Transform and disrupt: Circles’ first employee looks back

When Kelvin Chua, Circles’ head of R&D, first met the company’s founders back in 2014, he was intrigued.

They had a bold vision – to return power to the customers in the face of static and uncompromising offerings from existing telco players.

“In general, when founders pitch, it is often more about the long-term vision, but they don’t really look at the challenges and difficulties ahead,” he recounts. “However, the Circles co-founders actually had this journey already planned out and I saw that they had a high probability of success.”

Kelvin Chua, head of R&D at Circles / Photo credit: Circles

Chua had previously turned down the founders’ attempts at getting him to join their company as he had recently left another Singapore-based startup that had gone south. However, after hearing their pitch, he changed his mind.

Having spent his entire career in startups adjacent to the telco industry – Chua focused on developing communication solutions and related infrastructure – Circles seemed like a unique opportunity.

“For the longest time, I’d been trying to get my foot in the door of the telco industry, trying to influence how telcos are being built,” Chua says. “Here, I could build one from the ground up.”

He joined Circles in 2014 as its very first employee, embarking on a journey of transformation and disruption that’s still going after nearly nine years.

Daring to disrupt

Chua’s very first role at Circles was that of a senior software engineer. However, in those early days, he wore many hats.

“I was an engineer but I was also ordering water for the office, doing translation for Chinese-speaking partners, decorating the office… everybody was doing everything,” he recalls.

He was heavily involved in the early stages of the company’s journey. The team often consulted with existing industry players and experts to better understand what was going on in the sector and how they could build their own digital telco.

“Everyone told us not to do it,” says Chua. “They told us our ideas wouldn’t work, that we had to go about things in a certain way. But if we did it again that way, we wouldn’t be adding any value.”

“At Circles, we’ve always come from the perspective that if we want to disrupt this market, we need to do something different,” he adds.

To that end, the team decided to go back to “first principles” – focusing on what the ideal customer experience and journey would be and working backward to create this experience.

“One of our core philosophies at Circles right from the start is customer happiness – not just satisfaction,” Chua explains.

When the team launched Circles Life, the company’s digital telco, in 2016, it put a heavy emphasis on empowering the lives of digital natives. Circles offers unique customer-centric features such as flexible no-contract plans, the ability to add data on-demand, and a mobile app that doubles as a self-service dashboard to monitor usage. These are all features that make the telco stand out against its competitors.

The startup also pushed the boundaries with bold and unconventional marketing campaigns.

Besides differentiating Circles from its competitors, these campaigns also helped to address some of the hurdles Chua faced when hiring.

“When Circles was still in its early stages, it was very challenging to convince people to come and join – a lot of people thought we wouldn’t succeed,” he shares. “Once we became more popular because of these stunts, it was easier to sell the Circles vision, and we put in extra effort to improve our interview processes and make us more memorable to candidates.”

Build products, solve problems

Over the years, Chua has led several teams in Circles, including the DevOps and information security teams. He’s had the opportunity to learn about different working cultures and management styles, shifting from being a startup head to a more process-driven tech leader.

Chua’s focus on building the best product Circles can offer led to him becoming the head of R&D, a role he pushed for the creation of.

“I told the founders that I want this [role] because I saw the need for it,” he shares. “We have to anticipate future needs as we keep evolving.”

Armed with this problem-solving approach, Chua and his team are focused on anticipating potential market challenges or demands. Some examples of what his team has been working on include travel program Jetpac and in-app events platform Discover.

All of these features have been made possible through the technology behind Circles X, which enables telco operators to launch digital mobile brands from anywhere in the world. Circles X is the company’s cloud-native digital telco SaaS platform with marketing tech and telco tech capabilities built around a customer data core.

Circles X was originally developed in 2015 to power the firm’s own consumer platform. The Circles team needed an “extremely malleable and robust sandbox that allows for experimentation,” says Chua, one that would allow them to test and deploy new offerings easily.

In comparison, legacy telco infrastructure could have as many as 400 to 500 systems stacked on top of each other, making it challenging to innovate without breaking the setup.

With this in mind, Circles X is an enterprise technology product that enables telco operators to launch digital mobile brands remotely, run lean operations with 10x less people, and increase business agility.

According to Chua, the platform is “the outcome of years of learning in five different geographies.” Operating as a SaaS solution, Circles X currently powers global carriers (including Circles Life) and “handles the entire customer life cycle, enabling the operators to be more efficient in running their businesses.”

Photo credit: Circles

Circles X allows the company to run experiments on its own network, creating complementary business lines between its consumer and enterprise services. This allows it to use Singapore – where customers are more receptive to trying new things – as a testbed, as well as to roll out products to its enterprise customers.

The digital platform’s enterprise service came about because many partners were curious about how Circles was able to operate on such lean infrastructure.

“We realized we were on to something when every partner wanted the secret sauce,” Chua adds.

The company also launched the Circles X R&D Centre in a bid to enhance developments in the telco space and drive transformation across the industry globally.

Growing and going

Circles has come far from when Chua first joined. It is in what it calls “hypergrowth” mode, serving customers in 13 countries across five continents.

It recently expanded into Taiwan and Australia and struck up partnerships with leading carriers in Indonesia and Japan. The company has financial backing from investors such as Sequoia Capital, EDBI, and Warburg Pincus. In 2022, Circles acquired the mobile virtual network enabler business of Pareteum, a US-based communication solutions provider.

“When I first joined Circles, the company was like a teenager – a bit rebellious,” Chua muses. “Now, it’s an adult that’s matured and learned new things, but that streak of rebelliousness is still there.”

On the road ahead, Chua shares that Circles is exploring how it can customize its offerings for a wider audience and bring its services, technology, and expertise to the world.

“What works for Singapore might not work for Japan, for example,” he explains. “We want to start offering global services on top of Circles X.”

And Chua is looking forward to seeing the company’s global expansion become a reality firsthand.

“People often ask me why I’m still [working] here,” he says. “Circles has solved the initial challenge it set out to address but there are still so many opportunities to truly create great, customer-centric offerings – it is so much deeper, and that’s what keeps me here.”

Circles is a leading global digital telco technology and consumer company committed to investing and developing its engineering center of excellence across its different markets.

If you’re interested in exploring job opportunities with Circles, you can learn more on the company’s careers page.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.