Community First, Company Second

Founded in February 2006, E27 is a media organization focused on the Asian technology startup industry. We are devoted towards Silicon Valley-style, community-driven advocacy of technology innovation in Asia. We combine our online media with offline events to influence, discover and evangelize upcoming technology innovations from the startup communities around Asia.

Our most recent flagship conference, echelon 2010, saw over 700 attendees from 20 countries congregate in Singapore for 2 days for investment pitches, technology showcases, knowledge sharing and networking. Our events and participants have been featured in global technology media outlets such as BusinessWeek, TechCrunch, Venturebeat and more.

Our website e27.sg is the trusted source of information on Asia’s growing startup ecosystem. We are read by founders, investors and regulators. From founder profiles, trend analysis and the latest news on funding, exits, hiring and firing, get it first from e27.sg.

e27 is a wholly-owned business unit of Optimatic Pte. Ltd. headquartered in Singapore.

Our Grassroots Culture

The E27 community believes in a bottom-up grassroots organization structure for our media content generation and specialized events. E27 is proud to have pioneered the “unconference” event concept in 2006 which reverses the traditional “conference” format of “speaker-first” by having an “audience-first” approach that encourages and ensures open dialogue among all event attendees. In addition, we contribute actively to other similar events in Asia such as Barcamp and OpenWebAsia. We welcome volunteers anytime (signup link) to suggest new ideas or help out at our events.

History: Why “e27??

All quirky names have equally quirky back-stories. = )
The founders of e27 paid too much attention to the interesting correlation of hot Web 2.0 startups such as Google, Youtube and Facebook, all of which had founders below 27 years old. Some Silicon Valley venture capitalist even used this as an investment philosophy as they believed the new models of web businesses were best concocted by the “web generation” who spent their formative years online and were unaffected by traditional ways of business.

Today, we have retained the “e27” branding more as a signature of our emphasis on freshness and ingenuity of ideas, rather than a restrictive age limit. No human being, regardless of age, race, gender are barred from the doors of innovation.”