Kezaar Founder: There’s Room For More Female Entrepreneurs in Asia

Readers who follow our blog closely might have read the article where we briefly introduced Kezaar. Kezaar positions itself as Singapore’s marketplace for classes and workshops, where it matches users with talent or skills to share with users who have the desire to learn.

The idea is pretty straightforward and the UI is neat. But beyond this I thought it was also interesting to draw attention to the co-founder behind this skills marketplace, who is a female entrepreneur.

We do have female entrepreneurs in Asia, but not many. Kezaar’s CEO, Debbie Lee, in fact had a 15 year corporate career in the advertising industry before venturing into the startup scene. With the experience accumulated over the years, especially within the media industry, she takes pride in Kezaar’s UI which she makes sure is user-friendly. She elaborates:

We want first time users to access our site and have an instant visceral response to the site’s front end design. Usage is easy, simple, no-frills as we’re in the minimal viable product stage and proud of it! We offer users a one-click to sign-up via Facebook or email and three-clicks to start listing a class!

We offer our users an easy-to-navigate index page for those looking to list classes, across four class verticals such as entrepreneurship, enrichment, lifestyle and digital technology.

Perhaps being a lady could also mean that we have better judgement in terms of aesthetics compared to our male counterparts. And yes, the team also recognizes that Singapore is a market too small to take the business to greater heights. Debbie is in fact now in Hong Kong to expand the business. She tells us more:

Our goal is always on the big picture of the regional markets to take Kezaar abroad, I’ve been doing international business across a wide footprint of Greater China, Southeast Asia and South Asia since 2006 and experienced first hand how robust and dynamic our Asian markets are. The compelling commercial reasons (i.e. market size, social network population, rising middle income class in emerging markets, healthy GDP, strong disposable income) are all positive factors that drive us. Kezaar is a start-up proposition with immense value and legs to travel it will be a real shame if we restrict ourselves to a single market. Since it’s good, let’s share it!

Despite having extensive corporate experience, we also dive in deeper to understand if Debbie faces challenges in being a female entrepreneur. In her opinion, challenges are not unique to the gender but are what most entrepreneurs face. She shares her experience:

I haven’t had any personal experiences relating to the “stereotyping” of female entrepreneurs among the startups though I have to say that female entrepreneurs in the technology and digital start-up space tend to be fewer just by default as most techies are blokes who come from a developer or engineering background. Most female entrepreneurs are more widely found […] in the service and lifestyle sectors like travel, wellness, fashion, hospitality, and so on and so forth, which are traditionally associated with the fairer sex.

What is of value is for more female entrepreneurs to step up and be role models? We already have fabulous icons like Olivia Lum of Hyflux, and we definitely have room for more!

From my business experience I have observed that in certain cultures, they still share a very conservative and traditional stereotyped expectation of women in general based on socially expected roles as a wife or mother in a nurturing position within families. Sometimes these expectations cloud out and overshadow what many entrepreneurial women in business can and have achieved.