(中文按此) Forbole completed a successful marketing campaign in Taiwan in February, marking the beginning of a series of promotional activities for 2023. During the campaign, we engaged with Taiwan's web3 and crypto communities, venture capitalists, and institutions, introducing them to Forbole and Desmos. While we received many questions, one question stood out as particularly significant: why did Forbole appear in Taiwan? To answer this, we must delve into the founding story of Forbole.
2017: The Founding of Forbole
Forbole was co-founded by Kwun Yeung (Kwun) and myself, Terence, in 2017. Prior to this, Kwun had already started a business in the internet industry in 2005, and I joined him in 2009 to provide digital marketing solutions for clients, such as web and app design and development, search engine optimization, search engine and social media marketing, and more.
By 2017, we recognized the potential of blockchain technology, particularly its ability to disrupt the centralized nature of the internet (a.k.a. web2) if applied to social networks. With over 20 years of combined web2 experience, we decided to pivot our focus to web3 social by an idea of decentralized business referral platforms. This platform aims at facilitating users to refer business or career opportunities to each other, and establish a reputation system based on word-of-mouth referrals rather than cold calls or hard sales. We were inspired by the idea that many talented individuals just need a chance to shine, and many others can play the role of "Bó-lè" (in Chinese literature, this term is used to describe a person who has good judgements to spot potential talents) to discover and support these individuals. This is also where the name of our company, "For Bó-lè," originated from.
2018: Interview with AppWorks
In late 2018, the crypto market was facing a bear market after the bubble burst in 2017. We worked hard to pitch to various startup accelerators and venture capitalists. After much effort, we were able to secure an interview with AppWorks, a renowned startup accelerator in Southeast Asia, which led to our special connection with Taiwan. I had already heard of AppWorks in 2012 from Jamie Lin's blog, the founder of AppWorks, so I was familiar with their reputation. As one of the few web3 tech startups in the region, it was difficult for us to explain our work, especially during the harsh winter of the cryptocurrency market. We cherished every interview opportunity, and unlike other overseas teams who usually had remote interviews, we flew to Taipei to meet them in person. Jamie and the AppWorks team, including other partners, also met with us, showing their respect for startups .
In the end, we were accepted to join their 18th accelerator program, which began in March 2019. We have always believed that full commitment yields the greatest results, so we decided to move to Taipei during the accelerator program. This allowed us to truly understand AppWorks and the startup ecosystem they had built in Greater Southeast Asia.
2019: Accelerated in Taiwan
During Forbole's few months in Taipei, we experienced a period of rapid growth. We joined the Cosmos community in late 2017 because we planned to use Cosmos SDK to develop the decentralized business referral platform. At that time, Cosmos SDK was still in its infancy and lacked adequate documentation. We also realized that we had to find validators to operate our nodes, but we didn't even know what a validator was. We decided to become a Cosmos testnet validator to understand the role and build our validator community. We also needed a block explorer to monitor our blockchain's status, so we developed our own. This became Big Dipper, which won a Cosmos hackathon award and is now an open-source blockchain explorer with over 400 forks on GitHub.
Big Dipper gradually gained popularity, and as a validator, we won another competition later on (i.e. "Game of Stakes"). In March 2019, the Cosmos Hub mainnet went live, and in April, its native token ATOM was listed on major exchanges, reaching a peak market capitalization of 11th place. As one of the genesis validators, we gained more recognition due to the launch of Cosmos Hub, but our identity in the market was as a validator, rather than a decentralized social platform. Even though I showcased the decentralized social project at Mentors' Day in the same month, we had yet to figure out the road to product-market-fit of the decentralized referral platform idea. Therefore, at the Demo Day in June, I changed my presentation to focus on our validator business, which had better tractions and results.
Normally, Demo Day concludes the accelerator program, but we continued to use AppWorks' co-working space. In July, we met the Solana team. I remember having a call with Solana's co-founder Raj Gokal in a corner of AppWorks. At that time, Solana was preparing to launch its testnet and was looking for validators on Cosmos, so they approached us. After reading their whitepaper and hearing their story, we thought they were a group of talented people. At that time, we were still a two-person startup without venture capital funding, but I dared to ask Raj if we could invest in Solana. They had already completed their funding round, but I argued that if validators also invested, they would have more skin in the game, which would be more beneficial to Solana. Later, they set aside a portion of the subscription amount for validators in their Series A round, and we became one of Solana's Series A investors. This marked the beginning of our new role as early web3 investors. Since then, we have invested in many projects, including Kava, Oasis Protocol, Akash Network, and Wormhole, among others, forming the early form of our private investment arm, Forbole Ventures. We plan to further professionalize Forbole Ventures in the future.
2020: Recruit Taiwan teammates
Even though we completed the accelerator program, we continued to collaborate with AppWorks. For example, starting in 2020, we participated in the recruitment events held by AppWorks School, their bootcamp for people who want to pivot their career to tech startups. Through this, we were able to recruit talented individuals from Taiwan. One of the developers on the Desmos team, Chen Lin Yang (Paul), was the first Taiwanese member we recruited through AppWorks School. During our trip to Taiwan, Paul was one of the main speakers.
In retrospect, the most critical period of growth in our 10+ years of startup journey happened in Taiwan. I always proudly say that we are a Hong Kong web3 startup incubated in Taiwan. After returning to Hong Kong, we were able to scale faster based on the foundation we built in Taiwan. At the peak of the bull market in 2021, the market value of crypto assets staked with us reached $1 billion. Our team has also expanded to nearly 40 people, from diverse backgrounds such as Hong Kong, mainland China, Italy, Poland, the United States, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Australia, Egypt, and Vietnam.
2023: Taipei trip
Although we have achieved remarkable results and established a reputation in the industry, we are not well-known to many people due to our low-key approach and minimal branding activities. This is particularly true in the Chinese-speaking world. After more than five years of development and weathering several bull and bear cycles, we believe that the timing is right to present our brand to the world. We have chosen Taiwan as the first stop for our promotion. We hope to leverage Taiwan's influence to reach a broader Chinese-speaking community in Southeast Asia.