Singapore Entrepreneurs

Recently, a simple advertisement for an event (which I sought Mr Wang’s help to advertise) [1] sparked off a reprise of an old post [2] I wrote about months back. In response, Heavenly-Sword wrote about his views in distinction between the entrepreneurial knowledge and entrepreneurial spirit. Based on this distinction, he tried to seperate the impact of governmental control has derailed the entrepreneurial spirit in modern Singapore. Here is my one line summary to the issue, “If I am going to teach entrepreneurship, the conventional education will not work and leads to molly-coddling. So, this is how I am going to teach it…..”

There is a chasm in most Singaporeans’ attitude in entrepreneurship. The chasm is divided by two schools of thought which attempt to answer the question, “Can Entrepreneurship be taught?”. The first attributes that teaching entrepreneurship is an oxymoronic activity (something along the lines that you cannot teach creativity) and entrepreneurs are like artists, only the most talented are borne and survive, while the rest of them are eliminated by natural selection. The second school of thought suggest that we can “social-engineer” entrepreneurs, like what we did with the lawyers, doctors, and now scientists. I define this school of thought as the molly-coddling school. My only assessment to that is that both schools of thought are equally self-deluding. There is really nothing more to add except that most Singaporeans are equally clueless in deciding their own course of action.

Let me start with a recent training weekend where the semi-finalists of a business plan competition attended. The aim of that exercise was not to teach them the basics of fundraising, venture capital, legal and accounting procedures in handling a business. The idea of that training camp is to expose the weakness of the participants’ innovative business ideas. So, to cut the long story short, each and every single participant were passed around very room, where there is either a group of people, who are true-blue entrepreneurs (that includes myself), the venture capitalists or business angels, the industry leaders, the government bureaucrats, the academic staff and the student organizers.

The participants were suddenly given many contradicting views to their business idea. In the end, some of them actually complained to the organizers that they cannot make up their mind on whose suggestions to take. The chief advisor of the event (he’s a venture capitalist by training) simply replied at the end of the event, “That’s the point. In entrepreneurship, you are supposed to be exposed to many ideas and suggestions on whether your business will or will not work in real life.

You can have an open mind to listen to all the options but as an entrepreneur, you need to make a decision in how you should take this forward.” This incident demonstrated a very simple weakness in Singaporean entrepreneurs:

they just cannot assimilate and elucidate the information from both sides of the house and make an independent decision and passionate stand on their ideas. Actually, I can’t blame them for being so indecisive because our education system never allows us to fight for our own stand or opinions. If you want an example, try to remember what your junior college teacher teach you in GP. They always tell you to state both sides of the case but don’t fight passionately on one. Then suddenly you realize that you have been one of those in the crowd who has been molly-coddled throughout your life. Afterall, we all live in a nanny state.

A lot of people do not realized that they are molly-coddled since young. I remember the days where I defied my parents’ wish to study law and engineering. I remember that I was failed in my chinese exam (and I am an A1 grader) because I decide to be creative and write a detective or martial arts story. My idea is always the following: if Galileo can fight against the church for condemning his ideas about inertia, why should I fear about standing in my own position? I rediscovered that position when I went to UK to study. Similarly, it’s all funny when you realized why you have never fought passionately for something. That is because if you stay in a protected environment, you tend to take for granted in everything. You expect the government to feed you, to look after your livelihoods and to make life easy for you. Otherwise, you blame them.

That is one of the delusions when I see my students studying entrepreneurship. They thought that if they follow that track, they would be successful. They did not realize that they were coaxed into the idea of being one and they don’t even know why they want to take it up. When I start selling them the hard life of being an entrepreneur, I start to see many students drop out. This is the real test I set for my students. They failed not because they cannot do the course, but they failed because they gave up at the first instant of hardship.

Now I will state the popular delusions of molly-coddled entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurial Popular Delusions

Here are a few entrepreneurial popular delusions and myths which I see common in Singaporeans:

1. An Entrepreneur’s success is defined by making money: Yes, yes, it’s Asian culture. Believe it or not, it’s also American culture. That benchmark cannot work. What about social entrepreneurs like Mother Theresa and others who found ways to generate revenue to help the poor to create a sustainable environment or Jeremy Leggett who want to replace oil with a better energy alternative? I once told a friend that an entrepreneur is one who makes money through his passion whereas a businessman makes money for the sake of making money. That definition of entrepreneur is wrong as I mature along along the way when I built a company and learned some hard lessons about management and fundraising.

Most people become entrepreneurs for the sake of making money. I have nothing against that. That’s one of my secondary reasons. The real and successful entrepreneurs have a vision and wants to make a difference in life. That comes to my current definition: an entrepreneur is one who either creates a new invention/business idea/product/service that changes the way how market works, or one who redefines the market by carving a market niche where it is not replicable. In return for that success, he contributes back to society not necessarily with money but with other possible resources that could benefit people in kind.

2. Traders, Critics and “Entrepreneur” teachers (without starting their own company) are entrepreneurs: Please don’t make me laugh. These are what Hinly in Mr Wang’s post called people selling “snake oil”. A trader is not an entrepreneur because there is nothing new to what he is doing. A critic is a nay-sayer and is not going to contribute any thing new. Otherwise, why is it that we all remember Einstein and not Niels Bohr as a great physicist? In most books, the academics view them as intellectual equals.

The reason is simple: a critic cannot create something new that will change the world. Niels Bohr only knows how to criticise but do not know how to innovate, while Einstein innovated with new theories to view the quantum and the cosmos. He may be wrong but he never cease to try new ideas. “Entrepreneur” teachers are one group of people I know that I strive not to be. In my first step in becoming an educator in this area, I define what kind of attributes I must possess. Entrepreneurship is a contact sport. If you want to preach it, you better start a company on your own and not be an armchair critic. It does not mean that you have to be in a startup. You can still work in a bureaucratic place and manage to think out of the box. Think about the intrapreneurs in 3M or some smart government scientist like Burt Rutan who eventually invented SpaceShipOne.

3. If you (the government) want us to be entrepreneurs, please give us more money. That is not entrepreneurship. That is begging. If I cannot get the money to start my business, it’s not the end of my road. The correct attitude is to find new ways to generate revenue. Conventional textbooks and websites purporting to teach entrepreneurship tells you about the theory of fundraising. After raising more than 2M for three startups, I come to the realization that if you want to do a good startup, don’t bother to raise money. Do something that can generate revenue first, i.e. bootstrap your business. It seems that in Singapore, no one teach it. That’s the secret of success in becoming an entrepreneur.

4. Take a course in entrepreneurship, and you are a technopreneur You will know the theory. If you don’t bring your ideas to start a proper business, you are just an undergraduate. I remember nailing a student down during a presentation because he was trying to throw me theories. All I did was to ask him, “How much is it to make one unit of your product?” The poor guy just keep throwing pricing strategies till I gave up.

5. I want to be an entrepreneur because I am paid just as well as a scholar A famous US scientist who I deeply respect said this to a group of undergraduates during an “entrepreneurship” talk, “If you want to make money in Singapore, don’t be an entrepreneur, be a civil servant.” He was right on the spot, telling everyone that there is no fame and glory waiting for the entrepreneur. He even brought all the hardships he saw in his friends who tried to be entrepreneurs in the US.

6. Being a good entrepreneur is about taking short cuts and screwing other’s lives. Sure, if you have lots of money, the chances of someone screwing you back is definitely higher. The entrepreneurs community is slightly different in the US and UK, and also somewhat present in some people here. If you did something immoral and dishonourable, no entrepreneur will help you. If I am wrong, perhaps, you should ask some famous businessmen why credibility is so important in business.

7. There is only “I win and you lose” attitude. Entrepreneurs are a group of people who believe in a win-win scenario. A lot of so-called entrepreneurs I hear in Singapore do the following: they don’t pay good wages and cut corners. They gave their employees bad welfare. That’s why our SMEs are not growing compare to their counterparts in Hong Kong and Taiwan. I did not want to mention US and UK, because we are not even out of Asia. If you need a good example, the Google HQ is known to be a place where the workers are happily working there. The reason is if you give your employees good benefits and good growth opportunities, they will work towards your vision. If you get lousy and lazy employees, fire them. That’s the part which most people don’t get it.

8. If you fail, we laugh at you. The culture of fearing failure is the reason why there is a lack of entrepreneurship in this culture. We are caught in the rat-race to get the best scores in our education system. Most people accepted this social compact. So if you step out of the norm slightly and you fail, you will be laughed at. Actually, there’s nothing to fear for failing. I have failed in one startup before, but the entrepreneurs in Cambridge did not laugh at me. They continue to engage me because I did not fail dishonourably. That’s the point. If you ask me, I witness something here in Singapore among the entrepreneurial community recently that made me realize that they are also tolerant of failure.

Now we come to my doctrine in teaching entrepreneurship:

My Doctrine in Teaching Entrepreneurship

I have a doctrine in teaching entrepreneurship. Because of this doctrine, a famous entrepreneur told me that it’s hard for him to believe that I am an academic now and not an entrepreneur. To me, to be a good entrepreneur is not about getting things right. It is about being able to make all the mistakes as quickly as possible. If you can avoid the wrong things that some entrepreneurs did to screw up their business, you are most likely to succeed. It’s like in science, you cannot prove something to be right, but you can show that something is wrong so that you can reinforce what you believe is to be right until something comes along and changes the way you think. For young entrepreneurs, don’t start giving the excuses that it’s alright to keep screwing up. Yes, you can screw up, but you forget the other side of the equation, please learn from your mistakes. Here is one successful young entrepreneur told me, “I don’t think that I can acquire the experience of so and so famous CEO, but I can listen to the stories of all those who failed and try to avoid them. That’s how I succeed and many others fail.”

So, if I am to teach it, very simple, I will leave the professors to teach you all the business finance, accounting, legal and Porter’s five forces of strategy. I will just subject you to the real world of fundraising and hammer and con you until you break through my harsh training. Only when you survive and become stronger, I will pass you for the moment. There is no A grade in entrepreneurship modules and it’s not your GP paper. The only thing about being an entrepreneur is that in the end, you are happy and have the luxury of doing the thing you loved every day.

So, don’t be molly-coddled, and stand up on your own. Otherwise, don’t bother to try to be an entrepreneur. I will just tell you on the spot that you will definitely fail. It takes the fire in the belly to be an entrepreneur. If you are not passionate in what you want to do and able to endure the hardship, I would not suggest that you take this route. I will encourage you instead to be a bureaucratic civil servant.

Author’s note: The title is inspired by Charles Mackay, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions & The Maddness of Crowds”. By now, you will understand why I adopted this title for the blog entry. I have done some editing over the last two days. If you quote the article and it looks different, this is my disclaimer.

References:
[1] Mr Wang, Things That Can’t Be Taught. Or Maybe They Can, Mr Wang Bakes Good Karma, 29 August 2006. Refer to Hinly’s reply in this post from the same blog
[2] BL, “Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?”, SG Entrepreneurs, 14 August 2005.
[3] Heavenly Sword, Can Entrepreneurship be Taught??, Heavenly Sword blog, 29 August 2006.

Further Reading (Entries which came after that):
[0] Tomorrow.sg, Things That Can’t Be Taught. Or Maybe They Can.”
[1] Cobalt Paladin, Everyone can be an entrepreneur.
[2] Nomed’s Letters (a good parody on what I meant by fake entrepreneurs), Entrepreneurs are from Uranus, Con-men are from Pluto.
[3] The Kway Teow Man, Molly-coddling will never produce winners.
[4] Design Sojourn Teaching creativity a possibility or myth?

Technocrati Tags: Entrepreneurial Education, Molly-coddling, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurial Mindset, Failure

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