Grand Opening! The new Stepcase Office!

3rd of Jan, 2008 was a big day for me and my colleagues - it’s the grand opening day of the new Stepcase office! We threw a party and invited a lot of friends to celebrate together. What a great night.

We also celebrated my winning of 4th Top BusinessWeek Asian Entrepreneur in 2007.

Stepcase was started in my apartment six month ago. We don’t have a garage like houses in Australia or US, so I converted my dining room to an office space with a big L shape Ikea work desk and two office chairs. Most of our employees worked remotely so we were lucky enough to keep on low budget at the beginning.

Recently since we have more employees in Hong Kong and planned to add more, we need a proper office space. We looked for a suitable space at the beginning of December and settled with a space located in Cheung Sha Wan. If you live in Hong Kong, you know it is an area with a lot of clothing and apparel manufacturing businesses. The lower cost rent, shorter contract period, and conveniences of the area are the main reasons to locate here. Oh, and lunch is a bargain here!

There are a few Web companies in the Cheung Sha Wan area, like Bullpoo, Dookaz, and Foodeasy. Simon from Bullpoo, Edison from Dookaz and I believe Cheung Sha Wan could transform into a Silicon Valley of Hong Kong one day (We call it Silicon Alley). Also, I was told Hong Kong government thought about building the next Cyberport / Science Park in the Cheung Sha Wan area - I hope this will come true as it is something that will benefit to many startups in HK. As a side note, we didn’t consider Cyberport and Science Park, solely because of their locations. The transportation is pretty bad. How could an employee who may work through the night in the office, stay there and commute back home easily? InnoCentre’s supposed to be a good candidate (in Kowloon Tong), but they only accept tenants in design and creative industry. Err.

Anyway, I hope to cover more startup related topics in the future. In the meantime, I have uploaded all the photos about Stepcase to Flickr. Take a look when you got time.

2008 Stepcase Office Warming Party
Stepcase Limited