Being a CEO eats into you, says Tan Teik Guan of recently-acquired DS3

The DS3 family. Teik Guan is wearing a yellow shirt. Photo: DS3

For twelve years, Tan Teik Guan has been carrying the weight of the company and its employees on his back, first as DS3‘s CTO and then as CEO in 2006.

One wrong move could affect not just his 50 employees but also their families. It’s a huge burden to bear, especially since a startup lacks the stability of a large company.

“I didn’t just have my own kids to think about — all my employees are like my children,” he said.

But his reprieve finally came. In April this year, the management successfully sold the Singapore-based IT security firm to Gemalto, a multi-national corporation in the same industry. DS3 has been making profit by selling authentication software to banks.

While the specifics of the deal cannot be disclosed, he and the other co-founders, Zvi Efroni and Kelvin Teo, are happy with how it turned out.

For Teik Guan especially, who left his cushy government job to join an unknown company as the first employee post Dot-Com bust, the rewards were especially sweeter.

“Oh my gosh, it was a huge burden off my back,” he said.

Teik Guan and DS3 are part of the second generation of Singapore’s tech entrepreneurs that are starting to see the fruits of their labor. The first, represented best by Sim Wong Hoo of Creative Technology and Ong Peng Tsin of Match.com, made their fortune in the Dot-Com days.

DS3’s contemporaries include HungryGoWhere, which was sold to SingTel last year, sgCarMart, which was acquired by Singapore Press Holdings, and PropertyGuru, which partially exited after raising a USD 48M round.

Read: Cheatsheet of tech startup acquisitions in Southeast Asia

These companies were all connected by the fact that they thrived despite the lack of a startup ecosystem in the early to mid noughties.

“The region lacked that pool of people who can roll up their sleeves and bring you through different stages of a company,” Teik Guan explained, adding that while the situation is starting to change, such management expertise is still hard to find.

“You can count the number of exits with your hands. There aren’t many.”