Smells Like A Startup Conference

He reached out and grabbed the tag around my neck and pulled me closer to him. I heard a *beep* and then he said “I got you.”
After a somewhat awkward scanning procedure at the entrance gate. We were in. RISE 2017 in all its glory was at our fingertips. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Clean exhibition space, coffee, unboxed swag, hungry startups and freshly-printed business cards…yes, smells like a startup conference. If you’ve been to one startup conference, you’ve been to all of them and RISE isn’t any different. The experience feels like a casino in Vegas — being locked in a huge room for three days, completely disconnected from the outside world, indistinguishable music playing in the background, people walking around with a dazed look on their face (unsure if they’re happy to be there…or not), and everyone’s trying their luck. Simply replace the slot machine with a VC…
For you to get as much value as you can from these conferences you need a strategy. The amount of preparation work you do before the conference will determine if you’ve just spent 3 days and $800 on crappy coffee and small talk or got the best PR / Biz Dev / Feedback / {insert value here} ever. We spent 2 full days preparing for RISE and as a result got a handful of fantastic leads, heard just the talks we needed, grew our network into Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia, and still had time to do some sightseeing around Hong Kong. How did we do it?
Step 1, we decided what we wanted to get out of RISE. We came up with 3 goals and used those to guide every decision we made before, during and after the event.
Step 2, we canvased the conference agenda and created a list of every talk / event / etc. we thought was inline with our goals from step 1.
Step 3, we prioritized the list and divided some events between us.
Step 4, we looked up every person on the shortlist from step 3 to learn more about them — who they are, where they’re from, what they care about, etc.
Step 5, we DM a few of the people from step 4 and set up f2f meetings with them during the event.
Here are some of the talks we enjoyed and what we learned from them:
Leading a company through reinvention
Bracken Darrell, CEO, Logitech / Spencer Fung, Group CEO, Li & Fung
An incredible opportunity to hear two business leaders openly discuss how difficult delivering value to customers is for large corporations. Spencer Fung was polished, focused, prepared, and delivered Li&Fung’s vision for the current 3-year plan: build the supply chain of the future and impact a billion people in the process. Bracken Darrell was relaxed, honest, authentic, and openly admitted that Logitech’s current existence is based on its size, not novelty.

Going Native: How to build a world-class product for the local customer
Mark Britt, Co-Founder & Group CEO, iflix
A fascinating talk about the hubris of the West around innovation when in fact there’s some awesome stuff going on in the East that may have initially been inspired by the West but has since taken a life of its own. The message was clear — the USA doesn’t have a monopoly on good ideas. There was also an interesting reference to the use of metaphors in the startup world, e.g., “We are the Uber of {something}”, and specifically how they’re used to describe new startups in the East….dismissing them as copycats, when in reality they’re loosely based on a similar concept, but the implementation is completely different. Look to the East…

The future of branding is debranding
Thierry Brunfaut, Partner & Creative Director, Base Design
How can a small brand compete in a noisy world full of big brands? Be still. Be quiet. Be you.
Consumers will shift from branded products to branded places: stores and their owners. People will become the interface between customer and product.

An audience with Gary Vaynerchuk + Fireside Chat
Gary Vaynerchuk, Founder & CEO, VaynerMedia
We heard Gary Vaynerchuk on three different occasions in Hong Kong that week…and at each one, he said exactly the same things. That’s not surprising, Gary is notorious for speaking his truth and being very open and honest about his view of entrepreneurship today.
- Everyone is / should be a media company.
- Sound is the next big thing (We love podcasts).
- Social media is still way underpriced — in a few years, when the big companies start investing in these tools, we’ll appreciate how little we are paying today.
- Culture is the most important thing in building and maintaining a company. Building culture is not about the happy hours, free snacks or branded t-shirts. Instead it’s about understanding each person working in the company…how their motivation and desires change over time.
- Focus on building a business instead of “doing a startup / being an entrepreneur” — the first means you build a great product and get paying customers while the second means your chasing after the money and jumping from one funding round to the next.
See Gary’s full talks here:
From building a product, to building a global brand
Gary Hsieh, CEO, 1More
With all the planning we did, we kinda stumbled on to this talk….but we’re glad we did. Gary Hsieh used to be an executive at Foxconn who got fired over a mistake. In a true test of resilience, he took everything he knew about making digital products and built a successful brand of earphones called 1More. We instantly fell in love with Gary Hsieh brutal honesty and awkward sense of humor.

HAX Hardware Trends 2017
Duncan Turner, Managing Director, HAX Seed / Benjamin Joffe, Partner, HAX
This was one of the events happening around RISE. HAX is arguably the most successful hardware accelerator in the world. They help early stage hardware startups from the West Coast to leverage the manufacturing ecosystem of Shenzhen and bring their products to market….faster and cheaper. HAX has elevated the use of Kickstarter as a path-to-market to a level of mastery. In short, most startups that go through HAX end up selling their initial prototype on Kickstarter.
For the full report of the 2017 hardware trends: https://hax.co/2017/07/14/hardware-trends-2017/

Full the complete schedule of RISE 2017: https://riseconf.com/schedule

