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Steven Goh | CEO

Steven Goh | CEO

World's laziest CEO. CEO of NinjaPear. Ex-Founder of Proxycurl (10+M), Steven founded 5 other startups: Gom VPN, Kloudsec, SilvrBullet, NuMoney, and SharedHere.

339 posts published

The story of stupidity and Ubersnap

You might have come across this "GIF" printing photo booth if you have attended corporate events or weddings. The chances are that you just used Ubersnap's services. Ubersnap is probably the first company in the world to come up with the idea of printing GIFs. Today,

Building a product is not the same as playing a chess

Building a product is not the same as playing chess. An egomaniac tried to impress upon me that I should be like him, to engage my brain before diving headfirst into building my next business. He is not worth talking about. Instead, I will like to propose my stance on

Embrace chaos

The Singapore government just banned e-scooters on all footpaths. This stacks on top of the existing e-scooter road ban. The regulation was announced and enforced the very next day. In one fell scoop, e-scooters are banned while the nation pitches a society with fewer cars. I wish the e-scooter ban

Warning, this post is an incredibly entitled rant

Last night, I caught a fever from a mild store throat, so I went to bed an hour earlier. Last month I caught a cold as well, so I took a flu shot right after I got better. I suspect these physical ailments are ramifications of what is happening in

Many months later, I still suck at writing

A few weeks ago, I spent $150 on 50 Pure Red Line (PRL) shrimps. These are the purest breed of what is a high-end shrimp for my aquarium hobby. They all died except one. Today I bought more. Two more high-end ones known as Wine Red Shrimps. I spend every

Introducing SharedHere.com

I have been writing code, designing interfaces, and exploring Unix tools in the last two and a half weeks. I should not be coding. And yet I got my hands dirty because it is the most efficient way that I can wrap my head around the product as a programmer,

This time, failure is not that scary

In one of my earliest articles, I wrote about building a position of continuous survival [https://nubela.co/blog/the-bootstrappers-hierarchy-of-needs/]. Looking back, building that stream of sustained revenue was more than just luck and hard work. It was an act of desperation. I worked hard because I was desperate. I

Demanding excellence

I wonder if it is a false dichotomy between demanding excellence and being liked. Being liked has it's perks and I am envious of those perks because they are rare and fleeting for me. Unfortunately, I choose excellence everytime. I have no story to frame the point I

I doomed myself to failure because I live in Singapore

Growing up as a teenager, I consumed American drama exclusively and built friendships with fellow American hackers. Inadvertently, I longed to go to the US and even live there. In my interview with NOC, my university's international internship program, I raved so much about the US, and I

I was in the worst class in Anglican High - AHSEC4G

I was in the worst (performing) class in secondary school. I am not sure how well it does now, but Anglican High was a good school that ranks in the top ten. I was in the "Special" stream, as were most of my peers. Academically, our cohort sits

I screwed up my weekend project

Sometimes, I envy smokers because they always seem so relaxed while smoking. My drug of choice is programming. I am lost in my head when I am in the zone, arranging lego blocks of code both in my head and on my screen. I love coding, so naturally, I chose

This is how you can learn TypeScript in 5 minutes

Warning, technical post alert. I have been programming in the last two weeks, and boy do I miss it. We have been using a variant of CoffeeScript, known as iced-coffeescript [https://maxtaco.github.io/coffee-script/]. It is like Coffeescript, which is like Javascript, but it is also like Python with

I found a parent on the internet when I was 14

I spent a significant bit of my teenage life on the internet. I trafficked pirated content that was sold downstream by pirated DVD vendors, otherwise known as warez couriering [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_group#Courier_groups]. I hacked US military servers and used them to host botnets [https:

Leveraged cadence; exponential progress

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

Joke: we sold our first CCTV (after I canceled the product)

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

Told my wife today that I might find a job

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

What I said to investors after I canceled Sapiengraph

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

Open-sourcing Sapiengraph CCTV

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

Giving up too quickly

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

I canceled Sapiengraph

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

This is the ugly CRM I built in one day

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

Startups have a huge breasts problem

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

The B2B business has made me a better person

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