First-ever Walkabout Singapore draws young, diverse crowd

At ViKi, a staff runs a visitor through what the company does.

Palpable tension was present just before Blk 71 opened their doors to visitor for Walkabout Singapore, held last Friday.

As I sat in one of the offices with Kristine and Vinnie Lauria, co-organizers of the event, we wondered how many people would actually show up. Sure, there were 550 email signups, but there’s no telling how many of them might actually appear at a particular venue.

The worries were soon put to rest. Chatter filled the empty hallways, and a bunch of students stood outside the office, peeking in curiously. Time to get to work.

Held for the first time in Singapore, Walkabout is a one-day event where startups open their doors and bags of potato chips to curious visitors. The event originated with Walkabout New York City, and attempts to replicate the open-door, collaborative nature of Silicon Valley.

“Over there, there’s always a night party or product launch going on every week,” says Vinnie, who brought the event to Singapore with his wife Kristine. Alex Vayl and Karen Tan from Voxel are co-organizers.

As much as the event emulates the culture in San Francisco, Walkabout Singapore is all about the startups here. It aims to put the country on the map, telling people that there are a lot of cool startups here that they wouldn’t otherwise know about.

The event shows people that tech startups isn’t just about coding either. All kinds of people — designers, marketers, and business folks — are needed to make a company function.

Says Kristine: “Someone tweeted me and asked: I do linguistics, is there a role for me? And I thought that’s funny, because my first intern at PBWiki was a lingustics student. So I said, absolutely!”

About 75 companies participated in this event, with 35 offices open to the public. The startups are spread out all over the island, although most of them are concentrated in the central areas of Raffles Place and Tanjong Pagar. Blk 71, near Fusionopolis, is home to a large number of companies.

Check out an interactive map of my journey during the event:

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What struck me about the roving participants was how young and diverse they were. Kristine tells me that IDA Singapore, a government agency, had bused down about 60 or 70 students from various schools.

There were plenty of entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs, sure, but also students, lecturers seeking guest speakers, executives, and even Ministry of Manpower staff seeking opinions on the government’s manpower policies.

Attracting diversity has been a deliberate goal of the organizers. Says Kristine: “We want to say to students: ‘Look what’s going on. Come and be part of us. You don’t have to go into banking, or finance, or go to an MNC to be a lawyer’.”