In Conversation with Paddy Tan, co-founder from BAK2u

Sometime back, a Singaporean based company by the name of BAK2u have made it as a service help consumers keep track of their gadgets in CNN news. So after a couple of gatherings (from Ping.SG party to a couple of twitters and chat), BL sat down with Paddy Tan, the co-founder from BAK2u for an email interview to tell us more about what the company does in the realm of security, his personal trials and tribulations and how he sees the future of his company.

BL: Hi Paddy, thank you for taking the time to speak to us in SG Entrepreneurs. Let’s start off with your background before you started BAK2u.

Paddy Tan: I joined a contract manufacturing company in Year 2000 after I completed my National Service. I was a business development engineer with the new business division where we take care of designing and manufacturing 3rd parties accessories for Palm PDA.

From that job, I traveled a fair bit between the States and various other countries in Europe and Asia and along the way extended my exposure on how corporate clients use PDA devices to work and function.

Left the job about 2 years later, when I was headhunted to run an office here in Singapore for a Hong Kong Wireless Solution company. The team pioneered several interesting cutting edge wireless solutions for Field Service Agents, Sales Force Agents using PDA phones. That was when the asia telecommunication market started to pick up making use of 2.5 and 3G network integrating into their business processes.

During the SARs period, like many other companies it was affected and that was when I decided to try my hands on running my own businesses. A close friend of mine started a BPO (Business Processing Outsourcing) company here in Singapore where we handle automotive and technology related companies linking them to European companies. We become their arms and legs in Europe for the Singapore clients here. With the company moving a notch up, stabilizing overtime within 2 years I decided to step back and pursue something else, BAK2u came into the picture.

BL: What got you motivated to start up BAK2u? What’s the story behind that?
Paddy Tan: My friend Chris Chan and I started BAK2u Pte Ltd in Year 2005 together. It was a setup that was bound to happen as I met Chris when I was a country manager for the Hong Kong company, and he was rather new having just joined the partner’s company too. We hit it off sharing a lot of business ideas about running our own businesses and from one conversation, where I brought it up about losing items when traveling and it be great to have a simpler way to get it back.

Overtime, he and I got together to discuss more and he came up with the name ‘BAK2u’ as in ‘Back to you’ – ‘returning the lost items back to the owner’. The name was created in the Delifrance in Bugis Junction around late 2004.

The company BAK2u Pte Ltd was established in May, Year 2005.

BL: What were the initial difficulties and challenges you faced in this industry, given that the mobile market is pretty competitive? How did you overcome them?
Paddy Tan: BAK2u started with only 1 single product, that is label.