Singapore Entrepreneurs

Have you ever been asked to attend a school proclaiming teaching entrepreneurship will change your life? Have you ever told that if you attend so and so guru’s seminar, you will make millions? Here is a definite guide to help you in distinguishing which the real and fake schools are.

Author’s Disclaimer: The article makes no mention of any companies, but will caution the reader to open their eyes before signing up for S$40-$10K courses in entrepreneurship. Some of these companies may be authentic and some may be just selling “snake oil”. This does not happen only in Singapore but everywhere in the world, even in Silicon Valley and London. The aim is to distinguish between these real & fake companies.

One of the famous children stories that left a deep imprint in my memory is “The Pied Piper of Hamelin”. Basically, the story is pretty simple. A disaster occurred on June 26, 1284 where the town of Hamelin, Germany was invaded by a plague of rats. A man by the name of Pied Piper came to Hamelin and claimed to be a rat-catcher. The people in the town promised him a schilling per rat if he managed to kill of them. He played his pipe and enchanted the rats to follow him. In the end, all the rats were drowned. Despite his success of killing the rats, the people in the town went back on their promise and did not pay him. Out of spite, he played the music and lured all the children to follow him to a cave. In the end, both the Pied Piper and the children were never seen again. Some people used this story as an allegory of people who recruited the children into the crusades back in the medival age. Of course, it must have left you wondering why this is related to entrepreneurial education in Singapore.

Here is the modern day version of the same story. You hear a lot of private schools out of nowhere starting up institutes of entrepreneurship. If I flip open the ads in the newspaper, you will hear about courses to meet marketing and entrepreneurial gurus that will help you “free your mind and make you an entrepreneur”. These ordinary people out of nowhere will create the reality distortion field to tell you that you can sell like Steve Jobs, be a ruthless businessman like Donald Trump and appeal to your delusion of grandeur. In actual fact, they are selling you something that I am pretty sure will never happen.

Personally, I was invited to many of these types of events, because I have that unfortunate situation of teaching entrepreneurial knowledge in the university. I have to decline these schools a chance of attending such events. As I have indicated earlier, some of these schools may be authentic and could have transformed some youngsters’ life. The bad ones will turn students into evangelists for the wrong things and worse, fundamentalists to the wrong kind of business education. Since I don’t have a list to say which of these schools are real and authentic, I do have a checklist of what the bad ones really look like.

If you ever decide to listen to some guru (self-proclaimed millionaires) and pay your cash to take their snake oil, I will urge you to look through my list of telling fakes first.

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
- J A Baines

You know that this school is fake when….

• They start teaching you how to market your products using Ponzi and pyramid schemes: They start to teach your the abuse of multi-level marketing (MLM).Here are a few key identifiers to know that they are teaching you rubbish from [1]: (i) you are given a highly excited sales pitch to hard sell your product, (ii) Almost zero information offered about the company unless an investor purchases the products and

  becomes a participant, (iii) Vaguely phrased promises of limitless income potential, (iv) No product, or a product being sold at a price ridiculously in excess of its real market value, (v) An income stream that depends mainly on the commissions earned by enrolling new members or the purchase by members of products for their own use rather than sales to customers who are not participants in the scheme, (vi) A tendency for only early investors/joiners to make any real income and finally (vii) Assurances that it is perfectly legal to participate.

• Their teachers are millionaires in traditional and not new industries that buy low sell high: I accept that these people are qualified business people in a traditional business setting. My problem is with those who claim to say that they can apply their real estate business to teach students start biotech or IT business. That’s not worst part. They want to tell me that they know how to do the business and then cannot explain what FDA or intellectual property is. I am not even going into the technology part. When they start using the famous deference to authority strategy and their line is, “I am a millionaire & I make a lot of money more than you”, I know that it’s time to ignore this person and move on.
• If you are a dropout, you can be like Bill Gates: Here is the big myth that most of these schools want you to believe. They will spin the story in the following manner: You are a dropout like Bill Gates. Since you cannot drop out from Harvard like him, you can try dropping out of a resident university or polytechnic. You create Microsoft and then it become a multi-billion dollar company.It feels good to hear such stories so that most people can ridicule the schools. After all, Mark Twain made his famous comment, “Never let school interfere with my education.” Okie, let’s break down the myth, Bill Gates was working with computers when he was in Harvard. He had a product and a business idea of selling operating system to hardware companies. Of course, these “snake oil” schools overlook these facts, but stressed the fact that he was a dropout. Then they will throw you the following the statistic. Then they will tell you other than Bill Gates, there are others like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Steve Balmer, and Michael Dell are dropouts and they all hang out in the top 10 rich men’s list.

  Let’s take a look at the actual statistic of the Fortune 500 companies. Yes, maybe you find 5 of the richest guys are dropouts, then you start to look at the remaining 495. Believe it or not, 90% of the CEOs of these companies have proper university education. Let me adopt the same strategy to spin the story in the other direction, you also realize that a significant of them are former alumni of Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge and MIT. If I want to spin this, I can say that since 90% of the CEOs are from Ivy League or Ox-bridge, why don’t those who want to be successful go to those schools? Suddenly, you also realized that these “dropout” role models for entrepreneurs are only less than 1% of the actual group. Let me ask you, if you throw a hundred sided dice, the chances of you getting your number is 1/100. So, what makes you think that you will make the mark?

• They offer you some silly methods of learning that you can create on your own: Yes, the “whatever dads you have” books and playing board games with random dice rolls are the most common. You can read the same financial knowledge with standard books. Honestly, there are better board games which can teach you trading using game theory without rolling dice. Of course, there exist also methods of mapping your brain to the left and right to make you smarter. Trust me, even if you twist your brain to the left and right, it will not increase the number of neurons in your brain to make you smarter. If these knowledge are so great, why is it that the richest men in the world don’t need it?The art of being smarter is never about these methods, but how you look at information and make a good decision. You have to be dilligent to learn what standard best practices of financial accounting, investment valuation and legal and employment knowledge. As a matter of fact, I can give a free tip without charge on how to be a successful entrepreneur, and that is bootstrapping resources to build a company. It’s by observing the business models used by Microsoft, Dell and Google.
• They molly-coddle you to the RIGHT path with a cost: There is once I charged S$20 for a course I gave in NUS to teach winning executive summary for a business plan competition. The money I earned from that event are all channelled back to the business plan competition so that we can run events and prize money for the competition with no money flowed back to me. That is social entrepreneurship. I know the most famous entrepreneur in a US university who earned millions per month, and he does his lectures for the university for free. He mentors for free too, only to worthy students who prove their worth of being credible individuals. If these “entrepreneurs” who charge you a fee to get you to teach entrepreneurship, I wonder where the money go to. Worse, they spin you to believe that you are an entrepreneur without you starting a proper company but instead becoming their employee.
• You can be the best entrepreneur in less than X years: If you want speed and results, don’t be a high tech entrepreneur. To be fair, any kind of business can make money. If a school tells you that you can become a IT and biotech entrepreneur without working in a lab, they are really selling you snake oil. You can do that, if you work for IBM, you can acquire the technology borne by the hard work of some professors. If you are a nobody, don’t bet on the fact that you can acquire the technology because no one is going to sell it to you.

Now that you go back and look at the ads which you see in the newspaper, you should think again about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Honestly, the education is free if you know which books to read, what the mistakes you should avoid and how not to be conned. If you master the above three and find a good mentor who is willing to coach you for free without a single cent from him/her, I am pretty sure if you are an any-kind dropout, you can definitely make the mark without Pied Pipers trailing you into the river of no return.

References to read further on:
[1] Wikipedia on Pyramid Scheme, Ponzi schemes, MLM
[2] Charles Mackay, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Maddness of Crowds”.
[3] See the author’s earlier article on Entrepreneurial Popular Delusions & The Molly-Coddling of Crowds, SG Entrepreneurs.
[4] Design Sojourn, Everybody is talking about design, creativity & entrepreneurship.
[5] Kway Teow Man, “No Free Lunch“.