I went to the 121 Tech Invest 2016 event. It’s an exclusive invite-only event to match (later-stage) startups with potential investors for 1-on-1 meetings. The official description goes like:
121 Tech Investment Hong Kong is designed to connect tech companies from around the world with Hong Kong’s tech investment and finance community.
First off, it was great to see Kevin from Aria Ventures speaking in the panel about “Institutional money and tech: Investor appetite for the sector”. The moderator was persistent kept asking everyone about which companies they invested in. So in the end, Swapit got a great shout-out. I got quite a number of people who knew me, coming over, talking to me and congratulated me for that. Oddly enough, I didn’t have anything to with that, but it definitely got quite some conversations going.
The whole event had a quite intimate setting and therefore, it was easy to get to talk a good number of people. Some potential investors were among them, but also other fellow startup founders as well as members of the startup industry.
We weren’t one of the officially exhibiting startups and therefore, we didn’t get these scheduled 1-on-1 meetings. When you look at the kind of startups that exhibited there, it was very clear that they are at a much later stage than Swapit. So perhaps this might be something we could go to next year?
Meeting A Swapit Fan
I saw an investor attendee at the event who was carrying around a green umbrella. I immediately recognized the share and color and looked more closely. Believe it or not, that was one of our very own Swapit umbrellas. Have a look at the photos we took for our OnePlus X give away. The Swapit umbrella snuck itself into those.
Of course, I was curious to find out where he got that umbrella from. So we talked for a little while and as it turns out, that person’s wife is an avid user of Swapit. She is so active, that she even bought something from one of our team. We have this unwritten rule, that we give everyone we deal with on Swapit, two Swapit umbrellas. One for themselves and another (we hope) for a friend of theirs. It’s great to see the effect of that policy in real-life in such a surprising way. Our Swapit umbrellas are unique pieces of art. We only made 200 of those. So if you have one, treat it with care. It’s a collector’s edition!
Have you tried the Swapit app yet? You can download it here: http://get.swapit.la
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