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World's laziest CEO. Before starting the highly-successful Proxycurl and Sapiengraph, Steven founded 5 other startups: Gom VPN, Kloudsec, SilvrBullet, NuMoney, and SharedHere.
I watched an interview of Quek Siu Rui, CEO of Carousell, on Bloomberg TV. He spoke about being lucky enough to work on a product that he cares about passionately. But which came first? Passion or traction? Will Sui Rui be working on Carousell if he was not able to
Look what I put together today. I have had my fingers busy this week, getting involved in the actual productization process in our next experiment. Programming gets me ticking. As a decent programmer, the progress of my work is obvious and predictable. Predictable progress in programming is why it is
My brother is in Dublin, working for the DynamoDB product under Amazon AWS. Before Amazon, he worked for Skyscanner. My brother is quite an engineer with an attitude, and he loves working with smart people who speak their mind sans political correctness. I love that. Then another friend recently jumped
I was pitching right up till I decided to stop working on Sapiengraph. Perfect setup for some awkward emails but it has to be done. This is the email that I sent: > Hi xxx! I want to follow up to provide an update. I sought out an introduction to
This is a technical post separated into two parts. One readable, the other not (to most). I will start with an introduction to Sapiengraph CCTV, and how we, as a company, sought out to add software smarts into a camera. In the second part, I will be copy-pasting the README
It is time for the next experiment after Sapiengraph. I have a few ideas, but there are two that I am studying. The first idea is to productize TMP, a task management platform that we built internally that has turned on the capability for us to operate with a remote
I received numerous feedback from people I care about that I might have given up too fast. This is not the first time I have heard of this. So let us address the elephant in the room. I have a short attention span. It is hard to stay interested in
As a boss, I allocate resources in initiatives that will provide a return. Just like how an investor in a venture capital firm would. Instead of financial capital, my resources are human capital. And I take significant risks, so long as they seem sound. With Sapiengraph, the company arrived at
A while ago, I wrote the specifications for a Trello-based CRM known as ZIC (zero input CRM) and tasked it to an intern. Nevertheless, the product's complexity meant that the result would be unstable. And it was unstable. In my experience, it will take a full-time developer a
Pornography has painted a world by which women have disproportionally large breasts. With startup porn, we have the same problem with almost everything. I want to talk about "hiring the best" today. Every CEO, including myself, claims to hire the best in their company. Statistically, that cannot be
Business is people, and humans are irrational. Getting things done in a B2B company is about managing this complex web of inter-human relations. I am going on a limb to say that if you are an introverted or aspie founder, you are better off working on a B2C product. In
I am doing something different this time compared to how I used to build ideate and build products. This time, I am not building anything until I see paying customers. And oh boy, it is unsettling to be selling anything without anything more than a brochure and a promise. Eureka
It is no secret that I fired my brother shortly after I hired him. And I dismissed him for two reasons. First, he was not a good programmer due to inexperience. Secondly, as a young company, I could not afford to have my brother learn under my dime. I think
Genetically, I gain fast-twitch muscles easily. I am no different at work. I drive large movements in the company. And sometimes we move so fast that I can't help but to look back and force myself to regroup.
The title of this article is a story of a guy that I tried fund-raising from as a doe-eyed fresh grad. A while ago, he low-key flexed that he had bought himself a plot of land in Tanglin to stay grounded. I think he failed to accomplish his dual-pronged message
I pride myself as a Product CEO because I build great software. And currently, I have two tiny project ideas written down in my todo list. A Chrome Extension to click on a number and open the number in Whatsapp Web I use Whatsapp Web almost exclusively because I do
But like most people, I am not connected, loaded, or pedigreed. But I have a brain and a grit.
By success, I mean I made money to support one person (myself). Most entrepreneurs do not even get this far. And what I do is no secret. For every new product I launch, I have to figure out how to get to the first $1000. And if I am unable
The real world frustrates internet geeks. In the real world, everything seems so much harder. In the real world, the geeks have to put on clothes. The geeks have to go to work. The geeks actually have to make money and pay for things. Luckily the geeks these days are
Inefficiencies irritate me. Most of the time, inefficiencies exist for a good reason. An economic reason such as cleaners being cheap makes R&D for self-cleaning toilets prohibitively expensive. A carpark attendant is still required because for some reason; asshole drivers won't take "no parking"
I am what I am. But as time races by and collagen weans itself off my face, I have noticed the few times I cede control, were the few times things worked out well. Cede control in the company With LandX, I could hold onto the reins if I wanted
There was a time by which I made a concerted effort to stave off the intake of the news. That is because the primary intent of news reporting is to alarm. The secondary intent is to inform. This is why "Breaking News" arises so often. The TV networks
The giant startups that shook up our lives such as Uber and Airbnb did so because they were, by nature, disruptive. But disruption is a nicer way of saying illegal. Then they got so big so fast that regulators have no choice but to regulate them permissively, The recipe for
Especially so for someone like me who grew up trying hard not to take money from my mother because of tight financial circumstances. In a startup world, planning for failure is a recipe for mediocrity. Fighting this old habit has proved to be one of the harder battles on par
My investment track record, while limited in variety, has been pretty successful. They would be way more successful when I tune out my emotions. The times I didn't were led to outcomes that were less favorable outcome: * Like how I signed away an entire company I built because
