October 31, 2017, NTU EMBA’s Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management course had Lin Zhi-Chen, founding partner of AppWorks Venture Capital, address the class on “My Startup Road to Appworks, and Key Takeaways”, sharing his journey of business startup as well as difficulties and challenges encountered.

“I encourage the AppWorks team members help one another,” said Lin, urging knowledge sharing as a whole to aggregately give a boost to Taiwan’s software industry that has lagged behind in the global arena.

The official website of AppWorks states, “We see investment as a starting point of long-term relationship, and investment should be more than exchange of money and stocks; it should be more of an integrated force of investors and the management team, together pushing the company to excellence.” Usually, AppWorks helps startup companies for free in the beginning through the AppWorks Accelerator platform, and when they reach the Product-Market Fit, the business models of scale is gradually established, followed by helping the startups increase their capital and scale up their businesses.

As a successful veteran of startups, what Lin Zhi-Chen has learned is: startup is a process of two steps. The first step is get going from 0 to 1, i.e. finding a Product Market Fit to create a legitimate product/service out of creative trial and error for the best chance of success.

The second step is from 1 to 100. After the initial success, there will be lots of competitors copying your steps, and so it’s time to build an entry threshold and reproduce the experience of self-made success to master the marketing and management of the business.

Lin Zhi-Chen added with many startup stories of others and analyzed their entrepreneurial traits and mindset adaptation. Questions were zealously asked and answered in the class. On behalf of National Taiwan University, Guo Rui-Xing, dean of College of Management, presented a souvenir to Lin, to thank him for sharing his precious experience that will fill up the students’ knowledge vault for many years to come.