Required Reading: The Economist’s Special Report On Tech Startups

February 4, 2014 Leave a comment

Required Reading: The Economist’s Special Report On Tech Startups

Posted yesterday by Ryan Lawler (@ryanlawler)

It’s not every day we here at TechCrunch just point to someone else’s work and say, “Here, you should go read this.” But today’s an exception, because The Economist has put together a 16-page Special Report on the rise of technology startups around the world.

The report, which is written for the magazine’s general news audience, could serve as a sort of “State of the Union” for the industry. That means a lot of what’s reported there won’t really be news to those of you who are deeply involved in the startup world.

There are no big surprises or gotcha moments, for instance, in its various stories on the boom in accelerators, the move by hardware startups and suppliers to embrace Shenzhen, or the growth of tech ecosystems in communities around the world.

But where The Economist’s report could be useful is in helping those of us who follow this world every day to see the forest for the trees. In so doing, it we could possibly better understand the broader global impact that the spread of technology is having, how we’ve gotten here, and what the big trends are driving us forward. What it really means whensoftware eats the world, as it were.

And hey, maybe you don’t know much about how Rocket Internet operates, why platforms have become so important, or the negative psychological effects that entrepreneurship has on some founders. If any of that is of interest, it’s in there, too.

Anyway, I highly recommend you download the full PDF, save it for a quiet moment when you have some spare time, and read it in its entirety. Because every now and then it’s good to take a big step back, re-learn the things you think you already know, and maybe see the tech world from another person’s point of view.

 

Filed under TMT Trends

Unknown's avatarAbout bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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