Thai start-ups 'have high potential'

The founder of the Blackbox Accelerator program, Fadi Bishara, made his first appearance in Thailand at the DTAC Accelerate program last month. Bishara has helped mentor and provided advice to more than 100 start-ups in Silicon Valley and all over the world.

The partnership between DTAC and Blackbox Accelerator is aimed at building a bridge to Silicon Valley for Thai tech start-ups. Bishara said that Thai start-ups are as smart, energetic and passionate as other start-ups he had met in Europe and other emerging start-up ecosystems in the world but they are still very humble and kind. 

Fadi has in-depth knowledge and experience related to building successful start-ups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the 

world. He has been successfully matching human capital and venture capital needs across the globe and guiding talented technology entrepreneurs in their path for over 15 years. 

As the founder of Blackbox, his vision is to accelerate entrepreneurs, regardless of their geographic location. Fadi is also a venture partner at Sinbad Ventures, a fund that invests in early stage technology start-ups from Arabia.

He travelled to four start-up hubs in Europe and just visited Thailand. He found that the unique strengths of Thai starts-up he met at DTAC Accelerate is that they have strong empathy toward users and customers and focus on taking risks and building a company that solves problems of users/customers before raising funds. 

“They are not shy or afraid of sharing their ideas with others to get help and gain feedback to improve their products. In Europe, people are talking about investment before they are willing to take risk and do things and are more afraid to share ideas because they are afraid others will steal it,” said Bishara.

He also compared the top Thai start-up in the program to a successful Croatian company he had helped through the Blackbox Connect program – M.dot – which he helped sell for almost Bt900 million within 10 months. He said Thai start-ups just lack experience but in terms of skills, passion and intelligence they are equal to the others. 

“It is only a matter of time before Thai start-ups gain experience and knowledge as taught in the DTAC Accelerate programme. Thai start-ups really need to gain more experience and build foundational skills,” said Bishara.

He listened to the pitch of all the top 20 teams. Among the top 20, he sees at least three to five companies that are outstanding and have the potential to be funded. 

He also gave a lecture on “Founder-Market Fit” and “The Anatomy of Start-ups” to the finalists of the DTAC Accelerate Wizards of Apps program before hearing them pitch their ideas and give comments/feedback.

Bishara added that there are lots of opportunities for Thai start-ups as there are many areas that have not yet been explored in Thailand compared to the rest of the world. “For example, Thailand is really big on social and social commerce – buying/selling on social network is big despite lots of friction. It is not easy to buy/sell things online and social network here as there are lots of hurdles to overcome like payment has to be done via bank transfer, but people still sell a lot online. So when these infrastructures are built in the post-3G era, social commerce will explode and I’m glad quite a few companies in the DTAC Accelerate batches are taking this challenge head-on. However, at the DTAC Accelerate programme, we see there are also quite a diverse mix of Thai start-ups,” said Bishara.

He is so impressed by some that he has decided to personally mentor some of the finalists of the Accelerate programme.

Prior to founding Blackbox, Fadi was the founder and CEO of techVenture, building teams for early-stage start-ups. Having firsthand experience of building teams for more than 100 start-ups, he’s a frequent speaker and an adviser/mentor with start-up accelerators such as SeedCamp, HackFwd, StartupBootcamp, StartupChile, Skolkovo Startup Academy, and many other global initiatives.