Singapore X Portugal: Similarities between the two start-up landscapes
“How similar are the start-up landscapes in Singapore and Portugal ?”
This one of the burning questions in the minds of the attendees and which was actively discussed by the panelists during the Entrepreneurial Link: Singapore x Portugal talk held at BLOCK71 Singapore.
This forum serves as a bilateral platform to bring together key players in the Portugal and Singapore entrepreneurial hubs where issues such as investment opportunities and market access are being discussed.
The panel which was moderated by Mário Matos, President of Portuguese Business Society, consisted of Alvaro Pinto, co-founder of Aptoide, Derek Maggs, Managing Director at Veniam, Victor Chua, Vice President of Gobi, and Justin Hall, Ventures Principal at Golden Gate Ventures.
Some key insights we got from the session were on the highly similar start-up landscapes, with both governments playing an active role in promoting entrepreneurship through funding. For instance, Veniam highlighted that the Portugal government is pumping $450 million into the ecosystem to help start-ups. The web summit which was termed ‘the largest tech conference in the world’ was also one of the examples that helped promote start-ups in Portugal. Similarly, in Singapore, we see many tech conferences held every year, including the Innovfest Unbound and Tech In Asia conferences, held earlier the month of May.
Another interesting question was also posed to the panel on the success rate of corporate innovation labs. While corporate innovation labs are thought to have corporates and start-ups working together to some extent, the panel generally felt that these are not genuinely helpful to start-ups. Alvaro, founder of Aptoide, said that in Portugal, having an innovation lab is like building a good start-up in which most of them are bound to fail, and the reason why generally innovation labs are because these labs existed for the purpose of marketing and lack of long term plans.
We hope to bring you such exciting panels in the future, let us know who you would like to hear from in our next session. Drop us a note in the comments section below.
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