Nov 29, 2018

Seoul, Lisbon, Bali, Shenzhen and a farewell to Stan Lee!

Revue

Casey Lau

November 29 · Issue #22 · View online

Connecting the dots inside this newsletter.

Fried Chicken x Budae Jigae in Seoul

First, a quick trip to Seoul to speak about how RISE became such a big conference and the future of media at Next Content 2018. 3 takeaways from this trip:

Azar is a huge video dating app (think Chatroulette but without the 🍆) outside of Korea, but its made in Gangnam! They also have a cool office. They raised US$10mm a few years ago and never needed any more money because their users spend so much on their platform.
Finally met with Hashed - they are a fund and accelerator for blockchain startups. Speaking of blockchain, met with 2 awesome founders building some cool blockchain projects - MediBloc and MVLChain who is an old friend.
Got a 3-hour lesson on how Koreans drink depending on seniority - wow, that was insightful, remind me to hang out with younger people when I’m in Seoul.

Web Summit in Lisbon

Back to Lisbon for the 3rd Web Summit in Portugal - its getting bigger and bigger every year.

It was cool that Sunil Sharma (co-host of Collision) and I got a lot of MC time up on Center Stage to expose to the 70,000 attendees about the Toronto and Hong Kong conferences. After this third year it’s not as freaky to be on that massive stage, but now they have this steadicam that follows us out from backstage - its super Oscars style - and then we had a flying camera capture us introducing the PITCH finalists from the audience floor - that was amazing (and we just decided to do it on the day.)

Here are 5 photos from my camera roll at Web Summit:

me and Collision co-host Sunil Sharma backstage by @rapidographs

Opening Night audience - I feel that this night sets the mood for the next 3 days!

And yes it's freaky as hell to be on that stage in front of all those people, no matter how many times you do it!

The Forum / Speakers Lounge - honestly the food here is incredible.

Startup people from Asia on the last night (also my birthday.)

One of the talks I actually caught live was this one with Alexis Ohanian - the co-founder of Reddit and Initialized Capital and probably even more famous these days for being Mr. Serena Williams lol:

What I wish a VC had told me

All the talks are at the Web Summit YouTube channel – so many good ones!

Google for Startups in Bali

Honored to be invited to tag along to the Google for Startups (name changed from Entrepreneurs) APAC Summit - so meeting up with old friends like Grace from Found, Aim from Hubba and Bob from Peoples Squared and meeting new ones! Of all the stuff I do, working with ecosystems is really at my core and this is a great initiative by Google to help ecosystems from around the world. Mike Kim heads it up via Seoul and he’s awesome. I was there for 2-days being part of workshops on all kinds of community development stuff and happy that they will be announcing a Hong Kong partner soon. Learn more about how you can get involved with GfS here.

Tech in Shenzhen

Jumped over the border for Techcrunch Shenzhen to see some friends and if you haven’t been to the Nanshan district - this is what Shenzhen looks like now. Restaurants that you pay for KFC with your face, convenience stores with no one inside and you just scan with your WeChat and go and every major tech company in the country with a major office there and a Tech park that makes HK’s Science Park look like a pre-school! Wow! I’ll be going back and posting more.

My Overall Picks of the Week

Clever Dripper for coffee!

My new favorite app is Hi Hello - it’s a new namecard app that you use your iPhone’s built in QR Code reader to automatically download my contacts to your address book - so easy and so customizable. When my current business cards run out I will not be reprinting and just using this - though I guess I will have to keep a few for Japan.
Have you ever wanted a nice pour-over coffee without all the gear? Try the Clever Dripper - I got the small one and it travels well for Digital Nomads (I also travel with this Coffee Dripper Hat). I like it better than the AeroPress.
Talks at Google with Yuval Noah Harari - to say he is amazing is an understatement - he has a new book out called “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” He did this great talk to support it and Its available here as a YouTube video or as a podcast. Either format is must consume content.

Stan Lee RIP

Stan “The Man” Lee passed away at the age of 95 on November 12, 2018 - Stan had the most profound affect on my life, more than Steve Jobs, and I was lucky to meet him once way back in 1998 when I was doing my own comic books. You will be missed Stan but your legacy will live on for generations.