Angel investor: Singapore must liberalize talent inflow and maintain open, balanced immigration policy

The author is a part-time freelance writer, aspiring entrepreneur and overall generalist interested in exploring, researching and writing.

To describe Ben Chew as a busy man is an understatement. The co-founder of Startup Jobs Asia and current managing director of Strategia Ventures has a broad spectrum of business interests: he’s a business owner, entrepreneur, and angel investor.

A graduate of Ngee Ann Polytechnic with a diploma in electronic and computer engineering, Ben is also a Chartered Certified Accountant and Certified Accounting Technician.

After stints in accounting and the sale of accounting IT solutions, he kicked off his entrepreneurial journey with TBC HR Consulting (editor’s note: company has rebranded to Talentvis since this article was published) in March 2000. In December 2012, he incorporated Startup Jobs Asia and Strategia Ventures.

Startup Jobs Asia is a jobs and HR platform serving multiple Asian nations, while Strategia Ventures is an equities trading and investment holdings firm that acts as a private co-investment fund with venture capitalists, working with them and matching their funding in early investment rounds.

We caught up with him to learn more about his journey and current plans.

Where and when did you get your start in entrepreneurship?

I actually started by doing recruitment as a freelancer for an HR company in Singapore. I worked on a commission basis for them. However, as I saw no support for long-term operations in the firm, I felt that I could do better. So from 2000, I started TBC HR Consulting. TBC stands for ‘Thinking Believing Connecting’.

How did you get involved in founding Startup Jobs Asia?

I happened to meet Grace Chng, a senior editor at the Straits Times, who knew about my recruiting background and is quite interested in the startup scene. She asked me what could be done to help the startup ecosystem here, since many startups face challenges in talent acquisition.The thing is that recruitment consulting has some very high fees and can burn startups. It’s not sustainable nor advisable for a startup to engage in that sort of exercise. So I ended up developing Startup Jobs Asia. I wanted it to act as an HR portal, to ‘sexify’ jobs in startups.

When I was doing angel investing in a personal capacity, a lot of of company founders approached me about talent acquisition. The majority of jobseekers tend to join larger MNCs and want jobs in banks and other financial services. I made the decision to establish Startup Jobs Asia as I realized it was also the easiest and fastest way to boost the local startup ecosystem. Currently, Startup Jobs Asia has no full-time staff under a payroll.

Where does Strategia come in?

Strategia Ventures’ role is to finance Startup Jobs Asia. Right now, Startup Jobs Asia has very low costs. It also serves as a co-investment partner for VCs. We work with them by sharing deals and other information as well as investing with them in different funding rounds. We currently don’t have the staff to carry out the due diligence and other work that VCs engage in.