Guiding Principles
Been thinking a lot about the future start-up which I want to build in a few years time. Have distilled many ideas, thoughts and experience of failure into a set of guiding principles for my own consumption. 1. The business must have a direct transaction model, i.e. the consumer pays direct to the company for...
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....
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...
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...
Why Exits are Important (as a metric for Start-ups)
My friend, Rama Mamuaya (aka @rampok) from DailySocial.net (the top tech & social media blog in Indonesia) wrote a tweet this morning, “How exactly does one measure a startup’s success? Exits?” I want to emphasize why exits are very important as a whole for the technology scene in Southeast Asia. It is one of the...
Entrepreneurs’ Basic Etiquette with Potential Investors
A couple of incidents for the past year recently made me ponder about the way how entrepreneurs in Singapore, or generally Asians handle their potential investors differently from their western counterparts. Perhaps, in terms of Gladwell’s “Outliers”, the cultural legacy could be the major fact that contributes to their behaviour. Since raising money in such...
An Opinion about Singaporean Business Culture
Sometime back, I was in Shanghai on a conference. During that trip, I asked a Singaporean friend (who has been working there for at least two years) to tell me more about the business culture and what are the rising industries there. He told me that the Singaporeans are better in the education sector as...
Thriving without Intervention: Entrepreneurship in Perspective
KTM’s recent post [1] on emigration have provoked many interesting responses. While Hui Chieh, Lzydata and The Void Deck have offered their perspectives on whether the Singapore government are “listening” to the common people, a few comments (see appendix) centered on the issue of entrepreneurship in Singapore. The aim of this article is to examine...
