A Photo Essay Part Two: 4 Years in London, United Kingdom (Jun’s Good Life)
University is a formative time. I think many of my peers came thinking that they were exchanging their time and gold for a piece of paper that functioned as a ticket to the good life. However, not many in my encounters have defined what is the good life for themselves. Each person has unique preferences and gifts, this naturally means what is a good life is different for each of us. Its shape and form is up to us to define. Therefore, the definition of the good life has been something that I have working on to define for myself. The answers which I have reached necessarily inform the steps I must take post-university to achieve my desired outcome. The answers we get from what is a good life gives us directionality in life. I think this forward momentum is important in giving us fulfilment.
Look Far to Aim Near
The main challenge is fighting against what society defines as the good life. When I first entered university, it was absolutely bizarre, meeting so many 19-year-olds, telling me with strong conviction that being a lawyer was the be all and end all for them. On what basis have they arrived at the conclusion? What about other meaningful career paths. Many have never been to a law firm. Many do not know the struggles of working in law — the long hours, the fixed hierarchical structure, the insane competition.
I was not totally against a career in law. I was just against jumping into something without knowing the alternatives. Having spoken to many lawyers and investigated this path, I realised it was not for me. The good life lay in something else.
To formulate the good life demanded that I had a strong understanding of my identity. A key foundational component of my identity is entrepreneurship. The term ‘entrepreneurship’ can mean many different things to different people. What it means to me in essence, is solving problems in society, where the magnitude of the problem solved equates to the reward one receives. This is probably a romantic notion of entrepreneurship, given how there are many large companies with high earnings might be exploitative in nature. But I choose this, for various personal reasons which I shall elaborate later on.
In my first attempt at launching a business with the Extrapolate team. The main takeaway was that the good life is not grounded upon money. This team was in a deal on track to make good money. However, working for money made us all miserable. We were emotionally drained and mentally strained. It was not desirable. Money could not be main foundation, there had to be something more. So entrepreneurship for money’s sake was not a workable justification.
Realising What is the Good Life for Jun
The first component of a good life for Jun is the pursuit of entrepreneurship. The act of understanding and solving problems through human interaction fuels me. I derive pleasure from finding product-market fit, scaling teams, designing culture and the act of creation. To work with little or no resources to start with and grow something.
Entrepreneurship is also about romanticism and idealism. While the work itself has to be grounded in pragmatism, when one proposes a new solution, what an entrepreneur is saying is that they are making you live life in a certain way. For example, think about the wedding ring, before Debeers made it an object of commitment, these rings had no real significance in the marriage proposal process. However, since they introduced their ring, couples around the world use these objects to represent their love and commitment. So, in big and small ways, for better or worse, an entrepreneur changes the way we live by selling their solution to us.
I had the good fortune of meeting Joe and work for him in ConsenSys, he’s the Co-founder of Ethereum, a decentralised protocol. Starting the company to share a new way of decentralised life and work is a massive risk, but, he took it, to create a new world for consumers and his employees. A new world for consumers through products. A new world for employees through a radical infrastructure. Three years on and many mistakes later, we are working on things like projecting what would the future of work would be like? How do we enable Open Finance? These and many more questions make us all dreamers. A balance between relentless execution and idealism.
Further, when you solve problems, you tend to also require a team and as your product or service creates a bigger and bigger positive impact, the team necessarily needs to scale. Imagine the crazy parties one can have surrounded by a bigger group of smart and fun people. Life would be a jolly good time!
The second component is adventure. The world is filled with interesting people with fun stories and beautiful places. A life of entrepreneurship brings with it adventure as I explore new markets and solve new problems. Being desk bound or in a hierarchical structure is not where I will thrive in. I need to be moving around. A bouncy life. Exploring.
I desire to see new things, to know new worlds, and find out where has the best KFC. I was told that Prague had the best, but I was proven wrong. Ha!
The third component is fulfilled enablement. The quality of our lives tends to be defined by the quality of our relationships with the people we care about. To me, one of the key ways of elevating these relationships is enabling the personal evolution of those we care about. When we enable someone to evolve, they experience great joy at their progress, and we as bystanders bask in that joy as well. It is a warm intangible feeling that makes one feel fulfilled.
In the picture above, my team devised a method to bring in the founder of Mycelia Imogen Heap to meet Jeremy, who is very interested in her work. Alone, it would have been difficult to arrange this meeting. But when a community acts with a method and intention, good things can happen. The best thing was creating a framework that could be replicated so that others can benefit. On my part, When I am able to contribute to the happiness and success of those I hold dear, it brings me great joy. To be able to share in the joy of others is a true blessing.
The fourth and final component is financial autonomy. From Raz, Autonomy is the ability to pursue a path from a selection of morally viable paths. How this translates is that, one has financial autonomy when they can decide what they want to do with their lives because they have sufficient resources to do so.
While I discussed that money cannot be the key driver in life, I do desire to make enough to have financial autonomy. To be able to travel, eat, experience things I and the people I care about like to do, when we want to do it. If my kids in the future desire to study abroad or my partner wishes to take time off to write a novel or something, I hope to be able to support their aspirations. As an international student, I am acutely aware of the high financial burden my parents have taken to support me. I live a life of privilege, as evidenced by how my stipend enables me to make my weekly trips to purchase candy and juice at Sainsbury with no problems. The implication of this desire though, means I need a higher than average income.
Beyond the obvious niceties, financial autonomy is also about being able to be there when one needs to be. In August 2018, when I suffered some major burns from cooking Instant Noodles, my mum settled her work affairs with her team quickly and flew over in a heartbeat from Singapore out of concern. Sure, I was able to take care of myself. But, she wanted to ensure I was fine. The point is, even though we might not be fabulously rich, my parents developed financial autonomy to enable them to do what they want for their loved ones. I distinguish this from the rich Investment Banker/Lawyer, who might not be able to take off at a moment’s notice in a similar situation. So, even though these folks have money, I believe they do not have real autonomy.
To achieve all these goals necessitates that I take the path of entrepreneurship. A traditional path of getting a good job will neither allow me to scale my income fast enough and create nor will it fulfil my needs for adventure and community enablement.
Roadmap in Pursuit of Jun’s Good Life
The biggest risk in defining entrepreneurship as the foundation of a good life for me is that most entrepreneurs fail. The odds are not in my favour. So I have to mitigate that risk and increase my odds of success. I intend to do so in four ways- 1) Hyper Realism 2) Iterative Ideation 3) Developing my mentorship network 4) Friendship
Hyper Realism
To solve problems as an entrepeneur, I believe one has to be a hyper realist. This was something that I was thought by my mentor — Chun. We should observe the world for what it is and not what we want it to be. If we would like to create the world of the future, we need to deeply appreciate the world of the present, so that we can devise our plans to bring forward the solution.
We now live in an age with widening inequality and emerging right-wing nationalism. Many people are stunned by how Donald Trump rose to becoming POTUS. We observe the re-emergence of the philosophy of Carl Schmitt of the US versus THEM. Where community is divided along racial and political lines to find an enemy to pin our problems on.
As students of history, one can tell that these trends are not to be totally unexpected. We are currently living in age that is similar to that of the Great Depression in the 1930s. After the precipitous crash then, with rising inflation and high joblessness, as the existing solutions failed to ameliorate their suffering, they rapidly turned to more extreme solutions to solve their problems. The government’s only feasible response was to use monetary policy to purchase assets, that led to the rich getting richer but the poor remained poor. Widening income inequality led to dissatisfaction that threatened to rupture the social fabric. I believe this was one of the key contributing trends towards creating that window of opportunity for Hitler.
If we want to really understand brexit, I would submit that the frustration when people chose to leave was not borne out of any real noble ideal to take back parliamentary control. It was really due to the frustration of how public services were failing society. The leave-campaign was able to capitalise on the frustration at domestic services and pin the blame on the European Union for all the wrongs that society had. This radically simplified narrative was easy for people to get behind as they did not need to understand the complexities that plagued their own system.
The difference between then and now is how much more integrated the global economy has become and the rise of internet economy. The incentives for pursuing a strategy of war to claim resources is now less than the incentives of pursuing strategic economic cooperation. As countries trade more with each other, the battlefield has shifted from the jungles to the negotiation table. And so, we see the rising trade war between the United States and China, where both countries are increasingly influencing countries to pick a side to align their global production chains with them. We see China pursuing the strategy of One Belt One Road instead of colonisation because they understand that economic entanglement is more efficient a method of control than establishing their own rule.
The rise of the internet economy now means that land and natural resources need not be the primary drivers for growth. Value can be created through internet transactions using intangibles such as digital collectibles, advertising and so on. The emergence of the internet economy has also created a new challenge for governments to focus on. With the maturity of Automation technology, Cloud infrastructure, Telecoms, Artificial Intelligence; and the emergence of Blockchain and Self-Driving Vehicles— what we are observing is that many conventional ways of work are being displaced. It is a silent battle that is hard to detect because the grocery store worker replaced by automated check out and the autoworker replaced by a machine; is unable to voice out as an aria to the rest of the community. Their individual voices fade in an out of the public conscious. So while good honest people toil and toil, productivity increases for companies through automation, these honest people cannot see why even though they are working two or more jobs, their lives are not getting better. People start getting frustrated.
The challenge for governments then is to figure out how to prepare their economies for the new technology age. To re-train and up-skill their existing workforce, and change school curriculum for the economies of the future. The change is happening now, and the slower they act, the stronger the consequences of destabilisation later on.
So, yes, I am a hyper realist, I look at the market not for what I perceive it to be but rather for what it is. I strive to be politically neutral. To paraphrase Deng Xiao Ping — ‘ white government, black government, as long as the government can deliver, it is a good government’. I look for how the market is actually structured and find the gaps. If the gap is large enough an opportunity for a solution, then why not.
Iterative Ideation
If we follow my definition of entrepreneurship, then the biggest reason why businesses fail is because they do not have product market fit. The origins of their failure begins much earlier on, in the enterprise design. The key lesson that I’ve learnt hanging out with startups and business people is that often I think most entrepreneurs jump at a problem they see in front of their face and try to solve it without adequately meditating on the long term dynamics of the market need and appreciating the root nature of the problem. This leads them to concoct false idealistic assumptions for their market segment and devise solutions that the market doesn’t need. Or they realise that their total serviceable market is too small in comparison to their raise.
To counter that tunnel vision risk, I intend to take 2 years to study the world and all of the major trends. To appreciate where the future is going, how different communities are reacting, and where are the gaps. Coming up with many many business plans to stress test and try to validate my hypothesises through talking to industry professionals and mentors. Being open to investigate any area is the greatest way to prevent tunnel vision. This idea is radically simple and a superior approach over traditional ideation approaches. I am confident most people will not take this route because taking time off to think is a costly endeavour. I was inspired to take this approach by Masayoshi Son. Post university, on the back of the success of his first business, he took 1.5 years to study the market and devised over 40 business plans in all kinds of industries. Upon discovering his winning formula, he executed on it relentlessly and took huge risks to build what we know today as Softbank. I shall follow in his footsteps.
In conceiving new ideas, my simple rule of thumb is to follow the idea that ‘good artists copy and great artists steal.’ I am highly skeptical of making quantum leaps of improvements over existing solutions. However, I do believe in progressive improvement. Grab and Go-Jek are one of my favourite examples. I believe what they have done is steal the uber mobility model to build a huge array of users. Where they are improving over the uber model is that they are integrating financial services. Uber on its own will never reach profitability. The model is flawed in a sense that they rely on playing a price war against traditional mobility options. I believe the local choices are fully priced in, and there is a market rationale for that. It is unsustainable to keep forcing growth through new mobility functionalities. The ASEAN solutions on the other hand have gotten it right, in that the real money to be made is through payments and financial solutions. Once an app locks in users into their eco-system as Alibaba has done, they can open up any number of verticals to them and their build will be so much more successful. Payments are also unique in that they tend to exhibit monopolistic/ogliopolistic behaviour when they lock in a geography. This is logical because payment solutions are the rails for transactions between peers. If you own the way people transact, you basically own all their economic activity.
I foresee Grab and Go-Jek, Alipay and Wechatpay to displace Mastercard and Visa from APAC moving forward. My goal is similar, I intend to look for consumer focused businesses that exhibit these qualities. The rewards compared to enterprise software are telling.
I intend to go on this journey for two years because I think its a goldilocks time limit. If I take too long the exercise will lose its intellectual rigour, but too short will mean I might not be iterating on my ideas on sufficient stress. And so, just as how the strawhat crew of One Piece took two years to make themselves stronger before entering the New World, I shall do the same to conduct my investigation before I build a new company.
Mentorship
There is much talk about getting wellness coaches, business coaches, fitness coaches these days. I think it’s all well and good but I think there’s no real need to categorise all these people into such specific buckets and pay for them. I am not for paying for these coaches for most cases because I think they are prescribing to me a programme and their incentives might not be aligned with me. If I had to pay for advice, I would call these people consultants, not mentors. That is a key distinguishing feature.
As we go on our journey of growth, I believe we meet genuine people who are invested in our development. These people are what I call mentors. They might not be directly involved in our day to day but they are invested in a sense, they offer their guidance and share their life experience when one asks for it. For those that we work with, the best mentors are those who understand where we want to grow and push us in that direction. Using their experience and position, they can propel us to grow at a much accelerated rate compared to us grinding on our own. So, when I look at a job, I tend not to look at the company but ask myself who am I going to report to. Jack Ma is an advocate for such an approach as well. A large part of building that coalition of mentors around me has been influenced by my work with Fanny Koh. She was my superior at the Singapore Police Force. While, I had many many superiors during my stint, she was one who really took time to appreciate what I desired and gave me assignments within reason to further my interest. I repaid her with my loyalty and devotion to my duties. To go the extra mile to ensure her faith was not in vain. My time with her made me realise how fundamental it was to pick your mentor. A great company but a weak disinterested superior can mean stagnation. A small company with an interested mentor can mean exponential growth. I’ll always choose growth not brand names.
Good mentors allow us to punch above our weight. When I competed in the R3 global pitch competition. We were against PhDs and MBAs. We did well against them because we had Angie Walker, Director of Capital Markets, helping us make loads of connections to talk to industry to find product market fit. This enabled us to iterate quickly. I also called my mentors from Westgrove, and in a thirty minute coffee, he was able to swiftly point out my gaps and direct me to better materials. The key is that while he did not give me the answer to the question I desired, the important thing was he was able to value add by telling me where to look and how to discover my own answers. Sometimes that is all that matters.
As one would notice, I have many female mentors that have helped me along the way. Currently, the superior who I intend to train myself under — Vanessa Grellet, ConsenSys, is one of few executive directors in ConsenSys. With so much great talent, the curious thing is that women are still a minority among senior ranks. And so, part of my life’s work will be about widening women representation in business. I have attempted to tackle this problem with my team in school. As I discovered working with Christabel and Alex, the tension occurs on how we do it. If it is top-down and from a man, it can look very patriarchal. However, if the women want to create exclusive groups then they risk alienating themselves from the men. There is a delicate balance and tricky conversation to be had. I think what worked best for us, was just demonstrating faith in women to start their own projects in words and resources. To believe and support where possible. After much discussion and, back and forth, this was what Alex and Christabel did, and the outcome was the fruition of their project, a Women in Technology panel event.
Friendship
One of the major weaknesses in many entrepreneurs and people in general is the inability to look past the ego, which results in them neglecting to factor in their blind spots. This creates sub-optimal results in their decision making and execution process. Most of my friends know that I have very strong views. However, I have become more amenable to being persuaded by sound arguments and considered opinion. What is more important to me now compared to before I started university is less of my ego, but more of the desire to understand the full picture.
Through debate and discussion with friends with no real stake in the outcome, one can find blindspots in our own reasoning and thought process. The more sides you have of an argument, the better you can prepare your response. This has led me to make friends who have opposing views to myself. Tracy is such a friend. While I am predisposed to more conservative views, she is immeasurably kind and generous in spirit. The outcome of our chats is often one where I see the need for a balanced view. There is no right or left. The key is really being able to accept that different people can have their own unique opinions about things and their opinion is no less or more valuable than yours, provided they come from a position of reason.
A better person is one who can discover blindspots. Someone who can’t lives in darkness. Better to be humble and alive than proud and dead. Entrepreneurship is the hardest game of them all.
Throughout my journey, there have been many friends who have helped me. Some have directly volunteered to work on my projects such as Aleksi and Pablo, which is amazing! And some go the extra mile by just being present. It’s one thing to send a few encouraging words and another to lend your presence. My good friend Emma, while not knowing much about what I did, lent me her presence at the events I organised, and this quiet support was great to keep me energised and supported. I aspire towards doing the same for my friends as well. By mutually supporting each other, I believe we can all enable each other to become better and have higher quality friendships.
Conclusion
I hope I have illustrated my idea of a good life with you. As a dreamer, I wish to follow in the footsteps of other great entrepreneurs and have devised my road map and key principles. So, just as how NASA put a man onto the moon, I shall try to build the enterprise of my dreams.
Thank you for reading. Cheers!
