I moved to Singapore in August, over 3 months ago as part of the internet startup I am a co-founder of: iSyndica. Having spent 6 months in Singapore the year before, I had been accustomed to most elements of the city: the humidity, the food diversity (though I do call Subway my home about half of the week) and the culture. I had heard of great schools, NUS, NTU and SMU, among others. What I had not been prepared for, is the labor market that Singapore would subject our startup to.
The graph above highlights the type of profile iSyndica would like to hire given the current state we are in: early stage startup – less than 12 months old. We want someone who is entrepreneurial because we are all constrained by time, and talented so that he can be productive. A trade off of these two can be allowed since an entrepreneurial spirit can be guided, and a talented individual can be trusted to do a proper job. The issue is that in Singapore, there are market dynamics that affect the availability of the three desirable profiles, leaving tech companies in Singapore with an overwhelming, yet undercapacitated, supply of lower quadrant people.
First crunch: The right side of the graph, the group of talented people will seek to go to the US. This is the mecca for computer scientists, startup or not.
Second crunch: Asians are notoriously risk averse and tend to favor brands: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Avaya and the likes all offer CV validation, a steady paycheck and the comfort that one is on the right track.
Third crunch: Singapore has made the news in the US and Europe as providing a large amount of startup capital to young upstarts. This has made available a flurry of grants of $50,000SGD to a number of fresh graduates (or still in school) students with no experience to build and launch a product to market. Empirically, Singapore hasn’t had any global tech startups (ignoring the surprising story of Creative). Social Wok and Home Camera might be considered an exception (and where started by experienced individuals) given the overwhelming amount of individuals I’ve seen with their “Founders” or “Directors” business cards of companies. This easy access to funding has diluted the labor market for entrepreneurial people among small projects of 1-2 people.
Fourth crunch: We get money now what? Singapore’s great at providing money. I could be criticized for biting the hands that will feed me but I think my arguments are valid. Singapore is an island of 4 million populated in large parts by foreigners. If I am a Singaporean who has grown on the island, how do I understand how a consumer in the US or Europe (some of the bigger markets) perceives and uses internet services? I don’t. There’s no entry point into the mindset of your target audience, restricting your vision of the world to a smaller Southeast Asian subset.
Macro: Now with the rise of India and China as ecommerce and eservices consumer, Singapore could become a great hub. English-speaking, expat-friendly and politically stable. No, Singapore is too expensive and the labor isn’t there. China is boosting copycats of Youtube, facebook and google with the ferocity of the USSR government during the cold war. And geographically, it isn’t too great either. Being close to the equator means that distances to Europe, the US and China are still there. Over 6 hours to Beijing, 3.5 to Hong Kong, 24 hours to New York on a good day and 12 hours to Paris. I would pick Shanghai possibly as a better base. China has an overwhelming supply of graduates and they are aggressively pushing an R&D capability in computer software and hardware.
Little details: Being US-centric, most our customers and “partners” are in the US. With a 12 hour (13 during DST) time difference with the East Coast, it makes phone conversation, support emails and cold calling very difficult. For a while, one of my team member would be up all night responding to various issues.
Closing Remarks: Let it be noted that there are two dimensions that are important in my above analysis. The first one is that it concerns computer scientists and might not apply to other fields such as biotechnology. Second, Asia is more mobile oriented, which has driven a focus to Java based languages. iSyndica uses C#, .Net and MsSQL which are Microsoft supported technologies which might not be as readily available.
Despite the negatives, Singapore is a good place for Westerns to develop an idea – not develop a business. It is cheap for a developed country, the ease of living provides a nice balance to the toughness of a startup schedule, and getting a business incorporated is fairly easy. We were able to find a talented Chinese software engineer from NTU, giving us hope that we can bring more on board. However, we have begun looking more seriously at neighboring countries for help: India to begin with and probably China. Singapore for me is out.
Anecdotes: A friend who did some recruitment while at Motorola a few years ago complained that 80% of the candidates they interviewed couldn’t code a program in C to determine if a number was odd or even. Another friend working for Avaya similarly complained of recruiting difficulties.
