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The Asian-American Advantage on Southeast Asia's Startup Scene

• otoburb 12y ago
  >>This experience taught her how she wields her bi-cultural identity, business is business and success ultimately relies on performing better than the next person. “To earn their respect, I really had to prove I was worth listening to. The way I earned their respect [was to understand] the issues they were facing," said Koo. "I was able to bring them so many clients that they both doubled and tripled in size. I had to earn their respect by showing them I could outsell them.” tl;dr - only by outperforming locals will others be forced to listen to and respect you to compensate for the disadvantages of looking like a local but not speaking a second language fluently. The shtick is that supposedly superior Western culture (and upbringing), processes and know-how coupled with an understanding of local market dynamics beats the Asian 'lemming' upbringing and implied second-tier domestic home-grown business processes. The article talks about Asian-Americans being "aggressive" presumably due to an American upbringing. However, I usually feel it's the other way around -- that Asian business sense and culture has a much more aggressive and competitive undertone. I will concede that there is less of a risk appetite in some countries, but hesitate to simply restrict this supposed educational system failure to Asian countries alone. This old HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069731) touches upon the idea of a culture being considered risk-averse, but was specific to startup culture differences between Japan and the US, and not generalized to 'all' Asian countries as this article seems to be doing.