Singapore Entrepreneurs

Recently, a lot of discussion is centered on this issue about the difference of Silicon Valley and Singapore in the blogsphere. Actually, the real question is what is really lacking in Singapore that people do not feel that there is an entrepreneurship movement around.

A couple of posts caught our eye today and touched on the subject on what Singapore lacks. It started from Paul Graham’s article “How to Be Silicon Valley and Condensing Startups in America. Subsequently, various bloggers Woonzai, Bjorn and Justin gave seperate commentaries on Paul’s articles.

What Singapore Lacks by Woonzai. Woonzai argues that there is a lack of physical space in Singapore. Definitely, he provide a solution of discussion hubs in his article. To round up his thoughts, my guess is that he feels that there is lack of engagement among the entrepreneurs community.

What Singapore Lacks? Discussion Spaces? by Justin Lee. Justin adopts a specific example of using our new National Library and suggested that we should create Void Decks 2.0.

Condensing Startups in Singapore by Bjorn Lee. Bjorn made some disagreements with Paul’s initial articles, particularly on the issue of linking political thought to entrepreneurship. Like Bjorn, I disagree on this argument. The government has done a few things: low taxes, quick changes to legislation to lower the barrier of entry for startups and provide tonnes of information using their government portal like EnterpriseOne and ACE. Actually,”Teaching Creativity: a possibility or myth” by Design Sojourn also touched on this issue indirectly, and he attracted some strong comments and anecdotal examples from Mr Wang. Mr Wang cited many examples of the system has stifled people in his reply, and also placed a personal anecdotal example. Somehow, it baffles me that a lot of people speak of entrepreneurship as the undertaking of project and finding ways around it. With all due respect to his comments, I find that most of those cases he cited seem to show me that the people (including himself) actually gave up trying or did not find a way around the system.

Let me give an example. While the students in 7th Start-Up need to raise a lot of money for the prizes, they have to find ways around to make sure that the events can help to generate revenue. We brought it up to the steering committee and they flatly rejected on the grounds that we should make everything free. I made a bet with the chairman who was open minded about the idea of a workshop. The result is that if I can generate a positive profit, we will implement that in large scale next year. We implemented it and made a profit to cover some expenses and floated the money back to the competition. The better part is that we charge it cheaper than some private “snake oil” companies providing entrepreneurship lessons to the public. We also did market survey to show that there is a demand on these workshops. What’s more, schools want to pay for them. If you are an entrepreneur, you find ways around it. To all those pundits who think that the Singapore government is blocking everything, how about China and New Zealand? I don’t want to use silly comparisons like compare Singapore to China or who to who. What I am trying to say, even if the government is the problem, the entrepreneurs should find their way around it. Otherwise, it’s not entrepreneurship but molly-coddling.

Actually, we are pretty curious why Silicon Valley must be the only benchmark. Is it really the most successful technology cluster? We once floated this question to two respected professionals in this area, one from UK and the other from US. Interestingly, we all agreed that Silicon Valley is overhyped. Let’s be a bit more open-minded on this. I am going to state a few successful technology regions which are totally overlooked: Route 128, Massachusetts, Silicon Fen, Cambridge UK, Finland, Israel and Japan. One should be careful in making the comparisons to only one cluster. Cultural differences and socio-economical status constituted the genetic makeup of a technology cluster.

Updates:
[1] Guy Kawasaki has written something that supports my theory and this is how you can kick Silicon Valley’s butt.

[2] Rambling Librarian has also written a piece entitled Thoughts on Entrepreneurs & Librarianship, which he humbly disagrees with the notion that Singapore lacks spaces for interaction.

Technocrati Tags:
Business Angels, Venture Capitalists, Investors, Singapore Entrepreneurs, Start-Ups, Business, Singapore, Entrepreneurship, Private Equity, Technopreneurs, Silicon Valley

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