{"id":7773,"date":"2018-09-30T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-09-30T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/startup-ecosystem\/kg-labs-ecosystem-tour-september-2018-paul-bragiel-on-founders-obstacles-and-attracting-investment\/"},"modified":"2018-09-30T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-09-30T12:00:00","slug":"kg-labs-ecosystem-tour-september-2018-paul-bragiel-on-founders-obstacles-and-attracting-investment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/kg-labs-ecosystem-tour-september-2018-paul-bragiel-on-founders-obstacles-and-attracting-investment\/","title":{"rendered":"KG Labs Ecosystem Tour, September 2018: Paul Bragiel on Founders, Obstacles, and Attracting Investment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

KG Labs Ecosystem Tour, September 2018: Paul Bragiel on Founders, Obstacles, and Attracting Investment<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

In September 2018, KG Labs hosted Paul Bragiel for a series of meetings as part of the Ecosystem Tour programme \u2014 a recurring format through which KG Labs brought international investors, entrepreneurs, and practitioners to Bishkek to see the technology ecosystem directly, meet local founders and teams, and engage in substantive conversations about what the Kyrgyz startup scene looked like from a global investor perspective, and vice versa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Bragiel is the founder of Bragiel Brothers, an early-stage technology fund based in Silicon Valley. He was one of the co-founders of Golden Gate Ventures (Asia-focused), and has backed regional funds in Africa (Savannah Fund) alongside the global ones. In 2015 he launched Presence Capital, a $10 million venture fund investing in early-stage virtual reality and augmented reality companies. Collectively, he has invested in the seed rounds of more than 200 companies, with holdings that include Unity and Zappos. He sits on the advisory board of Uber. In his other life, he competes as a cross-country skier for the Colombia National Ski Team \u2014 most recently at the 2017 World Championships in Finland \u2014 and served as Team Attach\u00e9 for the Tonga Olympic Team at the 2016 Rio Games. The last two items are not peripheral; they tell you something about how Paul Bragiel moves through the world and why the ecosystem tour format, which is fundamentally about direct contact with unfamiliar contexts, appeals to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n \"Paul\n
Paul Bragiel during KG Labs Ecosystem Tour visit, Bishkek, September 2018. Source: KG Labs archive.<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The meetings KG Labs organised around Bragiel’s visit centred on two questions that are perennial for Bishkek founders: what are the main obstacles, and how does investment work in a context like this one. Bragiel’s experience is useful for that conversation not because Silicon Valley is a model Bishkek should replicate \u2014 it is not \u2014 but because someone who has backed more than 200 seed-stage companies and built regional funds in contexts that were not yet on the global investor map (sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia) has a developed sense of what «early» means, what founders in non-established ecosystems typically misunderstand about the investment process, and what patterns repeat across markets. The conversation was less about whether Kyrgyz startups were investment-ready by Silicon Valley standards and more about what specific mechanics \u2014 team composition, product articulation, commercial traction, investor communication \u2014 were the actual bottlenecks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n \"Meeting\n
Meeting with Paul Bragiel, KG Labs Ecosystem Tour, Bishkek, September 2018. Source: KG Labs archive.<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Ecosystem Tour series at KG Labs ran as an ongoing programme through 2018 and 2019, bringing a range of international visitors \u2014 investors, programme operators, policy practitioners \u2014 through the Bishkek technology scene with the aim of both informing the visitors and exposing local teams to perspectives they would otherwise encounter only at external events. The Paul Bragiel visit in September 2018 was one of the higher-profile stops in the series, given the breadth of his investment portfolio and his experience building emerging-market funds from scratch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Visit Details<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n
Programme<\/td>\n KG Labs Ecosystem Tour<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n
Guest<\/td>\n Paul Bragiel \u2014 founder, Bragiel Brothers (Silicon Valley early-stage tech fund); co-founder, Golden Gate Ventures (Asia); Presence Capital ($10M VR\/AR fund)<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n
Visit dates<\/td>\n September 23\u201324, 2018<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n
Location<\/td>\n Bishkek<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n
Topics<\/td>\n Obstacles for founders; investment attractiveness; Silicon Valley experience on startups and venture financing<\/td>\n <\/tr>\n <\/tbody>\n <\/table>\n
Source: WP post p2169, published September 30, 2018. Note: source folder «2018-05-21 Ecosystem tours\/» contains May 2018 photos from a separate ecosystem tour event; those are not documented in this post.<\/figcaption>\n<\/figure>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KG Labs Ecosystem Tour, September 2018: Paul Bragiel on Founders, Obstacles, and Attracting Investment In September 2018, KG Labs hosted Paul Bragiel for a series of meetings as part of the Ecosystem Tour programme \u2014 a recurring format through which KG Labs brought international investors, entrepreneurs, and practitioners to Bishkek to see the technology ecosystem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[374,333],"tags":[373,624,426,676,424,639,406,425,427,428,102],"class_list":["post-7773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community-and-events","category-startup-ecosystem","tag-373","tag-geo-bishkek","tag-bragiel-brothers","tag-op-ecosystem-activation","tag-ecosystem-tour","tag-format-event-record","tag-kg-labs","tag-paul-bragiel","tag-silicon-valley","tag-startup-ecosystem","tag-venture-capital"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"ru","enabled_languages":["en","ru"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"ru":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7773"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7773\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kglabs.org\/ru\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}