Singapore Entrepreneurs

If you survey the history of the rise of the internet companies in China, you will find very few books talking about them. Of course, it has mostly gotten to do with the language, and these companies are relatively unknown outside China. From the US side, many books have been written on the tech giants from the US. Even the web 2.0 founders are well documented in the book by Jessica Livingston in "Founders at Work". So, here we have a book "Silicon Dragon: How China is winning the Tech Race" written by Rebecca Fannin, a journalist who has been working in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing. In this book, she interviewed 12 top chinese entrepreneurs and their investors, and give a brief overview on how the top Chinese internet companies are now rising to the challenge against their western counterparts. By the way, the author will be speaking in a talk entitled “Silicon Dragon” organized by E27 on 18 March 2008 in NUS (check the link for more details). [ Read More ]

The book entitled “The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors and Policy Makers Live By“, written by Scott A. Shane has not disappointed. In fact, it is a very well written book about the myths of entrepreneurship and showed some interesting and counter-intuitive results against common folklore about entrepreneurship. In my teaching of the same topic to students, I prefer to call it the dark side of entrepreneurship. [ Read More ]

Lately, there is a lot of talk about CPF changes and compulsory annuities. No matter how much everyone may be happy or unhappy about the changes proposed to our social security, it is important to ensure that you can manage your finances. Sometime back, I recommended Christopher Ng Wai Chung’s Growing Your Tree of Prosperity and some of you have read excerpts from his second book. Of course, the focus of this post is to present a review for his sequel “Harvesting the Fruits of Propserity”. [ Read More ]

How do you know when an idea is a good one? Why do some ideas stick and some others come unstuck? Here’s a book which I highly recommend to you when you are trying to brainstorm for new business ideas. The book Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die by Chip and Dan Heath, seems to be an ideal companion for those who are seeking simple and interesting business ideas. We take the opportunity to review this interesting book and expound the main principles behind. [ Read More ]

Starting up with people is not an easy task. A lot about working in different places, be it a small and medium enterprise or a multi-national company are about relationship management. If you have not encountered an asshole in your workplace, you must be either really lucky or you are the asshole yourself. Recently, I chanced upon this interesting book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t by Robert Sutton and thought I might do a short review on it. [ Read More ]

Lately, I have been seeking some inspiration while making plans to move on after my present job. I chanced upon a book “Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days” by Jessica Livingston. It is a collection of interviews with many founders of well-known start-ups, for example, 37Signals, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, Apple, Six Apart, Firefox, Bloglines, Craigslist, Research in Motion and etc. I will talk about some of the lessons that I learned from the book. [ Read More ]

Recently, different bloggers, Aaron and Fearfully Opinionated have discussed the need and importance for financial education for Singaporeans in order for them to survive in our new economy. Actually, there is a simple solution to how we can help Singaporeans to get a sound financial education by reading. The solution is to read this book “Growing Your Tree of Prosperity” by Christopher Ng Wai Chung, which I strongly recommend as a beginner’s guide on financial education in Singapore. This book offers details on how you can grow your financial investments, take advantage of the global economic trends and survive in the changing economy in Singapore. [ Read More ]

The Marine Corps Way explains how to unlock the ingenuity and energy of an organization’s most precious asset: its people. Wannapreneur gives us the key learning points of this book. [ Read More ]

Get The Bootstrapper’s Bible…Free-of-Charge! [ Read More ]

Recently, Matthijs van Leeuwen, a co-founder of SimuGen (the biotech company who I co-founded with) dropped me a visit. While catching up with me on business, he gave me the book “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill as a birthday present, which was in turn, recommended by Daniel Sheehan (another co-founder and friend of mine in Cambridge). As I am not fond of books about telling me that they have the right formula for making a million bucks, this book was surprisingly good, and even my business mentor in Singapore, Justin Ong also highly recommended it. The book was published in 1937 and strangely the lessons mentioned in the book are still relevant for many people today. So, in this article, we review this timeless classic by Napoleon Hill. [ Read More ]