Uneducated series of thoughts from an entrepreneur in Hong Kong. // 1
People often assume that startups are the same everywhere. That is to say, that the startup ecosystems are mostly the same, but in different stages of development, or with different working languages. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The way of thinking, ways of innovating, of meeting customer expectations differ vastly.
Indeed, China and US have booming startup ecosystems but they couldn’t be further from one another. This is influenced by history, culture and governance. …
Roughly a year ago, I wrote to the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, detailing some of my thoughts as someone born and raised there, about how we might modernise and encourage development in this city. To my upmost surprise, I was heard, and invited to speak with the Policy Innovation and Coordination Office.
I love my home, and I feel very strongly that our future lies in innovation and bold ideas. We have some home field advantages — flexible capital, a talented and skilled workforce, and a truly uniquely global minded culture. We can’t squander that.
It has become apparent…
Elon Musk is famous for reasoning from first principles. It’s an approach I I’d internalised before I heard about him, in many of my happiest days in my high school physics lab, and one that still makes plenty of sense to me. It depends on finding some self-evident, fundamental truths, and deducing other principles from there.
First principle #1: We will die.
“Nothing is certain but death and taxes” — Benjamin Franklin
= In death, we are all equal and forgotten.
This means the process of living, not the final bank account total matters. …
Following on from this, I built another thingy.
Den’s Little Helper 2: HKEx
The Hong Kong Stock Exchange website literally gives me fear of life. It’s unwieldy. It’s not very beautiful. It’s built using .NET, which like, “ugh”.
More to the point, it’s sort of really annoying. When searching for something, you don’t get to search for a term in all of the publications of a given company. It’s also not very amenable to pdf-scraping, which is a beautiful tool that will cause knowledge management lawyers (and anyone dealing with data, really) everywhere, to kiss unicorns in happiness.
The solution…
I intern-ed in a law firm, and out of interest, built a couple of tools, one of which I’m showing here, to help automate processes I’ve seen law firms manually do. Note though, the code I’ve written depends very specifically on one particular process of work that I’ve observed.
Table of Exhibits Creator
Usually, a law firm may have to go through a large document, to find all the exhibits mentioned in a given statement to create a cover page.
This program is written in Python and replicates this process. It uses Textract, the Python package, to goes through a…
What are smart contracts?
Despite their name, smart contracts are not actually legally binding contracts. They are actually computer programs, which, when certain pre-specified conditions are met, trigger an event. Though not strictly necessary, they are often implemented with Blockchain technology
The basic idea of smart contracts is that many kinds of contractual clauses (such as liens, bonding, delineation of property rights, etc.) can be embedded in the hardware and software we deal with, in such a way as to make breach of contract expensive (if desired, sometimes prohibitively so) for the breacher.
— Nick Szabo, creator of the smart…
