Singapore Entrepreneurs

An interesting comment from one of our readers Encik Wan prompted me to write this post. In particular, my personal view resonates with his point to the author of this post, where I quote this important point about people talking about entrepreneurship: (his advice to the author) after bashing Asian entrepreneurs for a few more months, may be the person should consider to create/gather materials for Asian entrepreneurs to succeed in Asia markets. So, I offer five perspectives on how one can map ideas free of charge (without joining any dumb MLM process) from the west to the east and hopefully convince you that entrepreneurship is a positive endeavour.

One of my business partner told me this interesting story about his encounter with the entrepreneur. By the way, it is a very typical story that I also experience from some entrepreneurs. Typically, the story goes in the following way. A young man decides to give up his job to be an entrepreneur. Arming with an innovative idea, the individual seeks money to make his idea into reality. Instead of spending his time in building the prototype, he wastes his time to find the money. So, one fine day, a particular government agency declares, “We are going to fund this industry.” This entrepreneur sees it as an opportunity to get the fund. Unfortunately, his savings ran out. So he got desperate and angry with the funds when the designated people are still waiting for the agency for the funds. If not worse, this entrepreneur will start to blog about why the designated people are so incompetent (which really is not their fault). Let’s reverse the whole thing backwards.

What can the entrepreneur do in order to get out of this situation? There are a couple of things that he could have done: (1) secure a part time job to ensure that his bills are paid, (2) work on the prototype of his idea concurrently and (3) still looking out for the investors. Somehow in Asia, everybody seems to think that if you settle the third condition, the first and the second condition can be averted. This happens everywhere in the world. Back in the west, some western entrepreneurs make exactly the same mistake as these people. If you have read this book which I have recommended, you would have noticed that the successful entrepreneurs usually fulfill all three conditions, instead of betting on the last one. If you want to be an entrepreneur, you must accept Murphy’s law and make sure that you don’t end up caught in a desperate situation. In fact, one must be positive about being an entrepreneur.

So, what are the five lessons I can share with you:

• 1. Take calculated risk and don’t get yourself in debt: Successful entrepreneurs balance their cashflows very well. It is a lie that they are great risk- takers. All those stories about how this entrepreneur (barely surviving his last penny) got himself a big investment from so and so famous investor can only live to be told, when you become successful. That’s the first reality check for those out there who wants to be an entrepreneur. If you want to be the one telling your success story, stop complaining about how sad or horrible the entrepreneurial scene is and start doing something about it. That’s something I learn from my western counterparts.
• 2. Money don’t grow on banana trees: I admit that I took this from my business partner, Boon Leong. This someone is a local entrepreneur who have made his own mark in Singapore, in the midst of a desolate and horrible entrepreneurial scene described by other people here. He has a good take on this issue which I think that most people should start thinking and stop dreaming. If you are a good entrepreneur, you should be able to make your own money, be it selling comic books or doing online retailing. If everyone doesn’t know about this, every successful American entrepreneur has usually passed through one important phase in their student life: being a car sales man (which is the most hated job among Americans). Fundraising is an extremely taxing endeavour. Here’s a good rule which I learned from my western mentor: He who has the gold makes the rules. Before you go and think about accepting someone’s money, please ask yourself, “How much stakes am I giving to this investor?” or “Is 51% for him leaves me being a worker for him?” When I hang out with my co-founder, I don’t hear him saying “I can’t start my business because the government is not giving me money.” Instead he tells me, “I have the war chest to fund this idea myself.”
• 3. Don’t blame others for your own failings: It is unfortunate that things don’t go well in life. Believe it or not, I was still in debt when I was doing my PhD, because I was waiting for the funding to come. In the meantime, I did not curse and swear at the funding body. Instead, I worked out the amount of money that I needed to sustain myself until that happens. So, I worked as a bartender and did a couple of odd jobs here and there to make ends meet. Eventually, the money did come. The same process happened when I was doing my start-up. In the end, even getting some debt, I still worked on how to turn my cashflow from red to black. I can even tell you that I refused to bow to MLM pressures in the west when I was in debt. In the end, it is up to the individual to find his way out.
• 4. Stop believing in myths: Here is what a famous entrepreneur told me, “If you keep thinking that this is a bad place to do a start-up, no matter how good the idea is, you will fail because you believe that it will fail.” He was making reference to Cambridge, UK, where a lot of naysayers keep telling him that it’s a waste of effort because Silicon Valley and (put your favourite technology cluster) will outdo you. Strangely, this entrepreneur is a millionaire who founded one of the Fortune 500 companies in UK. So, for those who insist that Singapore is not conducive for entrepreneurship, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The term entrepreneurship indicates that you create something that the world has not seen before, and in the proceess you may or may not make money. If you are not the first to make it work, no one will.
• 5. Connecting the dots: I took this from Steve Jobs speech. However, I have an earlier experience with this lesson. I did a business finance course when I was an undergraduate in NUS. My fellow course mates told me that it’s a waste of time to do a business course since I am thinking of pursuing a PhD. I told them that it will be good to learn something. When I started working on a start-up, all that I learned come back to me, particularly, the most important lesson - the time value of money. It accelerated my learning curve in doing discounted cash flows for the business plans which I work on. A lot of people often say something like, “The things I learned are all rubbish, and they don’t work.” Try telling Steve Jobs who attended a calligraphy class (which is totally useless in a pragmatic Singaporean’s perspective) and now you find it everywhere from your desktop to your word processor.

So why is it important that we have to be positive in entrepreneurship? The reason is that most part of the process is suffering. You will even get people laughing at you for being stupid. However, unless you keep telling yourself that there is a light at the end of the road, you might just make it there. If you do achieve success, you are entitled to exaggerate in your success story on how you manage to get the money off this deal or from this investor. The primary ingredient for you to reach there, is to stay positive and make sure that you have done your cashflow and risk analysis properly before you jump into the point of no return.

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