Happy to Have Boyd Jones, Shenzhen VC, at Startup Tuesday

Yup, just back from Manila earlier this week, digging out of emails, getting some SEO training started, planning 2 events in March, and ended today with an AWESOME Shenzhen startup Tuesday! I’ve been trying to get Boyd Jones to speak at a meetup for months now, and finally our request was fulfilled! Also, a really awesome boost is Rachel & Henry from comfort works have stepped up and gotten involved helping organize events, and also redesigned shenzhen marketing website to better organize and promote these meetups!

Since Chinese New Years ended, we have re-organized the meetups to be in the Chai Huo hackerspace and moved the SZteam coworking in a special room in the back of the huge facility. People have overall given a positive feedback on the new cooperation, we are really excited to better combine the “foreign / sales / marketing” community with the Chinese hacker / programmer community. Eric Pan from Chai Huo thinks this will create huge value in the community.

At 7pm, there were only about 8 people in the room…I have to be honest, I was a bit worried…we tried marketing this out to our email list, were getting some phone calls on my mobile from lost people, maybe it was just a bit too early. by 7:30pm we had about 40 people in attendance!, one of our biggest and most successful meetups to date! It was a healthy mix of VC / Angels in the Chinese community, e-commerce startups, foreigners, Chinese programmers.

Going around the room, with Amy Gu doing a great job writing English names on the whiteboard we had each person do name, where they worked / what they were doing, and their favorite color (just to change it up a bit from week to week)

By about 7:30pm Boyd got up to speak, he let us share his powerpoint and I have uploaded it to slideshare for those who want to see it with images. Below I have take the text transcript and you can read the outline.

Startup financing options in China, by boyd jones

02.28.12 v.1.0 – ms ppt — Presentation Transcript

1. Startup Financing – Options from a Chinese Perspective
创业融资 – 从中国的角度看有哪些选择 从中国的角度看有哪些选择
Presented by Boyd R. Jones iTech Holdings Limited / Co-Power Ventures

2. True Early-stage VC in China
NONE . Well, not “none”, but not much. Spotty. No Silicon Valley-like infrastructure / ecosystem to support startups.

3. You Already Know What to Do Bootstrap!

4. But Be Careful…

5. Bootstrapping
defined: to promote or develop by initiative and effort with little or no assistance. Do you have skin in the game? How much have you invested? Time Money Resources Have you mortgaged your car and home?

6. FFF Approach
FFF before outside investors:
F riends
F amily
F ools

7. Post-FFF Resources
Angel Investors Accelerators Innovation Works / 创新工场 Chinaccelerator Incubators Public Private

8. Post-FFF Resources (cont)
Events / Competitions 深圳创新创业大赛 Startup Weekend Startup Labs

9. Chinese VC
Demonstrate traction Towards becoming dominant Tencent / Alibaba / Baidu strategy?

10. Go Abroad
Headquarter your firm in: Silicon Valley
Accelerators Angels Incubators VCs

Singapore Ibid. Tap abundant resources abroad

11. Conclusion
There is no short cut Build and invest in your own business Work very hard over time You can not create and fund a startup part-time. Therefore, don’t do it unless you enjoy it!

12. Contact Details
Boyd Jones
Weibo.com/BoydJones
t.qq.cn/BoydJones [email]

There were plenty of questions, as everyone wants MONEY for their idea and their startup. But we were all excited that this Shenzhen startup community is forming, and hopefully we can get more organized and build up a platform, a support network, to allow more people, both Chinese and foreigners, to successfully build and launch their ideas into a reality.

Another common question was HOW TO FIND PROGRAMMERS IN SHENZHEN there is an obvious shortage of them in the city. From the audience, we found 2 websites to go and checkout, szlug – shenzhen linux user group and lamper.cn for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) groups to network and find some good programmers.

This is what its all about, sharing, and helping. Thanks again to Boyd Jones for taking the time to speak to the group!