In 1995, I typed my first electronic mail (email) when I started as an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore. I was using Pine, a freeware and text-based email client which was simple and intuitive that allowed me to communicate from Singapore to the rest of the world via the Internet. As time goes...
The best part about being a start-up is that everyone within the founding team gets the opportunity to cross pollinate ideas and execute the market hypothesis so that we can fail fast and pivot if necessary or double down if we discover the secret sauce. However, as a company scales, the short term focus on...
During my third year as an undergraduate in the National University of Singapore, I co-founded the National University of Singapore Astronomical Society (otherwise, in short, NUSAS). Despite that I have been acknowledged as “the founder”, I held the perspective that everyone on the founding team (or we called the zeroth committee) and the few hundred...
Recently, I have made a transition from an entrepreneur in a failed startup to an employee in a multi-national corporation. I see this as part of the learning process that I need to go through before heading back to start another company in the future. I have learned that the hardest part about bouncing back...
If I have a choice in life to choose between a builder and a critic, I choose the life of a builder hands down anytime. To me, a builder is a person who create, inspire and make a difference in enhancing and delivering better value to others’ lives. I dislike the life of a critic...
A very common fallacy that comes with a start-up getting funding particularly at the seed stage is to ramp up the hiring quickly and scale the company quickly. The reason why the fallacy came about is because the investor expects that you are scaling the company with the business model that is expected to work....
In the far future, I have three guiding principles to what I will not do in building the next company. One of the three principles is try not to partner anyone as much as possible, whether the partner is a start-up or a large multi-national company. In a simple business perspective, the principle underlies one...
During conferences e.g. FailCon Singapore or fireside chats e.g. Startup Grind Singapore, I have been often asked by entrepreneurs and investors about coping with failure in the aftermath of Chalkboard’s demise. Essentially, there are a few sides to that question, “How do you recover from failure?”. The first level is personal, in how you view...
My wife passed me a physical copy of an article entitled “Foreseeing Red: Lee Kuan Yew on China” published in the current issue of Time Magazine. Turns out that three researchers from Harvard University (Graham Allison, Robert Blackwill & Ali Wyne) have interviewed him on his views on China, United States and the rest of...
