How I became an entrepreneur

I started this article hoping to discuss startup culture and values, but I wanted to first explore my personal character traits and the journey I have taken and the major life events that have shaped my perspective on establishing effective startup culture and values, so that article will come next.

The realities of my youth

I was born at the tail end of a revolution, one that led to complete secularisation of government, education and healthcare systems, that triggered a near complete rejection of, and a mass exodus from, religion and the shackles it held the populace in. From parents that had just survived a nationalist movement that saw bombs in mailboxes, indiscriminate injury, high profile political kidnappings, murders, martial law over the land, soldiers in the street and fear in everyone's hearts and minds. 

I was part of the first generation after this, raised to live the hopes and dreams of past generations, unburdened by traditions and reared to thrive in this new world freshly created for me and my peers. This was the new Québec.

Needless to say, I grew up in uncontrolled economic prosperity with unparalleled access to resources and infrastructure. 

Sadly, the pervasive shifts in global societal values saw our world being plunged in an ecological and economical nightmare. And by the time I became an adult, I lived in a world, where for the first time in generations, a prosperous future was not a social guarantee, where everyone needed to fight, hustle and push hard to succeed. 

As a consequence, and rightly so, I became cynical, disaffected and to some extent apathetic, like all others of my generation who were living through this same reality, Generation X.

But rest assured, I’m a real delight to be around :-)

Bedtime stories

Unlike other kids, my bedtime stories didn’t feature brave and heroic protagonists slaying dragons and protecting villagers from evil villains, I had a calculator and was being taught the fundamentals of money, simple vs compound interest, loaning vs borrowing, buying vs investments, amortisation, depreciation, etc. 

It made for super exciting allowance management strategies and school yards businesses. It also gave me the entrepreneurial & planning mindset that instilled in me an interest to make money, something that is still resonantly true to this day.

My first business

At the age of 11 or so, I made my first foray in business: the lawn mowing business, walking around the neighbourhood pushing a lawnmower, knocking on doors and offering to cut the lawn for a few dollars. Sadly, I wasn’t the only one with this idea, so the business soon became walking around the neighbourhood pushing a lawnmower and carrying a baseball bat over my shoulder to crack knees and ward off the competition… kidding, it was a polo mallet… kidding again :-)

But there was competition, a dozen boys, or so, hustling to be the best and most sought after lawn boy of the neighbourhood. Being lazier than most (something that is still resonantly true to this day), I launched a call centre -big word to say kitchen table and a phone extension cord-, where I centralised neighbourhood bookings and dispatched jobs to others, taking a cut of the take for my trouble. 

This lasted the whole summer and I got myself a boombox from Radio Shack when school started. 

My second business

Fast forward a few years, 16 years old, my mother purchased a fancy computer for a business she was starting, along with a colour bubble jet printer and a colour scanner… to which I added a laminating machine. 

As we all know what every 16 year old boy wants to be: two years older (at least where I’m from), it was Boom Town!  

Word spread fast and within a matter of months people from as far as 3 towns away were coming over till late at night to spend their allowance money on my tradecraft. 

My third business

At 17 I became a bartender (yes I’m that lucky), the bar I was working in had 5 video lottery machines and a constant stream of degenerate gamblers glued to them, including the school’s guidance counselor... needless to say I didn’t follow any of his advice.

With the proceeds from my second business, the good tips I was earning from the patrons and the learnings accrued from my “bedtime stories”, a new business activity shaped up, and soon my accrued savings provided me with a consistently growing revenue stream, with little to no enforcement required (to be clear, at that time, loan sharking was legal and usury rates were set at 51% by the government).

With this business I was able to support my lifestyle and saved enough to finance my college and university studies. 

Welcome to college 

College provided me with a lot of free time: flexible class schedules with big chunks of free time, 4 months of summer break and 1 month of winter break.

So I became a bicycle messenger, not very lucrative, but it did successfully fulfil my need for danger & excitement while providing me with a constructive way of venting my generational frustrations.

This stint taught me many soft skills, it socialised me, I learned how to network, meet new people, manage casual interactions and initiate elevator conversations, as well as how to set daily milestones to maximise effectiveness and how to position myself to get the best jobs.

It also enabled me to get known in the bike shops around town and landed me a job as a bicycle salesman the following summer. Something I did between college and university and during my first summer holiday in university.  

The entrepreneurial learning began

There are many things, events and people that have shaped me over the years, but none more so than working as a bicycle salesman. 

Working retail gave me hundreds of opportunities a day to overcome shyness, to test different communication & persuasion strategies, to understand the needs & ambitions of individuals, to define requirements and to create value propositions that would get customers over the finish line, or at least get them to tear open their wallets to hand over their hard earned money. 

It also taught me “the hunt”: a way to quickly scan the room, skip over the tire kickers and pounce on the big spenders, a strategy I still leverage on during trade shows. 

But the most valuable sales lesson I was able to perfect during this time, I took from “A Self-Made Hero”, a movie where the protagonist, in one of the segments, learns how to effectively do door-to-door sales. In a nutshell: “selling is not about lying to the customer, it’s about inflating the truth” (the best translation I can think of). 

And that’s how I learned to up-sell.

With this in mind, I discovered how to identify “the dream” in each customer, taking them beyond answering their immediate needs, to vocalising the vision of the better future they have envisioned for themselves, and then not selling the products that satisfies their immediate needs, but selling them the products that will satisfy their needs in that ideal future that they have just imagined, regardless of if they will ever get to see that future or not. 

Welcome to university 

University introduced me to the real first steps of adulthood, where I needed to take real responsibilities and plan years in advance for a desired outcome, set forth winning strategies to maximise grades while minimising effort, leveraging classmates, teachers and everyone else in my surrounding to get me there. 

My focus shifted from selling to persuasion, and persuading I did.. Keep in mind I’m smart, disciplined and really really really good at school work. 

This said, with limited extra time, I took up teaching roles to make money, where from my 3rd semester onwards I started running the practicals components of courses, then the tutorials and eventually lecturing the courses altogether. 

The sales and persuasion skills I had developed over the years really came in handy, and teaching soon became an exercise in selling knowledge in a format that students would want to consume, and keep consuming. 

My first startup 

While all this is going on, during college and university, I launched a software company I called “Back Row Scientific”, which was aimed at creating software of convenience to solve everyday problems, the most popular ones were:

• Digital briefcase, essentially dropbox before the cloud, where I would use rsync and scp to sync networked & home folders across multiple computers, ensuring that laptops, desktops and servers had all the same content. So one could easily move across multiple computers while ensuring continuous access to the same files, both online and offline (re-synching when said computer was back online). 
• Pipeliner, essentially LabView, Knime or Pipeline Pilot before they existed, a flow charting tool where each vertex is a decision point or a shell script, and each edge is an in/out parameter or a decision outcome. (I actually still use this tool on a daily basis... my ~/bin/ has some really old things I’ve been moving from computer to computer since the early ‘90s)

Not much money came out of them, but they were good exercises in creation. 

My move to Asia

The day after my last university exam, I was roughly 22 or 23 years old at the time, I packed up my apartment and I, at almost the drop of a hat, moved to China to pursue my graduate studies. 

Academic learnings aside, living in China provided me with many export business opportunities, sourcing directly from factories and selling in bulk to people all over the world, learning how to do trans-continental shipping and the paperwork it entails.

But most importantly, living in China exposed me for the first time to completely different social dynamics, life completely different from what I had experienced in any other country I had previously lived or traveled in (North America and Europe). 

And this period is also when, I would say, I became culturally aware and started thinking about leveraging culture and values as intrinsic value adding and differentiating components of any endeavour. 

About 8 years of entrepreneurial hiatus

I spent about 8 years of my adult life traveling the world in a quest for drug discovery. By this I don’t mean I spent 8 years discovering drugs, I mean I spent 8 years working on various segments of the drug discovery value chain with the aim of scientific discovery in relation to disease diagnosis and drug design, for a myriad of diseases such as tuberculosis, leprosy, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, colon cancer, diabetes and heart disease. 

I did do a project on cocaine and amphetamine but that was solely to understand and regulate appetite and the mechanisms of weight loss in mice.

During this period, although I didn’t spend as much time on business I should have, and limiting my money earning endeavours to co-owning a bicycle shop.

I, instead, volunteered upwards of 40% of my time to worthy causes in Singapore, namely creating programs for hospice residents (for lack of a better word) and the visually handicapped, and on a world-wide stage to promote road safety for cyclists and pedestrians.

Granted, they were all driving business to the bike shop, but my key takeaway from these activities was discovering and developing a sense of empathy and understanding of other people’s plights, and leveraging this understanding to initiate change in society at large, in other words how to start a trend or a movement.

2010, the year of full time entrepreneurship

The company I was working for at the time decided to shutter their Singapore operations and retrench all it’s workforce: 180 people went from gainfully employed to jobless… like in the movies, they locked the door, took attendance and told us we were all fired.  

This was a particularly distressing period in my life, as being a foreigner on an employment pass, it meant I had 30 days to leave the country and the life I had built, or find new work, or figure out how to legally stay in the country (illegal immigration in Singapore is not a given right like in other countries).

Having not enough money in the bank to secure an entrepreneur visa or having the right immigrant status to establish a company so I could give myself a work visa. I spent the month searching for opportunities in the Singaporean visa system, and I found one: creating a foreign owned company and appointing myself as a local representative.

Now what ? 

Like all new immigrants needing to fend for themselves in a new country, I did what had to be done. I started a scientific software distribution and solutions company, which evolved and mutated, led to an acquisition, then a few more startups, a few more acquisitions and which all led me to where I am today, in all my glory :)

What did I learn? What do you need to be an entrepreneur ? 

The most valuable skills & aptitudes I feel are absolutely needed to thrive as an entrepreneur are: drive, discipline, salesmanship, empathy, communication and persuasion, and this boasted by some sort of technical skills & knowhow... and of course a healthy appreciation for money to always keep your eyes on the prize. 

But most importantly, you might see my journey as an unfocused endeavour, as my mother would say :-) However being an entrepreneur is about leveraging every single action taken, as a learning opportunity and as a tool to use in the next leg of your journey.

Where will I go next, and what will I do is still unknown, but I hope my life experiences will equip me with the tools to succeeds and the ambition to learn.

So what the hell does all this have to do with startup culture and values? 

OK.

I am one individual with a unique journey, I work with other unique individuals with their own unique journeys. 

For us to collectively create value and succeed together, we each need to understand what drives and motivates one another, what are the commonalities that unite us and make us stronger, and what are the differences that create perspective and cause disruption. 

The culture and the underpinning values of a startup is the glue that will keep people together, that will make other people join and that will make success within reach. 

So how do you go about doing it?

That’s for the next article, so stay tuned!