving local tech startup ecosystems based on reaching global markets.

Your portfolio can get exposure to these opportunities via Cooper & Co.

The future of tech is outside Silicon Valley

Peter Thiel – known for his investments in Paypal, Facebook, AirBnB and Palantir – spoke in Saudi Arabia about his strong views on the topic of ‘the future of tech’ this week.

He believes tech will increasingly be created outside the US and California has lost their monopoly.

This reinforces the views we have long held here at Cooper & Co that while California led the way for decades and wrote the tech startup playbook initially, in the future global tech startup formation will increasingly align with population distribution that has education, capital and a thriving local tech startup ecosystem.

Asia is the world’s largest population region and has many of the fastest growing economies in the world.

New Harvard Research shows how to put a big rocket under your startup portfolio performance

Diversity and diversification are the keys

Investing in tech startups is hard, particularly global ones. Finding these gems in the wild takes unique insight, experience and a huge network of specialists.

On the same day that Elon Musk unveiled how he is going to take us to the Moon and Mars within a few years and across our world in half an hour it seems fitting we now have even more science around startup investing.

We are very happy to share some new Harvard research to help guide thinking. The short story to exceptional returns based on a study of 300 companies. More women. More education. More cities. More specific experience. More youth.

The importance of female entrepreneurs in a traditionally male-dominated industry and the benefits of a good education and pre-startup experience are clear. The leveling of the geographic playing field gives credence to the development of startup-friendly areas in cities nationwide. And while fit, gut feel, and due diligence will always be critical, this study points to the value of data in making equity capital decisions. Successful companies and their portfolios would be well served to understand their investments more deeply through longitudinal data collection and analysis. Smart companies will use this to create competitive advantage for themselves and for the startups they invest in.

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The Way Forward for Innovation in Australia

Old innovation ecosystem models are broken, it is time to realise the open models based around startups (particularly scalable global product based tech startups) are the key to our future.the-way-forward-for-innovation-in-australia

The above diagram by StartupCommons summarises the change in focus at a macro level, we also need to look at the basics of our cultural approach to select digital natives from diverse global backgrounds to represent our interests. Run your eye over most of our nation’s government and industry bodies and the focus and representation is a woeful, old, monoculture with computing science degrees a rarity and real recent internet entrepreneurship dangerously absent, they are similarly rarely constituted of independent non-aligned experts with fresh experience.

If these people can’t serve real customers ever let alone recently (in the last decade) how can they serve our society?

This path forward is so obvious other nations have ‘productised’ the right approach in order to give (and sell) to the world.

Read the full (non country specific) report from StartupCommons here.

Blockchain hot spots

As blockchain outstrips bitcoin in fintech what are the hot areas? CB Insights has some insightful views, looks a bit like Google Trends…

Software Entrepreneurs Must Go Mobile-First Or Die

Mobile has long been the catch cry for startup and enterprise Business Technology experts alike. This article originally from TechCrunch gives a very well prioritised list of how and why with examples.

Microsoft Has Just Launched Its First Android Smartphone, The Nokia X2

This new MS CEO is unlike any other, after Office on iPad and Salesforce.com now there is this droid phone, talk about changing strategy …