

The Asian-American Advantage on Southeast Asia's Startup Scene - nyodeneD
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/asian-american-advantage-southeast-asias-startup-scene-n231746

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>>This experience taught her how she wields her bi-cultural identity, business
is business and success ultimately relies on performing better than the next
person. “To earn their respect, I really had to prove I was worth listening
to. The way I earned their respect [was to understand] the issues they were
facing," said Koo. "I was able to bring them so many clients that they both
doubled and tripled in size. I had to earn their respect by showing them I
could outsell them.”

tl;dr - only by _outperforming_ locals will others be forced to listen to and
respect you to compensate for the disadvantages of looking like a local but
not speaking a second language fluently.

The shtick is that supposedly superior Western culture (and upbringing),
processes and know-how coupled with an understanding of local market dynamics
beats the Asian 'lemming' upbringing and implied second-tier domestic home-
grown business processes.

The article talks about Asian-Americans being "aggressive" presumably due to
an American upbringing. However, I usually feel it's the other way around --
that Asian business sense and culture has a much more aggressive and
competitive undertone.

I will concede that there is less of a risk appetite in some countries, but
hesitate to simply restrict this supposed educational system failure to Asian
countries alone. This old HN thread
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069731](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7069731))
touches upon the idea of a culture being considered risk-averse, but was
specific to startup culture differences between Japan and the US, and not
generalized to 'all' Asian countries as this article seems to be doing.

