I have spent the last three days in Singapore. They have really hot season at the moment, almost 100 Fahrenheit every day. Someone said that it is hotter than for 100 years. And in Singapore it means hot! But I always like to be in this country; nice people and everything works.

Singapore is one focus location for Grow VC, among maybe 6 other places in the world. The reason is that Singapore is an important hub in South East Asia, its government is very pro-business, it is one of the leading finance centers in the world, and it has also a lot of great young entrepreneurs. We, at Grow VC, are very much a global service, but for some practical reasons, it is important to have some hubs.

I met a lot of entrepreneurs, investors, governmental agencies, and other relevant people for startup funding. Governmental organizations, like iDA and Spring, are doing a lot of work to make Singapore attractive to entrepreneurs. They also have connections to other entrepreneurial center (that are also Grow VC focus places) like Silicon Valley and Israel.

I met the Singapore Venture Capital Association (Hwee Bin) that is doing important work to develop startup investments in Singapore, but also in the whole SEA region.  I also spent time with startup communities like e27 that is doing really important work to get startups to work better (Mohan and Sneha, thanks for the excellent spicy dinner) and SGEntrepreneurs (thanks Gwen), and incubators like Battle Venture (Jeffrey). I also met many entrepreneurs like Alvin, Danien, Joel, and Linda.

Generally I think Singapore’s situation is not an exception. They want to develop entrepreneurship and they see it is maybe one of the most important growth area  for the country.  They probably do much more than many other countries in this area, but they also have similar issues. It is not easy to get the startup funding market work well. We talked many times that all good entrepreneurs and ideas cannot be in Silicon Valley (I respect people and attitude there, but there are great people around the world). That’s why it would be so valuable to get the funding market to work better globally. These people shared our vision that it is possible to greate a “virtual Silicon Valley” in the Internet, when technology and globalization have enabled more international communities. These people also share that the vision that it is not only big institutions and organizations that enable new models. It is all people, it is crowd. We can change the world and funding market, if we really want.

This was our starting point in Singapore and I think you will hear much more about the cooperation of Singapore and Grow VC in the future. Now I go the other important Asian hub, Hong Kong.