How an overseas university program grew a Singaporean startup mafia

Singapore is one of the sprawling tech hubs of the world. While the government does its part in encouraging startup activity, the academe also plays a role in the growing startup ecosystem.

One, in particular, stands out: the National University of Singapore (NUS) and its NUS Overseas College program, or NOC. Started in 2001, the initiative aimed to provide undergraduates and postgraduates an “immersive entrepreneurial experience” through full-time internships with startups and companies around the world, says Freddy Boey, the deputy president of innovation and enterprise at NUS.

The premise is simple: Students from the university get to go abroad for a year and work at a tech company, much like any overseas internship. According to a 2018 survey conducted by the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, 79% of NOC alumni end up in the startup ecosystem after graduation.

Some notable NOC alumni include Darius Cheung, co-founder of 99.co and tenCube; Royston Tay, co-founder of Zopim; and Siu Rui Quek, co-founder of mobile classifieds app Carousell, which is nearing unicorn status.

These founders are just a few of the hundreds of NOC alumni who went on to start their own companies after the program. The same survey reveals that NOC alumni founded or co-founded 6 of the country’s top 100 most well-funded startups today, forming an “NOC mafia” – a group of successful startup founders who graduated from the program.

One of NOC’s big draws initially was sending students to Silicon Valley.

“I think it was when I was in university, I found out about Silicon Valley,” says Cheung, who was among the early batches of NOC students who went to the tech hub. “It was not bigger than Singapore. It had a population not too different from Singapore. And that got me completely fascinated with the amount of change a small population can bring to the world.”

Bjorn Lee, an NOC alumni and the co-founder of media platform e27 and meditation app MindFi, too, said that the Silicon Valley experience was the reason he went to NUS.

The timing of NOC’s launch was also crucial, as it came about during a time when Singapore’s own startup ecosystem still left much to be desired, and there weren’t many opportunities to discover companies in other countries. Singapore Management University and Nanyang Technological University – two other popular universities in the city-state – started their overseas internship programs years later in 2015.

Darius Cheung

Royston Tay

Yiping Goh

Jeffrey Tiong

Bjorn Lee

Siu Rui Quek

Joel Leong

Vinod Nair

Rameez Ansar

Kelvin Teo

Ze Yan Lim

Danny Tan