It’s been about two weeks since I touched down in Hong Kong. Still working on understanding the lay of the land, regarding trends, players in the field, and activities. There is a LOT happening here, but the verdict is still out on how meaningful most of it will be in the long-run… I don’t want to pull the trigger too quick on an overview of the Hong Kong tech scene— it’s still premature at this point.
On a more macro level however, I do see a pretty interesting phenomenon playing out in the media coverage of tech throughout Asia. TechNode, TechCrunch, and TechinAsia do a phenomenal job rendering the news on the latest innovative products, market trends, regional investment activity, and local acquisitions, but none of that ultimately says much about the on-the-ground experience of tech entrepreneurs in Asia.
This is the market-oriented approach to writing and talking about tech and entrepreneurship, and one that confuses the importance of the cause (the entrepreneur and the ecosystem) with the effect (the product and market). This leads to a disproportionate amount of attention given to the market, while the actors driving market movements remains untouched by popular media outlets.
There is a lot of lost value on brushing aside the day-to-day of tech entrepreneurs. Maybe it’s too “dirty,” subjective, or anthropological for the popular news, but I would love to see how the successes and struggles of entrepreneurs compare and contrast moving from city to city across Asia. What’s the lowest common denominator of unity between tech entrepreneurs in Hanoi and Beijing? More fundamentally, is there any applicable value in a shared lowest common denominator experience?
One way or another, there is an unsettling absence of on-the-ground information for outsiders coming into this space. Media coverage of startups is in need of an evolution— one that sheds the skin of "big corporate," market-oriented coverage and goes back to the fundamentals of early-stage startups, people and the community.