 I think a lot of you just had it. If you haven't, you'll talk about, there's the book right there. And today is just a sharing of different ideas, business discussions about how we can grow our communities. So without further ado, I'll let them introduce themselves and they can see our way to the show. All right, good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning. I'm going to try to very loosely moderate and facilitate this conversation, but it's really about Ian and Audrey today. We've had a previous discussion, so we're going to pick up on those and try to have an engaging and interesting conversation. Unfortunately, because of the technicalities, Ian will you probably won't be able to ask questions from Ian, but Audrey will stay in that room with you guys. She's not running away anywhere, so you can have her and ask her all the questions you want afterwards. So with that said, David just kind of introduced, and you all obviously know who Audrey is, but I want to start my question first with Audrey. And then, and part of that, Audrey, please do give us a little more background to introduce yourself. But we talked about how I should maybe introduce you as the person who put dot in Asia, dot SV. What is that about? When I entered the cabinet, it was four years ago, roughly speaking, and there was this new idea called Yangzhou Siku, or Asian Silicon Valley. And I thought it was still like a lot of my friends thought it was silly, actually, because we've been to Silicon Valley. And so we understand that it's not a bit bringing Silicon Valley to Asia or to turn Asia into Silicon Valley that it works. But however, we do see the importance of connections. And so I put this dot and call it, instead, Asia, dot Silicon Valley. So instead of Asia being a objective like Asian, Yangzhou Siku, right? This is how Yangzhou Lianzi is equal to connect Asia as a Silicon Valley as subsequently. Without that, it's actually the Silicon Valley way of thinking if it's more short-term, if it's more about creating short-term returns and so on. Actually, it has a lot of externalities. We have seen the impotemic, for example, as a result of that. And people in Asia are very creative and we created a lot of ways actually to counter the impotency. So the connection is in both ways. It's not just about using Silicon Valley's thinking to solve Asian problems, but also using Asian thinking to solve problem-caused by Silicon Valley. And this makes for a much more bilateral communication. That's great. And I'm going to come back to that. But before I go dig deeper into that topic, I want to ask Ian, who's the co-author of the Startup Communities Book. And I feel like the book is exactly about this. It's about different communities around the world wanting to become a thriving ecosystem. Can you tell us a little bit about the book and then also a little bit more about your experience? Yeah, thanks, Oko. So yeah, so the book is really the culmination of three years of work with my co-author Brad Feld and I. Not three years consistently. There were a lot of breaks in between, a lot of, you know, marinating on these ideas. For those who may not be aware, Brad wrote a book in 2012 called Startup Communities, which kind of kicked off this global phenomena. And we partnered over the last couple years. This book was just published in July, which is really an evolution on the movement that Brad kicked off. His first book focused a lot on Boulder, the principles that could be learned in Boulder, Colorado, his experience building the Startup Community there. What we're trying to do here is be more generalizable. We focus a lot on the systemic properties. We use the word ecosystem a lot, but too often we found that approaches to improve entrepreneurship in a community overlooks the systemic nature. And so we really focus on that. Audrey said the word directly, which was connections, right? That's really what this is about, about strong human relationships built around collaboration and support. And that's really what the book is about. We could go a bit deeper if you'd like, but a lot of it has been, you know, put into action with the local team in Taiwan, and it's been fun to be a part of that journey. Great, thank you, Ian. And Audrey, coming back to you, this agenda of Taiwan trying to become the Asian Silicon Valley, whether you like the terminology or not, it's a big agenda and it's been around me. It's been around me. Sorry for your trouble. No problem. It's a big agenda. It's been around for a while now. From your perspective in the office, what has the progress been? What are you proud of? And, you know, how would you analyze the results so far? Yeah, a lot of the work that we've done is to ensure that there is a compelling reason for talents to circulate. Like I personally went to Silicon Valley to start some companies. And thanks to the invention of telework maintained this teleworking relationship with the Silicon Valley community, like even now, right? Digitalminister.tw slash co-founder, sportman, but many other international organizations. And I'm not alone in this. There's many, those Taiwanese people who go overseas that want to return to amplify their work as well as people who have heard of Taiwan and chose this as their startup destination. And toward that end, we've introduced, for example, the Taiwan Gold Card, which you can check out at TaiwanGoldCard.com. And it's a community that with people who hold this open work permit, enjoying healthcare along with their family and so on. And it's all very streamlined without needing to invest a lot of money in Taiwan or to find a Taiwanese employer. What we're saying is that essentially just hang out with us and share your talents and things like that. And it really worked. I mean, now we're around almost 2,000 Gold Card issued this way, up from less than 200 before the pandemic. And during the pandemic, there's also more than 250K people returning from all over the world back to Taiwan to work on whatever they are already working on, but through teleworking and so on. So I think the COVID and teleworking initiatives in particular has really fostered this talent circulation and we've signaled that we are really in this for the long run. The open work permit is three years and unlike Singapore, you can reapply after the three years. And when we're relaxing the criteria as the Christmas gift last year from the Minister of Science and Technology, Mr. Wu Zhenzong, is that anyone who has the potential to contribute to science and technology is now eligible for a Gold Card. So that's pretty much everyone in the startup community. That's great. And I want to follow up on that question. Do you think that it's easier and to be an entrepreneur in Taiwan now than- Yeah, definitely. You're two or four years ago, definitely. Yeah. And what are some of larger kind of infrastructures or new things in place that entrepreneurs can take advantage of in Taiwan now besides the Gold Card? That's right. So in 2015, we've reformed our company law a little bit to promote the closely held corporations that would be able for you as a co-founder or as a founder to raise money up to like serious air or something without diluting your votes and rights. And that used to be very difficult. You have to set up a company at Cayman Islands or something. But now you can do so using local law. Now, in 2017, we further expanded it. So it applies to basically any company that's not public issued. And so like new inventions from Silicon Valley, including for example, the crowd funding and crowd funding for shares, for example, and these things, SDOs even, these structures become legally possible in Taiwan. That's great. I want to jump over to Ian. So is Silicon Valley the best ecosystem in the world? And what have you found in your research looking around communities around the world? Well, I think the best ecosystem is the one then and the one you want to spend the rest of your life improving and building the next great company. I think that the lessons are from Silicon Valley are of course that place matters. It's easier to build a great company in Silicon Valley than in many other places. Maybe we should amend that to say it used to be easier to build a company there, right? The things have been evolving, but place matters. I'll quote a friend of mine who is a French entrepreneur turned investor. And he said, I encourage all of my entrepreneurs to spend time in Silicon Valley, not just to learn and see how things are done and to build a network, but to see that no one is special there, that they aren't necessarily the smartest people, right? They don't have necessarily the best ideas. It's that they're doing it in a place where this culture which has unfolded over many decades has taken shape and it just makes the journey easier. It doesn't make it certain. Let's also not forget to double down on what Audrey was just discussing. Silicon Valley was really built by entrepreneurs, by immigrants. I think one estimate that I saw from a study in the middle of the 2000s, something along the lines of half of all technology venture-backed startups in the Valley over the previous several decades had at least one immigrant founder, right? And we know now that the United States is over the last four years and really predating that much further has begun to turn its back on immigrants. And now we're seeing that capital is flowing to more places, more communities around the world, opportunity is opening up in those markets and smart governments can stay competitive by having an open door. I mean, this is really about talent, right? That's what the whole game is. And to say you're welcome here, you have a place here, I think it's really good government policy. The final thing that I'll say is that also what has made Silicon Valley great is its resilience, right? Its adaptability, going back to that culture element. Silicon Valley made its way really in electronics, in chips and hardware, right? That might sound familiar to folks in Taiwan. It's also been one of the leading centers of biotech and it really wasn't even positioned to be that. But it became that because of the orientation of how venture capitalists and entrepreneurs would take existing means and create meaningful companies, right? So Silicon Valley is proof that it can happen anywhere by applying the right mindset, by being adaptable, being open, being collaborative, putting the entrepreneurs as the star, right? Makes those combinations, those winning combinations of great ideas becoming great companies and creating large markets. It just makes it more likely. And so I think those are some of the main takeaways from Silicon Valley. I don't think you should ever try to emulate it. We can learn from those principles, but really each place is so unique. And to the degree that you do want to adopt lessons from Silicon Valley, I would look back several decades about what actually got the flywheel spinning to begin with, not necessarily what's happening today. Ian, I know you've built your own startup as an entrepreneur and you sold it. And if you were to do a new startup now, would you want to do it in the Silicon Valley? Audrey, same question back to you. Would you want to be back there? Well, for me it's no because I don't want to spend the rest of my life there. I don't want to live there. So it's a definite no for me. Okay, I'm currently working in the Taipei City by my residency is in the New Taipei City. I recently met with the mayor and the deputy mayor of New Taipei City and they have this great sign that everyone who lives or have their residence in the New Taipei City are new citizens. So it's just a new resident. So we are all immigrants and immigrants, we get a job done. So I'm happy to stay in Taiwan and work in Taiwan. Great, Audrey, follow up. So what other ecosystems or communities do you look to when you are perhaps looking for creativity or inspiration and in terms of comparison? I don't want to use this word because I know Ian is very allergic to this word but what other ecosystems and communities do you look at? Inspiration. Yes, so I'm, as I said, I'm digitalminister.tw slash board member, RadcoExchange. And RadcoExchange is this basically unchain governance trying to project it to the real world, quote unquote real world. So my co-founder, Vitalik Buterin is now working with many like quadratic voting, quadratic funding, a lot of like Gitcoin, which is a real implementation of quadratic funding practice and things like that. And the good thing about the Ethereum, is it a co-governor now? Is it sovereign now? Maybe not. The Ethereum community is that they are very willing to look at democracy and see democracy as a technology. Now that's quite rare actually in jurisdictions around the world to see democracy as something maleable, as something that you can try different layout like semiconductor layouts. And so what we are doing is essentially looking at the lessons learned from the Gitcoin experiment, from the Ethereum domain name system and things like that and apply the lessons learned too. For example, that how it needs presidential happens on, which for the past couple of years has used quadratic voting to choose the teams to receive incubation for three months and the top five teams receive a trophy from the president, which is a micro-projector that went on projects that presidents playing when we call it central pie here. So her likeness, promising, promising, blessing, that's the word, blessing the team. Whatever the team did for the past three months, she promised to make it international policy within the next 12 months or so. That's executive power as heck as an award. And we learned that's including the voting method directly from the Ethereum community. Wow, those are some really interesting things that we should be all looking at too. As a digital minister, what is your day-to-day looks like? Earlier you said you attend 50 events a week? 10 meetings per day, yes. Per day? On seven to seven, yes. So what does the digital minister do, yeah? Give you just my meetings a day, right? Right, so I usually have my first engagement around seven a.m. I usually was North and South American communities. Now, the evening engagements are with African and European communities and what I usually do is to focus on the common values like this, this innovative one goals and sharing not only the time model to counter the pandemic with no lockdown, but also countering the infodemic with no take down and many other structural issues. But people in the Commonwealth's called Wicked Problems and I share the Wiki solutions to the Wicked Problems. Awesome, so I wanna now take this and take our two hour kind of third section of the conversation I wanted to have, which is Ian, you know, in your research, what did you find, how, what did you find government to be effective in developing ecosystems? What roles did they play where it worked and perhaps what they didn't do so well? Yeah, so government has a big role to play. I have a different view maybe on what that should be from what a lot of government officials might think that role should be. I think the first thing, and this is not as fun, not as sexy, but it's like getting the house in order is what I'd like to say, making sure your tax regimes and your regulatory regimes are fair, are transparent, are easy to understand, including in that immigration policy, right? That's a regulation around labor, doing things that only the government can do, right? Focusing on doing those things well. I think that governments who are looking to seed, to diversify their approach, right? To seed many different actors who are actually engaged, who are carrying out these experiments, right? I think governments can set high level vision and strategy, they can provide funding, they can provide other forms of support, convening and connecting, but ultimately I feel like when government tries to go down the road of delivering entrepreneurship, services for entrepreneurs like acceleration, incubation, investment, I think that's a step too far. So one way of framing this is government can help build the platform or the dance floor, but ultimately you have to let the dancers dance, right? And so that's a good way of thinking about it. And so those are the kind of things that I think about, about what government strategy, what government approaches work well and what don't. And RJ, I know some of these is exactly what you're working on. Yes. So not that, but that's really what I have to say. I completely agree inside one. We make sure that for when, for example, our national development fund from the National Development Council invest in a company, we always work with the actual community and we never get like more than 49.99% of the controlling share. Otherwise the startup becomes their own enterprises and that's not giving people the freedom to dance. Ian, obviously we've been doing work in Taiwan for over two years now. And one of the first things we did was to do an assessment, right? Can you maybe share a little bit about what we've learned in Taiwan before we started our work? Yeah, so this is a little bit repetitive of what I just talked about. But one of the things that stuck with me both from our assessment and my own experience visiting Taipei was that the government was making some smart decisions around you know, diversifying the strategy, looking for market participants to actually implement, right? The policy is let's improve digitally enabled, digitally driven technology entrepreneurship. That's the goal. Let's put some resources behind it, but let's have these other actors, many different ones implementing the policy. The second thing is that I see which is positive is a commitment, right? A sustained commitment, right? It's very early days. If you look at a bunch of these government initiatives, you know, we're talking what, five, less than a decade, five years, three years or so. This takes a long time. And so having that long-term commitment is critical. In fact, I think this is, you know, I try to think about what's the number one thing that confuses or confounds in entrepreneurial ecosystems. And I think it is that time cycle. These time lags are tremendous. So just remembering that it's early days. On the negative side, one of the things that I observed was that so much of the attention was on very early stage companies that it felt like there might have been a support gap for companies that are gaining traction and growing. I am a big believer in throwing a lot at the innovation economy. There's an American economist who turned venture capitalist named Bill Janeway, and he has this great quote, and he says, efficiency is the enemy of innovation. So don't try to make these policies efficient. Just know that you've got to try a lot of things. You know, a bunch of it won't work, but the things that will are going to drive value for the whole thing, and you're not going to be able to predict in advance what those things are. So I felt like it's great to have lots of this early stage experimentation, keep doing that, stick with it, but then also look for the companies that are gaining traction and find ways to support them as well. Make sure those mechanisms are there. The second thing that I would say is that I felt like the entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurs themselves could be doing more to self-organize and lead amongst themselves. So I feel like the government has done a great job to provide all these resources and opportunities. But one thing that I think could be done more is to encourage those entrepreneurs to lead. Now I know it's very easy for the founders to say, look, I'm busy building my company. I can't do this right now. And I think inevitably there is this cycle, right? There are gonna be times when founders really need to focus only on the company, but my plea would be over the long term that a startup community that is led principally by entrepreneurs not entirely is a more relevant and sustainable one. And so those are some of the things that I would have said some great strengths, but also some things to work on. Audrey, every time we share these findings, we get some reaction from the local community. This is the first time you heard some of these things. What do you think? What do you agree with? What do you disagree with? Yeah, I'll expand the argument a little bit. So the call to action in my community, look up zero to zero in the community, yeah, it's called Fork in the government. Pronunciation is very important, Fork, the government. Fork in open source, meaning take some things already there, but taking it into a more innovative new direction, like actually people on the cryptocurrency and this real edge of community knows a lot about Forks. And I'm talking about soft Forks, that is to say experiments that designed to be much back. So for example, my GoToKart.com, the website that I just mentioned, it's not a government project, it's literally a GitHub project. I also send a poll request when it visits me and it's literally built by people who got GoToKart and really want to share it with their friends and families. Now, one of the lead architects of that website, actually now works with the National Development Council, not for with and built our official portal for GoToKart owners. And you see this story repeating again and again, like our counter-pandemic work, Taiwan can help us, that's not a government website, it's literally crowdfunded on GoToKart.com and with the original goal of just putting a advertisement in your times, but it evolved into this like YouTuber showcase channel where international YouTubers share their model and compete on their best way to share their lessons. I think they're even joined by Arden as President Chenjian who recorded a YouTube clip about epidemiology, right? And that's then that to the Ministry of Health and World Health's communication efforts because we all use creative common licenses and open data licenses, it makes sure that all of the supports eventually could get merged into our own platform. And so the founders can then move on to the next slide while the public service maintains this scaffolding into a building, but the scaffolding on these platforms. By the way, I just wanted to point out that the audio somehow is working really, really well. This is surprising for organizing. Robin, as a human being, you're enjoying the human life of Chinese people. I wanna go back to what you mentioned, Taiwan can help, right? This is a big campaign, like you said, and for someone who's looking from outside in, I feel like it really hit well. It was very popular and it's being picked up, like you mentioned, around the world. What is the vision or what do you think can, some of the big outcomes you hope to get out of this? Yeah, I think one of the main ideas Taiwan can help is that we're not very picky about the topic that we can be of help. This is my name card, by the way. And it says, Taiwan can help, and next to the 17 UN Global Goals, there's even a moving forward logo to it. So full startup, like, are you to get swabs, teachers, baseball camps, or whatever, having that logo. And so the hashtag Taiwan can help is not something that's only used by Taiwanese people, it's actually remixed in every which way. We have, for example, Japanese people quoting that into their rap songs. There's literally a rap song about Taiwan can help. I'm by the Japanese team, those monos. And there's many other jurisdictions that then think about Taiwan and think about maybe just one or two things that were traditionally known to help with, right? So we talk about, of course, the semiconductors and the ICP, things like that. But we are, of course, quite strong as well on the medical assistance, humanitarian assistance, agricultural technologies, and every other thing. But by looking at the 17 Global Goals and seeing how they're next to it, then people learn that, oh, this is also about circular economy, and this is also about community building and things like that. And we take every chance, for example, I often say this jacket is made out of recycled plastic and waste, and that's circular economy and things like that. And so we all respond to the Global Goals. And so I think the main message is that we are here to help you, no matter which care of Global Goals you're working on, and as a logic, much more than any specific Global Goal. You know, I just, again, quick follow-up question. You know, when I hear you talk about many of these projects, you seem to very much in touch with the entrepreneurs themselves and the community. And I haven't seen many government people who were always doing that. In addition to being in this some industry, that's why I'm still actively participating. Can you tell us how you actually do that tactically? Like, you know, how do you make sure you're staying connected? How do you make sure you're still listening to them? Well, tactically, it means that I sleep for eight hours a week to keep my mind fresh. I make sure that I don't accept the public service event requests during the weekends, which is quite rare actually for members of the cabinet who are most busy during the weekends. But weekend is for me, for family, and for the sort of communities that I engage with. And also, when we're talking, I just saw your message on Slack and things like that. I'm like that, right? So when I go after, you know, in the weekends, I'm just on Slack full-time and responding to the new request. For example, last February, there was a guy named Power Wu from China City who posted up with the zero Slack saying, hey, I owed Google $26K US dollars in map usage for the builders, map issues, availability of masks. And that was enabled me to respond within hours saying, hey, don't pay the bill, I'll talk to Google and things like that. So this is all about a real time connectivity with the community on Slack channels. Everybody in the audience, make sure you get the direct Slack address of Audrey so you can get your debts. Okay. Yes, please, Ian, do you wanna add something? Yeah, I think I've said this now three times, but I wanna double down on something that Audrey just said because it's so important, which is this idea of the government appointing key personnel to roles of influence, right? You don't, in fact, appointing people into official government roles who have experience as entrepreneurs or in tech, who have those existing relationships in the startup community, the knowledge base, can actually be a very simple way of driving the agenda forward. My suggestion around that is similar to how you would vet a program, right? Do the work upfront, right? Make sure you've got the right people in those roles and put as few restrictions on them as possible. Let them do their thing, right? I just feel like it's the, I guess I'm talking about this in a few different ways I've talked about the policy sort of vision and then the policy implementation. And when it comes to startups, the implementation is so important because the way that entrepreneurship is organized, the way that startup communities function is so diametrically opposed to how most institutions work like governments and corporations and universities, that it's just, it's a lot better to appoint personnel, not necessarily to even a long-term role. I mean, I'm familiar with the city government of Seattle has a role called the startup advocate. And it's typically an entrepreneur who is in between companies, they're in between roles. Sometimes they do it for six months, sometimes they do it for two years. But they're basically the point person, the interface between that local government and the startup community. And it's been very effective. And it's a low cost, a relatively low cost way to make sure they've got the right information, right? And that they're responding to the community's needs in an agile way and being proactive in what those needs might be as it relates out to the government. So I really wanna emphasize what Audrey was saying and just to say that I feel like that's a simple strategy that government should be adopting everywhere. And I think Taiwanese government is very fortunate to have somebody like Audrey who's actually playing that role really well. Ian, we do have last four minutes here. Anything else you wanna add before we log you off? And then I have one question from Audrey. No, I just think that I just wanna extend some words of encouragement. It's been a real honor and a pleasure to have a front row seat to the startup community in Taiwan. Very disappointed that I'm not visiting in person. I'd like to actually be a public health refugee maybe from the United States. I need my gold card. But you're doing all the right things. It just stick with it, be patient, keep at it. Know that things can change quickly, right? This isn't a linear progression. You're pushing this boulder uphill and it feels like maybe some days it's not going anywhere. And then next thing you know, you're at the top of the hill and it starts accelerating, right? Maybe that's a bad metaphor. But the idea being you just have to keep pushing and you're doing the right things. You're just sticking with it is critical. So it's been fun to be a part of that ride and I look forward to spending more time with the community. Thank you very much, Ian. I know Ian just wants to go back for Dintai Fung. That's his favorite restaurant. And I just wanna say just for the audience that during the Meet Taipei and startup week, I had three different nights of different Zoom backgrounds of Dintai Fung. So this is a strong endorsement for me. Thank you, Ian. And Audrey, my last question is, I really liked how you explained your bio the other day to us kind of elements and traits or sort of mindsets you follow and goals. If you could maybe share with us that, I feel like that's a great way to end this conversation. Sure, definitely. So this is all about longer term thinking, this theme that we discussed today and during our preparatory meeting, I tried to put words to what I mean by long term, right? And I said, if the way that we are doing makes the world a better place when I look off compared to when I look then to the world, then it's a better thing. And I think that's the same ability and that's a really good alternate vision. And I would like for it to be a mainstream vision as opposed to this singularity vision. And that's indeed my job description, which goes like this. When we see the internet of science, let's make it an internet of beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality. When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear the singularity, let's always remember that plurality is a lift on and prosper. And have a good look at that. Awesome, thank you very much. All right, thank you to both of my speakers today. I enjoyed it thoroughly. I hope the audience did too. We learned a lot. And again, audience, you guys have audio with you so you can continue having, asking questions, having this conversation. For me, we're checking out here. We're logging off. Hey, online. We'll take a picture of that. Oh, taking a photo. Okay, not quite yet. Okay, we'll take a photo. And quick news, that OCOE and they plan to fly over to Taiwan in March. So we are looking forward to that. And hopefully we saw our digital minister's help. Of course, of course. So we'll take a picture with Ian and OCOE and the team this way. And later, Audrey will move over here to take a picture with OCOE. So can you take a picture? She got to hide Audrey. So Audrey didn't stand. No, it's good. It's good. Okay, we're fine. Yeah, maybe like this, yeah. Okay. Maybe just like this. Okay. Thank you for being here. Yeah, she wants to talk to you. The second one.