What exactly is a think tank?
I tend to partake in the discussions of economic trends in the areas of business, trade, industry, and most of the newfound tech innovations that happen around the startup incubation groups. When there is a smattering of long, round and square tables of hyperspace alpha-founders 23/7 in dedicated free form residence, there comes a point when thought processes at the crack of lightning, and the eureka of thunder can be the very spark you need when you think you have startup tech evolution at nought.
This is a blog that requires severe dedication of prime bandwidth (Fridays and most downtime social events as well) to the work done, the local to global startups founded and at the very centre, the core people who make it all happen.
I had been immersed in this work since working for my very first “startup” at PayPal Sg’s early days in 2009, and following MyCube’s Social Exchange Network, & Rocket Internet’s Home24.sg before embarking on the advisory board to stage a Singapore chapter for global Girls in Tech headquartered in San Francisco, as well as Bizpora.com (formerly Startup Stay). In those three years, I have been mostly blogging and product testing as well as content creating/ migrating/ editing. The think tank hours offer creative and cognitive palpable pulp-solutions that provide teams and collaborative people a patch of brainstorm and organisational thought-throughs. Asked to be CEO of a Startup Asia 2012 finalist LoveBytes, the cute daintily designed dating app found me excited (but tentative), until they discovered the pivot to a family point of view the year after. Stationed in incubation hub block 71, the interest in incubation groups started in endless startup consults, conversations and exchanges over coffee. A typical pivot for my work is to helm discovery and a mapping of systemic thought process, which occurs very differently to get to the centre of who you are, and towards the process of sussing out your inclinations.
In any, and all, of the Startups founded locally or migrated here from a global standpoint, are just a signal of the kind of prowess we have, not only in developing the tech behind them, but in correlation to the snapshots of ecosystems that need this - not exclusively in the sales, operations, and distribution to markets and making true of its progression, as well as in its application.
Thinking must not just be the task of the project manager, the task master, the product lead or the marketing influencer - and certainly not the wallet expert - it is all a distillation of each person’s multicoloured post-it of a contribution into its very design intuition & fruition, until you say, yes that’s the one.
The incubation groups make sure there’s a healthy creative ecosystem happening around these live-wire founders that create, smash, test and drawing-board-sear its latest versions before it’s laid to the beta launch rule of thumb to user-test-proof it to its limits.
This first entry will not wax poetic on a serious mode of quals versus quants, or which coffeehouse is best suited to extract the best ideas forth, or even to understand a two-year scale in the Bitcoin market in two quarters of your estimated three-year runway. These are semantics to the ghost that is the remains of its distillation at will - finding what sticks, what stays, and what should be filtered, pursued, and funded. Mobility is stopped in its tracks when the products don’t scale and have no support on day one - and we can find out how we help it along, what worked and if the economy, in its sheer brutal-networking and social-economising had its guts wrenched into the annals of finally being happy, with the perfect startup elements of a gig timed well, and with the end result of what you think is a brilliant journey that ended well.
But certainly every journey always begins with the thought of where you would like it most to end. This is CEO mishmash, but it is a good navigational truth or tidbit, to the un-initiated and in all the areas and matters of business builds.
I leave you instead, as in closing a personal letter, in every entry to this blog - a favourite podcast that relieves the well-read eyes and switches your smart-sensors sonically, to hear hear. :)
Talk. smart. watch. (Apple. geek. time.) Listen to The Apple Watch review: the comprehensive WIRED verdict http://bit.ly/1Hjj1VO
