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Singapore universities produce top students. Why don’t more of them become entrepreneurs?
We need a model where our famed efficiency and discipline also includes the daring required for the global start-up race.
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Singapore lacks neither talent nor capital. The island has one of the best education systems in the world, says the writer.
PHOTO: ST FILE
Tan Sian Wee
I first saw the value of an entrepreneurial mindset in 1995 at Stanford University. A group of students working on a project faced a technical constraint: web browsers could not display Chinese characters. Instead of filing a paper or shelving the idea, the students built a workaround on a small Linux server. That project became Sinanet – now Sina.com, the media giant behind Weibo.
The students turned a half-working prototype into a real company which became a tech giant. It was led by Mr Jack Hong, who at that time taught me programming.
