IAHGames founder went from distributing junk mail to running a $25 million games publisher

IAHGames founder Roland Ong (right) with Hakkyu Kim, lead developer of popular MMORPG Ragnarok Online. Photo: IAHGames.

Singaporean Roland Ong is the founder and CEO of IAHGames, one of Southeast Asia’s top electronic games publishers. Headquartered in Singapore, the company currently has a network of 35 million registered gamers in Southeast Asia, and it is slated to make $25 million in annual revenue this year through the publishing and operation of titles like Grand Theft Auto V, Granado Espada, and Counter-Strike Online.

But getting there has meant paying a heavy price for creative freedom. In 1987, the free-spirited entrepreneur quit undergraduate studies at the National University of Singapore’s engineering faculty to start a business. He says:

While I very much wanted to do arts, they placed me in engineering instead. The university gave us very little choice and placed us where the national quota was.

He realized three months in that it wasn’t going to work out as Singapore universities trained students to be system maintainers and not creators. So, he focused on the goal of heading abroad to study liberal arts.

The cost, however, was prohibitive. To fund his trip, the only way to make money quickly enough was to start a business. He then poured S$4,000 – his entire savings – into an old delivery van, and starting a daytime cleaning and delivery business by obtaining under-utilized cleaning equipment from a friend’s dad.

By night, he distributed – in his own words – junk mail to apartment blocks, making 50 cents a block for a total of S$50 a day. While decidedly unglamorous, it got the job done, and Roland saved up S$20,000 ($15,907) one year later.

With that wad of cash, he bought 20 computers and started teaching kids how to use computers through electronic games. By the time he sold the business to IT educator Informatics in 1991, he netted S$60,000 ($34,200) from the proceeds, more than enough to buy a one-way ticket to the United States to study liberal arts at Taylor University.

From journalism back to technology

While Roland dabbled in photography and journalism in university, taking sports photos for the campus paper and sleeping three hours a day, he soon found himself falling back into technology.

“I was running out of money,” he says, “liberal arts is expensive, so I had to find work in the computer science department. But the only way I could work there was to take up a communication systems major.”

He pointed out that tinkering with technology was always something that he has been doing as a hobby: he once created his own bulletin board system – a precursor to the Internet – using a 800 bps modem and a bunch of phone extensions. Together with some equally enthusiastic friends, he even built text-based games on the network by downloading and compiling the code himself.

It was entirely a hobby with absolutely no profit. I had a duality in me: I like technology but also wanted to be creative.

Seven-year itch

The unfortunate decision to experiment