I often encounter some people who don’t understand what is the actual startup investments, and I’ve personally met founders who treat them more poorly than we can imagine. This eventually leads startups to the ‘death valley,’ even when they have enough potential to progress. Investments in startups are actually similar to options in the trading world. Options are simply buying the right to do something in the near future in exchange for money. It sounds like a form of insurance. ...

Everyone discusses startups from the founders’ or investors’ perspectives, but from an employee’s point of view, the reality is quite different. Most startups fail within 5 years, with approximately 70% failing between 2 to 5 years. Singapore is not much different in this regard. In Singapore, the average job tenure is approximately 3.35 years. This number has been declining, particularly among younger employees, reflecting a trend toward shorter job tenures and more frequent job changes. ...

Personally, from my experience, the #startup ecosystem is (sort of) broken. Most founders aim to get investment, not build a business. Most founders believe their startup will be a unicorn, and if it’s not, they blame investors for not committing in time. Many aspiring founders expect cofounders to sacrifice by taking minimal equity and no salary, despite having achieved very little themselves. They then complain about not finding the right partner. ...

I’ve heard many CEOs complain that they can’t find a good CTO. A real funny thing from an engineer’s perspective, it’s often much more difficult to find a true business person. -0-;;;;; Why might this be? Comfort and security: It’s comfortable to be an employee at a big company with ESOP, which can lead to better outcomes than founding a company. Engineers might have less interest in starting their own companies, while most business people eventually aim to become CEOs. ...

Unpopular opinion: one of the bad stereotypes as a founder is someone who held former director/managerial positions in well-known big corporations. When I worked in a big corporation as a manager, my yearly budget was over $5 million (USD). I needed to spend it all; otherwise, my budget was considered sufficient, and it would be cut the next year. So, in most cases, we tried to spend the same amount or more within the year. To meet our budget goals, we sometimes made questionable decisions, just like you might see perfectly good pavement unexpectedly undergoing construction. ...

One of the difficult things as an early-stage founder would be hiring, whether we need to find a co-founder or founding teams. Whenever I joined a hashtag#startup, I often met hashtag#founders who hired bad apples as their founding teams and burnt lots of cash. One sad thing is sometimes the founders are bad apples. Assuming that we are just fine apples, how can we find or convince nice yet better apples to join us? ...

When you consider buying a house for yourself, in most cases the price is already too high; most people can’t afford to buy it without a mortgage. So if you visit a property site, in most cases you can easily see the mortgage calculator and check how much you could borrow a big chunk of money from banks and how long you need to pay it back. And if you do that, later you may have tax reliefs from the loan. Probably that is the only way we could buy our own home at this moment. ...