TH E N U S EN T R E P R E NE U RI A L S PI RI T
(Engineering ’08). One of NUS Enterprise’s success stories, Zopim, an online marketing and live chat software company, was founded in 2009 by four NOC students who studied together at the NUS College in Silicon Valley in 2005/6. The team was one of the first to receive a iJam grant from NUS and MDA. In November 2015, Zopim was acquired for US$30million by USbased public company Zendesk, which offers customers cloud-based service. Zendesk now has an office in Singapore, and the Zopim team has been absorbed into its operations. Co-founder Mr Royston Tay, 33, shares the rollercoaster journey of a start-up that bootstrapped all the way to exit.
ANATOMY OF A START-UP
What has been the biggest change for you as co-founder and CEO since Zopim’s acquisition?
A huge positive has been the depth of experience we have within Zendesk. Previously, finding mentors and subject-matter experts was tough. Today, within Zendesk, from the board of directors to the individual managers on the ground, our team is able to learn and grow quickly. Conversely, a big challenge is also trying to stay nimble and move fast within such a big team where decision-makers may be stationed all over the world and information inevitably diffuses at a much slower pace than before.
You are the pride and joy of NUS Enterprise. Tell us how your NOC experience led to Zopim.
I’m not sure about pride, but we might have brought joy to NUS Enterprise with our crazy antics, especially during the annual parties! To be honest, I applied for NOC as a financially-neutral alternative to the Student Exchange Programme (SEP). Somehow I was selected, and found The Zopim team myself in Silicon Valley surrounded by brilliant people like my co-founders Julian (Low), Wenxiang (Wu) and (Kwok) Yang Bin. One of our past-times was developing prototypes for new business ideas. Zopim was conceptualised by Wenxiang and Julian when they faced frustrations selling their belongings online before they returned to Singapore. Why answer phone calls from buyers? Wasn’t there a way to chat online with people viewing your listings?
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WITH A GREAT CULTURE, YOU ATTRACT AND RETAIN BRILLIANT PEOPLE. WITH BRILLIANT PEOPLE, YOU CAN CRAFT A WORLD-CLASS EXPERIENCE FOR CUSTOMERS.
Zopim bootstrapped all the way to acquisition. How did you manage to survive six years doing that?
The first three years was challenging for the founders indeed. We each survived on a stipend of S$500 a month, foregoing it sometimes to ensure employees got paid first. We’re all local Singaporeans who lived with very supportive parents, thus we enjoyed free housing, laundry services and amazing home-cooked food! As long as we didn’t look closely at our dwindling savings, it wasn’t all that depressing. Retrospectively speaking, that period built our characters. We now know how little we need to still lead fulfilling, meaningful lives. Shortly after we launched pricing in 2010, our product became a hit, and we got profitable. Channelling our profits back into the company, we were able to grow the business, and our team quickly expanded to 40 within a few years. Thankfully, none of the founders demanded to be paid well. All of us focussed on making sure employees were treated well. We offered generous stock options, reviewed salaries twice a year, made sure pantry and office facilities were top-notch, and always splurged on annual retreats at exotic locations, so people in our distributed offices got to hang out with the folks from Singapore.
Mr Royston Tay Continued from page 12
What advantages do today’s entrepreneurs have?
We have a wide array of funding options such as accelerators and crowdfunding. Barriers to developing and iterating through a new product are much lower, with tools like open-source software libraries, 3D simulation and printing technologies which shorten product development cycles massively. That’s why we hold tech entrepreneurs from the earlier eras with so much respect. Bootstrapping is much tougher. You not only need engineering brilliance to build a product, you also require business guile to sell a vision, raise money or sell your assets to get initial capital.
Do you think Zopim wouldn’t have been what it is if not for NUS Enterprise? What can NUS Enterprise can do more?
Without exaggeration, Zopim wouldn’t have existed without NUS Enterprise. I wouldn’t have met my co-founders, we wouldn’t have had an office. I’d have had no excuse to go jobless after graduation! NUS Enterprise has done a great job of being around whenever a start-up needs them. Two areas of improvement I can think of are mentorship and hiring. With many graduates in diverse fields, how can NUS build a platform that matches alumnus with companies for mentorship and jobs?
What the secret of your success?
I’m told that it’s our culture. A great culture attracts and retains brilliant people. With brilliant people, you can craft and maintain a world-class experience for your customers. Keeping customers happy (and paying!) is what keeps most start-ups going.
Photos courtesy of Mr Royston Tay
Mr Royston Tay
Once back in Singapore, I was roped in to develop the prototype, and we became illegal squatters in NUS Enterprise’s meeting rooms! NUS took pity on us and gave us a tiny room for free. We also became the initial recipients of the newly-minted iJam grant of S$55,000. Dr Lily Chan and Professor Wong Poh Kam of NUS Enterprise, Professor Teo Chee Leong of NOC and Wong Sang Wuoh (our investment manager) were all key figures in Zopim’s inception.
programme (which now also includes New York, Beijing, Shanghai, Stockholm and Tel Aviv), makes available annually to the 150 undergraduates not just entrepreneurship-related courses at prestigious partner universities, but valuable exposure as interns in the mecca of tech, with access to mentors and collaborators. The aim is nurture these young people into enterprising, resourceful, independent self-starters and, hopefully, successful entrepreneurs. NUS students can also intern with local start-ups and learn the ropes through the iLEAD (innovative Local Enterprise Achievement Development) programme started in 2008. But tech entrepreneurship is not the only frontier that NUS Enterprise champions. The patenting and commercialisation of innovation birthed at NUS is another area that has seen a fair bit of development over the decades. In 1992, the
Industry Technology and Relations Office (INTRO) was established to handle Intellectual Property (IP) protection and industry relations. It was later renamed Industry Liaison Office (ILO), a body that connects and partners with industry to commercialise the university’s innovations into products and services that benefit businesses and society at large. In 1995, NUS Technology Holdings Pte Ltd was formed to take equity in spin-off companies. A genetically-modified fish initially created in 1999 by Dr Zhiyuan Gong from the Biological Sciences department for the purpose of tracking pollution by flourescing, became a commercial phenomenon, and its worldwide rights to market these fluorescent zebrafish — now named “Glo-Fish” were sold to US company Yorktown Technologies. Glo-Fish has been referred to in various movies and even made an appearance on the popular TV series Big Bang Theory. Still, it is currently the tech start-up that draws the greatest attention, and NUS Enterprise has had a large part to play in this. THE MAGICAL BLOCK 71 Block 71 began life as a flatted factory block in Ayer Rajah and is currently slated for demolition. However, it is still the heart of Singapore start-ups, housing about 100 potential game-changers. The idea for a community of entrepreneurs came out of NUS Enterprise, which understood the power of proximity when it came to creativity. Setting up such a community would also allow its incubation expertise to boost the dynamic interactive digital media sector. So in 2011, NUS Enterprise teamed up with the Media Development Authority (MDA) and SingTel Innov8 to establish a strategic incubation programme called Plug-In@Blk71 that offers facilities and perks such as
hot-desking and free Internet access. Blk 71 is now the hotspot for hip Interactive Digital Media (IDM) companies and home to hundreds of tech-related organisations, including start-ups, venture funds and incubators. Over the years, NUS Enterprise has supported hundreds of companies and formally incubated more than 100 of them. Some of their more well-known successes are the aforementioned tenCube and Zopim, which was acquired by Zendesk in 2014 for US$30 million. Many founding entrepreneurs and companies who have exited their first businesses — such as NUS alumnus Mr Keith Tan (Arts and Social Sciences ’15) whose software suite for social enterprises Start Now was bought by local company Goodtizens — are still active within the Block 71 ecosystem, some of them even nurturing the next generation of start-ups through mentorships and investments. The ecosystem now extends to Block 79 (named “BASH” for Building Amazing Startups Here) and the smaller Block 73. Together, the cluster is called JTC Launchpad @ one-north. Block 71 has been such a resounding success that it even offers a programme called Block71 San Francisco that specifically caters to local tech companies interested in establishing themselves in the United States’ tech ecosystem.
PLUG>IN @BLK 71
NUS ENTERPRISE
JAN– MAR 2016
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