Uncovering the NOC mafia, which is way bigger than you think

What do companies like ShopBack, PatSnap, Carousell, and 99.co have in common?

Beyond the fact that they were founded by fresh graduates, all three startups were launched by members of the 3,400-strong alumni network of the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Overseas Colleges program.

The program, known as NOC for short, dates back to 2002 when its first batch of students were sent to Silicon Valley. NOC, which has been a foundational experience and source of support for many of Singapore’s leading startup founders, was designed to expose NUS students to entrepreneurship via full-time internships with startups around the world.

Student participants of NOC go abroad for work-and-study trips that last between three months to a year. In this timeframe, they intern at leading startups such as Tracx and Amanotes and take entrepreneurship courses at partner universities like Stanford University and Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

While the program initially involved sending undergraduates to just one college in Silicon Valley, it now has 11 partner universities and  features 12 programs held in 15 cities today. These include institutes in established startup hotspots like Shenzhen and Tel Aviv, as well as up-and-coming hubs like Ho Chi Minh City.

A 2019 survey of 1,000 alumni conducted by NUS Enterprise, the entrepreneurial arm of NUS, revealed that nearly a third have gone on to found their own companies.

Together, these founders make up the “NOC mafia.”

Banding visionaries together

As one of the longest-running entrepreneurship programs in Singapore, NOC is recognized for its role in building the startup ecosystem in the city-state – a reputation that isn’t lost on its participants.

“I’ve been passionate about building products since I was 13, and NOC was a dream program I wanted to join when I attended university,” says Daryl Lim, an NOC Singapore participant in 2019 and the co-founder of no-code robotics solutions company Augmentus.

The NOC advantage

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