When we pull Taiwanese American entrepreneurs as mentors, they actually also essentially become potential entrepreneurs that we’re also helping with.
My vision is we support all Taiwanese entrepreneurs. They can be Taiwanese American. They can Taiwanese.
What we’ve done is we’ve developed out kind of an online community via Facebook, with a very focused intention of facilitating mentorship, and posting some programs to increase the angles or points of exposure to one another, kind of the Taiwanese entrepreneurs and the Taiwanese American entrepreneurs.
That’s cool. I only heard of it yesterday, so I haven’t done too much digging into them.
Sovereign Fund.
Taiwania Capital, I’m aware, they invest in Taiwanese and non-Taiwanese companies, correct?
Do they fly, essentially, their program managers in those various accelerators, and then they will essential run a pilot, or I guess a standalone program for Taiwan, with intention of bringing them back to their local markets, or...?
Yeah.
That’s good. That’s interesting.
Those companies that are going into the Taiwan Tech Arena are immediately targeting US markets or I guess more markets?
Yeah, the opening ceremony.
Yeah. I was there yesterday, actually.
US, yeah.
What is your experience in terms of this?
For a small handful that we see that has the potential to become gigantic, those are the ones that we want to invest more time and money in. Now it does seem like from this trip to Taiwan and the last time I was back that the hard thing we ...
I didn’t know that, but we’re similarly trying to attract more angel investors. We want to be able to help as many companies as possible.
Yeah, SVT Angels, I’ve met David. Right, David? I don’t know. Actually, I haven’t asked him yet about their experience with how they’ve done and if it’s still operational. Do you know?
The whole idea is as we looked at Taiwanese folks in America, there is a relative high proportion of them who are doing well in VC as well as VC-backed tech companies.
We want to leverage the Taiwanese diaspora to invest human and financial capital back to Taiwanese entrepreneurs. They could be in the US already or they could be in Taiwan.
Subsequent to that investment, our intention is to continue to support those companies, because ultimately we want to see more Taiwanese entrepreneurs, Taiwanese-founded companies that are global, the good old days. That’s the premise of STEEP. It stands for Supporting Taiwanese Entrepreneurs Everywhere Project.
We were able to connect one of the companies to an investor who ended up investing. While we did that, we were also raising an angel fund, and we subsequently also followed on the investment as well.
Yeah. Most people, when they think of the US market, they think of Silicon Valley. We more aim to recruit a full cohort of folks to come, but we saw that we were able to help companies ahead of time anyways.
I think most people we talked to didn’t.
I’m personally based in Austin and initially, we started off wanting to fly a group of Taiwanese startups to Austin for a duration of two months leading up to South by Southwest. Have you heard of South by Southwest?
Our interpretation of "accelerator" is quite broad. We want to help companies short-path a path to the US market, but we are not a traditional accelerator. Traditional accelerators are usually time-limited and location-based. We’re actually location-independent and we’re virtual.
I guess I’ll start. Let me also grab my laptop.
Does that make sense? Two major things.
Then see if you’ve seen similar examples for other countries or even within Taiwanese communities that implemented in the past and how we can improve and how we can help as well.
Basically I have two major points I want to talk to you about, which is introduce what I’m working on and then get some feedback on what you think would be the best way to leverage the network I field and the people and resources that want to dedicate their ...
Thank you for carving out your time to speak to me.
