Young Singaporean Entrepreneurs are not Pop Idols

Recently, an article in Tomorrow cited a Business Week article on the Asia’s Best Young Entrepreneurs. Using that benchmark, we found no young Singaporean entrepreneurs on that list. Holland Village Voice wrote a follow-up article and asked the million dollar question what is holding back us from venturing out there as entrepreneurs and offered a few reasons. In this article, we examine a couple of other factors and also the question whether being in these kind of honours help entrepreneurs.

Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece from a personal perspective and does not reflect the organizations which I work for.

To start off, there are two views about what defines an entrepreneur. If you are an academic and practicing entrepreneur who have done a startup (officially registered, written the business plan, done fundraising and also creating the proof of concept) to create something different and add value to the industry, that constitutes the definition of an entrepreneur to me. To me, I only consider an entrepreneur who does two things: either you invent a new product or service that change the market landscape or modify an existing business model and create a new market landscape, then you are an entrepreneur. If you are a trader, you are not an entrepreneur and if you set up a shop selling this or that, you are not one. However, if you set up a shop to sell niche goods which no one else does, you are being an entrepreneur by exploiting the competitive advantage and opportunity that no one has. However, my fellow co-founder, Weichang, have a different view which I think resonates with most famous business men in Singapore: you are only called an entrepreneur once you made the big bucks and the only way to tell is that you exploit business opportunities to make money. Neither of us are right or wrong, but we look at it differently. One should read the reference [3] to see how the word “entrepreneurs” is being abused.

Risk aversion has always been cited to be the biggest factor that stops young Singaporeans to be entrepreneurs. That is true, but the culture is changing. I can see it from the kind of students I teach these days and ask myself what it was like 10 years ago. However, these young people brimmed with new idealism to be entrepreneurs have to deal with the older generation who have other ideas. If you ask me, I have not seen young entrepreneurs who dare to challenge old ideas till today. Actually, the other thing which a lot of people don’t seem to notice is our tolerance to failure. It happened to me before. I failed the first time, but the industry in the UK environment thought that I failed because the business model of the company will not bring in investments and worst, we have a bad team. When I came back the second time round, I solved all those problems. Try mapping the situation back to Singapore, most students will have given up for two reasons: (1) their friends and family will laugh, mock and look down on them for failing and (2) they are so sensitive to criticism that they feel that the world owes them a living. If an entrepreneur has not failed before, either he or she has so much good connections or a wealthy family that help to make his business work, or his idea is so good that it is hard to break it down. Even Steve Jobs failed before. So, the problem I see in my Singapore students, they all want the fame and glory to become entrepreneurs, but they don’t want to accept the hardship and have the will to try again.

The next problem that I see in Singapore is that everyone wants to be the business people and no one wants to be an inventor. Singapore are short of good technologists and geeks. I took a survey around my student teams. I have 90% engineers and students from School of Computing, they tend to want to become business development people, but none of them wants to be an inventor. Perhaps, one thing I notice when I was working people in Cambridge and MIT, at least half of us (including myself) are technologists rather than business people. We prided ourselves more on being inventors and the business commercialization just gets outsourced to some MBA students. That’s the inherent difference I see, and oftentimes, there are a lot of money but no good ideas. Actually, the reason is simple. Any fool can learn business lingo, marketing and financial stuff. I have seen MBAs who can give me Enron-like financials (i.e. crap financial analysis that even a layman can spot that something is wrong) even though they do possess professional qualifications. The technologists have an unique selling point that will always tip them in the stronger position. So, lack of innovators make up most of the problem in young entrepreneurs.

Now if these young people all want to make it to the list and not bothered about sustaining their business, we are asking to be deceived. Harold Fock once gave this argument about entrepreneurs should be in the submarine mode before they succeed. They should be making headway in their businesses before they get the limelight. I have counselled a young CEO who has a good technology and is now expanding to the US and UK markets with his product. He is shunning the limelight because he thinks that it stops him from doing the real work. It may be better in the long run that we have more of such kinds of young entrepreneurs than to have those in the Business magazine. In the end, in business, you are respected by your market capitalization and your business success (i.e. IPO and brand).

I have once argued that Singaporeans are better off being intrapreneurs than being entrepreneurs, since most of them are so pro-MNC. In fact, five famous CEOs (in the board of ACE) during a private gathering, gave me this view that they will prefer to invest in some guy with a few years or working experience in a big corporation than a young guy with no experience. Their rationale is that most young entrepreneurs in Singapore, unlike their counterparts in US and UK, are unwilling to learn and will break down the moment they fail (and it will not be possible to restore a broken youth). So, there you have it, if you want to be a young entrepreneur on the list, you better start to learn more and hire good people to join your team.

I think that I want to end off with a quote by Al Pacino in the Devil’s Advocate, “Vanity, my favourite sin.” Honestly, I am not impressed by someone who wins the award, but I am more impressed by a young entrepreneur who captures 90% of the market and are making new companies everyday without press coverage.

Related Links:
[1] Holland Village Voice, The Million Dollar Question for Singapore: What’s Holding Back Our Entrepreneurs?
[2] BL, The Dark Side of Young Entrepreneurial Students
[3] Knowledge@Wharton, Dos and Don’ts for Entrepreneurs, from Those Who Have Actually Done It

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