Barcamp Singapore 7


Barcamps are informal peer learning meetups. Barcamps feature discussions on various topics – from technology to travel, from science fiction to life-hacks. Barcamps are run all over the world by local volunteers. Usually, these meetups are run at shoe-string budgets at local universities, libraries or IT companies. The main aim is to discover the creativity and talent in the community and learn from each other. There are no invited speakers and no pre-scheduled sessions. The sessions are decided by participants. If you are in a room and find that the discussions don’t interest you, walk out and join the one happening in the next room.

Barcamp Singapore 7 is held in Blk 71 this year.

How does it work? :

  1. Show up early in the day
  2. Write down your topic and your name on the topic-sheet and post it on the topic-wall.
  3. Participants will walk around checking out the topics. If they like your topic, they will vote for it.
  4. The number of votes are counted and slots are assigned to the presenters. Each of these presentation slots are 30 to 45 minutes each.
  5. If a topic did not receive enough votes, lightning rounds are available, where each presenter gets 5 minutes to present his or her idea.
  6. There are usually a couple of spare rooms where one can run a mini-discussion in addition to the posted topics.
Topic Voting
Sessions went:
  1. Anatomy of my epic startup design fail @guyishen
  2. Hey I founded a web startup OH SHIT I CANT CODE @elishatan
  3. Fixing the Talent Pool, the startuproots way @startuprootssg
  4. A Review of what makes a tech startup works @diebermen
  5. How to get fundings from corporate VCS @singtelinnov8
  6. The Tech Conundrum: Outsource VS Inhouse @bleongcw
  7. Lessons Learnt from Running Founder’s institute @jpaine
  8. Crash Course iPhone Game Creation with Cocos 2D @jamornh

Thoughts and advices from various presenters:

  • There are various programming language out there, and if you decided to pick up and start learning one but couldn’t settle on which language, settle with the language where you could learn from anyone who’s willing to lend a helping hand to you [@elishatan]
  • Things in Singapore are broken: Scheme by governments are not churning out and too focused on starting up companies, and the baseline for talent pool can be improved – this is what Derrick Ho, founder of Startup Root mentioned in his pitch. High quality engineers are porched and offered a job in finance or investment firms, leaving only a small pool of talent for the startup community.
  • 3 success factor of a tech company: Hubris, Humility, Humor – need to keep hubris and humility on balance, and that most founders from successful startups enjoy working in their own startup [@dieberman]
  • In a founding team, there must be someone FULL TIME on it to kick start it, if not, the progress will be really slow. [@dieberman]
  • The problem with outsourced engineers is that they tend to over promise. The rule of thumb is that if they could deliver the job in within twice the original agreed period, the outsourced team is quite ok. [@bleongcw]
  • Important to hire someone who is a good teacher as the first employee for your company and he does not have to be the best in the industry, and then you build your team around him. [@bleongcw]
  • Findings from Founders Institute: 1. Most of us have bad ideas, our job is to get rid of the dumb ones 2.  starting a company is very hard and because of that, nobody is going to steal your idea – the more feedback u get, the better framework u get 3.  testing ur idea or a few ideas is a must. commit to one and don’t turn back – reason is nobody is really able to judge an idea/product – there are founders and there are everybody else 4. Vision is small 5. Disconnected from SV – do not know about the competitive landscape [@jpaine]
  • Tips from @jpaine, guy behind Asia’s FI: 1. Listen, don argue. 2. Get good mentors around you. 3. Assume everything will go wrong. 4. Keep enough resources for pivoting. 5. NO Asshole rule. 6. have fun
  • On Singapore startup ecosystem: @jpaigne said that Singapore are still lacking in terms of money and mentor although we have competitive advantages such as a strong command of english language and a multicultural community.
Basically those are the few pointers that are important. Will be writing more for e27’s coverage which will be live in 2 days. =)

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