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Wood Egg (my new company)

sivers.org

71 pointskryptiskt30 comments

As a predominantly Asia-resident member of this community who has passed through many of the countries I find this post rather interesting. I suggest changing the title to make the subject more obvious - I nearly skipped it.

However, I am going to be honest: I think the horrible truth here is that there is no 'startup scene' in most of these countries, no 'serviced apartments' in the places 'to meet the post people'. The claimed contents themselves betray a distinct lack of understanding of the host cultures through an American perspective.

Quite simply, these products look far too much like smoke and mirrors with external cultural baggage to boot.

As someone who as actually run a startup in China, for instance, the contents are a joke. No mention of the most important areas of consideration, overemphasis of things that are irrelevant.

So what the hell is this? They are hiring. Job description: "Find a few real estate people. Ask what’s the best place for a new business to locate." ... subtext: publish that as fact.

Come on... this is lowly. Just because you have some money to spam-market quick-e-books with doesn't mean you are the arbiter of truth. Hire a real writer, do some real research, and be honest about it. Without quality, there is little point in publishing.

Fail.

There doesn't have to be a startup scene in all of the countries. The books were written for entrepreneurship, not Valley-level startup scenes.

Eiter way, have you checked out write ups of the recent Echelon event in Singapore (http://e27.co/echelon/)or that 500 startups just set up a fund only for SEAsia countries?

As far as the spam-market quick-e-books comment, I'm pretty sure it was the absolute opposite of that. Did you read that after a year and a half of hard work he released these?

I don't see these books as a fail at all, but instead a step forward to good, actionable information that is useful to help bring and grow entrepreneurship to Asia.

I would love to hear what's important to you as I'm currently running a startup in Thailand and would love to learn more about all the countries, especially China.

Why don't you offer some advice as to what you see ont he most important areas of consideration and what is overemphasized?

Basic stuff: Stability, system of law, contrast available legal structures, different types of taxation, financial services, visa/immigration, shipping/logistics concerns, internal geographic breakdown, indicative service costings (utilities, advertising, etc.), nature of local human resources market, notable commercial events/tradeshows, trends over time with all of the above, etc.

Those things are covered and if you would have taken the time to do even a cursory review before writing your baseless dismissal you would have seen this.

It's clear this is an evolving project. I don't believe Derek Sivers would do a project like you making it out to be and I don't think you have any basis to think he is, even if you don't know who he is.

Just to quickly address some things where you've missed the point: these are entrepreneurs' guides; these are targeted at an American and other non-Asian markets so it's important to answer questions from that perspective, regardless if you think they're irrelevant (you can't know what's irrelevant until someone tells you or you learn from experience); it's amusing that the "contents are a joke" when they address the things you have asked for.

And from above:

> Come on... this is lowly. Just because you have some money to spam-market quick-e-books with doesn't mean you are the arbiter of truth. Hire a real writer, do some real research, and be honest about it. Without quality, there is little point in publishing. Fail.

Go look at the content before before making such claims ("lowly...spam...without quality") and advising them on their methods. After you've done that, how about focusing on the content?

Sorry for the tone but I can't stand these types of off-base dismissals and ending it with "fail" is just the icing on the cake. Derek Sivers is a respected member of the community that just spent the last nearly two years of his life on this and deserves better than these as the top comments on his announcement.

Are you suggesting that the table of contents does not reflect the contents? I suppose that's possible.

No, I'm not. I'm sure you can do your own search for "law", "tax", "immigration", etc.

If you had done that, I'd have no issue with a civil critique of the content but to dismiss ("fail", really?), insult ("spam") and patronize ("Hire a real writer[...]") the project of a respected member of the community (or anyone) to the extend that you did, with no basis (you haven't read the book and don't seem to have read the table of contents), has no place here or anywhere intelligent discussion is desired.

Being in the middle of the Taiwanese startup scene. Lots of smoke and no fire. Most of them just want to jump ship to elsewhere (especially to the US). That is made harder by multiple factors.

- general low quality of their projects (stated by multiple people from Startup Weekend organizers to incubator hosts)

- scarce funding (the VCs here quite often want something validated far more than elsewhere, and don't fund something until someone else did)

- low cost of of living (really easy to scrape by on very little money, so much smaller pressure to keep cranking that experiment/learn/pivot cycle, many people end up merely "threading water" for years)

All that said, I really really really hope this will change, and I'm among those who are trying to shake things up.

The table of contents has entries like:

> Describe the mindset of most people in Cambodia. Progressive or conservative? Future-focused or present-focused? Work-focused or pleasure-focused? Optimistic or cautious? Pressing for change, or maintaining traditions? Strict or easy-going? Or, if the mindset is very divided between groups, please describe the divide. (Feel free to just share your personal opinion.)

.. which doesn't look like a table of contents; it looks like the e-mail you sent to the person that you asked to write the book for you.

Good eye. I looked at that question so many times in the last couple years that I got blind to it. Thanks for pointing it out. Fixed for future editions.

The books, instead of being written by one person, are written by 50 different researchers. For every question I had, I found 3 different people to answer it. One local, one expat, one other. That way the book isn't just one person's point of view.

Then at the end, an editor combined all the different answers into one, and I went through the final-final to clean it up.

I'll write more about this soon. Good lesson learned about making a robust plan versus a fragile plan. At first I thought I'd write all 16 books myself. Next I thought I'd hire one writer per-country. But this system turned out to be a much better way to get different viewpoints.

Anyway - thanks again for pointing out the error.

Just skimming through the linked post, it seemed like you would be writing all 16 of the books (admittedly, this could be my own reading failing), which seemed like a really ambitious goal.

Are you planning on writing about the entire process after you've completed your journey?

Yeah. I'll be writing about it very soon.

Made a lot of mistakes. Learned some good share-able lessons from the process. You know I always try to describe those, afterwards, in case it can apply to something you're doing.

Just some feedback on your pricing: $50 is very steep for a kindle book, in fact I don't think I've ever seen a kindle edition so expensive. If this was around $20 I'd have bought it.

Derek Sivers is one of our industry's truly interesting people. I like to think that if I had f-u money, my life would be like his. I'm almost certainly too lazy for that, though. Keep being interesting, Derek. Hope this project does well.

Yep. Awesome guy. Inspiring.

Derek, congratulations on launching!

(As cofounder of Leanpub, this makes me especially happy, of course :)

Derek, Congrats on the launch! Just curious why you decided to launch with 16 books instead of just one or two? This seems to run counter to the Lean Startup/MVP approach. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you!

Because I'm especially interested in the comparison between countries, I thought the most fascinating part of the project was to ask the same 200 questions of all 16 countries, and compare the answers.

This definitely isn't a typical MVP business. I didn't test the market. I doubt this will ever make money. It's just something I wanted to do, for my own curiosity. If other people can use it, that's just a bonus.

> I doubt this will ever make money.

Why didn't you do this more of a wiki/collaborative/open style?

I may. But to get it started, I want to help set the tone and focus. But once there's a precedent/standard/example to follow, an open style may make more sense.

This is a great initiative. However, I'm missing the one emerging country in all of South East Asia, any plans for Laos?

Unfortunately not. I skipped Laos, Brunei, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and a few others. Having to draw the line somewhere, I picked countries where I either had an in, or had at least heard a lot of buzz and interest about (like Myanmar and Sri Lanka.)

It would be interesting to get insight of least editor of all editions (if that is a sigular person) on rating of the the countries in this year's edition of these books, rating being general impression of handling a business in stated countries.

Check out http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings

That IFC "Ease of Doing Business" index is quite well-researched. That has better information than my books, for direct comparisons like you're asking.

Derek, I like how you announced it only after actually doing it. This is much different than saying you're going to do it, which sounds obvious, but there is a big difference.

Thanks! It was SO tempting!

But keeping my mouth shut about it helped me slog through it and get it done, instead of basking in advance glory. It's too easy to slack off, if you've already felt the warm fuzzy joy from people's compliments on starting something. I didn't want to feel any of that until it was done.