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Lack of domain knowledge or network to acquire it

Azrul Rahim 10 years ago updated by Wan Adli Wan Hassan 10 years ago 1
A lot of entrepreneur nowadays started relatively young, often has little work experience. They were not exposed to actual industry practice enough to have meaningful insights into the particular industry and offer disruptive ideas.

For example, someone with an idea to disrupt medical industry might have never work in any part of medical industry or even know anyone within in.

This is made worse by the fact that they had no network or know anyone around them that can connect to them that domain. Some are lucky enough to have well-connected families (business network) that can open the initial door or help with the initial discovery process, but for many, it is a challenge to even get started. 

What happen then is that tech-startups that are started by youngster tends to focus too much on consumer internet, or worse, they started a project that is a complete mismatch with what the industry needs.

My Suggestion

  1. Work to get other startups and GLC to build a solid and meaningful internship or apprenticeship program.
  2. Build a process or a network where founder can tap into industry's experts or experience for feedback on their idea. This helps people build the network they might need later.
  3. Host events where people from various industry talk about their industry challenges. (financial, insurance, medical, etc...). This should open up our founders mind to new things (not just what they read online)
I agree with Azrul but i also feel that most start ups lack the strong technical knowledge to even come up wt a solid MVP.
Even their technical domain knowledge is not up to par.

I would like to add on to the suggestions
  • All universities grants their lecturers a sabbatical leave where they can get attached to other universities for sake of knowledge acquisition. Maybe magic or some government agency can introduce same concept where the founders or key personnel in a start up can get attached in a more established company to gain insightful technical knowledge. As we know there just certain things that are not taught in schools eg proper git management, A/B testing, scrum, etc. These practical technical knowledge is what a lot of start ups are facing. 
  • Cradle, MDEC, etc already provides a lot of business coaching but nobody is providing the technical coaching. I believe in order to be successful you need to be able to balance the two. I'm sure we have seen a lot of tech start up that have shown good potential but could not get there because their technical skills are just not good enough.
  • e.g. My company is good with mobile development but we lack skills in game development. So I would like to send my people over to intern at a game development company. That game developer might be good in their field but lack skills in mobile. I would gladly accept their people and teach them mobile development.  I'm sure you catch my drift ;)

My two cents