April 2026
(Based on a talk at a Singapore Entrepreneurship Event)
“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
– Steve Jobs, Founder of Apple
“I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters – who your neighbour is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think. Mine is a very matter-of-fact approach to the problem. If you can select a population and they’re educated and they’re properly brought up, then you don’t have to use too much of the stick because they would already have been trained. It’s like with dogs. You train it in a proper way from small.”― Lee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore
I really like Singapore. I think, like Australia, it’s a nation that is super successful and hits well above its weight class in terms of output of excellence. I wrote the quintessential Australian essay here and because of that one, I’ve been asked to do similar for Singapore. We have a goal, how can Singapore create great technology companies? That’s our compass heading.
What we’re going to do in this essay is we’re going to do a deep dive exploration exercise into what’s working, what’s not working and how to do better. Sometimes you have to find the individual pieces, layer them onto things that don’t seem connected but actually influence everything and see how it all fits together in apophenic ways to see how to unlock untapped value and potential.
Sometimes an outside perspective from someone with no horse in the race can be helpful. We’re going to try to make some discoveries and I find the best way to do that is to layer multiple concepts on top of itself in unpredictable ways. Why do we want big technology companies? The answer simplistically is because they grow quickly. You can go from founding to unicorn status in 3 years flat. I’ve backed startups that literally did that. When you watch that happen firsthand it’s truly phenomenal and you realise is replicable.
I’m also going to tackle this at a micro and macro level. What someone on the ground can do but also what a government can do. In the past this has been very effective in Australia as some of my essays have made their way through the government that have literally changed laws to implement some of what I have talked about in the past. I’m going to try and do something a little similar here but for Singapore.
Miracles and Education
Let’s start with something I think people don’t understand about Singapore from an outsiders perspective. It’s one of the only example in modern history of an authoritarian government that works and that people like. The Singaporean government is basically always elected by a steep majority, they’re very good at undermining any opposition and one single party has ruled for its entire history. The country has state owned media, state owned banks, state owned airlines, state owned telecomms and state owned property developers. These state owned enterprises are the most successful Singaporean companies and are the top of the Singaporean stock exchange.
The country is super wealthy as its balance sheet is supported by the success of all these state owned industries and companies and all these companies by virtue of being state owned can compete effectively without any competition because the government can straight up stack the deck in its favour creating virtual monopolies where the profits go back to the government and its citizens. It’s a sort of hybrid of a private market with heavy government involvement. So the government gets to pick what and who succeeds.
This is kind of genius and Singaporean citizens are the only example of a citizenry that has flourished under such authoritarianism and they stick out as the exception to the rule. Flourishing life expectancy, generally happy and wealthy population, safe cities and 1 in 10 Singaporeans is a millionaire. It did this by converting itself into a transportation hub with low taxes, becoming a transit hub with monopoly state owned industry.
This means that capital invested in Singapore pays almost no tax and also global visitors transit through Singapore on the way to most of the world. So this creates a situation where globally people come through and spend money and invest in Singapore. This is a tap of practically infinite capital flow that is helped by being politically neutral and is the strongest incentive ever to invest locally.
This is all pretty miraculous and is the result of the sculpting from the visionary Lee Kwan Yew. He ruled from 1959 until 1990, around 30 years but then I think secretly from the background as “Senior Minister” until his death in 2015, a straight run of let’s call it 60 years. This current stretch of time is the first without the nation being explicitly sculpted by him.
He had a vision for Singapore of a highly educated, ultra safe nation with a politically obedient population that are excellent workers with a nation that absorbs foreign investment and converts it into large state owned enterprises and he was very successful at it. Turning what was a tropical swampland into a modern city global powerhouse in 60 years flat is an absolutely extraordinary accomplishment.
But what that means is when you are in Singapore it’s something of an artificial reality. But this one is very successful while most others fail over time, in fact most authoritarian governments eventually just become dictatorships. So far though, Singapore has mostly avoided this. But by virtue of it being centrally planned, you’re never entirely sure if what you’re hearing is an original thought or some sort of propaganda. Is what you read in the news really original or is it mandated? This is an important concept to appreciate because the government is heavily involved in the life of its population.
Right from early school years where the education system is difficult relative to western countries, it then tries to filter its population into types of worker roles it believes the country needs. It conscripts all of the men for 2 years into the army from age 18 to 20. There is tons of eugenics style testing in early school years that filters kids into different life paths. For example, only 27% of children born in Singapore will ever attain a University degree. In Australia that number is 44% of Australian born children will attain a University degree.
I found that surprising because I thought Singapore generally encouraged higher education. But that’s not true, it only encourages it for the top exam testers. If at the age of 12, you’re not showing academic aptitude, the country tries to filter you out of going to university. It filters you into worker rolls and so on. I think this results in a situation where people don’t necessarily control their life trajectories, there is an invisible hand of government directing it all from afar.
This I think creates a lot of potential mismatch that happens here where someone who would have made an excellent engineer in their university years never gets there because they failed an exam when they were 12 years old. I’ll use a personal example, in Australia I am regarded as one of the best software engineers and angel investors, millions of people use products I’ve built and I’ve helped companies and governments create billions of dollars of enterprise value.
But I actually failed high school and barely scraped into university in Australia, which is where I thrived. High school wasn’t for me but University very much was. In a Singaporean context, I probably would never have made it into University and so all the things I helped with, I never would have if I was here instead of there. I suspect there’s lots of Singaporeans who would thrive in University but don’t thrive in High School but who get filtered out of ever going to it. I’m not sure how to measure this but it’s something that is happening.
So here we maybe have our first bottleneck. Get more Singaporeans into university. The Singaporean born university rate shouldn’t be 27%, it should be double this. If you fix this bottleneck, you will get more great technology companies. There is something about universities where it is fertile soil for the nurturing of innovation. Great companies are frequently founded in proximity to universities. I think it’s because university is a place of learning, generally. It is generalised learning where you can pick your own adventure. This lets people learn things they would never have otherwise and take that into their careers.
Here’s something that people don’t understand about building great technology companies. They are meandering pathways. People who create genuinely new things are coming at problems from orthogonal trajectories. The innovation isn’t often coming from the experts, it’s coming from the rogues you would never have expected it to come from until you’ve seen it come from these sources often enough like I have.
You have to cultivate creativity and original thinking which starts from letting the 16 year olds go and try and learn whatever they want. You can informally see this in that many of the best founders are actually self taught or come from weird life experiences that they connect into the future. Meandering pathways are how you develop excellence through the amalgamation of previously unconnected ideas.
Steve Jobs for example famously took caligraphy classes in university which he incorporated into Apple Computers. He never even finished university but while he was there he became a caligraphy master and fell in love with fonts. This is the reason Apple cared so much about design and is one of the reasons Apple won the computer race for a time. Because Steve Jobs cared about design and caligraphy and that’s why Apple did and he brought fonts and design to computers. Which it turned out the market really wanted. And that’s why even today, people who care about design buy Apple products. It’s because Steve Jobs got to learn caligraphy.
There’s an important lesson in this story that Singapore needs to take heed of. Get more people Singaporeans into universities. Make that the default pathway regardless of childhood grades. This will start a lot earlier in life where the Singaporean government should avoid testing people too early and filtering them into different life pathways based on their school grades at 10 years old. Technology moves too fast today and I don’t think we can predict anymore what skills will and won’t create value.
The person I’ve invested in that revolutionised healthcare had a background in running salad bowl retail stores. I am attempting to change the way housing is constructed but my background started in television writing. Great technology companies are background agnostic and we do a disservice to founders by trying to predict too hard who a person is going to become and filtering them into the wrong life path and not letting them organically create the most amount of value.
Conscription and Copying
Let’s move onto the next bottleneck. The country very explicitly says it wants a hyper educated and obedient population and the education and military system is designed to create this rule following obedience. This is where you stumble on I think a strange component of Singapore, the population is highly educated but the creative original thinking innovation aspect has been educated and conscripted out of its people. Singaporeans are excellent at following rules. But this runs at odds with startup culture which is all original thinking frontier innovation that is counter cultural and revolutionary. The act of creating something new by definition is going against the status quo.
Here’s a story about rule following that I’ve only ever experienced here. I’ve lived almost everywhere in the world at some point but this story I think is uniquely Singaporean. My brother in law had Stage 4 Colon Cancer which he passed away from. He was admitted to a hospital here and towards the end he couldn’t really eat anything. But the hospital he was staying at had a really excellent Kaya Toast store that he loved. I used to buy it from here everyday that I visited.
But this one day I join the line for Kaya Toast late at 4.40pm but the store closes at 5.30pm and the policy of the Kaya Toast store is they stop serving Kaya Toast at 5pm. I wait in line and the guy in front of me gets served and then I make it to the front of the line at 5pm. I literally see the clock tick over to 5pm. The guy serving me then says, sorry it’s now 5pm and the policy of the store is we stop serving Kaya Toast at 5pm so we can’t give it to you.
I’m really confused for a minute and I’m like, no no I was in line from 4.40pm I’ve been waiting for 20 minutes. You could see me in line plus I come here everyday. Plus it’s Kaya Toast, there’s nothing to it, just toast the bread and put the Kaya on it. In fact I can do it even. I then explain the situation that it’s literally for my dying brother in law who has cancer and he physically can’t eat anything except for Kaya Toast. I mean this is literally a hospital we are in. But they refuse and say the rules are the rules and the policy is the policy.
I’m starting to get really annoyed because I can’t understand what is happening here. I ask to speak to the manager and I explain everything again to him. He says the same thing. The rules are the rules and the policy is the policy. I actually couldn’t believe what I was hearing. So they continue to refuse and I don’t end up getting any Kaya Toast. It doesn’t matter that I was in the line or that I’d bought from them before. Rules is rules.
I cannot think of anywhere else in the world that would do this and this would especially never happen in Australia. What would have happened in America or Australia is the employee would have looked at the situation and thought, this rule makes no sense here. This is one of our best customers who buys from us everyday, they were in line before 5pm and the need here outweighs the rule. We’ll let you buy from us and that would have instilled loyalty and a great customer experience in me the consumer.
I have lived some variation of this story many times in Singapore. This pedantic rule following for the sake of rule following to the point it makes absolutely no sense is a classically Singaporean thing. This story is why Singapore struggles to make great technology companies. It means 2 things. 1 is Singapore is a great place to build a company that can effectively deploy an army of rule followers. 2 is instilling great rule following tendencies is a great way of removing the thing inside people that makes them want to be founders.
The kinds of people that make excellent startup founders are not very good rule followers and are generally original thinkers who are anti authority. This is not going to fly well here. The whole reason they often start their own companies is because they’re not good at working for other people because they but against the status quo and the rules. In the opening quote of this essay from Steve Jobs, he’s literally describing the best people at building technology are the misfits and the rebels.
Anti government authority questioning revolutionaries are great at startup building but are a type of person that the Singaporean government doesn’t really like or want. This starts all the way in schools and the army and I think the Steve Jobs of Singapore don’t flourish under this system. They’re told their whole lives that their creativity is a bad thing, thinking for themselves is a bad thing and they need to do better at school and then throws them into the army where they have no choice but to listen.
I don’t think for example Steve Jobs would have done very well in the army but that’s what the country does, it takes every Singaporean Steve Jobs it has and then educates and conscripts the creativity out of them. Let’s use an informal proof for this, Steve Jobs was 20 years old when he started Apple, Mark Zuckerberg was 19 years old when he started Facebook, Bill Gates was 20 years old when he started Microsoft. Many of Australia’s big success stories too Canva and Atlassian were founded by people in their early 20s but let’s stick to the big American examples because they’re the best at technology creating.
These guys had they been in Singapore would have spent the years that they were founding these companies in the military instead. Some of the greatest companies in the world are started by broke 20 year olds and I think that isn’t a coincidence. It’s because these are years where you have no responsibility and have the time to work on whatever you want. This is often the years when people accidentally create groundbreaking technology. Steve Jobs doesn’t realise he’s creating Apple when he starts it, he thinks he’s just trying to take agency over his life and make some cool stuff and some money. He then accidentally builds the greatest business that was ever created.
So what we’re seeing is we’re conscripting these guys right in the prime of their technology inventing and startup founding years. I think it’s also why Singapore doesn’t have a lot of world leading athletes or artists. Because all of these types of careers peak young. Even me. I’m not in the same league as these guys but my first startup I founded when I was 19 and it is used by millions of people per week and makes billions of dollars for the state of Victoria, where I’m from. I would never have built it if I was in the army instead. But it’s something to keep in mind.
You can sort of also see this in the data. I tried to research Singaporean inventions and discoveries and there aren’t any, in fact what I found top of the list from the Wikipedia page is Chilli Crab and Kaya Toast. Neither of which are technologies. When I go to the Australian Wikipedia page I see the Refrigerator, Wifi, Kangaroo Cranes, technologies that unlock entire industries.
If we go deeper and look at the Singaporean stock market. The two largest technology companies in Singapore are Sea Limited, owner of Shopee and Monee and Grab Holdings owner of Grab. Market caps of $70 billion and $30 billion respectively, 2 technology decacorns. I found that very encouraging, Singapore has great decacorn technology companies despite not really inventing a lot of frontier technologies. Both are derivatives of American tech companies but I think that’s fine to work with to understand the playbook. Sea owns Shoppee and Monee which is a copy of Shopify and Square and Grab is a copy of Uber.
What are the other Singaporean decacorn companies? We have DBS Group, UOB Bank, Singtel, Singapore Airlines, ST Engineering and Flex. Do you know what these companies have in common? They’re mostly Singaporean state owned enterprises or have large ownership stakes by the government and in the first examples the government played defence blocking competitors which gave the local companies time to win.
So there’s only 2 real modern examples of decacorns created in Singapore. I was trying to think of why that might be and then I realised I think those 2 things are causation. The conscription and the lack of big technology companies is related. So right from the get go I think that tells us 2 things about Singaporean technology. 1 is that the nation is not good at creating technology because we’re occupying the people who would be doing this in their prime startup building years with armed service. And 2 the nation is very good at copying other technology.
The big ones are either government companies or copies of American companies. So maybe the path to building great Singaporean technology companies isn’t to try to invent anything, just take some big American companies and copy them locally with the government acting as a barrier to entry or partner with the government itself to create a state owned enterprise. For example the Singaporean government banned Uber from entering the market paving the way for Grab to flourish. The government can delay the financial licences for overseas competitors which might let Singaporean fintechs thrive.
This has worked very well for China and is an originally Chinese playbook. They blocked Amazon while paving the way for Alibaba to succeed. They blocked Youtube and Instagram which paved the way for TikTok to succeed. Copy a big American company locally then partner with the government to block the entrant of the American company into China. Once the company establishes an unassailable beachhead within China, begin exporting overseas.
This playbook seems to work well for Singapore too and with it we have discovered the path forward I think. They need to throw out the Silicon Valley playbook and use their own. Singaporean startup founders I don’t think should try to invent things, they should copy the things working overseas. If we also look into the business models of decacorns, I see no Software as a Service decacorns. I don’t see any Media or Consumer businesses. No Enterprise Sales companies.
What I see are a lot of Telecom, Manufacturing and Financial Technology in the state owned decacorns which I imagine is because of Government playing defence for them. But here’s the example that I think is the most interesting, both Sea and Grab are 2 Sided Marketplaces. There’s an insight in this type of business model. Something about the only 2 big wins being 2 sided marketplace businesses means that this is a strength of Singapore. So let’s build more 2 sided marketplaces and play to our strengths.
What’s another insight about those 2 big wins? They’re manpower businesses. If we overlay our previous learnings that Singaporeans are excellent rule followers but that also labour is relatively cheap in Singapore. You can build a small army if you need it. Which is what Grab and Sea have done. They’re people businesses that require throwing vast amounts of people at a rapid operational cadence at the problem. So this is something Singapore is great at. Any problem that can be solved by throwing large quantities of rule following people at it, that is a business that Singapore would be great at.
I’m going to introduce a nuanced point here from my experiences with other countries outsourcing. It’s really hard to get strict rule followers. They totally go rogue and start making decisions and introduce errors. But Singaporeans will actually follow the rules so strictly to the point that it doesn’t even make sense and that is a strength here so let’s play to it. This is a type of demographics that flourish under a 2 sided marketplace business model because what that business model needs is throwing armies of people at a problem. So rule following isn’t used pejoratively, it’s a type of advantage.
I think we can infer that this is why the 2 biggest wins are this type of technology company. I don’t think Singapore is going to create an Apple or Facebook or Microsoft from scratch anytime soon because the people who are in the peak years to create those companies, the government conscripts them instead so we need to work with what we have. So let’s stop trying to make something we can’t create. Capital is more effective when deployed with a tailwind behind it. This is that tailwind.
Let’s make the Singaporean versions of great Western innovation 2 sided marketplaces and play to our strengths. The Grab to their Uber. The Shoppee to their Shopify. There is probably the Singaporean Airbnb and eBay waiting to start, a Singaporean Realestate.com.au or Etsy and there are playbooks for how to build these. Maybe an Asia focused Tinder or Bumble. The founders just need to start building them.
In this new AI world, there are huge kinds of businesses that need large pools of educated cheap labour that are great at rule following. AI Data Labelling is the first thing that comes to mind, these types of business models are the ones that will thrive. You’re not going to build an LLM anytime soon but there are enormous businesses to be started in the labelling and training of LLMs built by other people.
That’s what I’d advise Singaporean founders to do. Take what’s successful elsewhere in the world and copy it to a local Asian context. That’s what Sea and Grab did, they used Singapore as a beachhead to take over large parts of Asia, that’s why their market cap is so large. It isn’t because the revenue is coming from Singapore. Do you know what this says to me? It says that Western companies have a hard time in Asia adapting to the local context which means these are markets you can have an easier time winning in. You get a better return on your dollars not fighting American companies on their home turf.
I suspect additionally if the government ever removed conscription, within a decade of that you’ll see some very large tech companies started by the Singaporean Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. I’m sure that that person would rather start the company than join the military anyway. In fact if I was a policy maker, I’d create an entrepreneurship exemption to conscription. You can avoid the army if you start a company and run it for 3 years. This might get the results you’re looking for on a macro level.
If you can get government support, you’re better off in Financial Technology or Manufacturing. Without government support you’re better off copying a Western 2 Sided Marketplace business model. If you’re trying to create a tech company that isn’t a 2 Sided Marketplace, FinTech or Manufacturing, I think you should stop and build one of those instead. Something is happening in Singapore that is choking those types of businesses from succeeding. I don’t know what it is but there’s something.
If I had to guess, I think it’s the creativity angle. To build a decacorn Software as a Service or Enterprise Sales or Health Tech or Media company. These are frontier technology innovations. You have to create something ground breaking and new that the world has never seen before that fundamentally lets a business or consumer do something new that they couldn’t before in a completely reinvented way. You have to invent something truly new.
But that’s not the strength of a Singaporean founder. FinTech, Manufacturing and 2 Sided Marketplaces by comparisonare operationally intensive businesses. Singaporean founders are operationally innovative, not technologically innovative. The act of creation is hard, the act of optimisation is where the strength lies. I think that’s the playbook, take what’s working elsewhere and bring it here and optimise the shit out of it. Don’t try to create new technology.
I also think there is a capital element to this picture that is part of the choke point. Maybe there isn’t enough risk taking capital to fund the risk taking that is needed to create new technology? Do you know what risk taking capital means in a practical way? It means having investors that are comfortable with huge losses to fund the portfolio that produces the one breakthrough.
Would we describe Singaporean startup investors with being comfortable with lots of losses? I lose money for example on 9 out of every 10 investments I make. I’m very comfortable with losses because the winner becomes a unicorn. It’s ok to lose money on 9 out of 10 when the 10th 100Xes your money. Are Singaporean investors comfortable with this kind of loss rate? I think the answer is no. And it isn’t just no, it’s really no.
But here’s an interesting fact from Pitchbook, Singapore actually absorbs 60% of all Venture Capital dollars in ASEAN and is the 5th largest Venture Capital market globally. Singapore actually has a very sophisticated venture capital ecosystem, it’s just all the dollars are deployed later in the lifecycle of a business and are concentrated in the winners. In other words, Singapore is great at growth capital but not inception capital. The capital isn’t risk taking, it’s growth accelerating.
I think the average Singaporean startup investor would prefer to have 10 base hits rather than 1 home run and 9 losses. Even if it meant on a portfolio basis it performs worse. Being good at venture growth is sort of a category of venture capital that reflects this. You only do Growth if you’re not looking to maximise returns but when you’re trying not to lose money because the companies are more mature.
When capital preservation is prioritised over capital returns maximisation that’s when you do growth over early stage. But remember we are playing an outlier power law game. The 1 home run performs better than 10 base hits. But on a psychological level, losing money on a day to day basis is hard to swallow. I think the Singaporean investors don’t like losing money culturally and that’s why the venture ecosystem is skewed towards growth.
So you have to be extremely capital efficient when you start a startup but you’ll have capital showered on you once it’s working and growing really fast. This is an insight all on its own. Build businesses that focus on growth and aren’t necessarily trying anything new because there isn’t the early stage venture capital to support the early stage. When the venture funds move down the risk curve towards early stage, you’ll start producing a lot of great Singaporean technology companies. So if I was every single Venture Growth fund in Singapore, if I wanted to grow the top of the funnel that will get me standout wins, I’d start Early Stage funds to complement them. Even with small cheque sizes.
Personally I think ecosystems flourish better when the capital is focused at the earliest stages and not at growth. That’s how venture capital works best and the returns are the best. The losses are a sign of how far out you are on the risk curve but so are the returns. Venture is the highest risk capital available because it’s designed to absorb the risk of trying borderline insanity types of businesses. But Asian culture I think particularly struggles with this style of investing and I’d even go so far as to say that this is why these countries have nascent early stage venture capital industries. Because there is no industry where being wrong 9 out of 10 times means you are the best in the world. But in technology creation, that’s exactly how it works.
I think this comes from a cultural save face element. When you are losing money on 9 out of 10 investments, culturally you do not seem like you know what you are doing. Asian culture does not respect this because from a first principles schooling mindset, we derive self worth from our quantum of correctness. Like stereotypically, Asian parents want their kids to be Doctors right who have to be correct most of the time. But this style of correctness doesn’t lend itself to technology creation. In fact you want people who are wrong most of the time but when they’re right, it creates something new.
I’m going to also informally infer it comes from a low risk tolerance savings mindset. Let’s use a weird statistic to prove this. Singaporeans have a 90% home ownership rate and a low amount of average debt tied to housing. Singaporeans generally borrow a low amount of money and then pay it off rapidly. Australians and Americans by comparison have a large amount of household debt and they have long pay back periods. What that says to me is that the average Australian and American is comfortable with more risk than the average Singaporean.
Debt is an informal indicator of risk. Borrowing money is inherently an act of risk taking. People that borrow money are taking more risk by definition. Singaporeans don’t like taking on debt and when they have debt, they prioritise rapid pay off. This says they have a low risk tolerance. Australians are regularly mortgaging their homes to start businesses. I think that would make the average Singaporean feel sick, mortgaging their house to start a company with. That same low risk savings mindset is the exact mindset that makes you a bad technology financier.
So I think these are related. This low risk tolerance to investing is why Singapore has no decacorn SAAS companies. We are in a sense creating the lower risk decacorns, going after lower hanging fruit. The higher risk decacorns are being funded by the Americans and the West. The style of business models that require more risk capital to materialise. So if we have lower risk capital, we need to aim for the lower risk decacorns and lower risk business models which essentially means faster growth rates and earlier profitability. If I had to take it a step further I’d say the ones that don’t have technology risk.
What technology risk is is if the technology doesn’t work, then there’s no business. Think a drug company where the drug doesn’t work or an AI company where the AI model doesn’t work. Those types of companies won’t work in Singapore. The ones that will work are companies with market risk, can you win the market with a technology that everyone can create but can you out execute against your competitors.
So don’t do anything in Singapore that has technology risk, only do things that have market risk. Market risk is overcome with operational excellence. Technology risk can only be overcome with invention and innovation. It is very much more difficult to find someone who can invent something out of thin air than can optimise a supply chain. But a supply chain can be optimised by throwing armies of rule following people at the problem. Which is how we win in Singapore.
So we’ve sort of understood now what our strengths and weaknesses are. So let’s adjust the sail accordingly to try and catch this tailwind. We know how we’re going to win and create more great Singaporean technology companies by focusing on business models that are capital efficient and have low technology risk because there isn’t enough risk capital.
We’re not going to try and create new technology, we’re going to copy western business models and ideas and bring them to Asia with local contexts. We’re going to try and get the Government to help play defence for us and introduce barriers to entry. We’re going to pick the markets and industries that we’re good at Fintech, Manufacturing, 2 Sided Marketplaces and avoid SAAS, Consumer, Enterprise, Media.
We’re going to focus on profitability and growth because there’s not enough risk capital to support research and development, meaning at a minimum 10% revenue growth per month or doubling every year. We’re going to achieve this growth by out executing not out innovating by throwing armies of smart rule followers at the problems and create internal company playbooks that allow our rule followers to maximise return on labour.
Immigration, Family Wealth and the Housing Market
I was once in a bar in Singapore and there was a sign that said: “We Don’t Care Who Your Parents Are, You Must Treat Staff With Respect.” I didn’t really understand what it meant but then when researching this talk I found this article from the Singapore Business Review that said that 50% of Singaporean entrepreneurs utilise family wealth when setting up their first business. That seemed really weird to me. So whether or not you start a startup in Singapore often depends on whether or not you were born into a wealthy family. I don’t really know what to do about that but it’s something that exists here and seems high.
I think it’s a sign of not enough early stage capital. In Australia, if you don’t have wealthy parents, it’s pretty straightforward to put together enough $25k cheques from top startup investors to start the company or you can go through structured programs like Startmate and the Melbourne Accelerator Program, our versions of YCombinator. I don’t know if that exists here in Singapore, I tried to research it and the best I found in articles is Antler and then literally just Ycombinator. So if it doesn’t, that is the lowest hanging fruit high order bit for a big Singaporean growth fund to tap into. Writing tiny $25k cheques in volume to get companies off the ground for Singaporeans that don’t have wealthy families.
If every Singaporean venture firm with a growth arm started also writing tiny $25k cheques, I can almost guarantee that within a decade that will result in more Singaporean unicorns. That’s what we experienced in Australia. It turns out when you grow the top of the funnel of entrepreneurs starting companies, more take off and it naturally results in more unicorns coming out of the bottom of the funnel. It’s actually not the big cheques that do the heavy lifting in growing an ecosystem, it’s the small cheques that do the work for you.
Alternatively, you can immigrate more technology investors to Singapore. You know what’s a really easy way to get a skillset if you don’t have it? Immigrate it. Just bring that skillset from overseas and let it flourish locally. But here’s a weird thing that happens here, Singapore is generally anti immigration. Some of the best people from overseas aren’t granted Singaporean visas. I for example am married to a Singaporean and applied for a permanent residency in Singapore. It was denied.
I’m one of Australia’s best angel investors. If I was granted a Singaporean PR and could live here, I would absolutely bring that knowledge here. But my PR was denied. I even appealed it and it was still denied. The reason for the denial is because I run a company in Australia that I would keep running from overseas. So I wouldn’t have any “local Singaporean employment or income.”
I found that so silly. It’s obvious that Singapore would benefit from the skillset of overseas people to plug local gaps. And I wanted to move to Singapore anyway but the government literally wouldn’t let me. I think there’s some low hanging fruit here. If someone is the best at something overseas and wants to come to Singapore anyway, make it easy for them to live here. T
That person will probably start that startup in Singapore instead of for example Australia, like myself. Easiest way to acquire overseas talent and grow your local ecosystem. Let the best overseas angel investors and entrepreneurs in. That is a simple way to fix the bottleneck. If you’re planning to start a company in Singapore or invest in Singaporean startups, you are allowed to have a 5 year permanent residency. That would be a super easy way of getting huge results.
There’s another thing I think is also harming the creation of new startups in Singapore. And that is a nuance to do with the housing market. Singapore has simultaneously horrifically expensive private housing from private developers but also super cheap affordable government housing in the form of HDB’s and BTO’s. This is a housing product that is world class and is straight up the best in the world. It allows every Singaporean to be wealthy from housing and have a safe and fulfilling life with excellent shelter.
But here’s the nuance that stops you from starting a startup. When exactly, you are allowed to buy the HDB or BTO. Currently you’re only allowed to buy one if you’re married first. But when you get married is exactly the worst time for a person to start a startup because that is when you need secure income to start a family. That is the time in your life in your early 30s when you’re not able to take risk because startups are anything but secure income. People generally are taking all the risk in their life front loaded before they get married and start families.
So we know that the Steve Jobs of Singapore isn’t starting their startup in their early 20s because they’ve spent years in the army from conscription. But there’s another window in time that the Singaporean Steve Jobs would start a startup, that is in their early 30s right after they’ve worked for a few years and have a savings buffer and have bought a property, usually a few years before they get married. That’s how the data plays out in the West.
But this one housing policy in Singapore, requiring people to be married before they can buy an HDB means that the Singaporean Steve Jobs doesn’t buy a property in Singapore first, they wait and get married first because they have to to qualify for the HDB. And because they get married first, they can’t take the risk and start the startup because they have a family. That’s the other thing I would do, get rid of the marriage prerequisite to buy an HDB.
In an unintuitive way this will result in more startups and more unicorns. Because Singaporeans will be able to buy their HDBs earlier in life and will be more financially secure earlier in life. Which means they will take the risk to start the startup in their early 30s right before they get married. We’ve already missed the window with Singaporean Steven Jobs when he’s in his early 20s, because of this housing policy we miss the window with him again when he’s in his early 30s.
I think these 2 life stages are the most important to capture these people and let the entrepreneurs start the companies to create the unicorns that Singapore wants and needs. This will probably also improve the fertility rate too. We know that when people are wealthier they have more babies. The primary source of wealth for the most amount of people is housing wealth. The primary source of housing wealth in Singapore for the average person is buying an HDB.
So people both have more children and start more companies when they are wealthier and buy a house earlier in life. This HDB policy is artificially delaying the lives of all Singaporeans till after marriage and so everything is being delayed as a result of this. I think Singapore would simultaneously experience a startup boom and a baby boom if it ever did this. Two birds with one stone. Fixing the falling fertility rate and getting more Singaporean unicorns.
My final point if we merge the housing point with the immigration point is actually another nuance of the housing market. You can’t buy an HDB if you own property overseas. I would get rid of this policy. Because that actually stops people who want to come to Singapore from doing so. For example, my wife is Singaporean and she and I want to buy an HDB and come live and work here in Singapore for some of the year while also living and working in Australia. But we can’t.
You’re not allowed to buy an HDB if you own overseas property and since all our income is Australian, we can’t get a loan in Singapore to buy the much more expensive private housing. Since we only want to live here a few months per year, we don’t own a Singaporean home and so we don’t come as often as we want to. This has second and third order effects. We’re not starting businesses or investing in Singapore, even though we really want to, we are investing that in Australia instead. And it’s just because of this simple policy, let people who are Singaporean buy HDBs as well as own overseas property. You’ll bring many overseas investors and entrepreneurs who already want to come and have lives that allow them to but are locked out for policy reasons.