What a great event! … the MDeC InnoTech.my 2007, held on Friday, 7 Dec. Congratulations to MDeC TeDD team for pulling this off.

This year’s forum was themed “Connecting Innovation, Capital and Technopreneurs” where various VCs from different parts of the world (namely US, India and China) spoke.

A particular VCs that we Malaysian can probably better relate to, is Colin Wong. Colin was born in Batu Gajah, Perak, an ex-Googler, the founder & president of Prosperati, and now the CEO of ZoeCity.

Colin started off by presenting the VC landscape in the US–the top three investment areas were software (USD$1.11B, Q3 2007), biotechnology (USD$1.1B, Q3 2007), and clean technology (USD$844m, Q3 2007). It was also noted that there was an investment trend shift towards internet/consumer media, consumer hardware, and material science. Regardless, Silicon Valley remains as the top US innovation ecosystem, where research (universities) meets venture capitalism and entrepreneurs.

The gist of Colin’s talk was about risks and failures. Both the VCs and entrepreneurs in Malaysia shouldn’t be afraid of taking risks in new ventures that may not have proven business models, management teams or technologies.

Fail fast, fail often to find success. It’s all about risk.

(And yes, Colin, it would be awesome if MDeC were to set up office in Silicon Valley ;))

All in all a great event, except there was no vegetarian food for lunch (ouch!).

* Picture courtesy of my friend Azrul