Detailed feedback on JFDI’s Request for Comments

We’ve been blown away by the time, energy, insight and enthusiasm shown by everyone who’s responded to our Request For Comments 1 document. A massive thank you to everybody.

We have split up the feedback we have received so far into several broad areas and will keep adding more as it comes in. Listing a comment here doesn’t imply we agree or disagree with it: we simply want to acknowledge all that came in.

As we don’t have formal permission to quote the many people who have written to us privately, we have summarised or extracted feedback from everybody anonymously. If you recognise something in there and feel you’ve been misquoted, or if we’ve missed a point you made to us, let us know and we will put it right. If you want to comment further on the feedback, please do so at the Google Group.

Response of potential customers

• Investor confirms interest in seeing dealflow from JFDI
• Existing incubator expresses interest in taking dealflow from JFDI
• Existing fund expresses interest in taking dealflow from JFDI, is impressed by commercial opportunity identifying element
• Investor says: any efforts that produce more seed stage ventures of quality are welcome
• Established investor would participate in demo days

Potential Partnerships

• Major established US incubator offers affiliation, giving access to: Brand, IP, processes, know-how, Networks of mentors, entrepreneurs and investors, etc
• SG professional associations offer joint working on events
• Polytechnic offers partnership on resources
• Contact charitable foundations
• There may be potential to explore the relationship of JFDI.100 to the iJAM scheme if the latter is reviewed
• Chinese organisation promoting entrepreneurship amongst young people offers partnership to identify talent
• There are significant opportunities to link the program to a major software company’s existing developer engagement activities
• Attracting talent and High Net Worth Individuals to Singapore could help SG government agencies fulfil their remits
• Intensive support for first time entrepreneurs welcomed by SG government agency
• Major SG corporation says JFDI would fit with its innovation strategy: wants to explore involvement.
• Could you aggregate information and networks together like TIE?

Scale and scope of operation

• Do one batch per year of ten and make it good.
• A reality TV series around this would be good
• Maybe should narrow down the range of technologies to a more specific area like mobile games, web games etc depending on expertise available

Alternative and additional locations

• A Middle East location would work for JFDI as well as Singapore
• Regional investor says: something like this would work elsewhere in region
• Government agency outside Singapore says: this would work in our country too
• Should JFDI be run out of KL?

Sourcing and selecting participants

• Attracting talent will attract more talent. Need to get quality people on board as participants for credibility from day 1
• Recruit teams, not individuals.
• Are they even enough people in Singapore who’d want to attend? Would there be too many?
• Are all the suitable candidates already bonded to government?
• Are all the suitable candidates Malaysian?
• Should this be open to the world, with Singapore as a base?
• Would the project be better with a blend of people from around the region?
• How would candidates be selected?
• What obstacles will they have to overcome?
• Why won’t they spend the hundred days eating our food and playing world of warcraft?
• Would they have to be tech savvy?
• Would they have to be business-minded?
• There is cultural inhibition to entrepreneurial thinking in SG and that will take time to change. Bringing in foreign talent and mixing it with locals is a great idea
• Will the SG government worry about the balance of foreigners to locals?
• The work/employment pass / immigration status of the folk participating in JFDI needs clarification
• It’s hard to screen online for great entrepreneurs- the talent recruitment piece is going to be challenging, especially in looking for the right attitude in applicants – fire in the belly required
• It seems that those that are the most likely group of participants are those fresh out of school (be it poly or uni) with minimal or no working experience. They tend to be more idealistic and risk taking. This cuts both ways. The risk taking mentality is important to drive success but the idealism and inexperience can be a hurdle as they progress through the program and realise things are far less rosier than they expect.
• Although the experience of a developer is no gauge for his productivity, good ones tends to be a lot more productive than someone fresh out of school. This is a huge asset when it comes to building web startups in a 100 days.
• Why balance the teams? seems like you might want to self select and/or cut?
• – Setting a high bar for participants seems important. So what’s the appropriate selection process? Some kind of test-based process (like interviews at Google)? A series of chats and interviews to get a clearer picture of the applicant (that might take too long)? Academic excellence in computer science? Are proposal submissions a good way to look at how an applicant thinks about both business and technical issues? Maybe a combination of the above? Probably need to be most rigorous about this.
• What is Y-Combinator’s selection process?
• The flipside of this is how will JFDI attract the best applicants to apply? YC has Paul Graham’s brand name, track record of follow-on funding and a large pool of potential talent to draw from. Good mentorship is meant to be JFDI’s selling point (I think), and we might recognise that it’s important for startups, but will potential applicants realise that and is it enough to motivate them to apply?
• some reasons why selecting individuals would be tricky: (a) You might get 30 bad ideas instead of 10, and more people to “convert”, (b) You don’t know if these individuals can naturally work together, (c) It adds an extra step to the process – organising these individuals into teams that can and are happy to work together. Still, it’s an interesting idea because it seems counter-intuitive.

Ideation process and creativity

• Founders need passion and domain expertise for the idea in which they are working – don’t lose sight of that
• Would participants feel fully engaged if the ideation process means they are not working on their own ideas?
• Do not restrict creativity in any way. Create an environment where people can think freely. Don’t push everything into RFCs, daily programs, courses, guides, steps etc. Give them some deadlines, tell them to come to you if they need help, but encourage them to figure it out themselves.
• The entrepreneurs should be actively involved in idea generation. They should feel it’s their idea, that the project is their baby and it’s success is their responsibility.
• The ideation process is a very good start as taking risk on some unproven idea is certainly less palatable to most as compared to working on solving some existing problems.
• Identifying market needs/problems and getting customers (follow-on investors or first customers) is JFDI’s killer app/key strength. Having a process to identify problems to solve, identify with initial customers and develop commercial solutions makes a lot of sense. It needs to start with real-world problem definition (not “Here’s a cool technology idea, now what problem can I solve with it?”) and have participants develop solutions during the workshop.
• To some extent, selecting individuals instead of groups (who come to JFDI with their own idea) could make them more open to taking on problems from the ideation process. But you could get the same (and perhaps ideal) result if you selected groups of excellent individuals who can already work together, but who aren’t fixed on an idea of their own.
• If the problems and product ideas that emerge from the ideation process don’t incite passion in the participants, they may not be fully engaged in it. And the lack of domain expertise would also be an issue. A participant who is indifferent to or doesn’t know anything about cars would not make a good product for the automobile-related market.
• Seems like getting the problem finding and ideation process right is going to be crucial for JFDI to be unique and effective, and participants need to emerge from the process feeling that it’s their idea/baby. Might be a good idea to think through this process more deeply with the workshop partner.
• Another way could be to conduct the problem finding part of the ideation workshop outside of and prior to bootcamp, sort of like a call for submissions/applicants. During the process, potential applicants are exposed to what JFDI believes are key problems to solve. Applicants (maybe teams) would then be required submit proposals based on these problems that JFDI has flagged as interesting. This is sort of like YC’s request for proposal process. Where YC identifies an area of interest of a problem of interest and calls for proposals for it. (The latest YC RFS was for iPad applications.)

Aligning interests and motivations

• Setting goals and expectations correctly will probably be the most valuable work, with all the other bits of fostering motivation following. Some may be motivated by success, some may be motivated by responsibility to the team, others idea ownership, etc.
• Concern that entrepreneurs participating have ‘skin in the game’
• When you’re fresh out of school with a 20k++ debt and no dime your pocket, working at a startup might not be feasible for the moment. Add that to social pressures like giving $ to parents, saving up for wedding, HDB down payment …
• IP and equity structure to be resolved. Do any of the govt monies carry any rights to IP or other tails that would limit flexibility?

Positioning and promoting JFDI

• What does Joyful Frog mean? Where did the name come from?
• Positioning relative to other early stage support structures in SG needs to be spelled out
• JFDI could be positioned as an educational experience, not necessarily a venture screening machine
• Make clear what precedents you are drawing on from the existing early stage incubators like Y-combinator and which you are leaving behind
• You can help entrepreneurs, but you cannot create entrepreneurs!
• By helping to nurture the startup landscape in Singapore, new avenues of opportunities may be open to people who never thought it was possible
• Not sure if ‘graduate’ is be the right word. You’re not a school. People don’t graduate. It puts responsibility on you, where you only have a facilitating role. 99% of the responsibility lies with the entrepreneurs themselves.
• How will this help Singapore entrepreneurs?
• Could you film the process and sell it as a business show with sponsors?
• How will the programme encourage Singaporeans to be more entrepreneurial? i.e How will they know about what JFDI is doing and how will it help those who aren’t chosen for the programme?
• a public lecture series would be a great way to raise awareness.
• It may be difficult to differentiate JFDI from any of the other iJam incubators (who supposedly offer “mentorship”) in a potential applicant’s mind. Except that JFDI may not offer iJam funding, while iJam incubators do. JFDI would need to get potential applicants to see the value it offers over funding from other sources.

Funding, structure and governance

• The legal structure of the organisation needs to be confirmed
• Need to consider the motivations and deal terms free to the parties involved to make sure this works for everyone
• Need to clarify how JFDI will engage with investors
• How would Government funding change the project?
• Would corporate funding or corporate sponsorship be an option?
• Would the entrepreneurs be willing to fund 30% of the programme themselves?
• Would entrepreneurs buy their own plane tickets if chosen from overseas?
• How would JFDI make money?
• Could the programme be somehow crowd-funded? Would those people see a return on their investment or would it be more like a loan? How would you promote this? How could everyday people get involved?
• Why don’t the principals backing this do so with their own cash?
• Consider looking for a major industry player as a strategic investor

Sustainability

• The standard model for an incubator like YC is exits, but I’m not convinced there’s enough deal flow in Singapore (and enough interest among foreign VCs to look at deals in Singapore) to generate sufficient returns from exits in the first few years.
• There’s potential to connect JFDI’s revenue model to the problem finding and ideation process if large potential customers could be involved.

Operational notes and queries

• JFDI would be covering participants’ (not just mentors’) transport, housing and living costs… Is that really necessary? YC applicants make their way to YC on their own and sort out their own living arrangements. They just get a space to work and Paul Graham’s time.
• Are the particpants covered by some form of medical insurance (this might end up being very, very important)?
• Do participants get walking around money?
• How does housing work, exactly? (furnishings, bedding, utilities, internet, etc.)
• How is the cost of transportation during the 100 days covered (that adds up to probably $500-1K per participant just by itself)
• What happens to teams after JFDI?
• Given the unique cultural barriers mentioned in the document, does the program have a way to help mitigate and manage all these? Are the mentors (specifically the western based ones) well equipped to understand these cultural differences and work around them?
• Where will the companies created be based?
• Entrepreneurs will be provided with an office space and a home space during their time at JFDI. Who will pay for this?
• Is housing in JB or KL an option?
• Would a university donate a space during school holidays? Would this be enough time?
• Could JFDI get a housing estate cheaply en-bloc?
• How would JFDI arrange meetings with investors?
• What would happen to those who fail?
• Could teams join together and hire one another?
• Would the investors have to be based in Singapore?
• Would the new businesses have to be registered in Singapore?
• Getting ‘customers’ and identifying market needs seems a hard problem and one that is not addressed well here. It’s a neat trick if you can pull it off.
• I’d like more clarity on how you will find customers (ie investors willing to participate)
• Would these people shadow CEOs? would they delay their own decisions by asking mentoring CEOs? Would mentoring CEOs shadow the founders?

Issues of presentation

• Minor corrections to table on p15 required
• This covers a lot of the how, while the why remains a bit to be read between the lines, and should probably be made explicit
• It would help to illustrate JFDI with some examples of successful businesses founded in comparative schemes in the US like Y-combinator, Techstars
• Show detail on what covered on 100 day course
• Add financials – Clarity on financials would help the case
• The RFC as written doesn’t address the perspective of a potential participant, it’s written for funding agencies. A document that sets out a clear and attractive deal for potential participants is also required. Maybe partition this document for investors, entrepreneurs etc.
• The tense of the document is inconsistent, it’s oddly present tense at the beginning and future tense for the body. Future tense is better.
• “list of confirmed and potential partners” – I’m feeling bullshitted here. Which are confirmed, which have expressed interest and which do you think are good candidates?
• “Between them, JFDI’s three founding mentors have supported the development of over 2,000 SMEs during the last ten years” – 2000! seriously!? I can’t take this number seriously, and I need context otherwise I think you are trying to bullshit me.
• who are you trying to talk to? why singapore? not necessarily answered to make it irresistible, also don’t leave answering the question why this team? to an appendix