Here’s how Zendesk finds talent and maintains a startup culture in Singapore

Zendesk GM of chat Royston Tay (L) and CEO Mikkel Svane at the company’s revamped Singapore office. Photo credit: Zendesk.

When Singaporean startup Zopim was bought by Silicon Valley customer engagement software company Zendesk, it became one of the country’s startup success stories.

It’s now almost three years after the acquisition, and while the Singapore office has grown to almost 100 people, the local managers have taken care to preserve the culture that got Zopim from a plucky startup to part of a cross-border organization. Not only that, they’ve been able to work through the tech talent shortage that plagues the local ecosystem and maintain a development team that serves clients all over the world.

“The culture evolves,” says Royston Tay, Zopim co-founder and Zendesk GM of chat. “When Zopim was founded, the culture was basically us, the founders. As we added new talent, the culture slowly evolved but its core was brought along as well.”

See: From beta to Facebook, strong bonds held Zopim together on its way to the top

New people, new products

Zendesk announced today it’s expanding its Singapore office, which pulls double duty as the company’s Asia-Pacific headquarters and a development center for Zendesk Chat. This is an evolution of the live chat product that drove Zopim’s success.

“When we started with the idea of building a real-time communication layer between customers and businesses in 2007, the best place to do it was on a website,” Royston tells Tech in Asia. Now the audience is spread out – on their phones, on a myriad of messaging apps.

Talent supply is not going to suddenly balloon overnight, but demand really has.

The goal for this product is to be a real-time conversation engine for businesses regardless of what customers use – chat, messaging, or social media apps. “So long as you’re having a live conversation with a business, you’ll be using our product,” Royston says.

On top of the expanded Singapore office, Zendesk recently unveiled another four offices in Asia-Pacific: a development center in Melbourne, a customer experience hub in Manila, and sales offices in Tokyo and Bangalore.

In Singapore, the company will hire more people for its chat research and development team, including product specialists and engineers. The plan, for now, is to have an overall headcount of around 120. Zendesk is working with Singapore’s Economic Development Board to support the hiring of more Singapore citizens and permanent residents through capability development grants that are meant to support the training and hiring of highly-skilled professionals.

Hiring in Singapore

Like many startups and tech companies in Singapore, Zendesk has to find ways to address the scarcity of technical staff.

Royston is happy to report things have improved since the Zopim days. “Back then, there just wasn’t a very deep pool of talent that was sold on joining a startup,” he says. The company had to staff up with mostly fresh graduates. The Zendesk deal helped them add a little more maturity and experience by bringing in more “gray hairs.”

What’s changed now is that more international tech companies like Google and Facebook are staffing up in Singapore and startups are becoming more attractive places to work. That leads to a deeper pool to fish talent out of but also to more competition between employers.

Culture shock

Hire slow, fire fast