Serial Entrepreneur - Casey Lau - crispycomics(at)GMail(dot)com
Company: Various Projects and Companies
As most of you will know, Casey Lau is definitely one of the leading advocates pushing the local Start-up scene. As he has numerous projects going on at once, we choose to look at what he has done in the past and how he got to where he is now to try and showcase his approaches to being an entrepreneur.
About Casey:
Casey Lau is a serial entrepreneur that has his roots in Vancouver. Having studied graphics design in Vancouver, he came to Hong Kong to look for a job in the pre-97 era. Out of school and travelling in Hong Kong he found a job at a company that was doing product design for Warner Bros. and Disney in just a week’s time. He eventually ended up setting up their Mac design studio and described it as being quite adventurous as he didn’t know what he was doing at the time. But it worked out well.
He expressed that he learned a lot while working in Hong Kong for that first job. The structure in Hong Kong is quite different even to part time jobs that he had done in Vancouver. In fact, there was not so much a structure at all. You often did the job first rather than ask for permission from numerous people, which is something that he likes. After his first job, he went on to work for a travel CD Rom company where he was sent south China. At the time (in the 1990s), China had not been as well developed and it was quite run down. There was not too much to do, but he was able to learn Photoshop and such programs on the job and eventually the internet boom came along.
With his experience in design, he and a partner started a web-design company. With a lack of competition, it was not hard to find clients. All you had to do was to go out and meet people. Eventually, the question of how you actually make money with these websites came. Being an avid comics reader and seeing how successful Amazon was, he founded a company selling comics online on a subscription bases. This was also when Star Wars was making its second round in popularity with the prequel series. His company had offered star wars toys and found that these toys sold very well. They eventually focussed on the toys and moved to the states when an American firm gave his company venture capital to continue to grow the company and. At that time, they were able to hit every milestone as necessary. Eventually, even PCCW, led by Richard Li in one of his earlier IT ventures, started investing in their company and venture capital in the multi-million dollar range was reached. However, the company was very “corporate”-like at that time and they eventually sold it before the internet bust happened in the United States.
When he moved back to Hong Kong, he started another project. Since he had experience being successful with a start-up he did not have trouble finding venture capital. He founded Velocity 9, a multimedia web animation/production company. The only regret about that company was, they were missing an element of the company similar to YouTube. The company would eventually be sold to an Australian company just before the delayed internet bust (in Hong Kong).
Casey is still currently working on numerous projects ranging from Media companies to Iphone Applications. He believes that there are no bad ideas, and that you just need to find the right team and the right implementation to get it going. He also believes it is very efficient to conduct business online as you are servicing a wide area of people at one time and will continue doing so. He hopes to continue working in a start-up fashion, and that his goal is to use his time more wisely and be healthy while doing the numerous hours of work that he has.
By interviewing Casey, it seems that he made everything very easy for himself. Perhaps it wasn’t the task that was easy but it was his approach to things. You just have to move in a little ahead of everybody else. It seems that he has done just that and has been very successful.
Some of Casey's current projects:
http://www.crispycomics.com/
http://www.popcorn-network.com/
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Posted: 2010-May-19 08:12:19 |
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