An Awesome Idea with a Bad Team Just Won’t Work｜An In-depth Interview with Trevor Townsend Part 2

Also, obtaining an outstanding product and a suitable business model at the same time can boost you towards success.

“Hope I didn’t bore you with too much data!” he smirked, looking somewhat bashful — but in a playful way. After introducing the basic knowledge on Australia’s shifting energy industry, Trevor was still eager to share more of his insights on Taiwan’s startup ecosystem, and specific traits he looks for in startups with high potential.

He scooted a bit closer towards the camera.

“Taiwan has a strong hardware background,” Trevor started off fair and square, “and that’s the real strength startups should cling on to.”

When it comes to identifying Taiwan’s role within the global market chain, technical industries are always the first to be mentioned; but instead of seeing it as a restrictive curse, Trevor wants startups to regard their advantages as an unstoppable force.

For example, Taiwan has established this robust OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) ecosystem thanks to its successful hardware founders; however, not only do these manufacturers benefit from each other within their society, software startups can also take advantage with having easy access to such connections. “Just the fact that you can easily get down to manufacturers and co-work with them, gives you a gigantic comparative advantage over other software competitors overseas.” Trevor stated.

However, this certainly does not indicate that Taiwan startups should restrain themselves to their home country. While the island of high-technology benefits on its prosperous manufacturer ecosystem, it also lacks a thorough business model for inexperienced startups to follow and practice. The biggest reason Taiwan startups often fall short when expanding abroad, is that they seldom realize an outstanding product without proper marketing still won’t find success, while neglecting how important a stabilized business model is to a growing company.

But before complaining about the amount of funds you need to actually find a working place at Europe or the United States for testing the water, you might want to take a much easier access to a Western-market-like business model that people often ignore into consideration — the one and only, Australia.

“Australia has similar demographics as the US and Europe.” Trevor passionately explained why he would love to bring Taiwan startups back to Melbourne, “You’ll learn to understand what customers want, what customers will pay for. It’s a good market to experiment on, to look at various different segments and how your product would fit, or how people would buy or use your product.”

Once the advanced technology connects with the suitable business model, all you are missing towards success — is a good team.

“When we’re recruiting for our programs, one of the crucial standards is the quality of the team. A really good team with an okay idea can pivot their way to success; as long as they’re coachable, and are willing to share with us the core capability around what they’re doing, they can move their way to success.” Trevor moved on before we could even take notes, “However, a poor team and a great idea will be outperform every time; once their ideas head into the market and weren’t executed well enough, someone will immediately copy it.” And there goes your dream, crushed and torn into pieces.

If you want to avoid such tragedy (and hopefully that’s our common goal), Trevor suggests looking for these two essential elements when building your team: resilience and cohesiveness.

We all know how hard it is to start a business; founding a startup is always one step forward, two steps backwards. You’re having lots of things going wrong, you’re dealing with 1000 quests — you have to be an expert at everything. And that’s a hard job.

Secondly, your team should consist of people who have different views, different backgrounds, different approaches on the way they work. So rather than having employees who are very similar and agrees with each other every time, teams with different attributes that members can bring to the business are much much better.

With the two traits mentioned above, even a mediocre idea could get your well-organized team a good spot in the ever-changing market.

It was definitely a lot to take in from Trevor, with his total passion for sharing his insights regarding every aspect of startups, either within Australia, Taiwan, or around the globe. It was surely a pleasure to have shared these precious minutes with him, sitting in a small room but being provided with the largest picture of the flourishing market.

“I would love to!” Trevor answered without even thinking when we asked him to join our mentor lineup. His eyes were barely opened when he smiled, and so were ours.

Written on September 20th, 2019 by Billy Kuo.