TED started in 1984 to bring together people from three worlds: technology, entertainment and design when founder Richard Saul Wurman noticed a convergence between the two industries. It started organically and grew into the global, inspirational brand it is today with some of the world’s most influential leaders gracing the TED stage.

Now there’s convergence between two more industries; technology and kiteboarding and there’s a movement emerging that is connecting the two worlds. ‘Maitai’ is a kiteboarding camp in Hawaii connecting mostly Silicon Valley based entrepreneurs with professional kite boarders. The event has been running annually for five years on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

Founded by Venture Capitalist Bill Tai from Charles River Ventures and Susi Mai,a professional kiteboarder based in Dominican Republic the event brings together approximately one hundred people to kiteboard in the day and network in a relaxed setting by night.

MaiTai Founder and VC Bill Tai (left) co-founder Susi Mai (right)

Legitimate Business Expense?

The technology side of the group attracts an eclectic mix of people ranging from venture capitalists to startup entrepreneurs; Silicon Valley based entrepreneurs and investors include Constantin Bisanz who exited his last company Brands4Friends to eBay for $200million, CFO of Fortinet Ken Goldman, Aaron Gershenberg of Silicon Valley Bank Capital and engineer Andy Belk of Apple,  Daniel Graf of Google, Katie Zacarian of Facebook, Michael Copeland of Wired and Susan Coelius Keplinger of Triggit.

Ex army special forces and now entrepreneur Tom Katis launched mobile walkie-talkie app Voxer at last year’s MaiTai and came back this year to talk about how he manages kiteboarding around the world whilst running a technology startup; he justifies it as a legitimate business expense by saying kiting is his way of keeping healthy and when healthy, is more productive. Katis built a security company that he bootstrapped into an international business with over 7,000 employee before Voxer, ‘I’ve been at the place where you work yourself into the ground to grow a startup and I’m at the point now where I make sure I have a strong team in place to deal with running the company when I’m absent.’

The estimated net worth of individuals of the beach at MaiTai this year was approximately $2 billion; there were two Facebook engineers on the trip and it was held the same week Facebook went public with it’s IPO. This gave the startups an audience well worth pitching to including Founders Fund’s Kenny Howery, and Sony’s Chief Transformation Officer Geeorge Baily. The startups that pitched this year at MaiTai included people search engine Ark.com bringing up Google + -like social search results for the rest of the social networks; the site aggregates data from your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter allowing people based search results.

The company recently turned down an acquisition offer from Facebook and co-founder Patrick Riley tells me their experience on Y Combinator helped open doors to Silicon Valley funding, recently closing an impressive $4.2 million seed round. She-Rae Chen launched photo-sharing app Afolio whilst Ronald Mannak / Colin Karpfinger launched Yobble, the umbrella company that built Air Guitar Move – a guitar pick that plugs into the mini-jack of your iPhone enabling you to play air guitar on your iPhone. The company took no venture funding raising a whopping $33,000 on Kickstarter and are annoucing their distribution in one of the US’s biggest retailers in stores all over the USA this week.

Richard Branson Kites with a model on his back

Why entrepreneurs like kiting?

Kiting takes extreme focus, when you are learning you cannot think about that pitch deck you need to get investor ready or that engineer  you have to email, kiting forces you to live in the present moment because, as we found out, kiting it is dangerous when you’re first learning and taking your eye or mind off the kite could end you up in a gust of wind that sweeps you up and drops you down hard. But Tai thinks it’s more about the aspect of failure, not just about being a technologist.  ”There are similarities in the personality of someone that starts a company and someone that kiteboards- they’re both a constant state of failure and you fail many times just to have the moment when it all comes together and you land on the board the right way,” added Tai.

There are connections running deep between entrepreneurship and kiting, even before MaiTai, Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson is a big enthusiast of the sport and MaiTai co-founder Susi Mai organizes an annual kiteboarding camp (BVI Kite Jam) taking kiters to Branson’s Necker Island every year. The sport has also jut received Olympic status and will be going to Brazil in 2016, Bill Tai is  also an Olympic Ambassador for the sport.

Maui wants to be Silicon Valley’s satellite

Maui makes a good satellite for Silicon Valley not only because you’re on American soil and no language or currency change and data roaming fees needed, but also because there is a large tech hub on the island already; Entrepreneur Keith Powers has been encouraging entrepreneurs to set up office in Maui for years and the mayor of Maui, Alan M Arakawa is in talks about setting up a tech accelerator on the island. A business park is currently in construction near the airport and exclusive resort Lumeria Maui wants to become the destination site for Silicon Valley recruitment test and training drives.

The future of conferences

Networking has become contrived where a drink and endless business cards are forced exchanged at endless events, MaiTai is about learning a new skill-set together; conversation is not immediately about how many users you’ve got or who your investors are, it’s about how you failed on the water or a new trick you learnt with the kite. The bonds forged between people on MaiTai are the strongest I’ve experienced at any networking event or technology conference because people are authentic in learning a new skill together. With kiteboarding you have to be in it for the long term gain and no matter how good you get there’s always another level to reach.

MaiTai is now expanding into Australia and Brazil, teaming up with Silicon Valley Bank and helping launch pitching competitions for entrepreneurs. This year MaiTai had over 1000 people ask to be a part of the event, but Tai assures me it’s quality over quantity, ‘Silicon Valley is about getting feedback from people who are smart, experienced and understand the market, this event has dozens of startup founders who have succeeded in the things that they have done; the community around kiting allows us to be at the same level from peers not only in kiting but also in business so people come not just to learn to kite but to learn business.”

See our video interview with MaiTai co-founder Bill Tai below:

From time to time I come by videos of talks that VC’s or entrepreneurs have done, and they’re absolute boring snoozefests. Although, once in a while I find a true gem like this one.

In a talk last month with the Stanford University Technology Ventures Program, Dana Mead from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers breaks down everything from how venture capital works to how firms deal with founders and scaling its investments.

Mead provides some awesome insights into what it takes to turn a newsworthy investment into a huge return for a firm like KPCB. Of course, being the group that placed a big bet on Google, they know a thing or two about the subject. This video is great for people on both sides of deals in tech.

At the 40 minute mark, Mead discusses a touchy subject, bringing outside management into a company to take it to the next level. This is of course the part where some founders end up leaving the company out of frustration.

Sit back and learn from one of the masters.

I met with one of Tudou’s founders, Marc van der Chijs, now CEO of Spil Games Asia, for coffee and a chat in Spil’s offices in a converted warehouse beside Shanghai’s Suzhou Creek.  Originally from the Netherlands, Marc first came to China in 1999 as a senior controller for Daimler-Benz’ China operations. He left Daimler-Benz soon after to work as an independent consultant.  Marc was unable to discuss Tudou’s upcoming IPO during our meeting because of the public filing.

Instead, our chat focused on Spil Games and the issues that all web startups have with monetizing their sites. We also discussed Marc’s work as an Angel Investor, with Shanghai based technology startups.

Spil Games

Spil Games are one of the world’s leading online gaming companies with 47 websites running fully localised content in 19 languages and serving over 4000 games to upwards of 130 million unique visitors per month. Their games target web and mobile users. Marc explained that, while most of their existing games use Adobe Flash they are now creating their games in HTML 5 to enable them to reach the broadest possible audience and allow them to run on Apple iOS devices reaching a significant proportion of the mobile market. He can envisage a time when HTML 5 takes over as the predominant platform for web and mobile gaming.   Spil are actively promoting the technology with others  by a HTML5 game jam that they organized together with Google in both Hilversum and Mountain View.  So far, most of their titles are single player but, with the rise in social gaming, especially on the mobile platforms, they are finding their output in those genres increasing.

I asked Marc the question on the minds of all web startup developers, how do you monetize your sites? Marc responded, that, at Spil Games, with 130 million visitors per month, advertising revenue is clearly a significant income generator, however, there are many users who ignore advertising, or indeed, don’t even see it. The real growth in monetization is in micropayments and advertising within games. Many game fans, once hooked, are willing to make a small payment for a level up or to buy some item within a game. Micropayments for in-game upgrades are not yet the largest income generator for online games but it is a growing slice of the pie and could soon overtake banner advertising as an income source.

The trick, of course, with all web content, is to “keep it fresh” that means update daily and, for games sites, introduce at least one new game every week. Otherwise, your readership and members are not going return.

Angel Investing

I first came to know of Marc van der Chijs through his Twitter account @chijs. On his twitter profile he describes himself as an “Angel Investor” I wasn’t entirely sure of the distinction between angel investors and venture capitalists so I asked Marc to clarify for me. The distinction as very simple, Venture Capitalists are usually companies where Angel Investors are typically people who may not have as much to invest. However, the boundaries are somewhat fuzzy, especially with the emergence of Super Angels, Angel investors who have larger amounts of money to invest.

Marc continued, that he focused his investments on local Shanghainese technology startups but that he had reduced his investment activity recently, mainly because there were simply too many companies approaching him, but, also because many local startups are focusing on the Chinese market only instead of taking a broader global perspective.

One local startup that Marc has invested in that he does believe can have a global impact, although he was quick to point out that he is also a co-founder, is unitedstyles.com, a personalized kids online fashion site that will go live (in beta) on November 15th.

The Girl 2.0 Expo, held in Shanghai over the weekend and run by Girls in Tech China, pulled in some big name speakers like Dave McCLure, Venture Capitalist and founder of ’500 startups’ and Larry Namer, founder of E! Entertainment TV.

Girl 2.0 was originally founded to empower women in technology but has grown in stature, “building an ecosystem that is changing the way women work with and support one another”.

“It’s the century of women. I’m in the right place at the right time. women in China.” Larry Namer, founder of E! Entertainment TV at Girl 2.0 China.

The conference included ‘Gone in 30 Seconds’. a competition for 5 startups to give a 30 second ‘elevator’ pitch to 5 judges led by Silicon Valley VC and Angel investor Dave McClure. Surprisingly, given the nature of the conference, it was an all male judging panel.

Other talks and panels at the conference included discussions on learning from China and learning from the USA about setting up cross border ecosystems to encourage entrepreneurial collaboration between Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley and China.

Last night at the May Tokyo 2.0 event a presentation was given by Hiro Maeda about a new venture capital group called Open Network Lab. Open Network Lab was formed earlier this year by three public Japanese companies; Digital Garage, netprice.com, and kakaku.com.

The main topic of the presentation was the Seed Accelerator Program. For the Seed Accelerator Program, teams of three people can submit an idea or working prototype to the Open Network Lab. If the team is accepted into the Seed Accelerator Program; Open Network Lab provides free office space for 3 months, free internet service and hosting for 3 months, $10,000 in initial funding, and mentorship to support the team.

Open Network Lab has partnered with the venture fund incubator based in Singapore, Neoteny Labs. One of the benefits of the partnership is that mentors from both VC groups are shared. Some of the mentors include; Joi Ito, Dave Morin creator of Facebook Connect, Shawn Fanning, Cory Ondrejka who created Second Life, Tim O’Reilly and several others.

After three months are up the teams have a chance to present their product to investors from the US, Japan, and Singapore. If an investor sees potential in the product, they will invest directly in the product.

Hiro Maeda’s full presentation from Tokyo 2.0 can be watched below:

Open Network Lab Presents at Tokyo 2.0 May.

A primary mission of Open Network Lab is to help Japanese startups expand and succeed globally, not only in Japan. I think this is a great initiative, and look forward to seeing what new startups and ideas come out of it.

For more information visit Open Network Lab’s site, or check Dr. Serkan Toto’s article on Techcrunch.

Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the venture capital firm which backed Skype, Feedburner, Overture, Baidu, and many such other startups which were later acquired by big Internet fishes is planning to raise $400 Million for start ups in India, US and China.

The economic growth rate indicates that India and China would surpass the total economy of rest of the world. So venture capitals are ready to re-invest after a long break due to the global economic crisis.

The firm may invest 15 percent of the funds in India said Mohanjit Jilly, executive director of DFJ’s India unit. DFJ expects to invest as much as $20 million a year in India, which has a history of investments in India and had already invested $75 million in 18 Indian companies since 2005.

The California based firm has invested in India-focused companies including travel Web site Cleartrip.com , the Indian travel site with tremendous market reach and Reva Electric Car Co., which has a tie-up with General Motors Corp. to sell electric cars.

Norwest Venture Partners, based in Palo Alto, California, raised a $1.2 billion venture-capital fund, the biggest to be completed this year, to expand in Israel and India. While DFJ is investing almost half the funds compared to previous year, on this Jolly says ‘Smaller pools of capital are easier to manage and can help investors recover their money faster’

Talking about investing particularly about Indian startups, Jolly says “India has been and will be a story of growth for decades to come, Just hold on and ride it.”