Meet the NOC mafia making waves in Southeast Asia

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Hello readers,

Wait, how is it June already? I made a resolution at the start of the year to make US$1,000 off the internet. To date, I’m only 3.3% there. Yikes, I guess that means less TikTok-ing and more hustling for me in the next six months.

While my goal still looks pretty far away, the journey has been fun nonetheless with the help of my supportive fiancé. Every day, I would wake up to a slew of tweets and messages about entrepreneurship and business-building from him. How romantic.

So far, his advice has been great, and I could understand why. You see, during his uni days, he spent one year learning about entrepreneurship from this program called NOC, which has already birthed a couple of prominent founders in the region.

Today we look at:

• Who is in the NOC mafia
• 99 Group doubling its sales bookings in 2020
• Other newsy highlights such as Thailand getting its first unicorn and Line entering the digital banking line in Indonesia

PREMIUM SUMMARY

The mafia that has made an impact on Singapore’s startup scene

By now, most of you probably have heard of the “PayPal mafia,” the group of ex-employees who had left PayPal to launch successful startups including Tesla, YouTube, and LinkedIn. In Southeast Asia, we also have our very own gangs formed by former employees of Lazada as well as Grab and Gojek. But before these companies, one university in Singapore has already been building its own mafia since 2002.

• Introducing NOC, which stands for National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Overseas Colleges program. Students who participate in NOC go on to cities such as Silicon Valley, Shenzhen, and Tel Aviv to work and study entrepreneurial courses at partner universities for three months to a year.
• The NOC mafia: NOC alumni have gone on to launch a range of successful startups: classifieds marketplace Carousell, leading cashback platform ShopBack, and patent insights provider PatSnap, which entered the unicorn club last month.
• The NOC execs: Besides launching startups, other alumni are also holding key positions in startup enablers. These include Durwin Ho, CEO and co-founder of innovation consultancy firm StartupX; Goh Yiping, serial entrepreneur-turned-VC at Quest Ventures; and Shannon Lee Chaluangco, investment director at MDI Ventures.

Read more: Uncovering the NOC mafia, which is way bigger than you think

PREMIUM SUMMARY

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