Thought: Hiring Fast & Slow
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....
The Irony of Lee Kuan Yew’s “Insightful” Worldview
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...
Why I am glad to predict the Punggol East by-election wrongly
To start, I predicted the result of the Punggol East by-election wrongly as my guess is 51% for the ruling party and 48% for Workers Party with the 1% split for the minnows. Of course, with no polling data available, the way I came to the prediction was to look at the historical datapoints we...
Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson
Written by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson, the central theme of the book “Why Nations Fail” is to explain the huge differences in incomes and standards of living that split the rich countries of the world from the poor, and put forward a perspective based on how institutions created from politics can evolve the...
Why AcqHire will never be an exit strategy in Asia
Acqhire is a new buzzword as an exit strategy when big tech companies have purchased small companies, primarily as a talent recruitment strategy with a sometimes significant signing bonus. So far, to the best of my knowledge, it only happens in the US. Facebook is probably the most well-known company in such type of takeovers...
Building and Managing Tech Teams in Asia 2: Cultural Nuances & Scope Creep
In the second part of the series I am building up on building and managing tech teams in Asia, I want to focus on the problem of scope creep and why paying something cheap might cost you more. The other highlight of the article is to understand the various cultural nuances present in Asia when...
Building & Managing Technology Teams in Asia 1: The Tech Conundrum
In Asian countries, most mobile-web technology start-ups have found major difficulties in building technology teams. A few factors contributed to the problem, with lack of talent being the most common cited reason. Other factors include weak entrepreneurial ecosystem and inactive programming communities. Any start-up founder with a business background will tend towards outsourcing the building...
Thinking about Expansion out of Singapore to Asia & US
An interesting post from Willis Wee in Penn-Olson today prompted me to provide some perspective on the issue of expansion. The question that most people ask: if I build a start-up from a country with a very small market size (say, Singapore but it can apply from Slovenia to Monaco), where should I expand the...
Where & Why did Social Media succeed & fail in GE 2011?
After the past 10 days of intensive campaigning, cooling off and subsequently polling day for the Singapore General Elections 2011 (GE 2011), an interesting question comes to mind, “Why has social media worked for the opposition parties and failed badly for the ruling party particularly the case of George Yeo?” I examine certain aspects of...
