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Comment by mkress | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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