This week saw Singapore’s Digerati celebrated by the country’s Prime Minister just as a rising star from JFDI’s first batch closed a $6.5m series A round. We have reached the end of the beginning for the country’s startup scene, writes JFDI CEO Hugh Mason.
The last time I met Facebook’s co-founder, nobody knew who he was.
One evening in 2009, Meng Wong and I were sitting in Hackerspace. We drank whisky and chatted about how cool it is that stuff which was sci-fi when we were kids now comes free with your phone. Then some dude called Eduardo showed up and said he had just arrived from the Valley. So we took him to Nabin’s for moussaka, beer, and sheesha.
Only six months later, when The Social Network came out, did we realize he was that Eduardo.
I’m glad we had the opportunity to meet Eduardo Saverin as we did because, today, everyone introduced to him must get dazzled by dollar signs. They probably don’t get the chance to know the thoroughly nice guy behind them. But this week Eduardo was on official Poster Boy duty, doing his National Service as a newly minted Singapore Citizen, shining as a binary star alongside Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. It was a glittering celebration of how important startups have become for the country.
Founder’s Forum
The occasion was the opening of the Founder’s Forum, an invitation only gathering of Digerati from around the world, this time held at the Istana, the country’s presidential palace. Meng and I were honoured to be invited along but I have to confess that we both felt strangely out of place.
We wondered why. It wasn’t impostor syndrome and it wasn’t the surreal sight of hired lovelies on the lawn wearing cheongsam to dispense an uniquely singaporean combination of Haw Flakes, Satay and mosquito repellant.
Eventually it came to us: entrepreneship truly has been adopted by the establishment. The event was partly about showing that to the world but the official endorsement also seemed to saying to a traditionally risk-averse nation: “Do Try This At Home, Kids”.
That’s quite a pivot, as we say in the startup world.
Back where we work, the scrappy due-for-demolition factory that JFDI calls home has recently been given an official ministry makeover. It now wears corporate murals, official graffiti walls and a new coat of paint. And at the Istana, all the men had been told to wear coats, despite 90% humidity and 32C heat.
So I was delighted to see that, like me, JFDI alumnus and Tradegecko CEO Cameron Priest had disrupted the dress code. He looked much more comfortable than most of the bankers, foreign investors and corporate folk who largely made up the crowd. As did Jayesh Parek, one of the investors who I knew was planning to share in Tradegecko’s $6.5m series A fundraising announcement this week. Which they duly did yesterday. But while the news was still confidential, we celebrated privately.
The End of the Beginning
The best part of the evening for me was the chance to walk through the grounds of the Istana at sunset. Meng had read that Lee Kuan Yew often loved to take that walk, watching fondly over the fate of each big tree and the CBD growing in the distance. That night we got to follow in his footsteps and I was delighted to hear frogs croaking, joyfully.
It was a good chance to reflect because Tradegecko’s fundraising is hugely significant for everyone in JFDI’s community. Not just because it gives a big uptick to our portfolio valuation. Much more because it’s validation for a lot of people’s hard work.
Today we work in a building with $1.5billion under management, looking to be invested in early stage tech businesses. Literally feet from our startup teams are investors in our space with $200m to deploy. No need to make an appointment – it’s a five second walk for teams going through our Accelerate program to talk with Monk’s Hill Ventures, Northstar Silicon Island, Clickstream Ventures or Frontier Ventures. Two more funds from Japan will be moving in with us next month. But back in 2009, startups and Singapore hardly ever appeared in the same sentence.
Early-stage investors were also thin on the ground. Pioneers like Wong Poh Kam had laid the foundations to connect the few active business angels but, even so, it took Meng and I nearly two years to raise the money to set up the region’s first accelerator program. Thank you to everyone who took that leap of faith on the frog.
So somehow Tradegecko’s latest raise plus the event at the Istana felt like the end of something. Borrowing from Winston Churchill: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Learning from success, learning from failure
As founders of JFDI and co-owners of Tradegecko and our other stand-out successes like OurHealthMate, Healint, DatastreamX and Silent Eight, of course we celebrate good news. But as engineers aiming to understand what makes startups tick, we also want to know what breaks so we don’t have to make that mistake again. It’s the only way we know to move early stage venture development forward, from an exciting but unpredictable dark age where the only option is to ‘hunt’ for fleeting success, towards a more sustainable model where we ‘farm’ innovation systematically.
Which makes now also a great time to celebrate local founder-turned-JFDI-startup coach Adrian Tan. He and his team worked alongside Tradegecko in our pioneer cohort of startups in 2012. But like most startups, their business didn’t work out. Quite rightly, Adrian has taken to heart the commitment JFDI’s community makes to transparency and he has written openly about what they got wrong. We’re hoping that others in the community and our updated portfoliowill also work with us to share their learning so that we can collect and reflect on the patterns that reveal what can go wrong as well as right.
Esther Dyson is famous for saying “Make new mistakes!” and as scientists we believe, on some deep level, that may be the only approach that matters. If a new generation of entrepreneurs in Singapore can take Dyson’s words to heart, and keep showing that it values learning from failure as much as success, our ecosystem truly will have come of age.