The dark side of the entrepreneurial mind
Touched with Fire
Behind the glamorous startup grind is a menacing statistic — according to a study, a staggering 72% of entrepreneurs are affected by mental illnesses, compared to just 48% of non-entrepreneurs.
Tip of the Ice
For those who have started your own business, or even for those who haven’t, you can probably imagine it to be extremely stressful.
For starters, entrepreneurs often face setbacks while juggling between roles, struggling to make payroll for a business that has a high risk of failing (over 75% of venture-backed startups fail).
But it may be more than a stressful job that…
Taking care of your mental health during COVID-19
Mental health in Hong Kong has historically been a significant but stigmatised issue but the pandemic has made things much worse.
At WNJ Ventures, our team is well aware how mental health issues can quickly escalate. In light of this and as part of our Level Up campaign which focuses on raising mental health awareness in Hong Kong, we created a short video to reframe the ways in which you’re probably already taking care of your mental health to cope with stress, depression and everything in between more effectively.
Mental Health Charities & Resources (HK)
Today, I’m excited to announce our strategic venture building partnership with Blue Lemon Digital and their family activity digital marketplace — Fambam (Hong Kong).
Our core goal is to create synergy with our portfolio companies. One of our focus is to utilise our expertise in venture building and work closely with founding teams and entrepreneurs to fund and accelerate their brand building and marketing campaigns.
At the start of 2021, our venture builders worked with the KIX Esports team to build from scratch an international virtual Esports tournament, The Asia Mobile Esports Tournament 2021. Due to the social distancing restriction as a result of COVID-19, the tournament had to be shifted online, accommodating for over 1,100+ players participating from all around the world.
Our…
Welcome to the Streaming Ages
Japan’s entertainment industry faced many challenges this year, especially because of the pandemic. Still, with the increasing reliance on streaming video entertainment from quarantine life, the anime scene shows much potential for exponential growth. Check out our video essay below, where we discuss the following questions:
- Who watches anime and why?
- How accessible is anime to the foreign audience?
With its rich and diverse world building, character design, voice acting and animation touched by Japan’s unique cultural sensibility, anime culture had already been gaining global traction long before the pandemic. However, this year’s COVID-19…
Today, I’m excited to announce our investment in KIX esports.
Digital gaming is a key focus sector for us, representing the opportunity to tap into over 2.5 billion gamers around the world.
eSports is a fast-growing subsector which has captivated a large group of millennial and Generation Z gamers… and gradually emerging as a key alternative form of entertainment next to film, music and TV.
So the moment we met with Charles, founder of KIX eSports, we were deeply interested in his vision to build a business that really connects with next generation gamers.
And since then, our venture…
We briefly cover some of our thoughts across two consumer tech sectors in 2020: digital gaming and fintech.
Digital Gaming: Social Gaming
Our thesis at the start of the year was that social gaming will emerge as a trend in the digital gaming space: games which are intrinsically social will generally perform better than ones with less social experience built around it. This is primarily because social gaming provides four core benefits for business models including better growth loop, higher engagement, better retention and stronger defensibility.
People-Watching on Twitch
From ‘mukbangs’ to ‘study/work with mes,’ there has been a rising community of streamers who broadcast themselves casually living out their lives. Receiving as much as US$1,000 from a single fan donation, lifestyle streamer @triciaisabirdy has over 162K followers on Twitch and 12.8K followers on Instagram who watch and participate in her cooking content and chill hangouts.
With the emergence of an exciting but therapeutic new medium of video entertainment, we discuss the following questions:
- What exactly does lifestyle streaming encompass?
- Why do people find watching the lives of strangers interesting?
- How is this slice-of-life community an…
Eat, Listen, Game, Repeat
Just like any other population, the gaming community is composed of individuals who have a wide range of personalities and preferences, especially when it comes to their consumption habits. However, there are also notable trends in what food or drink gamers consume and what music they listen to.
Among North America, Western Europe and Asia Pacific, 80% of gamers eat or drink something while playing. Moreover, public playlists curated specifically for gamers, such as “Power Gaming” (1.7M+ followers), have accumulated at least a few hundred thousand followers each on music streaming service Spotify. …
Socialising After the Pandemic
As mentioned in our previous article, it is no secret that the digital gaming community is growing exponentially. Although COVID-19 gets credit for giving the industry a boost, data before the pandemic shows that millennials have already been spending US$112 per month on video games, with Gen Z and Gen X spending US$92 and US$59 respectively. Where gaming is increasingly blurring the lines between entertainment and social media, we explore why this sector is a gateway investment to sustainable returns.
Easy Come (but not) Easy Go
When the term ‘gamer’ is mentioned, it is not unusual to imagine an image of a…
