AppWorks from Taiwan
Date: 26 March 2014
Chan kick-started the session by delivering a talk titled 'AppWorks: Build a World-Class Mobile Ecosystem in Taiwan. AppWorks is a leading accelerator and venture capital fund focusing on mobile and internet businesses in Asia which have since trained more than 200 startups. He then divulged details entailing why mobile internet is the biggest paradigm shift in our era. Mobile is the only media growing in 2013 and accounts for more than half of Facebook's ad revenue. Chan who advised aspiring technocrats to start young so that their chances at success and groundbreaking feats will be automatically enhanced.
A former Student Union president at National Cheng Kung University, Su was offered a lucrative job after graduating from Master's studies with top honours. However, the enterprising lad chose a path less crowded and signed up for AppWorks where he learned the key to strategic business management. His previous ventures were catastrophic but a resilient Su remained unperturbed. In a tell-all talk titled 'From a Student to an Entrepreneur', Su chronicled his life after graduation up to the establishment of Fandora, his brainchild and one-stop centre for digital imagers, visual artists and graphic designers to market their unique designs online which revenue today has exceeded TWD200 million.
Audience who relished Tseng's talk, titled 'My Journey Establishing PubGame', and would discern that there is one striking similarity between his story and Su's: That both visionaries have tried and failed but they never gave up on their dreams. PubGame is a startup built from failures and experiences as disclosed by Tseng, who recounted a painful episode of losing all his savings to E-City, one of his previous ventures that crashed. Forced to start from scratch again, it took him countless failures to finally established PubGame, a profitable web and mobile social games publishing business involved in the marketing of provisioned game services in Asia.
