Singapore Entrepreneurs

Why I am writing this, because I want to support this entrepreneurial BestBlogForward Competition by Kevin Lim in theory.isthereason. . The idea is to blog about the most popular entry in your blog and here is how I am going to begin I am telling the story behind why I decide to write this earlier article: “Finding the Golden Path: Can Singapore be a Silicon Valley?”

The article “Finding the Golden Path: Can Singapore be a Silicon Valley?” has been an interesting article in all fronts for Singapore Entrerpreneurs blog. This article is originally inspired by the comments from the blog by Bjorn Lee and another article by Kamran Elahian together with an old article from Business Weekly. Earlier before reading his article, I was having a chat with a venture capitalist who gave a good argument of how Singapore is like Microsoft in the present, being very entrepreneurial during the 1960-1990s and started to slow down in the 1990s. It was also a confluence of events. The last piece of the puzzle is that I was wondering whether there is really an change in the mindset in the younger generation. Through my work with Start-Up@Singapore, the quality of the business plans and the way how student entrepreneurs present themselves have improved significantly seven years ago before I went overseas. You have to understand that I have just returned from Cambridge, where I did a biotech startup and had some reservation whether I will be enjoying entrepreneurship like the way I did back there. So, finally, something spurred me to write this article. Besides, at that point of time, I don’t see a lot of venture capital activity in seed stage and series A companies in Singapore. Hence it set me into thinking what we should start doing.

Why is it that I consider it to be the most popular blog entry? First of all, this is what happens after the article is published in this blog:

• Featured in Tomorrow.SG: This is the first article I submitted to tomorrow.sg and it was published as a proper blog entry. I had submitted entries before but they did not get published. Slowly, with the confidence generated from this article, the SG Entrepreneurs team become motivated to write more and started thinking about the current design which led to SG Entrepreneurs 2.0.
• Getting to know new friends in the blogsphere and beyond: The real reward for writing this article is that I get to know more people in the Singapore entrepreneurial eco-system, particularly the younger entrepreneurs who wrote back to me and voiced their opinions on the issue. I was also thankful to Bjorn for sending it to the students from the NUS Overseas Colleges. As a matter of fact, one of the directors wrote back to me, and if not more, Professor Patrick Turner from INSEAD wrote me an encouraging email for my thoughts on the issue. There are different opinions and ideas voiced out from the students who I mentored, and I felt that I am finally engaging them to think about the future of this ecosystem. It is not only the locals, but also my friends from Cambridge and Boston gave me very high commendation for the insights I brought to the table with this article.
• Published in the real world: This article will be turning up in an innovation magazine which will be coming out soon. So it did help right.

At the end, I still like this conclusion I have written in the article, which I hope to share with you again:

I want to answer the question in the beginning, by taking an example how Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, brand the IPod product and the products made by his rivals. In his famous MacWorld keynote, he labelled all the other mp3 players to be “IPod Wannabes”, contrasting with his opponents constantly competing for the title of “IPod Killers”.

If you understand what I am saying now, the aim is not push Singapore to become a Silicon Valley, but to grow Singapore towards achieving an identity of a technology cluster that made its own mark. The future will be brighter for Singapore, if we start thinking of how to transform this new entrepreneurial movement and local infrastructure to a different and branded place compare to the one in California.”

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