Carousell co-founder on the app’s early days and what lies ahead

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Siu Rui Quek is one of the co-founders of Carousell. If you live in Asia, you’ve definitely heard of Carousell. It’s a Singapore-based startup that’s in the scene right now. They just closed a US$35 million dollar Series B round last August. The startup is essentially a mobile shopping app similar to Ebay, but it’s very mobile-based and optimized.

Siu Rui and his co-founders were trying to solve a personal pain point when they came across a billion-dollar idea. In this interview, Siu Rui shares some great insights on his journey, how to build a company, and how to be successful.

Could you give us an introduction of who you are and what you do for a living?

“[…] So my name is Siu Rui. I’m one of the co-founders of Carousell. We started about four and one-half years ago now, together with my two other co-founders, Lucas and Marcus. I initially was involved very much with product, essentially figuring out what we should be building, what problems we should be solving. Eventually, I was wireframing the products, things like this. Eventually, [I] got involved with launching markets, customer support, and the works. That’s how startups go. You do whatever that needs to be done. [I] now work closely with the executives of the company on the overall strategy and vision. So, that’s me.”

Could you give us a background of your entrepreneurial beginnings?

“I was in school [in] National University of Singapore. […] I was doing my bachelor’s in business administration [in] my first two years there, and I was essentially going through the motions of what a business school student would. Literally, they were ingraining into you that success is clearing 10 rounds of interviews with Goldman Sachs and you should be an investment banker, management consultant, or a product manager in a CBG company. So there was success being built into us.

“But in my third year of school, one of the things I was fortunate to be part of was this thing called the NOC program. It’s NUS Overseas College where they sent us overseas for a year to Silicon Valley in California, USA. It was where we worked full time as interns in small companies and tech startups. So 20-30 people in a company [making] technology-based products, and I was in a company called VSee. It’s a video conferencing software company, and I was a product manager there.

“Being a product manager, you get your hands into everything. So it was a great hands-on experience to learn the ins and outs of a startup. But actually, the real magical thing was just being in the Valley itself. We took classes at Stanford. Everywhere you go, the coffee shops, [when you] take the train, everyone’s talking about startups, about apps, and the latest technology. And you’re part of this culture [with] people [that] speak at events, guest lecturers, people like Jack Dorsey of Twitter. And when you hear their stories, these guys are just fundamentally passionate about technology and about solving problems at scale.

“That one year really changed my mind and my co-founders’ minds. They also went through the same program. It was when we realized that we loved technology. We love how technology could make a big impact in the world. And that was how we got started even tinkering around with products and building products. That was, in essence, how we got started with even figuring out the first steps of Carousell.

“We came back to Singapore. We started learning how to build apps. And one of those apps that we started building was an app that we wanted for ourselves. […] We just wanted to de-clutter our lives. We built a snap-list-sell app, which eventually became Carousell.

“We brought it to a hackathon. In 54 hours we put together a prototype of it. On Friday night, we shared the idea. […] The next 54 hours, [we] built a prototype and demoed it on a Sunday night. And we realized that this was actually solving a problem for way more than just three of us.

“It was then that we realized that, ‘Hey, we’re onto something quite special.’ This problem seemed to resonate with a lot more people. And this was March 2012. [I] was just finishing up my final semester in school, and it was a crossroads. You [have to] decide [whether] to do a startup or to go and find a job because that’s what society expects of you in Singapore—in Asia. So May 2012 came, we decided, ‘Hey, this is too exciting. We really love tech. We want to see how far we can go with Carousell.’ And we took the plunge to do this full time in May 2012.

“So there was a time we made our parents really, really angry as well. In fact, […] one of the toughest things of starting Carousell is just actually telling your parents that you’re going to do a startup. Because they fully expect you to go get a job—a good job—in the corporate world. […] They became one of our largest supporters now, but initially they weren’t too happy.

“But May 2012 is when we went heads down, really started building the product. All three of us were self-taught, so we spent the next three months heads down building the first version of Carousell. It wasn’t a very good version, but it worked. We launched it on August 13, 2012 and the rest is history.”

How did you approach talking to your parents about starting up?

Is there a reason why you chose the name Carousell?

What are your goals for 2017 and beyond?

What does success mean to you? 

What’s one piece of advice you’d like to give?