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There Are No Right Answers

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Things I wish I knew at the beginning

It may sound like an odd thing to say, but it needs to be heard: there are no right answers. It needs to be repeated many times over.

Startup life is more hard work and grime than the romance it portrays to people who aren’t living it — once you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, you need to keep making more.

The trouble with Singapore and the people in it is exactly as this article puts it: “the average Singaporean professional would rather do the wrong thing, the right way – than the right thing the wrong way.” (There are some problematic assumptions in the article, but I agree with the overall premise.)

We can call this anything we want: a cultural quirk, the Singaporean way, the kiasu syndrome. I won’t pretend I know exactly why we are this way, or even say definitively if we are changing or if we aren’t — though I suspect the education system and the ‘Singapore dream’ has something to do with it.

Growing up in Singapore, the “right way” and the “right answers” are so deeply ingrained in every step of our lives that we seldom stop to think whether they are truly ‘right’, or whether there is such a thing as one way of ‘rightness’ at all.

We’re told (and led to believe): success is great grades at the PSLE, O Levels, A Levels, entry to a prestigious university, a scholarship if that can be arranged, a ‘good job’ (by which it means either a prestigious government job or MNC job or at the very least, one that pays decently well), a good match, a flat (to upgrade to a condo or other ‘private’ housing at an appropriate time in the future), the right number of kids, the right number in your bank when you finally hit the ‘right’ age at which the government will allow you to withdraw your CPF monies to retire in the ‘right’ way.

It’s a national manifestation of the corporate saying (of yesteryear): nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM.. or McKinsey. Strive to do well for yourself but always cover your ass when you can help it.

And then what?

For those of us who have rejected the ‘right’ path and the ‘right’ way to life, it takes a shockingly long time to unlearn this obsession with being correct — to even learn that there is no such thing as the one true way, answer, or path. That this sort of thing is better left to exam-takers and students. And to the religious.

Obsessing about the ‘right’ things to do leads us to take steps that lead to outcomes that are far from ‘right’, such as:

  • Postponing your passion for the safety of knowing what comes next. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the yearning for stability. It is essential to the way most of us structure the rest of our lives, and it affects our interactions with the people around us. Yes, money is very important. Yes, prestige is important. But if you choose to slog for the Big 4 instead of hustling while you are most able to, in your youth, then you shouldn’t be too surprised when you find that your ‘passion’ or ‘dream job’ is rather hard to pursue as a hobby on the side when you have so few hours after-hours. When it’s time to take it up again, your peers will be far, far ahead and far more accomplished — because they slogged for it. I have known crazy talented dancers or musicians at school who would rather do this than keep at their craft, even if it’s so clear to everyone else that in 10 years they could very well be among the best in the world. And yet they would rather temporarily live off the prestige of a massive, faceless company.
  • Projecting for a future that you will talk about, but never end up living. It takes tremendous discipline to actually do what you say you will. It takes more effort than actually doing it. I was often asked, “How do you find the energy to travel to all these places? Or find the money? One day I will quit my job and travel the world for six months.” The problem with that sort of defeatism is that many people dream of doing things. It’s okay to dream. It’s much better to do. You need to know what you really want out of a less-than-ideal situation that you willingly get yourself into — greater financial disposition is usually accompanied by a reduced appetite for risk. It can empower you to set yourself up in such a way that you can eventually fund what you really want to do in the future, but I generally find the people who end up doing exactly that are a dime a dozen and they are the ones who have immense discipline to follow through. Which are traits which would have served them well whether or not they postponed their ambitions.
  • Vacillating. This is the scariest place for anyone to be in. Our education system has trained us to spot answers. We memorize from ten year series, spot trends, guess-timate what we should devote our attention to, skipping whole chunks of interesting knowledge for a higher probability of being correct. After a certain time, our lives stop being defined by the numbers and letters we are awarded for our efforts. Anyone who allows themselves to continue being judged by someone else’s standards is selling themselves short. The net result of a lifetime of all this, which are second guesses at worst and trained reflexes at best, culminate into an expectation of success in return for labour. As kids in school will tell you, this has always been true and will continue to be even more so outside the school system, there are those kids who don’t even seem to try who will do better, and it will have nothing to do with how hard you worked and everything to do with how they were smarter and worked harder.

I could go on. I’ve had a relatively straightforward path to unlearning these bad habits, mostly because as a student of the humanities I preferred to meander than to be precise; I was better at essays than at equations; I was more inclined to investigate the nuances, the spaces between the black and white. I don’t think one should dwell entirely in those nuances, but they have a part to play in kicking you away from certain assumptions about the ‘right things’ that are often dead on wrong, because you consider every other possibility.

In my short time learning to thrive in the startup world, there’s been plenty of thinking on my feet, and even more of making things up as I go along (caveat: make things up in a measured manner, if that’s possible: if you say you will sell ice to eskimos even when you don’t have the water to freeze, you better be able to find a body of water somewhere, somehow). If there was a ‘right’ way to go about doing this, I definitely did not see it. There are some best practices one would do well to adhere to as closely as possible: I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to protect yourself legally and to make sure you are not being taken for a ride by business partners (insisting on contracts with specific scopes, knowing exactly what percentage of equity you are getting and when, what voting rights you have — sounds simple when you talk about it, but is not practised enough especially by young entrepreneurs who are learning on the job. I know because I say this from being on the wrong side of those experiences, early on.)

But the “right” answers? Not such thing. The rational, reasonable things to do so in these strange, fluid worlds of business and technology, very often end up being plain wrong. Pursuing the right answer at every path may land you further away from where you want to be. It is what makes some founders flounder in the face of a little competition, as though competition alone was enough to quit. It is what makes others stick relentlessly to a model that doesn’t work, because the right answers tell them a pivot is not required, even when a pivot is what will save or improve their lots. It is what makes others yet never quit the safety of a job they dislike (oh, and staying in something you don’t particularly love or hate isn’t any better — would you ever marry someone who say they “don’t mind” marrying you? I hope not), to carry the hope of one days and somedays.

So what is the right way? I have no such prescriptions, except this: have a ball of fun, doing and learning this stuff, on the job. Be nimble on your feet, be ready to jog when it’s necessary and sprint when you have to. It’s the best job in the world. It wouldn’t be so if it wasn’t so hard to be ‘right’ at it.

Featured image is “Go” by kaneda99 (link), some rights reserved.

Why I Run

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At some point about ten years ago, I abandoned any ambition of being an elite athlete. I had some training and some talent, but not the discipline, laser focus or hunger. I could win easily at school and be the school champion but injuries and the lack of a track coach for an extended period of time proved to be real setbacks to my national level aspirations. Above all I was not hungry enough to win, and I knew it. I was pretty good at it, but not great.

In the ten years since, I’ve dabbled in too many things to name — my informal learning process has been haphazard, yet absolutely essential (more on that in later posts) — yet two things have stuck with me. Writing, and running; two things which seem to meld effortlessly into everything else because they’re so important. Sometimes they came as a package. A regular running routine kept my mind sharp through the periods of extreme stress in the Singapore education system, and put me in good physical shape to do battle with examination boards and other endless requirements.

Now, as an entrepreneur I still keep close to my heart the lessons I learned from runner/writer hybrids like George Sheehan. Unlike the testosterone and steroids and flaky glamour of the sprinting world, long distance running as a whole appealed to me (although I was a sprinter first) for its meditative, even philosophical qualities; Sheehan’s Running to Win is top of the class for that sort of thing. It is contemplative, inspirational (and not in a cringe-worthy or overtly motivational sort of way) and it makes you look at life through a different prism: that of the interconnectedness of body, mind and success/ambition. I unknowingly carried its lessons with me through my teens before revisiting it in adulthood.

I love road-running. I despise treadmills and gyms. I love pounding the road, discovering new ways to get to familiar places, I love running to my girlfriend’s house and back again. I’m not sure what I feel about competition or group running; running to me is a bit like religion. It’s better with other people, for some of you, but for me it’s 100% private. It’s my alone time with the world and the only time I’m completely switched off. Once in a while I may abide church/competition, but most of the time I am perfectly happy doing it alone even if I’m told I’m doing it wrong.

After a brief lull period — in everything (I had a spell of ill health that forced me to re-evaluate and change pretty much everything about life as I knew it; I closed my last business, moved countries, and stopped running) — I’m now back with a vengeance. It’s slow-going at first, as your body and mind creaks back into action. But the adrenalin is addictive. That’s why we do it, I think. Those of us who choose the hard way: to run almost barefoot on hard pavement, to ignore the wonders of a salaried stability, to chalk it all up to that weird feeling in your gut that you have to do this. That’s what I live for. That’s what I run and work for.

I don’t know what will come out of this. I have some vague hypotheses that I may ramble at length about, here, in between the arduous tasks in the setting up of a new business. I may or may not have any spectacular insights. The worst that can happen is that I run a lot, and fail to create anything of lasting business value. The best? That this page will continue to be updated with links to the essays about running and business that I will write. And that they will be of use to somebody other than myself. Or at least fun to read. We’ll see.

For now, you just gotta keep on running.

Business Is

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“Every successful business (1) creates or provides something of value that (2) other people want or need (3) at a price they’re willing to pay, in a way that (4) satisfies the purchaser’s needs and expectations and (5) provides the business sufficient revenue to make it worthwhile for the owners to continue operation.” — Josh Kaufman

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Loving My Brother (Startup Version)

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I’ve always been close to my family. We’re a small, tightly knit family. Where other people had massive reunion dinners at each year’s Lunar New Year, mine had always been tiny, composed, calm, and very staid. We knew everyone’s name and we knew what they did. We genuinely liked each other, which was rare for most (large) Chinese families. We avoided the mahjong table. I never learned to gamble.

The thing with regular Chinese families is there’s so much bloody shame in everything you do. We mostly recoil from the physical touch, no matter how close you are to each other — it’s just damn weird to be physically close or too exceedingly emotional around each other.

My brother and I, five years apart, grew up at odds with each other. Our odd number of years between us meant he was in the morning classes, and I was in the evening ones; if he was in the evening classes, I was in the morning ones. By the time they finally did away with double session school days, we were already in different schools. We did not have much time to bond, and what little time we did have together was spent getting on each other’s nerves, as little children are wont to do.

It suffices to say we led very separate lives for a long time.

We were close, but not too close.

Normal: seeing each other at home, having lunch and dinner with the family, occasionally going out with his friends.

Strange: calling each other on the phone, chatting too much, confiding in each other, talking to each other about our personal lives.

Close enough to tell each other about who we were dating and occasionally introducing them to each other — not close enough to talk about why it worked out or why it didn’t, even when I was very obviously heartbroken and in a state of mourning.

Despite all these obstacles, we maintained a sizable amount of interest in each other’s lives. Certain areas overlapped. Basketball and soccer were two areas we bonded over, as very young children. Adrian would command me to follow the NBA finals of our favourite team, the Chicago Bulls circa 1992, so that he would know who won the moment he got home from school. Not knowing what to do or what information he wanted, and not daring to ask, I copied down every single scoreline the moment it flashed on the screen. I presented him with several pages worth of numbers when he got home.

Music was another. He played in a local rock band for many years, starting from when I was a wee 10 year old. He would thrust the bass guitar into my hand and make me strum along. My “stage name” was D’ arcy, after the Smashing Pumpkins’ chick bassist. I never learned to play bass, but I spent many nights imagining I would one day be a rock star with him.

Then the rest of our lives took over. We finished our respective educations, went to university, did our own thing generally. He became a teacher; I went and tried to do everything. Everything including the occasionally strange and unrecommended, before eventually emerging from the experiences with a preference for the strange and constructive. He got married, I left the country; he became a father, I came home to my own set of responsibilities. I was so uninvolved and detached from Singapore and the family for a time, through physical distance and my other pursuits, that I did nothing at his wedding except show up (exceeding expectations too, at that).

Fast forward to 2010. He was no longer teaching, and I was no longer happy to remain a freelance writer. I guess we were both keen on “starting up stuff” — it has always been such a thrill for us — and it just so happened that we found we had something else in common. We would chat for hours about ideas, technicalities, business and marketing aspects, programming possibilities, among other things. I introduced him to Founder’s Institute. He attended, did brilliantly, found his footing (along with awesome co-founders), and is now way ahead in the launch of his educational apps in his young company.

When I come home we now chat rather extensively, to the amusement of our family members who mostly aren’t interested in tech or startups or entrepreneurship, exchange pointers, contacts, ideas, and above all learn a great deal from each other. As if we didn’t already talk, gesture, move and sound like each other, we now talk about the same things. It’s nice to have someone in the family who gets it, who faces similar struggles, who is seeking a similar path to success. It truly helps.

These days, I see my family a whole lot more than I did in all of 2008 and 2009. We’re more open about everything, enjoy each other’s company, and I hope to spend much more time with them from now on. If this is what adulthood is like, I have to say I quite like it.

Confessions of a Journeywoman

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It’s taken me a while to finally put up this site, to write this post. It’s not supposed to be so hard to do — I did, after all, spend many years honing my craft as a writer, with some success (speaking of which, the reason this site exists is because I want to keep all the travel and literary writing at Popagandhi.com).

I still continue to write, but for now starting up things has become something of an obsession.

Where do I begin?

3 years ago I was just graduating from Singapore Management University, with my degree in political science. I had some idea of what I wanted to do. More of one, of what I didn’t want to do.

What I didn’t want to do:

  1. Get a “proper job”
  2. Work crazy hours in a gig I didn’t love
  3. Anything corporate
  4. Waste my life thinking about the what ifs, when I could be… doing something awesome

Looking back at it now, it was a giant leap of faith. 3 years went by in a blur — what I accomplished, in that short time, was to have led a life I had always dreamed of, writing and photographing everywhere, spending inordinate amounts of times in exotic locales, doing stupid shit like going to Yemen dressed in a balto, pretending that terrorism and civil war was somebody else’s problem (and narrowly avoiding several bombs along the way). In the end, that career and lifestyle was not something I could do long term, for someone who wanted to “settle down”. So I came home.

What I was going to do at “home” (where home meant Southeast Asia, in general), I had no idea. I moved to Kuala Lumpur with no savings and no job. I wrote freelance for a while. I knew, in the end, that I needed to do something in tech, but I didn’t know how to. I had been away for too long, and been too distant from “the scene” — my friends were all abroad by now — I was hardly even in Singapore at all.

Somehow or other, I got involved in a small, ambitious aviation startup. It was a LinkedIn introduction that did it, but I ended up working on a mobile app idea in a co-founder’s capacity. There was a lot I know now that I didn’t, at the time. I am no longer involved in it, but in the process of searching for talent, putting together business plans and strategy, I found I had some aptitude for this stuff. I became deeply immersed in the inner workings of the emerging startup “scene” in Singapore. I learned a great deal from it.

And here I am, now in the midst of 2011. What am I doing? I run a small digital agency called Pen to Pixel. We started a year ago, as a complementary service to offer to the clients from the aviation startup. We pivoted the first time when we disengaged from the aviation side of the business. We are pivoting again, right now, which I will come to later. At the time, with zero account management, project management experience, and no agency experience to speak of, trying to run it was like jumping off a cliff. It would take days to make a quotation — how much should it cost? How should it look? What would I say in it? — all of that was really difficult to me. How should a project be run? How should invoicing, payment, legal terms be processed? All that was very new for a kid who had not had a day’s worth of “real work”. I can’t say it comes easily now, but I do believe that there’s nothing you can’t learn to do once you’ve set your mind to it. How we did that and survived with something to show for it, with zero capital, is another story for another day.

In the midst of building all those client websites and other print and digital projects, I had the opportunity to experience first-hand the tremendous changes that the startup scene in Singapore, and Singapore in general, is going through. It’s a wonderfully transformative process. The Singapore of my childhood was one of rapid change at all cost, where, the moment you left the country for some weeks you came back and it felt different (and not in a good way); the Singapore that I briefly stepped away from, and returned to, is one of promise. In a few short years we’ve built an ecosystem for startups that’s unrivalled by any other larger Southeast Asian city. We may not always get everything right, but there’s a comfortable mix of money, talent and opportunity. The friendships and the potential of the startup scene in Singapore was what made me start looking homeward, such that even if I still don’t spend more than 180 days in Singapore each year (for personal reasons), I am at least in Singapore every two or three weeks, deeply involved in everything that goes on there — whether it’s tech or politics. I incorporate in Singapore because it is the best place to do so.

Though Pen to Pixel continues to do client work, we are going through an interesting period in our short history that will redefine who we are and what we do. We’re working on an ambitious social game on Facebook; we’re also getting our very first iOS app built, our own product. Games and apps are definitely something we are very excited about. Then there’s also a bunch of HTML5 projects that we’d like to get our feet wet in. Whatever happens now, will depend very much on the talent and drive of my small, dedicated team — as well as on the decisions I make and opportunities I am able to bring about. Maybe one day we will be able to pivot again and build a product or two that will define our careers. It’s a big baptism of fire.

I hope to document what we do, the people we meet, the work we get done, and the journey we will be taking, with sunny Singapore as a backdrop.

I hope you will join me.

P.S. And if you’re a bright, curious mind with some design chops — I’m hiring.