Environment and Circumstances

“A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.”
- Hugh Downs

In Southeast Asia, it is a much difficult and different battleground for tech start-ups. The issue is often the entrepreneurial ecosystem that is established by the local community around the environment. As the years go by, when I see some investors from so and so famous venture capital firm pass by Singapore, I realized that they have often come to the same few conclusions with a set of pre-conceived biases and prejudices about the Southeast Asia market. To name a few, one, SEA is a fragmented market and two, there are no exits greater than US$30M that justify any one of them to come here. While some signs indicate the potential rise of Indonesian market, it is still a tough ride ahead for tech companies in this region.

We often hope for the eye of investors who looked at a large and heterogeneous market and the investors & older entrepreneurs to have a mindset of those in Silicon Valley & Zhong Guan Cun. The reality is totally the opposite. It also creates the constant platitude lingering in my mind that it would have been much easier if I have been in Silicon Valley, getting the millions to burn from the investors there and create a billion dollar company. In actual fact, we have only one strength but many deficits in the start-up scene. The only strength if you match founder to founder from Southeast Asia against Silicon Valley or Zhong Guan Cun, you won’t see much difference. The difference comes to the employees whether they can scale up to be part of the dream and the ecosystem being more friendly to help one another.

The problem with that thinking is that we can never able to move up the chain without self belief. If we accept the circumstances of our environment, the problem exacerbates in its own way that may be detrimental to how we should move forward despite the difficulties we faced. It may be luck of where you are that might determine your success. Personally, I have to fight against that viewpoint not with anyone but with myself. It’s something really hard to overcome.

Luck and Execution

“Greatness is not primarily a matter of circumstance; Greatness is first & foremost a matter of conscious choice & discipline.”
- Jim Collins, Great by Choice

Somehow, reading biographies of people (Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson) and companies (In the Plex by Steven Levy) and various books (Jim Collins’ “Great by Choice” and Simon Sinek’s “Start from Why”) helped me to overcome the lingering whim which seem to dominate most of my thought processes. It’s probably easier to explain via three simple arguments:

• Every challenge is difficult and continues to exist whether the success rate is 10% or 0.1%: Here’s a way to think about the ecosystem in Southeast Asia against Silicon Valley and Zhong Guan Cun: the success rate with a good entrepreneurial ecosystem (which takes years to build) may be 0.1% for Southeast Asia and 10% for Silicon Valley or Zhong Guan Cun, with three essential components: one, finding good talent to help you scale your company; two, the abundance of funding from angel to high levels & powerful tech companies in the vicinity from Google to Baidu; and three, a positive feeling and a lively debate within the ecosystem. We will have to constantly be challenged if we are to take on the system fraught with difficulties and obstacles. If it’s that easy, everyone can be an entrepreneur. It’s actually dependent on how hard we keep thinking about the problem and constantly question the “why?” rather than the “how?” and “what?”. Even we fail in our present endeavors with the current start-ups, we can try again. Someone told me that it’s hard for me to try again if things don’t work out for what I am doing now. While hearing that really demoralizing and somewhat insulting comment, I was answering in my mind, “I don’t think so and I am going to try again whether I am 40 because I want to do what I like.” The central idea here is not whether one should try again. We just have to learn from our mistakes and try again even if the environment is not going to be friendly with us. The real lesson is that we have to accept the difficulty of our challenge and focus on solving the problem as hard and to the best we can.
• Overcoming the increasing prevalent view that successes owes more to circumstances and luck than to action and discipline: Probably Jim Collins sums it in his book “Great by Choice”:
  

  Life offer no guarantees. But it does offer strategies for managing the odds, indeed, even managing luck. The eseence of “managing luck” involves four things: (1) cultivating the ability to zoom out to recognize luck when it happens, (2) developing the wisdom to see when, and when not, to let luck disrupt your plans, (3) being sufficiently well-prepared to endure an inevitable spate of bad luck, and (4) creating a positive return on luck – both good luck and bad – when it comes. Luck is not a strategy but getting a positive return on luck is”

• Being resilient and figuring out how to execute the stormy present are keys to success: Having a clear vision and strategy armed with flawless execution still remains the way to build things whether it’s a project, enterprise or company. Sometimes, people give up when they are so close to getting the break. I have given up thinking about what life would be if I am not an entrepreneur. But in the end, I realized that it’s no point in looking back but looking forward to your next challenge in life.

Reflecting over the year, without a rigourous debate with my spouse and wife to be, I could not overcome the greatest enemy which is myself. Probably, we can never cease to learn and that’s what I hope this post here will remind me now and sometime in the future, whether success or failure.

“Good research advances understanding but never provides the ultimate answer; we always have more to learn. And Life offers no guarantees.”
- Jim Collins, “Great by Choice”

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1. Founded Chalkboard on 15 Jan 2010: From the beginning (with a former name Chlkboard) to now the next stage with my co-founder, Saumil Nanavati. The company is a location based ad network which seeks to help small and medium local businesses to drive walk-in traffic. I also thanked the team (Nazrul, Chaiwat, Jon and Serge) which we have assembled that are in the midst of our operations from now to next year. So, we have new iterations coming up soon, and do check us out there. For career, this is the most important thing and we have managed to hit almost 9M impressions now within 3 months after scaling up to the next stage. It has almost taken all of my life, and I suppose it will continue to do so next year.
2. The Journey with the team in This Week in Asia: Well, the podcast has expanded to a bigger team, brought in a lot of big guests from Dave McClure, Brian Wong, Sarah Lacy and Mitchell Baker. Of course, some internet pundits in Asia, for example, Serkan Toto, Gang Lu, Akky Akimoto, Rama Mamuaya and many others who have popped by in our virtual studio. Hey, we even got endorsements from Leo Laporte from This Week in Tech and got ourselves in the best of 2010 for TWIT last week.
3. SG Entrepreneurs under new leadership: Gwen has taken over SGE this year and have partnered with Startup Digest and also doing cool stuff with Isaac. Have lunch with her team (Larissa, Yuting, Shannon) and Isaac yesterday. Should be interesting for the year ahead.
4. Small successes with Thymos Capital LLP: Happy with the iHipo acquisition by Potentialpark, and also the successful fundraising of Lunch Actually (who consolidated Eteract under their portfolio). Two out of ten for me as an investor is a pretty lucky one. Well, kudos to the entrepreneurs Patrick and Arnout (from iHipo), Zam, Violet and Jamie (from Eteract & Lunch Actually) for their great work.
5. From award to exco in the Singapore Computer Society (SCS): Well, I got the Young Professional of the Year from SCS IT leader awards this year and subsequently joined the executive council to be the editor of IT Society. Sitting in the same meeting room with major players of the industry helped me learn more about the workings of the industry and built up my network. If not more, the experience working with them and the professional secretariat has been great.
6. The friendship forged and built with friends in Hackerspace SG: I have spent at least 9 months a lot in Hackerspace SG. If not more, the friendship and parties are there great. The place is always thriving with geeks learning a skill or two. Well, as the resident scientist there, I will like to spend some time on innovative projects next year and also get back onto the chill out nights.
7. The interesting travels of my life: Where have I been this year? A lot of places: Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Sri Lanka, China and …. No matter what it has been, it has been a year of travel and I think more will be coming soon in the coming year.
8. Delegate to Asia 21 Summit: Thanks to Gen Kanai’s nomination. Being a delegate for this event has been an eye-opener for me. It helped to put me in perspective and transition from a start-up guy towards getting into management in a company. Meeting other innovators, social entrepreneurs, public policy makers and business leaders from all over Asia makes the experience very worthwhile.
9. The original research work I have done, shared and continued with: Okay, I only manage to get one paper out this year. That’s pretty quiet in original research. Well, I shared the work I have done in my previous life from BlinkBl-nk 7 to Barcamps. So, I hope to put up interesting ideas to come. Yes, there is that unwritten book which is 80% done, and I have to bug my collaborators, Michael Netzley and Nicholas Khoo on it.
10. The most important thing of all – meeting my soulmate: She found me in the most unlikely of places: Hackerspace SG. She’s the most important thing that happened to me this year and probably for many years to come. I will leave that much here, and hopefully, a major change in my life is gonna come for the year ahead.

It has been the best year of my life and I hope that the year ahead will be a better one too.

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1. Thoughts on my SCS IT Young Professional of the Year Award

“Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true
I must be here confined by you
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.”
- Prospero, “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare

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Probably I share the story behind how I got here. I was nominated by Christopher Lim, a SPH journalist who I have met the first time when we were traveling together to Malaysia for a Nokia technology event. I shared with him the work I have done with Thymos Capital LLP and SGEntrepreneurs, as both an investor and a community organizer. What follows after, we stayed in touch via Facebook. Two months later, he messaged me on Facebook two months later after our meeting that he like to nominate me for the award. I thought that it was alright to put my name forward and believed that I might not made it into the interview round at that point of time. Probably, getting a nomination from someone independent and not within my professional circle served a fair validation to what I have worked on so far. Second, I believed that the other candidates who are also nominated for the same award are just as good and if not better that me.

Probably, the interview I have gone through is one of the most interesting experiences of my life. What made it really memorable is that I was interviewed on the same day (15 Jan 2010) when Chlkboard was launched. Before the interview, I was thinking about the launch of the product and decided that I would complete the interview to the best of my ability in front of the board. I remembered when I completed the interview, I called my co-founder Saumil Nanavati and told him that I am heading to his place to prepare the launch for Chlkboard. He asked me how the interview went. My answer is that it is the most natural interview that I have ever been, meaning that I did not hold anything back and just conveyed my thoughts in a straight and honest manner. The same goes for when Nicholas called me on the same day as well. One of the things I did tell the judges, is that I am happy to wake up every day, getting ready to work on what I want to do and how I can pursue my dreams with my passion and drive. While I was looking for the next thing to do in a transitory period last year, I thought that I was ready to give up for something stable. In the end, I come to the realization that being myself is the best way in how to move on with life. Once I figured that out, I put my mind and focus into it. That journey started with Chlkboard and many good news that come with my work in Thymos (which will be unveiled in due time).

So what does this award mean for me? I prefer to view it as an encouragement for the future that I am building in the process. To me, as the years go by, the best way to think about awards & accolades is not to think about whether you will win them. As of life, I find that I learned more from failures and less from successes. What is important to me now, is that I can put all the heart, dedication and focus on what I work on and do my best in everything that matters, whether I am working on my start-up or helping the community from time to time.

Photos of the Awards Ceremony

Photo taken by Nicholas Khoo

Photo (by Nicholas Khoo): Standing along side with Rear Adm (NS) Lui Tuck Yew (Acting Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, Singapore), Alphonsus Pang (President, SCS), and the other distinguished winners for the SCS awards which include Peter Ho, Head of Civil Service.

Update 1: You can now read the official citation in Singapore Computer Society IT Leader Awards 2010, and the video attached here:

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1. 2010: A Year Worth Remembering

The problem of today is that the Universities today do not encourage creative thinking between different discipines. Most academics are locked in their silos and with the universities becoming more and more like an educational institutions, it becomes harder for people to pursue original and interesting ideas taking a multi-disciplinary approach. One interesting model which is similar to this idea is the TED Foundation, where they bring in people from various disciplines for a conference and they have made it open for everyone to access the talks. The fellowship I have in mind is for longer term and gives the thinkers the affluence to continue pursuing their ideas.

The idea is to create a virtual institute that will fund an academic after his or her PhD for seven years. The academic will be able to pick the university of choice, or choose to move between places over the years. Once the funding ends in seven years, the academic will no longer gets another round of fellowship. The aim of this fellowship is to encourage new and original ideas in innovation and give the academic the best times of his or her years to do original and exciting research. The funding only applies to people in theoretical sciences and not in applied sciences. Why theoretical sciences? The best example to support my case is the development of quantum theory in physics during the 1920-1930s. If quantum theory did not happen, we won’t get the engineering innovation of transistors that power the computers today. Through my interaction with fellow academics in the humanities, the funding should apply to the social sciences such as psychology, economics and philosophy where new ideas can emerge that brings in the scientific approach.

Of course, there is some differences in my proposed model as compared to the type of fellowships offered in other foundations. In order to stop inbreeding or create silos by various PhDs in certain areas, particularly, nowadays it is easier for students under famous supervisors to get jobs in academia. For the application, I have set a different criteria for the fellowship: the academic’s recommendation must be made by someone from another discipline. For example, if you are a physicist, you cannot solicit a senior physicist to write your recommendation for the fellowship. It has to be someone from a totally different discipline who sees the spark in you to generate new knowledge.

I have made my pitch and will consolidate my ideas into a full proposal on this foundation from time to time. Hopefully one day, we will see it happening.

Acknowledgments: The original idea of the virtual institute came from Professor William Saslaw from University of Virginia (one of my collaborators in both papers of physics and economics) but I have made a lot of modifications to the idea to be more reflective of the current times.

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