BL’s Interview with High Browse Online

Our partners from High Browse Online, National Library Board (NLB), has published an interview today with one of our co-founders, BL.

The interview with BL is mainly about the history of the formation of SG Entrepreneurs and the future plans of our blog. This is also a chance to know what BL’s favourite books are in both fiction and non-fiction genre. Yes, he spends an hour before sleep to read per day. Here is an excerpt from the interview about the formation of SG Entrepreneurs.

HB team: ….. Tell us more about the SG Entrepreneurs blog.

BL: Our story to start SG Entrepreneurs is interesting because the three founders – namely, Weichang, Gwen and myself, started the blog despite the fact that each of us was originally residing in different locations: Cambridge UK, Silicon Valley US and Singapore. Each one of us has taken different routes in being an entrepreneur. Gwen and I started off as business competition organizers. For myself, I started my biotech company in Cambridge while Weichang (owner of manytutors.com) started his companies without any formal training.

Our aim at that time is to promote the spirit of enterprise and focus on entrepreneurial education in Singapore with a balanced view of both theory and pragmatism. We plan to build a community of young entrepreneurs and set up something for them to learn. One of our other goals is to provide a venue to signpost information for people who want to know how to set up businesses in Singapore. We also want to expose our readers to the difficulties of being entrepreneurs, as different from some educators who glorifies it without realizing that people are doing that for the wrong reasons.

Through the process of working on this blog, we have found friendship with both the local and global entrepreneurial community and have a fruitful interaction with them (John Nesheim, Guy Kawasaki and Jack Yan). We were featured on the Business Visitor Magazine as one of the blogs recognized for entrepreneurs. I write entries of the blogs to impart knowledge to the students who I mentored for the Start-Up@Singapore business plan competition. I am glad that some of them who read the blog have taken the bold step to start their own enterprises despite the odds. Some of our articles have been re-published in other entrepreneur related forums and magazines.

For example, “Finding the Golden Path: Can Singapore be a silicon valley?” will be published in an upcoming innovation magazine. Of course, working with High Browse Online in recommending books on business and entrepreneurship is another milestone for us.

In the next phase, we will be introducing new technologies (podcasting) and organizing events to bring our community together. We also hope to engage & work together with the major entrepreneurial organizations like ACE and Spirit of Enterprise.

About our partner:
High Browse Online: an initiative by the Public Library Services, National Library Board. Featuring book reviews, librarians’ recommendations, readers’ contributions, and events at public libraries, they are also called “the Book Blog”. They invite readers to post comments or contribute reviews and recommendations. They have regular columns in promoting new books from different areas with interesting themes for a period of time.

Technorati Tags: Entrepreneurship Education, National Library Board, Singapore, Book Reviews, Book Blogs Partners, Singapore