Logging on to E-Commerce

By now it’s impossible to ignore the e-commerce around us -- the webVan zips through the streets delivering Ben & Jerry’s ice cream; your dad peruses through the golf book you Amazon.com-ed for him on Father’s Day; you look through eBay for this week’s selection of your mom’s collection of Ray Coniff records being auctioned off -- the ones you thought you would inherit one day.

The gold rush in e-commerce is still on, as far as we can see. And Asian Americans are among the pioneers. Back in 1995 -- yes, way back then in “Net time” when giving out e-mail addresses seemed so gauche -- David Liu was already testing theKnot’s vertical niche in the online wedding market. Monica Lee, who now heads up business development at CityAuction, was investing in the now wildly popular Internet matchmaking site, match.com, while networking up and down the Peninsula. Quantum leap a year later and we find Amar Goel in his dorm at Harvard, drawing up Web site ideas for a custom golf site, Chipshotgolf.com.

Today, you can buy almost anything on the Internet -- a handmade set of beeswax candles, an autographed picture of Ricky Martin, a set of golf balls with your logo on it. Or how about a sail boat in North Carolina?

We’ll probably look back on today’s e-commerce much like we look back at the first American supermarket, the Piggly-Wiggly, which revolutionized how people shopped for groceries at the beginning of the century through the invention of self-serve aisles and push-around grocery carts. A lot of us will look back, though, and ponder our role in this technological revolution.

The success stories make it seem so easy, leaving the rest of us scratching our heads, feeling a little perplexed and maybe a little envious of the opportunities that have passed. You might ask yourself, “What the heck have I been doing the last three years?”

The truth is that even though the Internet market is maturing and everybody already seems to be hawking everything possible, there are more opportunities for the fire-in-the-belly Asian American entrepreneur with an innovative idea.

As Asian-American VC networks and professional associations grow in number and in strength, the barrier to entry for Asian Americans into the Internet is lower than ever before. Asian Americans are developing ideas, taking chances, leaving their day jobs -- the fortunate ones are taking the advice of their parents to start their own business while the majority are pressing forward, against the advice of their parents. “The only barrier” in Silicon Valley, as Sybase CEO John Chen said a couple of weeks ago, “is in your head.”

“Be brave and be prepared for a lot of work” is the common advice for fresh-faced entrepreneurs. The truth is that for every success story, there are many that toil in anonymity in the “dot-coms.” Being an entrepreneur requires luck, preparation, networking and a lot of work.

Go visit a start-up in its early stages, and you’ll find an office with no windows, cubicles separating the CEO and database administrator, and a floor strategically divided between incoming faxes, bills and strewn pizza boxes. At 10 a.m., you’ll find the staff looking at you, bleary eyed from having stayed up all night hammering out a term sheet that had to be faxed to New York at 5 a.m.

Yes, the potential upside is great -- just ask any of those tens of thousands pouring forth to the Bay Area from business schools and consulting companies to join the closest IPO dot-com. But the most successful ones are those who believe that the market will reward those who create, innovate and develop truly useful products and services. Liu, Lee and Goel have all brought to the table ideas to make things work better. A passion for innovation, creativity and fun -- mantras in that almost innocent, pubescent period of the Internet -- is what keeps entrepreneurs up at night, and up at dawn for conference calls.

So now that we can buy everything from mochi to mooncakes on the Internet, what’s next? Commerce is only the first step to leveraging the power of this new medium. What is truly exciting about the Internet is that communities of common interest are now being built around the world. Through FastAsia.com, renren.com, Asia-links.com, and women-connect-asia.com -- just to name a few -- we are seeing the Internet build bridges to provide not only commerce, but content and community for all those of Asian descent. The Internet will evolve so that communities will not be based upon common buying or selling interests, but upon real discussion and participation in ideas and issues. Maybe we can stop buying from each other for a minute and say hi?