Sriram Krishnan™ Live

I met Eric during the HPAIR Business conference in Hong Kong two weeks ago. He’s a jolly good fellow and we all loved his down to earth personality. Eric spoke in the entrepreneurship panel. Below is his introduction, followed by the interview. Enjoy!

Eric Tsai is the CEO of eriQoo.com, a portal website recognized by millions of internet users, which ranks a wide-range of products and services, from best selling consumer goods to the hottest celebrities. He has recently launched a beta version of eriQoo.com, providing a unique source of popularity ranking data for various industries, brands, and products. By utilizing his unique business model, eriQoo.com is targeted to be recognized by 85% of internet users by the year 2009. Mr. Tsai was recently recognized by BusinessWeek Asia as the No. 1 Entrepreneur Under 25 and has been awarded the highly prestigious United States of America Presidential Award.

Prior to founding eriQoo.com, Mr. Tsai was the youngest fixed-income analyst recruited at Credit Suisse. Mr. Tsai was born in Taiwan and graduated early from high school in the U.S. and from Sophia University in Japan. He is also fluent in Chinese, Japanese, and English. (Introduction courtesy of HPAIR)

So during the HPAIR conference you mentioned that you were a “trouble maker” during school days. So tell us, what sort of trouble did you create? What was the worst?

Well, to elaborate, I think I meant to say while in school I am not the “nerd” kind of person, I guess I am more of the careless kind. I was quite careless of the consequence that I do things like locking my teacher in the sports equipment warehouse for an hour, etc. I also use the term “trouble maker” because I tend to believe trouble makers cope with risk. And I think being able to take risk is one of a very important factor/qualification to be an entrepreneur.

Tell us a little bit about your background apart from what was mentioned in the introduction above

I have crumpled numerous times through out my life, as a contrast to Tiger Wood’s American Express commercial, “there are no rainy days” – in his life; my life was full of muddy days. I was however, lucky that I got more chances to learn from all failures that I faced and to transform the failure into experience. One example would be, I was born and raised in Taiwan where everyone speaks Mandarin, except me. I was therefore called an idiot and was placed in a learning disability class. Spending time in a learning disability class was no honorable mention but the experience of going in and to learn how to get out have helped me a lot in later years at various breakthrough situations. Another frequently asked question usually center on my life in a catholic boarding school in the States, where again, I did not speak English, on top of that I had zero culture awareness. I was probably the gold member of the probation club upon my first step in starting my journey of accomplishing the so-called American Dream!

I have some rather boring background there really isn’t too much I can say… My life is full of running in to hurdles and dropping into holes instead of jumping through and going pass…

How did you come up with the name eriQoo?

My friend nick named myself eriQoo according to Eric’s Japanese pronunciation.

What were the initial struggles you guys faced during the starting up?

Our business model is based on internet advertising, pipelines to major consumer-oriented companies were very important but we had some hard time earning trust due to the fact of our limited network and brand name.

About the team. Tell us more about your team. How many of you are there? Where are they based?

The headquarters in Tokyo houses 8 analysts, in charge of business planning and marketing, our deign studio in at the Silicon Valley has a headcount of 8, and we have an engineer center in India with a team of 5 and we recently opened a Satellite office in Taipei with an operation of 5.

During the conference you mentioned Japan wasn’t a good place to start companies. Any reason for that? Which country in East Asia would you say is the most conducive for an internet based startup?

To clarify, let me put it this way, comparing USA to Japan; I would say USA probably does not have such a high entry barrier as oppose to Japan for venture to be started up by foreigners.

And in the business field of Media, the Japanese market tend to be more paper oriented (there is a 7-11 at every corner of the block, resulting a large magazine reader population; and as oppose to Americans drive to wherever they go, subway system is well built and is heavily utilized, this also result a large demand to read free newspaper or free magazines during the ride), this unique culture took away a lot of potential growth of Internet companies. Whereas in USA, due to its unique geographical factor, Internet seem to be the most efficient method to get accessed to information.

I personally do not know too much about the culture of all countries in East Asia, but in theory, I would say China is the best choice to start up a portal website in this region.

What was the inspiration behind your company?

I am a heavy internet user and cannot imagine what life would be if without Google or Wikipedia. I appreciate the service of “redirection listing” that Google provide to all internet users and am also thankful to the service of “referencing” that Wikipedia provides. I therefore thought by creating a service that integrates both merits of referencing and listing should help improve the efficiency of research.

Let’s talk about numbers. How many unique monthly visitors do you get? And is the business model all online advertising?

I get about 30 million unique users per month, and the business model is online advertising, although we also have a business arm for website production.

You started this company with 10 former classmates. That sounds like too many people. Were there any frequent misunderstandings, confusion etc? How did you overcome this?

The culture here in Japan is most people will get a job offer at the beginning of their final school year, many students utilize this year long free time to do internship, etc. I was lucky that many of my college-mates was able to spend their last year at college to help set up eriQoo.com. 10 may sound like a large number for start-ups, but I think we managed to plan their shift well enough that everyone was able to add their value when its needed. There wasn’t too much misunderstanding nor confusions.

What can we expect in the coming few weeks or months from eriQoo?

eriQoo.com is on its way to develop some automated data collect, which we hope to be able to display search results for any inquiry. eriQoo.com aims to redefine the method of research from “redirecting” into “referencing”.

On a more personal note….
What books are you currently reading? What do you recommend?

I…. I don’t read books… if I do find time for read, I use it to sleep…

Nokia N95 or iPhone?

iPhone for sure

What’s your favorite movie?

I don’t think I have a particular favorite movie, the recent movies that I have watched are Rush Hour 3, Oceans 13, wanna watch are Ratatouille, and Bourne Ultimatum, etc.

Thanks so much Eric. It was a pleasure speaking to you. You’re gonna be a star. Wait, you’re already one.