What Happens When a Joyful Frog Jumps Out of its Well?
We get the concepts of out-of-the box thinking, persistency, ingenious-ness, getting out of the comfort zone – all the qualities that define a frog entrepreneur. If you see yourself as a frog not comfortable in your own little well, keen on exploring different possibilities and not wanting to be bogged down by limitations, then JFDI might be a program for you. JFDI, which stands for Just Fucking Do It, erm, I mean Joyful Frog Digital Incubator is an initiative to create new entrepreneurs and investment ready business in 100 days! Inspired by Y-Combinator, TechStars and Seedcamp, JFDI programme plans to create a self-sustaining startup ecosystem in Singapore and other countries in Asia. Started by Meng Weng Wong, Hugh Mason and Soon Loo, JFDI has backing from MDA and are now in discussion with other partners to help their financing. I spoke to Hugh about this interesting initiative and got to know further details.
Inspiration Behind the Initiative
According to Hugh, there are three roots to JFDI: the first is a perception that Singapore’s entrepreneurship scene needs to “grow” more individual entrepreneurs and credible teams to reach critical mass. The second one is that other people seemed to have a formula that worked for doing that (their heroes are Y-combinator, Techstars and Seedcamp). Lastly, they observed the negative pressure that many of the first-time entrepreneurs they worked with seem to be under, from family in particular, to avoid “failure” and how Singapore needed places where it’s OK to try stuff out and find out what does and doesn’t work.
While Hackerspace is mainly for geeks/hackers, JFDI is a program for entrepreneurs who want to create great products along with a sustainable business.
Another rampant problem that many startups in Singapore complain about is the lack of talent. He observes from his experience in working with several of the existing incubators and listening to many business plan pitches is that there seems to be more money available for investment-ready businesses than there are businesses ready to take that investment.
How is JFDI Different From Other Incubators?
They mention it very clearly that are not looking at competing with any existing incubator or investor. Instead, they want to create deal-flow for the whole system. They also mention that they are not the only people doing this and completely support the initiatives at Institutes of Higher Learning. Their model is also different from other existing incubators here. JFDI believes in creating rapid turnaround cycles regardless of the products achieving necessary traction. They also involve customers and investors from Day 1 rather than bringing them in at the end which according to them creates higher hit rate. Another differentiator is that they start with commercial opportunities and build ideas around them.
Why 100-Days Only?
Like the Y-Combinator program which lasts for 3 months, the 100-day timescale was chosen so that they can make things focussed and affordable and there’s a rapid learning curve – not just for participants – but also for the whole entrepreneurship community in Singapore because they can share as much as they can. It also means that they either succeed or fail fast almost akin to the principles of agile development.
Cut Down to the Chase. When and How Can I Apply?
In Hugh’s words, “Online. In addition to demonstrating a key skill required for a startup (such as software engineering, sales and product management), we will expect anyone who wants to take part to prove that they have read and understood the ideas in some key books so that they have a common language to share with everyone else. They don’t need to be an entrepreneur when they join us (they will become one by the time they leave) but they do need to show evidence of the personal qualities required. We’re particularly focused on engineering talent: there will be a role for commercial people but we will expect everyone who takes part to demonstrate that they have got their hands dirty and written code. As I write this, we’re still working through how the process will work and we will announce it when we’re fully funded and ready to roll. We hope that will be Q2 2010. In the meantime, anyone interested can start reading background material here: http://bit.ly/5VrwUz“
To find out more info about this initiative, look out for Meng’s talk in our upcoming echelon 2010.
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