A Foreign Entrepreneur Finds It Hard To Scale A Team In Singapore

French entrepreneur Hugo Angelmar has been based in Singapore working on a startup he co-founded with a few others. Here, he shares his experiences on trying to find computer scientists in Singapore.

Hugo Angelmar writes:

Singapore is a vibrant city, with 4 million people and a number 1 rank as “best place to start a business”.

I moved to Singapore in August, over 3 months ago as part of the internet startup I am a co-founder of: iSyndica. Having spent 6 months in Singapore the year before, I had been accustomed to most elements of the city: the humidity, the food diversity (though I do call Subway my home about half of the week) and the culture. I had heard of great schools, NUS, NTU and SMU, among others. What I had not been prepared for, is the labor market that Singapore would subject our startup to.

The graph above highlights the type of profile iSyndica would like to hire given the current state we are in: early stage startup – less than 12 months old. We want someone who is entrepreneurial because we are all constrained by time, and talented so that he can be productive. A tradeoff of these two can be allowed since an entrepreneurial spirit can be guided, and a talented individual can be trusted to do a proper job. The issue is that in Singapore, there are market dynamics that affect the availability of the three desirable profiles, leaving tech companies in Singapore with an overwhelming, yet undercapacitated, supply of lower quadrant people.

First crunch: The right side of the graph, the group of talented people will seek to go to the US. This is the mecca for computer scientists, startup or not.

Second crunch: Asians are notoriously risk averse and tend to favor brands: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Avaya and the likes all offer CV validation, a steady paycheck and the comfort that one is on the right track.

Third crunch: Singapore has made the news in the US and Europe as providing a large amount of startup capital to young upstarts. This has made available a flurry of grants of $50,000SGD to a number of fresh graduates (or still in school) students with no experience to build and launch a product to market. Empirically, Singapore hasn’t had any global tech startups (ignoring the surprising story of Creative). Social Wok and Home Camera might be considered exceptions (and where started by experienced individuals) given the overwhelming amount of individuals I’ve seen with their “Founders” or “Directors” business cards of companies. This easy access to funding has diluted the labor market for entrepreneurial people among small projects of 1-2 people.

Fourth crunch: We get money now what? Singapore’s great at providing money. I could be criticized for biting the hands that will feed me but I think my arguments are valid. Singapore is an island of 4 million populated in large parts by foreigners. If I am a Singaporean who has grown on the island, how do I understand how a consumer in the US or Europe (some of the bigger markets) perceives and uses internet services? I don’t. There’s no entry point into the mindset of your target audience, restricting your vision of the world to a smaller Southeast Asian subset.