This year's Young Entrepreneur Award winner Yat Siu believes Hong Kong's budding businesspeople need to be bold, start young, persist and control their fears. 'Chances are that you will fail - a lot,' said the founder and chief executive of Outblaze. 'Learn from your mistakes and your failures, and you'll be getting good value out of the time and effort you've invested - regardless of the outcome.'
Founded in 1998, Outblaze is a privately held company with offices in Hong Kong, the United States and Britain. It provides premium e-mail and social media services to service providers, telecommunications operators, corporations, universities, and media and publishing companies and portals.
According to Outblaze, it services 76 million users across 480,000 domains, with its suite of services also including online scheduling, file sharing, and protection against spam, viruses and phishing.
Yat believes that the awards are important to the city because they recognise 'notable achievements across several industries, and highlight the vibrancy of the business scene in one of the world's business and finance capitals'.
More poignantly, an important change in the local business scene that he has observed is that young leadership at companies 'is more readily accepted and promoted'.
As for hardware, he also believes that the adoption of new business technologies in Hong Kong 'has greatly improved as professionals in the city have become somewhat more youthful and international' post-handover.
'During most of the 1990s, Hong Kong was a laggard in technology, adopting late and only when necessary,' Yat said. 'Thanks in part to the efforts of overseas returnees, Hong Kong has become an early adopter of technology. Its view of technology has shifted from consumer fascination to actual business use.'