Get inside the head of investor saying YES to high risk

Must register Webinar to join live session
http://bit.ly/apr21investor

In the late 1990s, building an electronic product company was a herculean feat. Components had to be designed from scratch. Firmware engineers spent months writing low-level code to control silicon. Communication stacks were written from the ground up. Assembly lines were built by buying capital equipment and hiring manufacturing workers. Distribution was dependent on retailers buying your first 5K units without any prior sales traction.

After 30 years, the story is different. No longer do startups spend months writing communication stacks for radios. They drop in a $3 pre-certified radio module with WiFi and Bluetooth with most of the functionality already in place. Hire a contract manufacturer who is willing to build a 10K unit each month. Similar to software, many hardest technical problems have been abstracted away. As starting a hardware startup has gotten easier, more founders have done so and competitive advantage or barriers to entry are today’s hard problems.

Fitbit and GoPro went public while significantly profitable, having raised only $77M and $90M respectively from VCs excluding capital from CMs. This is far fewer VC dollars raised than the average SaaS IPO. Fitbit scaled from $0 to $1.9B in revenue in 7 years while very few SAAS startups scale that quickly (SaaS public revenue average at 7 years is ~$90M). As hardware startups increasingly adopt software-like business models, it’s more common to see 45%+ gross margin business in GoPro, Fitbit, Dropcam, and much higher on the subscription or data storage product.

The “hard” part of any sector changes as old problems are solved and new problems appear in any startup history. The fundamental difficulties of building any disruptive company remain the same: team, market, distribution, and marketing. These are the problems that unite all companies trying to build value in the world. Our investor panel is going to share their insights in evaluating, assessing, and managing their high-risk ventures.

Moderator: Bess Ho, Host of Silicon Valley Builder
Panelists:
Jay Eum, Managing Partner of GFT Ventures
Jing Ge, Founding Partner of Vectors Angel
Joseph Wei, Managing Director of Technology Ventures Group
Edward King, VP of New Ventures of Inventec Corporation
Must Register to join live session:
http://bit.ly/apr21investor

Agenda:
7:00 pm Networking
7:10 pm MC
7:20 pm Moderator Introduction
7:25 pm Discussion Panel
8:30 pm Q&A
8:50 pm Ending

Target Audience:
Startup Founders
C-level Executives
Product and Prototype Designers
Electrical, Mechanical and Computer Engineers

Bio page
https://github.com/bessho/SiliconValleyInternetBuilder/wiki/Innovation-Event-Series

Supporting Organizations:
Silicon Valley China Wireless
http://svcwireless.org/
Hong Kong IoT Alliance
https://alliance.hkiota.org/

Sponsor:
InvestHK
https://www.investhk.gov.hk/en/home.html