Bowie Lau’s clever use of analogies makes for enlightening and interesting conversation as she talks about her journey into the tech field. “Blockchain is like women,” she quips, “powerful, complex but immensely useful. Women have an immutable memory, never forgetting a particular experience for the rest of their lives and maintain a connected chain of information in their heads. Women love sharing information with other women, even those that they don’t know or trust. Jokes aside,” she laughs, stating that things can’t easily be modified on the blockchain and ‘what happened has happened and what’s done is done’.
Born in Hong Kong, later relocating with her family to Canada, Bowie’s early career was in the field of hospitality, where she specialized in hotel management in the United States. In this hard-core industry, she experienced her fair share of difficult customers which helped her to be more accepting of life’s challenges, while learning that the customer is king.
Bowie talks enthusiastically and frankly about taking a 180 degree turn away from the hospitality industry to something completely different that she had no prior knowledge about. With strong support and guidance from her husband and with a CFTE FinTech course, AI in Finance course and an Oxford Blockchain Strategy course under her belt, she set out to learn as much as possible about the web3 space.
A few years down the line, Bowie is fully immersed in the space and is making quite a name for herself. She is a venture capitalist and business enabler, founder and managing director of MaGEHold / MaGESpire, a partner at True Global Ventures, and an event organizer for Game On! 2022. Her three focus areas are: angel/VC investing in technology startups in the area of AI, big data, cybersecurity, IoT and, more importantly, blockchain; secondly, she provides value-added consultancy services for startups; and her third focus area is education where she runs a community (in Hong Kong) conducting periodic educational talks on topics mostly related to blockchain and other emerging technologies. She believes that community engagement is key to the success of any blockchain venture.
Key beneficiaries of her endeavors are startups and the ever-evolving community forming around the web3 space. By enhancing access to Key beneficiaries of her endeavors are startups and the ever-evolving community forming around the web3 space.
As Bowie delved deeper, she realized that there was a dearth of genuine forums that were knowledge-oriented and unbiased in the Gaming, Arts, Music and Entertainment (GAME) arena. She found that most of the conferences were inherently biased as a marketing platform rather than a knowledge and awareness platform. “This inspired me to create the GAME On! summit in Hong Kong with the support of StartmeupHK (a Government of Hong Kong initiative from InvestHK) to provide a comprehensive conference filled with knowledge and views of industry practitioners in the web3 and Metaverse space.” She also introduced a pitch competition with cash prizes that provides startups in the space with a meaningful avenue for interaction with venture capitalists, investors, and business enablers.
Bowie describes the Metaverse as a digital reality where one can experience freedom of expression and communication that can be quite liberating and fulfilling in contrast to the constant pressures, onerous expectations and stifling social conventions in real life.
“Personally, the Metaverse could become our go-to stress-relief avenue redefining the way we work, with stressful interactions replaced with Metaverse high-fives, huddles and other forms of collaboration and timely feedback in a pleasant manner.”
She believes that for user recreation it provides an escape and with adequate safeguards like time and spending limits, mental health and quality of life could be improved in an ever-stressful world. For business interactions like conferences and meetings, she says the Metaverse offers a more interesting environment with fun-action sequences that provide better engagement.
“New ways of living, working, interacting and conducting business is what excites me,” remarks an optimistic Bowie. “It is important to me that any new experience created by technology has an intrinsic value to the user be it psychological or economical. I would like to be remembered as someone who helped the cause of web3 by spreading awareness and knowledge, inspiring people to develop new skill sets to actively participate and define the use-cases of these new and emerging technologies.”
