Asian students career association holds annual summit on Sunday, October 22nd, 2023
BEVERLY HILLS, CA (GoshRobin) 2023/10/21 – Gap Capital Partners managing director Robin Rowe will be speaking at the summit of the LEAP Asian students career association on Sunday, October 22nd, The LEAP 12 Summit is from 9am to 5pm at Caltech in Pasadena. Professor Rowe has been a LEAP mentor for many years. Rowe is a speaker in panel 3.
Panel 3: Take A Next Leap: Insights from Entrepreneurial Thinkers and Doers (2:15pm to 3:15pm)
- Robin Rowe, Managing Director at Gap Capital Partners
- Jasmine Jiang, Director of Investment at Sunstone Management
- Catherine Liu, Founding Partner at MagStone Law, LLP
- Dr. Chongyang Luo, COO at Coastar Therapeutics
- Zhen Wang, Co-founder of Cheese and EIR at IdeaLab
- Dr. Guanxi Yi, CEO of Laplace AI Lab and Head of Research at Metis Themis Insights
- Moderator Hailin Liu, Business Development Associate at Metis Themis Insights
Robin Rowe speaking at LEAP 12
Before the panel, moderator Hailin Liu asked Rowe to share a few thoughts…
What would you consider as the first pivotal trait for achieving success in entrepreneurship?
To stop waiting. Do something to create product. Tell others about it. Find someone so enthusiastic for your product that she or he will talk about it with you every day.
When embarking on the journey to find a co-founder, what potential pitfalls might one encounter, and what key considerations should be kept in mind?
Look for partners who show integrity in their daily lives, who accomplish things and who don’t criticize themselves or others.
Many people are not ready to be good partners, are still processing their childhood family drama. Have baggage, and start-ups can be stressful. Damaged individuals may overreact out of fear, greed and self-sabotage. When facing a crisis or significant decision, your partner may regress, act out their childhood trauma with you unwillingly cast as her or his bad parent or evil sibling. Try not to escalate. Avoid being distracted by arguments or taking it personally. A sense of humor helps.
Could you elucidate on the significant disparities between engaging in a substantial corporate role versus working in a startup environment?
People have the same flaws wherever we may be, but organizational structure impacts performance differently. Wherever you are, create an island of sanity and productivity. Team with good people. Enjoy your w0rk.
Ironically, large corporations, the standard bearers of capitalism, are the purest implementation of communism. With a mercurial exalted leader not elected by the workers, cronyism through a generally inaccessible central planning committee known as the corporate board, and a general prohibition against workers owning significant private property, because everything belongs to the organization from the chairs workers may be sitting in to their innovations and product ideas.
Start-ups are often structured the same as a coldly impersonal top-down Fortune 500 companies, but being small may offer a family business vibe where everyone knows each other. A start-up doesn’t have the layers of middle management to protect the sanity of workers from hearing a CEO’s latest wild plan to implement an outlandish or incomprehensible vision. And to keep their jobs, middle management will also protect the egos of top management by discouraging workers from reporting anything about why the company’s products suck.
I’ve worked at Fortune 500 companies such as Lenovo and AT&T, at NGOs such as the UN WHO and Girl Scouts, and at many high tech start-ups.
Am curious to hear, your perspectives on the prevailing trends in AI entrepreneurship?
Everyone’s aware, I hope, that generative AI is the hot trend. Primary investment focus has shifted away from the metaverse and blockchain.
CinePaint is an open source graphics software project I have led for many years. The Lord of the Rings films, the Harry Potter films, Too Fast Too Furious and The Last Samurai are some of the many Hollywood motion pictures that have used CinePaint as a post-production tool for image retouching and visual effects.
The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF ) is a Hollywood technology think tank, a collaboration between the motion picture studios of the Motion Picture Academy and the Linux Foundation. At recent ASWF meeting, I presented the latest version of CinePaint and asked for feedback and suggestions from Hollywood’s top creative technologists. Generative AI is the one feature Hollywood says it wants to see in CinePaint.
CinePaint is free software maintained by open source programmers. We’ll be launching a Kickstarter campaign on November 13th to fund development of generative AI in CinePaint.
CinePaint 1.4.7 for Windows with GTK1 Dark Mode 2023/2/20
About Robin Rowe
Robin Rowe is managing director of the family office Gap Capital Partners where he oversees more than a dozen high tech start-up investments. At age 16, Professor Rowe founded his first start-up, a sports car company.
Recently named chairman of the ISO C++ Low Latency Financial Systems subcommittee for algorithmic trading and banking. An avid programmer, Robin’s taught C++ software design at the Naval Postgraduate School and the University of Washington. Robin’s software designs span the U.S. traffic control system, AI for national defense and motion picture animation technology used by Disney Marvel and Mattel.