Bernard Leong - Co-Founder
Dr Bernard Leong is the co-founder of Chalkboard where he currently serves as the chief technology officer and is the architect behind the solution to help small and medium enterprises to market promotions.
Formerly a partner at Thymos Capital where he does early stage investments, his portfolio and specialization includes online social networks, mobile-web applications and games that leads to iHipo being acquired and also Lunch Actually (Eteract) raising next round of financing. His accolades include the Young Professional of the Year Award for the Singapore Computer Society 2010 and Outstanding Young Alumni for National University of Singapore 2007. His expertise includes technology and social media. Currently, Bernard also serves as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with INSEAD Business School and also teaches entrepreneurship in NTU.
The writer's posts
Recently, a lunch treat with a couple of friends brought up an interesting discussion on how much we should pay interns in a start-up. Given the dearth of talent in Singapore as many claimed, one solution is to look for inexperienced and passionate people, and they usually come from the tertiary institutions (universities and polytechnics). The aim of this article is to establish some principles in setting up a reasonable pay scheme for interns in a start-up. Read more
If you can't smile after signing a deal, chances are that you've been screwed over. Photo: Candie_N
Here’s a situation which some entrepreneurs would go through. They decide to take in an investor or join an incubator program. In front of them, an investor asks for “x” % of equity. The entrepreneurs then speak to different people in the community to get some advice. The opinions will be diverse. They turn to US tech blogs, which give them a totally different picture. All this adds up to a lot of frustration.
Any entrepreneur has to deal with this potential scenario and negotiate in good faith with investors. To help you, here’s a checklist of things to do before getting an investment deal.
This second article of the series, adapted from an entrepreneurship course I’m teaching, introduces readers to: (a) the executive summary, (b) the business plan and (c) the elements that construct both documents: Technology/service/product description, management team, marketing plan, market segmentation, business strategy (business model), operations plan, financials and exit strategy.
This post is republished from my blog. Read more
“Startups don’t get killed by competitors, but by their own incompetence”
- Paul Graham in TC Disrupt 2011
After seeing over the years how up and coming entrepreneurs often drag on with a startup that is going nowhere, I realize that failure is not an option they want to think about.
Of course, if you are passionate about an idea and set about making your passion a business, having thoughts about “what if I fail” is a bad idea and definitely something investors don’t want. You’d be expected to put your heart and soul in the startup because it’s not about the founders but also the employees who work with you to build the idea into a sustainable enterprise. Read more
This first post of a multi-part series touches on the definition of entrepreneurship, the different forms of entrepreneurship, how countries measure growth of entrepreneurship activity, and the first toolkit: How to identify ideas and business opportunities.
I will also provide some interesting case studies, for example, the Aravind Eye Centre for social entrepreneurship. This series is based on the “MPS 812: Entrepreneurship” course I have been teaching in the School of Physical & Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. This post is republished from my blog.
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Filed under ToolkitTags: Aravind Eye Center, entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship 101, Identifying Ideas & Business Opportunities, Intrapreneurship, Introduction, LifeSaver, Michael Pritchard, MPS 812, Social Entrepreneurship, TED Videos, Thulasiraj Ravilla
An interesting post from Willis Wee in Penn-Olson 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 company to?
What I agree with Willis in his article, is that expansion to US is not a vanity exercise and his urging to entrepreneurs in a small market like Singapore to think about the Asian market in general. I am going to sketch out a few points which one should consider before expanding: Read more
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 major reasons why top tier venture capital firms from US like Sequoia and Benchmark Capital and super angel investors from Silicon Valley only pump their money to China and India instead to an emerging market like Indonesia and its surroundings. I will explain why exits are important (as a metric) for the success of a start-up and how it impacts the venture financing in the entire region of Southeast Asia. Read more
The era of business plans and presentations to raise money for mobile-web start-up ideas is over. In Silicon Valley, the venture incubator, Y-Combinator led by Paul Graham and his team have crushed this old school way of building an internet start-up by mentoring teams (with co-founders coming from a software engineering background) to produce a prototype and take the beta product to market. Recently, in my duties as an entrepreneur-in-residence for INSEAD Business School, I came across one MBA student who has totally got it right about building an internet start-up in the 2011 way. He actually built a prototype, tested it with users work out exact market traction with good hypotheses and did at least one product iteration similar to exactly how my co-founder, Saumil and I built Chalkboard. Here are a checklist of things which you might want to do if you want to execute the idea and not just talking about it using powerpoint slides or business plans. Read more
On our April 1st episode, our two co-hosts Mike Foong jets off to San Francisco for the iPad, and Bernard Leong isn’t on for the first time with an important discussion to attend – leaving John Lim, Daniel CerVentus, and Michael “Smitty” Smith from Yahoo! to return in our small three-man panel that isn’t short on the news. Our stories focus on Google’s exit from China, mobile platforms and development in Asia, Malaysia broadband and India’s step up recruitment. You can go directly to TWIA website or listen the podcast here in SGEntrepreneurs. Read more
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Filed under MediaTags: Apple, Asia Tech News, Blackberry, Google Android, Google China, High Speed Broadband, iPad, Nokia, Nokia N900, This Week in Asia, TWIA, Yahoo
The talk focused on how start-ups can quickly work out whether their ideas are feasible and we offer 7 tips to do that. This presentation was given during the SPRING Young Entrepreneurs Event and Idea Generation Workshop in Asian Civilizations Museum on 29 March 2010. Here are some tips which I spoke about during the presentation which you will need to get things started: Read more
