Starting Carousell hasn’t been a walk in the park for CEO Quek Siu Rui

Quek Siu Rui has not taken a holiday in nearly eight years.

Since he co-founded Carousell in 2012, almost all of the 32-year-old’s free time has been devoted to thinking about what is next, he said. “I have this almost extreme view of the world where [if you do something,] you’ve got to do it well and good. You’ve got to be laser-focused and almost obsessed about it.”

Siu Rui Quek, co-founder and Group CEO of Carousell / Photo credit: Handout

As the face of one of Singapore’s most prominent startups – widely recognized as a pioneer in mobile classifieds – it comes as little surprise that Quek is almost constantly working. On weekends, he often has to remind himself not to send emails to employees, he said, admitting that he has wished the weekend would pass more quickly so his workweek could begin again.

So when asked what he would like to do as part of this interview series, where a Post journalist interacts with tech CEOs over an activity of their choice, Quek opted to go hiking – an activity he used to enjoy but has not had much time to indulge in.

“My life has been relatively simple and focused on Carousell, it’s almost boring,” the CEO said with a laugh. “I haven’t gotten a chance to do as much walking in my life because – Carousell comes first.”

On a balmy, humid Saturday morning I met Quek at Bukit Timah Hill, Singapore’s highest hill at 163 meters tall. The place holds fond memories for Quek from his secondary school days when he used to hike there as part of an outdoor activities club and later on when bonding with colleagues in Carousell’s early days.

Dressed in a black T-shirt with the Carousell logo emblazoned across the front, exercise shorts, and army-issue running shoes, Quek greeted me with his signature toothy grin before announcing that we would be embarking on a “moderate” trail. I groaned. With my general lack of fitness, I had hoped to take an easier route.

But Quek was rather more philosophical about the challenge: “The outdoors really shapes you as a person, it’s therapeutic and through the challenging highs and lows you really learn perseverance,” he said, recounting past climbing trips to Malaysia’s Mount Kinabalu and Nepal’s Annapurna circuit.

As I huffed and puffed up the trail, Quek recounted how he was always more interested in learning how businesses operate than in studying, even though he said he did fairly well academically.

As a student at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, he embarked on several overseas internships to gain work experience, taking on everything from assembling chairs and making deliveries for a Taiwanese office chair factory to housekeeping duties at an adventure resort in Guilin, China.

And while serving in Singapore’s national service in his late teens, it was Apple co-founder Steve Jobs’ famous “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University that Quek printed out and tacked to the side of his army bunk as inspiration.

That same keen interest in business and entrepreneurship stayed with him when, as an undergraduate at the National University of Singapore (NUS), he applied for a year-long internship program in Silicon Valley where students were sent to startup hubs to gain working experience while taking entrepreneurship courses at universities such as Stanford.

“In our Stanford courses we had the opportunity to listen to Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Aaron Levie of [cloud storage startup] Box, and we realized that these guys who started these companies were no different from you and I,” said Quek. “They were passionate about the problem they were trying to solve, and if they can do it, why can’t we?”