The 500 Mobile Collective with Edith Yeung of 500 Startups
Edith Yeung from 500 Startups joined us for a chat on all things mobile and an overview of the mobile landscape all over the world. Drawing from her career experience with Dolphin and BiztechDay, she explained her investment thesis: how it continued to evolve with a ever-changing landscape of mobile and how she looked at investing into startups not just in the US but also how to map ideas from Asia back to US. On mobile, we discussed from payments, healthcare, enterprise, gaming, content to on-demand apps and understand the latest trends in mobile. We also discussed some of her investments and she offered her advice on how mobile startups need to figure out driving up app installs and usage.
Here are the interesting notes and links to the discussion (with timestamps included):
- The story of Edith Yeung (@edithyeung, LinkedIn and personal blog) [1:24]
- How did she start in technology? What is her early career like before joining 500 Startups?
- The story behind BizTechDay and an interesting link back to SGEntrepreneurs (co-founded by BL, Gwen and Weichang).
- How did she start BizTechDay and eventually that take her to new opportunities?
- How is her role in Dolphin browser? How did that shape her thinking from an operator to a venture capitalist?
- Eventually she move into venture capital by becoming a founding partner of RightVentures and 500 Mobile Collective, what made her decide a career in investing into companies?
- 500 Startups and 500 Mobile Collective Fund [9:05]
- How did she get involved in 500 startups and started the US$10 microfund?
- What’s her investment thesis? How has that evolved over since she started investing 7 months ago?
- Why focus on mobile? What are the interesting opportunities that she is looking at?
- Mobile payments [11:05]
- Is there a space that can grow past the existing payment networks such as Visa, Paypal, Mastercard? Does the mobile payments space involve bitcoin or block chain? We discuss Coinbase (US), Coins.ph and Bit.X (both in Southeast Asia) dealing with bitcoin remittances between Indonesia ruppiah & Philippine Pesos.
- Mobile content [15:30]
- Taking a cross border approach, looking at success news reader in Asia: Smartnews in Japan, Today Headlines (今日头条) in China.
- Apps in China before Meerkat & Periscope: YY and 6rooms
- Mobile commerce [17:54]
- Carousell (Southeast Asia)
- Her interest in mobile on demand commerce apps that focus on daily services with immediate transactions.
- Mobile healthcare [19:20]
- Mobile ad network and monetisation [21:58]
- Given that Admob has been bought by Google, what are the new generations of mobile ad networks? Is mobile ad network dependent on media relationships rather than technology?
- Mobile gaming [24:31]
- Given that most gaming companies seem to produce one hit wonders similar to hollywood studios, what are the kind of companies she is looking for in this space? What are the lessons learnt from gaming that can be applied to other mobile areas
- Mobile developers tool and enterprise [27:05]
- Mobile Action
- Apps focusing on helping developers to monetise.
- Flurry Mobile Reference for the discussion: The Mobile Addict.
- Mobile payments [11:05]
- Is the 500 Mobile Collective Fund focus on US or to the world?
- What is her advice to mobile startups in thinking about driving app installs to usage? [33:19]
Edith’s presentation “Startup Metrics for Mobile Pirates”
Podcast Information:
The show is hosted by Bernard Leong (@bleongcw) and are sponsored by Ideal Workspace (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) and Linkcious (and check out their other product, Chiibi).
