Net prophets

At CoCoon, a sprawling work space in Tin Hau, entrepreneurs – mostly in their 20s and 30s – are toiling away in front of their laptops. They speak to one another in muted voices, take breaks on beanbag chairs, go to the vending machine for box drinks, step off to quiet corners for phone calls with clients. But the loci of their attentions, the homing centres of their swirling paths of movement, are their laptops. Venture anywhere and the laptops go with them.

CoCoon is privately owned and run as a social enterprise; start-ups and other small businesses can use its premises for a monthly fee of HK$1,000. Enter, and you’ll see what a Hong Kong tech start-up looks like.

I suggest to Ken Chan, one of the entrepreneurs, that setting up an online business doesn’t seem particularly exciting. “You can’t say it’s not exciting. It’s exciting in our minds,” he says, emphatically. “It just takes time.”

Often schooled in the ethos of California’s Silicon Valley, Hong Kong’s young tech entrepreneurs are undaunted by uncertainty – even by the prospect of failure – as they strive to stake their place in a local start-up scene that, according to those active within it, has come alive in the past five years.

While their backgrounds and expertise vary, one thing they can agree on is that Hong Kong needs more examples of online businesses that make it big – as in, make big money.

Armed with laptops and ideas, the entrepreneurs at the Tin Hau office are having their go at making it big – in some cases, their second or third go.

“In Silicon Valley, people are used to working in a company where even the founder isn’t sure if the ideas are right or wrong. So people are very open,” Chan says.