Rosa Fu of DIT tells us about the only early-stage investment institution focusing on entertainment and life.
Tell me more about you, including your career and how you established DIT.
Rosa Fu: When I worked at the Institute for Information Industry, I was mainly in charge to raise, promote and give some guidance to startup businesses in private companies. Later, I was hired to be the vice president of DIT Incubator & Venture Management Inc., which served as a one-stop service model. After the change of personnel and shareholder structure, I took over the position of general manager officially.
One-stop means to provide the service for founders from feedback to crowdfunding, entering and being stationed in management, startup coffee shop business, investment in early stage, equity crowdfunding, and others.
Currently, We will focus on investing and developing talents in the early stage. DIT is the only joint venture centralizing on the“ Entertainment & life ”in Taiwan, integrating the resources and cross-domain advantages over 20 well-known enterprises, as well as funding from Seed round and Angel round, in order to find new team members, who have a value of a strategic investment.
Since 2017, we had the experience to coach more than 70 startups and participated in around 20 investments in early-stage, Total amounts count to over $40 million, also motivating new investments to come in, around $150 million, and the products and services include independent games, education online, livelihood services, data analysis, pet economy, financial technology, social media, PaaS, O2O and social video, and so on.
Do you have small habits that would have an impact and be meaningful to your life and business?
Rosa Fu: In my daily life if I’m not familiar with something new, I’ll make notes and try to study during my leisure time. And I’m used to surfing on internet and searching for any kind of new knowledge, to make me well prepared on the cutting edge of the industry, to stay ahead of the curve.
Like trend of NFT which is very popular recently, VTuber, web 3.0, and so on. Web 3.0 and the multi-universe are current key topics. The more projects we can catch up on, the more and better we can help and give guidance to my team.
How do you promote your product and services online?
Rosa Fu: In addition to updates for our official website and blog, we would promote a variety of team-friendly contests, speeches, and exchanges. On Facebook, We also have the associations for alumni, to make those founders not only communicate online, and learn from each other, but also create opportunities to link between different industries.
Furthermore, we have the annual recruitment for accelerators, which focuses on two areas, “Interactive entertainment” and“Livelihood technology”, for the outstanding team in Taiwan. And we cooperate with the government, to create a talent pool, help with training and funding collection in a different period, it’s just because of our complete service, no matter the team is new or some more mature with physical products, they can search the DIT in each stage of the startup.
What types of tools, software and skills do you use to manage your online marketing?
Rosa Fu: After the new coronavirus outbreak, the entity of the promotion and marketing activities are less, we began to develop a variety of online activities, also to broaden the scope of the startup. The original exhibition or workshop will be used to Gather town, Zoom, Discord and other tools to instantly converted online.
COVID-19 has created new business opportunities and new models for WFH, con-call and online markets. Instead, the areas DIT cares about and inspires us to have more opportunities and choices. During this period, in order to avoid the relevant restrictions of the epidemic, the telework was initiated, we can provide more immediate service to the team and also build leadership and demonstration for accelerator management in the event of an epidemic.
What is your policy and process for recruitment and how do you keep your current employees?
Rosa Fu: First, to enable job seekers to have a clear understanding of the job requirements and understand the corporate culture during the interview, so as to facilitate job seekers to have a correct expectation of the position and the company, and enhance the employee retention rate. When the candidate is on board, We will arrange courses and career planning for what employees need, and provide travel subsidies to encourage colleagues to spend time with themselves and their families.
In the daily, we adopt parallel communication, team members are also teachers and friends, DIT gave great space to exertion, and you can learn anything here if you want. Our corporate culture is inextricably linked to the original purpose of the company. DIT Startup was created to help more entrepreneurs realize their dreams. To do one thing well is a worthy ambition, this is why so many people have chosen to join us！
How do you keep growing by yourself?
Rosa Fu: Various types of exposure to movies, exhibitions, lectures and activities make me grow up continuously. On the other hand, I’m used to making friends in different areas, with different hobbies, hosting irregular communication, and outdoor and indoor activities, these not only make me study from different scopes but also help relieve stress in daily work.
Who should be your competitors in this industry? And what’s your plan to keep strong in this area?
Rosa Fu: We should be the only one in Taiwan, with the accelerator and own investment, focusing on the entertainment and people’s Livelihood business field.
Our goal is to grasp and deepen our investment precisely, taking the interactive entertainment as an example, we built DIS becoming the leader in this industry, from startup to integrating and operating the whole ecosystem of independent games in Taiwan, and at the same time, we enhance the willingness from other outstanding teams to join us, further make us becoming the best choice on Inbound and Outbound of this area, creating the next successful investment.
The government has also aggressively put in more resources recently, such as reforming the rule, establishing the platform for inter-department communication, and infrastructure, and promoting the subsidy scheme. We will also cooperate with the government to exchange resources and hope that this industry in Taiwan will grow up and DIT will be the largest new ecosystem of entertainment.
Share a success story of teamwork.
Rosa Fu: Tengshi(TSA) and LADY FLAVOR are our outstanding teams. Tengshi (TSA) used his expertise to build multi-platform e-commerce during the COVID-19 pandemic, even reaching 300 million in revenue last year. (E.g. Petstimes, Damokampo, Powerhero…)LADY FLAVOR relied on her own charming KOL channel brand for electronic commercial products, even under the pandemic, annual revenue also reached more than a hundred million.
In addition, we also have many excellent independent game teams, such as“Homura Hime”, which has been budding since the time of students. Since joining DIT, it’s not only a graduation project, it has become a more complete, well-known game publisher–Playism is a favour and will be issued in 2023.
And a remake of the classic game–The Legend of Tianding. They use richly abundant history and romantic chivalry, in the early 20th century, the Daodaicheng of Taiwan was used to let players feel the atmosphere of the contemporary space-time background, hoping that the game was not just a game, but also could pass on this period of Taiwan’s historical story in the process of playing.
Your central thoughts in the final?
Rosa Fu: I love reaching out to every entrepreneur and listening to them share their stories as if they were inspired by them, for they are always full of energy and power.
When a dilemma comes, I told myself that life is not perfect. If you can’t avoid it, let the passion lead your emotions, and then simplify yourself. Recall the past life course, which period of experience most enables you to be at ease, have the enthusiasm that will lead to the direction to your future path…
Your website?
https://www.facebook.com/DITStartup/
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