Showing posts with label Kuky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kuky. Show all posts

Thursday, March 31, 2016



CEO Mavi Miller has been working diligently to get her dream startup off the ground, and we're please to announce that KukyWorld (https://kukyworld.com/) has finally launched! Please check out her wonderfully creative and beautiful e-commerce site for really neat and kooky items! Okay, truly many of them are just beautiful. Browse and shop everyone!
Kuky Launches! Come Take a Look!
Thursday, March 31, 2016

Kuky Launches! Come Take a Look!

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Employee Weiya performance at leading hotel chain in Taiwan
Professionals entertaining the hard working employees at one of the leading bakery cafe chains in Taiwan.
With the Weiya season at a close (Weiya - a tradition especially in Taiwan of celebrating Tu Di Gong, the god of wealth and merit, and marking the end of the Lunar Year. It's an opportunity for employers to thank their employees for all the hard work of the past year), it's time to dust off those business plans and focus, re-focus, and/or pivot.

PROS/CONS of BUSINESS PLANS
Lots of debate surrounding business plans, whether to do them or not is the question. The Cons are a startup team hiding out in their business plan process, determined to get their plan exactly "right" before moving forward. Or the concern that putting down every thought in 88 pages of documentation, only to abandon it with the next monthly pivot. Time better spent doing something else? 

Jibao Team celebrating at their Weiya. Left to right: Augus, Chloe, Diane, Hai Chen and Paul.

In sales, we're often taught to "Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan." The Pro of doing a business plan is that it forces you to think through your ideas and the mere act of committing them on paper helps to clarify your messaging. 

Do you need a completely polished and typo free business plan? Its depends. Are you creating it for an investor? Or do you need some guiding principles to clarify your thoughts and share with your teammates and partners? I'm more for the later. Some of the teams under Xceleration Labs guidance have recently committed to paper their business plans (even after months and years of operations). 

BUSINESS MODEL CANVAS
If a business plan sounds daunting, try out the Business Model Canvas, an excellent Lean Startup tool, to help clarify your thinking. There are plenty of excellent guides out there to help you clarify your thoughts. Ash Maurya does an excellent tutorial that you can find on youtube. 

PATISCO
CEO Even Chung of Patisco hard at work on his Business Plan
After you've used the business model canvas to work through your thinking, that should help guide your business plan, as it has guided Patisco's re-focused plan. More to come in a later blog post. Hint: 2015 should see a rapid expansion into more business lines and more geographies.

KUKY WORLD
Another team, Kuky World, had the advantage of attending a business school class and get guidance from one of their Professor to develop a more traditional institutional investor oriented business plan. 

For this exercise, the Kuky team (Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Summer Fellow) was asked to create a more focused and niche marketed plan. This plan should serve as a great jumping off point to build one of the most unique and "kooky" e-commerce sites to come along in a while. 

Kuky World will bridge Chinese designers and Chinese manufactured products with US audiences. Stay tuned, as it should be an interesting entrant into the highly competitive e-commerce marketplace. CEO Mavi Miller is banking on her curating skills to carry the day, and she is quite the fashionista, as an excerpt from the Kuky business plan attests, "For the last ten years, Miller has been passionate about finding unique products. Colleagues, friends and strangers on the street regularly ask her where she bought these items." - a reference to the unique items she may be wearing or carrying at the moment!


That's all for now, we say good bye to the Year of the Horse, and wish everyone happiness, health and good fortune for the coming Year of the Ram. Happy Business Planning!

Aki's name card at Fable/Dr. Finance Weiya.


Dust Off Your Business Plan Startups! It's Post-CNY.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Dust Off Your Business Plan Startups! It's Post-CNY.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014


A terrific update on previously mentioned Kuky activities and their soon to launch website as well as mobile app, as summarized in Yale Entrepreneur, entitled "A Kooky Company" (Please see http://yaleentrepreneur.com/2014/11/10/a-kooky-company/)

Below are some photos of Mavi Miller during her past visit to Taiwan and Xceleration Labs.

Mavi Miller of Kuky in the background working with Paul Chen of Herbuy (www.herbuy.com.tw) in the foreground.

Mavi Miller with the Jibao Team visiting a local photo exhibition on cats!

Mavi sharing her ideas on Kuky with Paul Chen of Herbuy at Herbuy headquarters in Neihu.

A Brief on a Kuky Company: Congratulations again on Mavi Miller and team.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014

A Brief on a Kuky Company: Congratulations again on Mavi Miller and team.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

"Beg, Borrow, Steal" is a fairly common phrase in the startup world.  

 This does not mean actually go out and steal money from people or stick up a bank.  This merely refers to the idea of leveraging resources that are around you, without having to kick in the budget for it.

 I probably first heard the expression "beg, borrow, steal" while working for a fairly mature SaaS company.  Although the company had many organized structures and departments, there was still a small group of us who met the companies various challenges head-on without much resourcing. I found myself on small intrepreneurial (see Guy Kawasaki) teams who would work on a particular challenge with limited resources, so we were forced to "beg, borrow, steal" from other departments.  If we were short a marketing resource, we'd secretly recruit a close marketing ally to spend some cycles on our project.  Or perhaps leverage a top and forward thinking sales person to help us test out a sales pitch.  Eventually, the borrowed time would necessitate us talking to their superiors, but we'd work under the radar as long as we could.

Sample Items that will be available from Kuky World in Fall 2014.  Stay tuned!
In the startup world, I've found there are often few resources, so you'd have to implement a "beg, borrow, steal" strategy to get your work done.  Mavi Miller, CEO of Kuky World has done just this recently.  In need of design resources, she'd made a series of World Cup bets with a designer friend of hers.  In her own words, "Me and two of my friends basically bet on every (World Cup) game as to who would win.  And since we have different backgrounds and different needs our stakes were whatever our strength is.  I had to do translation and do MBA homework for one of the guys, and I luckily won most of the bets so Kuky's website found its designer.  Haha!" Resourceful!  Go Kuky!
Beg, Borrow and Steal Your Way to Resources: Or How One Startup Leveraged the World Cup!
Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Beg, Borrow and Steal Your Way to Resources: Or How One Startup Leveraged the World Cup!

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

At least, this is what Mavi Miller, Founder of Kuky will be doing this summer at Yale Entrepreneurial Institute's (YEI) Summer Incubation Program.  She'll be joined by 7 teammates, whom she recruited this Spring from amongst roommates, classmates, and other campuses.  Besides juggling a full course load with lots of lab work, Ms. Miller found the time to take advice from the good folks over at YEI on a weekly basis, continue her pilot program of bringing Chinese designed and Chinese manufactured items, that are hard to get in the US, to members of the Yale community.

A First Look at the KuKy Logo
In addition, congratulations are in order for Team Kuky who also applied for and won an additional grant from The Morris and Miriam Pozen Entrepreneur Fund, which is designed to promote entrepreneurial activity within Yale's School of Management (MBA Program).

So while many of you will be interning at a bulge bracket investment bank or doing lounge reading on Myrtle Beach or even taking part in a Beijing summer exchange program, Miller and team will be doing their research, formulating their plans and preparing their executable marketing plan to launch Kuky by year's end.  

Looking for that rainbow coloured keyboard or that one of a kind character USB stick?  Check out Kuky coming this Fall.
School's Out! More Time to Spend on Your Startup says Kuky!
Wednesday, May 07, 2014

School's Out! More Time to Spend on Your Startup says Kuky!

Monday, March 17, 2014

As a startup founder, sometimes your passion, motivation and determination are not enough to sustain you through the difficult times.  Often times, we turn to family and friends who smile knowingly trying to give us helpful advice and encouragement.  Finally, its not uncommon for CEOs and other founders to take multiple meetings (have "coffee" 5 times a day) with potential investors giving them updates and receive polite smiles and advice.

In the end, how do you know its working?  Especially, when you're pre-revenue?  Often times a startup needs other external affirmation to keep going, and if its an investor who's willing to take a chance on a pre-revenue company, that works as well.

Mavi Miller of KuKy


In this vein, we'd like to congratulate one of our teams - KuKy's founder Mavi Miller for gaining acceptance into Yale Entreprenuerial Institute (YEI)'s inaugural Summer Venture Creation Program.  The operating board of YEI's Summer Fellowship program had identified KuKy as one of the five most promising teams for incubation.  Mavi Miller and her teammates will be spending the Summer of 2014 at Yale in YEI's incubator.

Not one to rest on her laurels, Mavi Miller is in Taiwan and Shanghai for her Spring break and talking to various experts and teams to further develope her KuKy venture.  Go KuKy!
External Affirmations: A Necessity for Startups
Monday, March 17, 2014

External Affirmations: A Necessity for Startups

Saturday, February 8, 2014

KuKy is the brainchild of Yale undergrad, Mavi Miller. Having grown up in different countries, she ended up enrolling in a local high school in Shanghai and fell in love with the city. Upon graduation she started working for a Shanghai trading company, before taking another leap by making her way to the United States and enrolling at Yale University. 

 In Shanghai, Ms. Miller discovered her love for Taobao, the Chinese language online trillian dollar yuan shopping site. After arriving in the US, she sought ways to order her favorite things such as clothes, shoes, accessories and other items from her favorite Chinese language website.  

Mock Up of Kuky on-line service.  
Format and products are merely representative and subject to change.
Special acknowledgement to Patisco for providing the demo framework.

She was immediately faced with a few significant challenges: 1. Unless she could get together enough items in one order, the shipping costs were cost prohibitive; 2. The wait time for sea shipping was 4-6 weeks; 3. Without a tracking number on the Chinese side, Ms. Miller had no way of knowing what was happening to her packages.  Often times, items would be lost.

On a hunch, Ms. Miller sought out her fellow Yale students from China and found that many of them had a similar desire to order from Taobao, but couldn't figure out how to do so in an effective manner.  As a solution, Ms. Miller starting pooling together orders, which reduced shipping costs per item; sped up shipping times via air freight and leveraged a Shanghai forwarding company for tracking her packages.  The result was many satisfied friends and friends of friends getting their favorite items from Taobao within a week at prices (even with shipping costs) at a fraction of buying from popular American e-commerce sites.  In some cases, items bought off of Taobao are not even available on comparable American e-commerce sites.

Ms. Miller is now planning to expand her reach and solution to others at other University campuses by bringing her offline process, online.  "American Taobao" starting on a New Haven campus is kooky, you say?  No, its just Kuky!  Look forward to Kuky coming on-line in the near future.

In the meantime, Ms. Miller is still receiving her and her friends' favorite Taobao sourced items one package at a time.
Products from Taobao.
Note: Items are only representative and may not be final items to be provided by Kuky.

"American Taobao": Maybe Not So Kuky After All!
Saturday, February 08, 2014

"American Taobao": Maybe Not So Kuky After All!