Why I am Excited About the Growing Developer Ecosystem in Southeast Asia
Editor’s Note: Jason Costa is currently a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At present, he is studying entrepreneurship & innovation with a focus on software and the web. Prior to MIT, Jason spent four years working at Google, where he was a Technical Programs Manager on the Developer Relations team. He has spent significant time working in Silicon Valley, Ireland, India, China, and Southeast Asia.
I can’t believe that it’s been almost a year since some of my colleagues and I ran the Google DevFest tour through China, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam & the Philippines. That was a fantastic experience, as we met so many great people from each of the aforementioned countries. And of course, an honorary shout-out to all of the developers who came out to Singapore from Malaysia too! I’ve since moved on from Google to attend graduate school at MIT, but I look back fondly on the days I spent working with developers in Asia.
One key takeaway from my time spent working extensively in Southeast Asia, China, and India was the amazing entrepreneurial culture they all have. There are a number of reasons why I think Southeast Asia will continue to grow into a hotbed of innovation, particularly in the web space.
Active Startup Culture
An active startup culture exists there, with a very important ingredient innate to any vibrant entrepreneurial scene: clusters of highly intelligent people collaborating with one another. There’s the e27 guys in Singapore, the BarCamp folks in Thailand, the GTUG crew in Malaysia, and the list just goes on. At least once a week I get something in my inbox about some cool unconference-style event happening in the region. Critical mass is vital to innovation.
Opportunities to Contribute
There are so many opportunities to contribute. This makes it incredibly exciting to be there, and this is true of Asia Pacific in general. Why is it so exciting to work in places such as India, China, and Southeast Asia? These regions are developing so quickly, it’s astonishing. One can walk out onto the rooftop of any local building and witness displays of cranes for miles. With any quickly developing region comes lots of little growing pains, but any good entrepreneur knows that lots of little problems means the local landscape is ripe with good opportunities for solutions.
Solving Local Problems Just Got a Whole Lot Easier
When it comes to the web, things continue to get even better. Solving these local problems has only gotten easier with time. APIs for Google Maps, Twitter, and many other services, that funnel data across the wire (or over the air!), have unlocked a lot of value for the world at large. The “developer artist” who creates something unique can continue to generate even more value. And services like Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine have only lowered the barriers to entry by taking away the headaches of hosting and scaling a great new application.
Timing!
While I’ve chatted with entrepreneurs in the Valley, in Boston, and across Asia who share a frustration with the state of the global economy (it’s understandable) – I actually think it’s a great time. What do Apple, Oracle, and Skype all hold in common? Each was funded post-market correction. Right now is a great opportunity to clean away a lot of the cruft that comes with a boom. You know we’re in a bubble when the me-too apps start segmenting themselves by geography – i.e., “we’re going to be the YouTube of China or the Facebook of Poland.” Now we can finally get back to focusing on innovation. There are too many interesting challenges to tackle: filtration of data in the real-time web, addressing privacy concerns in an increasingly social web, designing a truly great UX for the mobile web, and so on.
As for Silicon Valley, I get asked a lot if I think that innovation is shifting away from there. I don’t think that’s the case at all – the Valley is hyper-competitive, and is saturated with extremely smart people doing some amazing things. More important though, I once heard a quote from Nathan Myhrvold where he framed the question, “Was it bad for Boston that Silicon Valley came up? And is it bad for Silicon Valley that Seattle and Austin are coming up?” The question can easily be extended to ask if it’s bad for the US that Bangalore, Singapore, Beijing, Wroclaw, and many others are coming up. Myhrvold’s answer stuck with me: “Of course not. In one of these countries, some little kid is going to grow up to get a PhD in pharmaceutical sciences, and will develop a pill that, 30 years from now, is going to save my life. How could I possibly be mad about that?”
And that’s the point of the entrepreneurial cycle. We’re all in this together – and when one entrepreneurial hotbed takes a step forward, we all take a step forward with that. This is a great time to be an entrepreneur anywhere, and I know I’ll be watching with great excitement to see what happens next in Southeast Asia.
Image courtesy of Zazzle
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