growvc

We strongly believe there are excellent startups, good ideas and also potential investors around the world. Grow VC also expands its own activities beyond crowdfunding to foster startup success stories globally. We will publish much more about our new initiatives later this year, but if you check our new Grow VC Group website, you can get some hints of what is coming.

In the last week one portfolio company, US-based Lost In Translations Inc., published a press release about their opening beta. Today I want to tell about another portfolio company, Skimmler. Skimmler was established in Pakistan, its founders Adnan Khan and Suhaib Anwar, have the experience necessary to run their own company. Their company has done software and apps development for larger companies in Asia and the US. Now they have decided to launch their own product company.

Wayne Soh, Plugandplay Singapore & Adnan Khan, Skimmler

Grow VC came on board to Skimmler in the very early days of the company. Grow VC also supports the company in their operations, especially with funding, international business development and some commercial functions. We have together decided to move the company to Singapore, where it is easier to run international operations, get investors and protect IPR. We also considered other locations including Silicon Valley, but for now Singapore is a good foundation.

Skimmler publishes its first product later this year, but I can say it is the next step after Flipboard in reading. It will offer tools to read mass media and blogs and make the whole experience more social. It will also help many bloggers and smaller publishers to offer an easy-to-use app to read their content. But I don’t want to spill any more, you will see.

Adnan and myself were in Singapore a couple weeks ago. After some Visa issues that Adnan and Suhaib had; we met local investors, startup communities, incubators and other partners. We studied Singapore’s Entrepreneur Visa rules and also looked at some public funding schemas. We talked about strategy, next steps, targets for this year and many other things. We got a lot of positive feedback and interest in Skimmler.

This is something many entrepreneurs are doing and planning daily. It also tells that it is not only to build your product, but you must think many other strategic and practical things.  If you have international plans, one question is also to select the location for the company and find partners and support around the world. For many entrepreneurs it also means the practical questions of, how to get a Visa and working permit to a place and where it would be good or optimal to run your business. The Economist just had an excellent article about entrepreneur visa practices in different countries. Asia is a huge and growing market, but it is not a single country it is many and you have also many daily issues to build your business within the region.

We will also follow the progress of Skimmler and other cases in our blog. We especially hope that practical stories and cases can help other entrepreneurs in their work. This is a part of work to build a Global Virtual Silicon Valley where entrepreneurs, startups, investors, service providers, and professionals can work together regardless of location. Skimmler has just started its journey to become a globally known company and it is never an easy journey, but as a global Venture Community with many partners around the world, we will do it.

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Tags: Grow VC, Singapore, startup

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2012 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Business Updates, Entrepreneur Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.