I read with much chagrin an article in today’s Today *plays canned laughter*, titled “Cupid just a click away”. Loh Chee Kong reports on the spurt of startups that are trying to bear the mantle of SDU’s match-making efforts. Some 30 new services have sprouted up in the last 5 months alone:

• iFoundaries “Who works around you?” – an online dating portal for white-collared singles. Think “Who lives near you?“. Secured S$141,000 in seed funding from SDU’s Partner Connection Fund. To be unveiled this July.
• Singles Mingle – taking care of a couple’s needs from the first date till they say “I do” *another PORTAL – what a bore!*.
• GoMovieDate.com – online match-making for blind dates at the movies! Mr. Matthew Tan (director) says, “Our website helps them to do sweet little things like send chocolates or flowers after the movie date.” *erm…how very thoughtful of GoMovieDate.com*
• Lunch Actually – match-making through lunch dates. *interesting…maybe I should sign up myself*

I say chagrin, because I believe the success of entrepreneurship in S’pore can be partially attributed to the number of singles we have. Don’t get me wrong! I’m perfectly cool with entrepreneurs having boyfriends and girlfriends. It’s just that most Singaporean girls (or their parents) start getting fidgety if you don’t marry them before 30. You’re then expected to take up a housing loan and buy public housing, or if you happen to marry a rich one, move into a condo at the very least. After a pompous wedding attended by all your pals and relatives, you’ll find yourself happily married to the love of your life, and saddled with housing and car loans. You stare glumly at your seriously-depleted bank balance, silently curse the S’pore government for getting their CPF and public housing schemes right, and kiss your personal seed capital and startup dreams goodbye for the next 1 or 2 decades. Five years on, your house is filled with the joyful sound of children, and you decide to upgrade to a larger apartment and give your family a better life, chucking your startup dreams and aspirations out of the window for good.

Unless your significant other shares your dreams, it’s gonna be reaaaaaal hard to bite the bullet and bear the risks of starting your own business or work for a startup.

Don’t you think our Civil Service sends us conflicting signals? On one hand, we have the Ministry of Community Development and Sports dangling big fat carrots to encourage couples to have kids. On the other, countless nameless public servants in statutory boards such as EDB, Spring S’pore, IE S’pore, IDA and MDA work their asses off to promote entrepreneurship and our SMEs.

Wake up Singapore! You can’t always have your cake and eat it too!

p.s.: A simple solution would be for the government to import entrepreneurs from around the world, and stop trying to encourage entrepreneurship amongst Singaporeans. Singaporeans can continue in their 9-6 jobs and receive a comfortable paycheck from the government or MNCs while they have loads of fun making babies. Leave all that entrepreneurship bullsh*t to them foreign talents yeah?

But you and I know the likelihood of such a policy being adopted is as likely to happen as Chiam See Tong becoming Prime Minister of Singapore. Besides, I’ve yet to make my first million as an entrepreneur!

Bah.

I love TODAY – I leave home with a copy tucked under my arms, and proceed to devour it, regardless of whether I get a seat or stand the entire 45 minutes of my daily bus journey to work. When I do get a seat, I’m always struggling between reading the articles carefully and scanning them so I get to catch up on my sleep.

Which is why, it’s always nice to turn a page and catch sight of some eye candy – simple things like these go a long way towards perking up an otherwise-mundane morning. My daily dose of poison came in between pages 38 through 45 in today’s Today.

Extracted from TODAY Online

On the left, we have pretty Ponz Goo – she may be 35, but she certainly doesn’t look a day past 25 (at least in photos)! On the right, we have sassy Yenn Wong, who at 27 looks…well, 27 (okay I ran out of my wits here).

In addition to looking just fine, Ponz and Yenn are both CEOs of their respective businesses – Ponz founded and owns the Haach Spa and Wellness Chain, while Yenn runs JIA (a boutique hotel in HK) on top of her HK online gaming and Bangkok-based interior construction and furniture businesses. I couldn’t find any official statistics, but my hunch is that S’pore’s female CEOs are a minority amidst our male-dominated club of SME CEOs.

Which only serves to put the majority of S’pore’s male CEOs to greater shame! I cannot even begin to fathom showcasing our lot of generally undesirable male SME CEOs in a similar spread in the newspapers. For this year’s Budget, we heard how the Singapore Government wants to attract and nurture our pool of world-class SMEs. I think we’re quite some ways from achieving that, especially when our SME CEOs are short on the areas that really matter – competencies, ambition and mindset.

When you’re an SME, there’s a need for the CEO to serve multiple roles. Yet a lot of them can’t really master basic stuff like business planning, human resource planning, marketing, or financial analysis planning, much less complex topics like Level 5 leadership, creative incentives and employee compensation, and other complex Organisational Behaviour issues.

Certainly, you can hire people or outsource a large chunk of these, but where then is your value-add as the CEO, beyond the money and/or the idea? On top of that, some of our CEOs also lack that ambition or drive to bring their businesses to the next level. I hear stories of conservative CEOs who are keen on maintaining a particular lifestyle, and prefer not to take even the most calculated of risks with their businesses. A chunk of these folks refuse to look beyond the shores of Singapore, and instead are contented to live off the fat of government tenders.

Little wonder then for new chairman of Spring Singapore, Mr. Philip Yeo’s comments.

We cannot do the same SMEs as we have today, which are manufacturing, services and retail. We need to train the new generation of SMEs…it will be a different Spring.

Today, “New Spring chief to groom future CEOs”, 29 Mar ‘07

My guess is that he’s given up on changing the ambitions and mindsets of the existing lot of underperforming SME CEOs, and will instead focus his energies on grooming an elite cadre of well-rounded scientists-cross-trained-as-businessmen scholars. I know I know; elite, cadre and scholars go hand in hand, but my English teacher once said repetition can be a form of emphasis!

If there’s ever a miracle worker in Singapore, it’s got to be Mr. Philip Yeo. The man with the golden touch has given us the National Computerisation Programme, a robust MNC landscape, Jurong Island, Biopolis, Fusionopolis and a bustling Life Sciences industry. Will he once again leave behind a wondrous legacy?

Or will our ailing SMEs be a harder nut to crack? Only time can tell.

Until Philip’s poster-boy/girl SME CEOs return to our shores in their shiny steeds, the majority of our SME CEOs will continue to remain…well…plain ‘undesirable’.

*wink*

Singapore is home to 160+ VC firms managing a total of S$X billion. Fact.

Singapore has a successful venture capital industry. Myth.

The truth of the matter is, out of these 160+ VCs, only a handful are known to be open to the idea of investing in Singapore start-ups. The majority raise and park their capital here and invest in India and China, because as one venture capitalist once told me, “the deal flow quantity and quality is just so much better.”

Whoever mooted the idea of using US$1.3b to attract venture capitalists to set up shop in Singapore (in the form of EDB’s Technopreneurship Investment Fund) in the hopes of completing the Singapore entrepreneurship puzzle could have been somewhat misguided. Bring the VCs and you’ll get your start-ups? HMMMMMM…I salute your spirit and intent, but not your methods.

Our venerable business angels don’t fare much better on the scorecard either. Most of Singapore’s angels made their wealth from traditional businesses, such as real estate or banking and finance. To most entrepreneurs, these angels continue to maintain their relevance, and more often than not have a tremendous impact on their F&B-or-what-have-you enterprises. Yet anecdotal evidence suggests Singaporean angels, by virtue of their poorer risk appetite, lack of domain knowledge and insistence on positive cash flow, have missed out on one of the largest slices of the entrepreneurial pie – technology innovation.

And so our government resorts to market-distorting policies to plug the funding gap in the ecosystem, through a co-investment model (in the form of SEEDS funding and Growth Financing) for start-ups. I say these are market-distorting, because public funds are being used as a means to lower the risks borne by VCs and angels, to incentivise them to invest in 2nd-tier start-ups in Singapore. The really good start-ups will have no problems securing access to capital – VCs and angels would be falling over their feet to stake a claim on them before you can say return-on-investment. The question all of us should raise then, is: “Is this the best/most effective and impactful use of public monies?”

Ok ok ok…hold your horses. Not all SEEDS-invested start-ups were 2nd-tier. These funding certainly give entrepreneurs a shot at proving John Fischer (the F in DFJ) wrong about Singapore.

I don’t believe Singapore will ever produce a world-class start-up in the next 20 years.

- John H. N. Fischer at Stanford GSB, when asked after a class about why DFJ stopped investing in Singapore

I don’t need to extol too much on the mega-high returns that start-ups are garnering in the Information economy and increasingly so, in the Attention economy. Singapore has wasted a good 5 years chasing the shadows of the dotcom boom, and it’s about time our nation’s leaders start taking a serious look at this, with a different eye. Your MNC-courting ways won’t work when it comes to nurturing world-class SMEs.

At the end of the day, it’s all about the team behind the start-up. Court the talent, and all the capital and wealth of the world will flow into Singapore.

When that day comes, I will gladly close this blog down. Until then however, the rest of you will have to put up with my endless tirade.

The next time you come across a man in a suit having a serious discussion with a geeky-looking engineer in Singapore, stop dead in your tracks, whip out your handphone and snap a picture. You’ve just captured history .

Thanks to the Singapore education system, our schools and universities have churned out cohort after cohort of excellent lawyers, accountants, businessmen, programmers, engineers, even expert test-tube cleaners for our life sciences industry – you name it, we’ve got some of the best in town!

Yet, our best-of-the-breed seem to exist in separate worlds. In primary school, we were streamed into various bands of academic excellence – peer pressure deemed hanging out with folks from a lower band as un-cool. In junior college and university, we were likely to spend more time interacting across faculties at canteens during your breaks, than working on inter-disciplinary projects. The majority of local varsity coursework continues to value domain experts more highly than ‘Jack of all Trades, Master of None’ generalists.

Couple all of the above, with a general lack of interaction between businessmen (who kept to their swanky business schools and pompous fellow students) and domain experts (we know better than those snotty businessmen) and what do we get? Yet another piece of the puzzle to the question that whysgentrepreneurssuck seeks to answer!

Because our businessmen and domain experts don’t talk to one another more, we end up with the following:

• Domain experts developing products and services with technology they love , but without market demand or sensible business models
• Businessmen selling business ideas or products without true competitive advantage, and thus having to resort to an insane amount of fluff

What can we do about it then?

• Be aware, and do not discriminate! Businessmen or not, we’re all keen on building that next big start-up, and join the ranks of Osim, Banyan Tree, Hyflux, e.t.c. Instead of exclusion, try picking the brains of that next smooth businessman you come across – you might just find a new partner for your start-up.
• Leave the comforts of your safety zone, and make contact with all kinds of people – you’ll never know when you need to invite that accountant friend of yours to be your start-up’s CFO, or that nerdy geeky class loser as your CTO.
• Keep the talking alive! Fire that email off to that cool dude you met at the last event. Perhaps Entrepreneur27, SGentrepreneur, Barcamp Singapore, Mobile Monday, etc could consider a regular combined event to allow the entire community to mingle and exchange ideas?

More ideas people?

Ever wondered why Singapore’s infocomm SMEs fare so poorly beyond our shores?

Some of the common excuses I hear from peers or entrepreneurs I meet include:

Aiyah, Singapore’s market very small mah…then gahmen only give tenders to MNCs and GLCs. GLCs also very unfriendly lah, dun help us SMEs.

Gahmen give us grant for product development, for brand strategy, but never give us grant for brand roll-out.

In fact, I could go on and on about each of the above-mentioned comments, but I won’t – not in this entry at least. The one that has been bugging me the most is…*drum roll*

Branding? Orrrh…yah I paid a design house to design my logo recently. Also hired an intern to do my marketing lah. Whatever collaterals we need, my sales team looks for her.

Of course, I exaggerate. However, the underlying fact remains – a significant portion (don’t ask me to quote, it’s all anecdotal) of our infocomm SMEs that form the 80% of companies and businesses, but only <20% of the revenue, continue to have fallacies to the utmost degree when it comes to branding.

Add to that the fact that ~60% of the ICT industry (in terms of revenue) in Singapore is dominated by hardware distributorship and system integrators – companies that make moolah by pushing other people’s brands…it’s little wonder we’ve yet to see a strong ICT brand emerge from Singapore. Even Creative Technologies, our poster-boy of yore has become the proverbial hare in the race with the once-turtlish Apple Inc. The result? The ignominy of losing in its brand equity, market share and a P/E ratio of 915.

Instead of chasing that next deal, you Singaporean SME CEOs, it would do your companies some good to STOP and THINK about how branding can be a strategic enabler to your businesses. Repeat after me!

1. Branding does not equal marketing!
2. Branding is NOT ancillary when it comes to your business!
3. Stop treating your Marketing & Communications folks like support staff!
4. (to add more when they come to mind)

Without strong ICT brands that we can call our own, to distinguish our companies from ‘the madding crowd’, Singapore’s infocomm industry will surely melt in the heat of global competition.

Wake up your bloody idea, because I told you to.

Wake up your bloody idea, because otherwise, your company won’t be stickin’ around for much longer.

Wake up your bloody idea, I implore of thee (or is it thou?) – the fate of our tiny nation state’s future lies in the hands of you SMEs!

We Singaporeans live in bleak times.

Amidst a global landscape of successful entrepreneurship, few Singaporeans truly qualify to stand up and be counted.

Of course, critics will claim that Singapore is but a population of 4.5 million. Without a sizable local market, and with a super efficient government that fixes whatever that doesn’t work and gives the Economic and Development Board (EDB) carte blanche to reel in the MNCs of the world, how can an individual or a small team be expected to make it to the big league from within our shores?

What then of Israel, may I ask? A country of over 7 million (not that much larger than Singapore) is home to close to 20 publicly-traded companies on the NASDAQ. That’s a figure that’s even larger than all of Europe, which can only lay claim to less than 10. Sure, Israel’s surrounded by a whole bunch of hostile nations. Singapore, on the other hand, has not experienced wars since the Occupation by Japanese WW2 forces since 1945. From the looks of it, Singaporeans appears to lack the instinctive desire for self-preservation as Israelis do. Singapore is safe from dangers.

Or is that so?

In recent years, multiple neighbouring nations have chosen to nitpick with Singapore over a variety of issues – apart from perennial Malaysia, we also have Indonesia (for calling Singapore a ‘tiny red dot’) and Thailand (all that ruckus over the Shin Corp deal). Oh wait, isn’t a predominantly-ethnically Chinese Singapore surrounded by the 2 most populous Muslim countries in the region?

Come on you Singaporeans! Stop turning to taxi driving as a late-stage career move. Come on MAS and banks! Make non-collateral-based loans a possibility. We’ve missed out on enough YouTubes and Skypes to have kicked our butts off our asses since yesterday already.

The future of SMEs and entrepreneurship in Singapore needs YOU!