It was an eye opening experience for one of the young local and innovative entrepreneurs, Hiro Tien, who attended the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) on June 22-24 in Palo Alto, California.

Brunei was also represented by Sophia Siu, another young creative entrepreneur who is the founder of Evesta, a social event app that connects like-minded people to build stronger communities around the world. Both were invited to join the GES by the US Embassy in Brunei.

In an interview, Hiro Tien, the founder of Escape Square, the first locally developed escape room, said, "The Global Entrepreneur Summit was an eye opening event. About 700 entrepreneurs and 300 investors were selected from a pool of 5,000 applications globally to attend the two-day summit at Stanford University.

"The fact that the President of the United States himself came over to host the event was unbelievable. The entrepreneurship energy was off the roof at the event as networking events sparked off day in and out, be it formally or informally," he added.

Aside from face-to-face networking, Hiro highlighted that "technology (a GES16 app) enabled me to acquire contact details of all these entrepreneurs from all around the world right on my phone. I think that's tremendously useful for my business in terms of international expansion".

At the, Hiro Tien also witnessed the importance of support to start-ups and entrepreneurs from all relevant organisations where the US government and Silicon Valley came together and hosted the world's entrepreneurs in one venue.

The result, he said was an amazing flow of potential partnerships and collaborations across the world."As a small business from Brunei, we are suddenly connected to entrepreneurs from all over the world. I wish to leverage on the network gained at GES 2016 to build my business beyond Brunei and contribute to the nation's economic diversification plan," he said.

One of the most memorable moments for Hiro was the chance to meet Steve Case, billionaire founder of AOL (American Online)

Hiro asked what he thought about non-tech companies dabbling in the venture capital world nowadays and Steve Case answered that companies like Chipotle (Mexican fast food chain) and Under Armour (sportswear), were once shunned by venture capitalists for being too traditional but are now multi-billion dollar companies today.

Hiro was also elected by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for its Global Entrepreneurship Bootcamp 2016 to be held at the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts this August 7-12.

Source:
@BRUDIRECT.COM

by BruDirect.com

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