A Year In Review - 2016 SoGal Worldwide Events
by Pocket Sun
I realized that I like writing on planes. When I was flying from Hong Kong to New York City, I started to list some of the events that SoGal hosted in the past 12 months. The list became huge. Every month, we were making waves in different cities and countries, to empower and inspire the next generation of female entrepreneurs.
Born in Nov 2014 in Los Angeles, SoGal is now two years old. Every day as an entrepreneur, I am chasing, and fighting, because in any investor’s eyes, you’re pretty much dead without growth. SoGal has become larger than I ever imagined, conquering new territories, and connecting women entrepreneurs all over the world. Since a year ago, we also started venture capital investing, to put money where our mouth is. But that’s worth another entire post.
In the beginning of Jan 2016, I officially relocated to Singapore. Many people have asked me why. Well, Singapore is a good place to be based at. With 7% income tax, four official languages including Mandarin and English, the best airport in the world, the most efficient government in the world, and several of my family members, Singapore is an easy country to settle in. By no means it’s perfect - I find Chinese and American people to be much more wild and exciting than Singaporeans. Due to the education system and micro-management of the government, most Singaporeans crave for stable jobs as bankers, lawyers, and doctors. They are obedient in my opinion, and I rarely met anyone or anything that made me WOW in the past year. There are startups, and the government supports them. However, the guts and ambitions of Singaporean startups just don’t cut it for me, at least for now.
But I have my way to make up for the lack of excitement.
I travel.
Since I moved to Singapore, I have been pretty much flying out of Singapore twice a month, to many different parts of the world. Most of the time, I travel to meet startups and entrepreneurs, to build up our global investor network, and to spread the SoGal spirit to as many people as possible. I thoroughly enjoy traveling and flying, because it drives my curiosity, inspirations, and new ideas.
Before 2016, SoGal was mostly known in the US. We were featured in many different media outlets in the US, and grew from Los Angeles to New York City and the Bay Area. But with my relocation to Asia, we were able to quickly launch new chapters in a number of new cities, including Singapore, Vietnam (one of our most active chapters, believe it or not), Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong/Shenzhen. Additionally, we took SoGal to the world - the first-ever global female-focused startup competition, the 2nd annual SoGal Summit in Silicon Valley, the 2nd annual Influencer Fest in Los Angeles, the workshops in Shanghai and Taiwan, and the numerous events we put on in London, Boston, Seoul, Tokyo, Jakarta, Bali... We are literally a traveling brand!
2016 marked two important events - getting on the cover of Forbes magazine as a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Venture Capital, and delivering my first TEDx talk to 1,000+ people in the audience. These two milestones set up momentum for SoGal, and tremendously helped us in many ways.
In this post, I’ll take you through our footsteps from the US to China, to other parts of East Asia, to Southeast Asia, and to Europe.
One of the biggest things we did in 2016 was co-hosting Her Startup, the first global female-focused startup competition. With full execution power, we organized 12 competitions in 50 days, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Singapore, Beijing, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Chengdu, and Vietnam. From 600 applications in two months, we selected 16 teams to go to Silicon Valley for the global finals!
Let’s take a look at the teams from each regional competition!
We picked 16 teams to send to Silicon Valley, and stayed with them dorm room style for an entire week (big thank you to Ascendas Singbridge for sponsoring flight tickets for the 5 Chinese finalist teams, and Draper University for sponsoring a whole week of free accommodation)! This was actually a precious due diligence process. Our impressions of many teams changed drastically after the week ended. We hosted a two-day bootcamp at 500 Startups Mountain View office, with help from the awesome Elizabeth Yin. The bootcamp included a Forbes 30 Under 30 panel, keynotes and workshops by veteran entrepreneurs and coaches, Private Demo Day, and investor meetings. Several teams were able to secure millions of dollars in venture capital funding during the week!
The global finals happened at our annual SoGal Summit in Silicon Valley on July 20th (BIG THANKS to PayPal for being our major sponsor). We invited dozens of women founders and CEOs as speakers, to share their insights and perspectives at different stages of entrepreneurship, and to encourage the 450+ entrepreneurs in the audience to take big leaps.
At the global finals, the 16 teams stunned us, and afew teams touched my heart especially. For example, a female entrepreneur from Shenzhen who doesn’t speak more than 10 words of English, practiced harder than anyone else to deliver the company pitch in English, with a bright smile on her face always. Or Yasmine Mustafa, CEO of Roar for Good, who only recently got her American citizenship after years and years of being an illegal immigrant.
They remind me of what entrepreneurship really is - the courage to break through any barriers, and the will to achieve any goals in life.
The most valuable thing to me is the friendship we built throughout the process. We then collaborated and met up with these teams in different places, i.e. running into the COO of Singapore-based Vanitee in Seoul, hosting multiple events with HeyShop in Shanghai, and introducing the Philadelphia-based CEO Yasmine to the SoGal community in Shenzhen.
We invited more than a dozen of VC investors to judge the global finals, including Tim Draper of DFJ, Arielle Zuckerberg of KPCB, Veronica Wu of CSC Upshot, Lisa Zhang of Intel Capital, Elizabeth Yin of 500 Startups, Crystal Huang of GGV Capital... Towards the end of the finals, Tim Draper decided to invest $300,000 into three of our finalist teams! Pretty sure that made us the startup competition with the most award money xD
After SoGal Summit and the finals, we took the Top 16 teams on a road trip in Silicon Valley! We visited Google for Entrepreneurs, Draper University, Y Combinator, Facebook Headquarters, Stanford University Design School and Business School, Planet Labs, and Braintree.
Next, let me show you some of our global events in the past year!
Perhaps you found familiar faces (or your own face) in the pictures above! If not, we will continue to travel the world and meet you this year!
Happy new year to all SoGals! The world is ours, and we shall continue to make it better!
