Seed-funded startups often believe in the fallacy of quickly ramping up their hiring to scale the company.
This thinking is prevalent because the investor expects you to grow the company with a business model that is expected to work right away. In all honesty, startups at the seed stage have not figured out how to do that yet.
In the book “The Startup Owner’s Manual” by Steve Blank & Bob Dorf, a startup is defined as a temporary organization in search of a scalable, repeatable, profitable business model. Even if you have raised money to assemble a team and build a product, you should not go on a spending binge with the hope that the product will bring you customers.
The typical mentality is to “hire fast, fire fast”. But having learnt from my past experiences, I now prefer to hire slow and fire fast. Read more
Whenever I teach the Entrepreneurship course in NTU, I often made the point that my aim is not to teach people how to start companies, but rather to impart some best practices on how successful people build their companies.
Finally, I found a book that echoed exactly the same view. “The Start-up of You” by Reid Hoffman (Co-founder of LinkedIn) and Ben Casnocha describes in detail on how one can map the lessons of successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley into their own careers in an uncertain global economy out there. It might be interesting to draw out some of the important ideas sketched out in the book. Read more
The Founder Institute is opening its doors to more applicants once again. To qualify, applicants must be passionate about building a technology company, regardless of whether they have started their enterprise.
The program supports a wide range of technology industries: Digital media, software, biotech, cleantech, ecommerce, advertising, consumer electronics, and more. Read more
The Shell LiveWIRE Awards 2011, which recognizes young entrepreneurs in Singapore, is on again. But this year, it is introducing a new category, the Shell LiveSPARK Awards, for secondary, junior college, ITE, and polytechnic students. Read more
Neoteny Investor and Entrepreneur, will be heading down to Singapore to conduct business clinics for local entrepreneurs.
The aim of the clinic is to allow participants to engage in casual discussions with Sean around their business idea/plan/model.
The clinic is organized by JFDI and is fully sponsored by MDA therefore participation is absolutely free. Click here to stand a chance to be handpicked by Sean to meet him! Read more
The talk focused on how start-ups can quickly work out whether their ideas are feasible and we offer 7 tips to do that. This presentation was given during the SPRING Young Entrepreneurs Event and Idea Generation Workshop in Asian Civilizations Museum on 29 March 2010. Here are some tips which I spoke about during the presentation which you will need to get things started: Read more
Other than the food and beverages industry, education is one of the hot areas in Singapore given it’s aim to become an education hub for the region. How about running a school for kids between six months old and six years old? It may sound impossible, but Simran Kaur, founder of Stage and Such found a niche in the education sector with her company, Stage and Such. We interviewed her on what inspired her to set up Stage & Such, why the company offers services for a niche market and her thoughts on the education industry in Singapore. Read more
During my trip to Monte Carlo for the first Nokia Developers summit 2009, the Nokia-Adobe Open Screen Project announced the first five recipients, and surprisingly, one of them is BreakDesign, a Singaporean based company developing the Barking Seed platform for Flash-lite games on the mobile phone. In the next few months, I have asked around for this interesting stealth start-up and finally, in the recent Nokia One Connected World event in Kuala Lumpur, I managed to meet up with Rick Treweek, one of the co-founders of this interesting company. So, I spoke to Rick and he is generous to give us some time to be interviewed about the Barking Seed platform which they are developing for the Open Screen Award, the first flash lite game – Dawn of the Fly, his thoughts about the mobile apps space and experience working as a partner to Nokia’s developer ecosystem. Read more
If you walk past the lane opposite Boat Quay in Singapore and look, you will see that one of the shophouses there displayed a logo called “Wego.com”. Wego is the name of a travel search portal made in Singapore and used to run by the name of Bezurk. In fact, if you talk to a lot of frequent business travelers, they will frequently refer you to this site to find hotels, flights and even good deals on travel. Ross Veitch and Craig Hewett started this enterprise some years back and brought Martin Symes, an experienced veteran into the company as CEO. They have been featured on the press from WSJ to many travel magazines such as Expat Living and Time Out Singapore. What’s the story behind Wego.com? So, we brought in Ross Veitch, one of the co-founders to share their story with us. Read more
Yesterday, Chris Evdemon (board member, BANSEA and partner, Eastern Bell Venture Capital) gave a interesting presentation about investing and doing business in China. Organised by the Business Angel Network – Southeast Asia (BANSEA), Chris has now uploaded into slideshare. There are some interesting notes about how to set up in China. For SG Entrepreneurs who might plan to move to China, this is a good set of presentation slides for reference particularly about who to seek for early stage capital investing, infrastructure and what needs to be done. Read more
Share this: