Ryan was an active student in NUS, where he was involved both in Residential College 4 and NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) Singapore Programme. He has worked at various companies – first as a Market Research Analyst at momenta Group, then as a Marketing Communication Analyst at Eunoia an F&B Technology startup, as part of the NOC programme.
After graduation, Ryan worked closely with the founders at Capital as a Management Associate before he decided to take a leap of faith and started Pitchspot with his co-founder, See Ting, from N-House.
Q: Knowing that this book will be distributed amongst the Business School community, how would you want to be known to the readers?
Through NUS Enterprise, I work closely with founders of startups to focus on product and market validation and I share my domain expertise with budding entrepreneurs and innovators who are just starting out their ventures. Achieving problem-solution fit is great but does that mean the market will require said solution? This is exactly what Pitchspot is solving – to enable market validation to be conducted within the innovation community much more easily.
Q: Has this first career been what you envisioned it to be?
It’s a lot more than I’ve imagined. They say entrepreneurship is a journey. We plan to fundraise by the end of this year to scale in Southeast Asia and I think a lot of startup founders will agree with me when I say – we gotta hustle hard and stay strong amidst the storm.
Q: Were you scared to startup?
Yes. One worry was money since doing a startup would likely mean no financial stability. Other questions I ponder about includes whether we could close the next deal? Will the startup take off? Furthermore, I wanted to obtain family approval before venturing into a startup business. My mother like many Singaporean parents, holds a traditional mindset – she wanted me go into banking as it would likely ensure financial security. She felt that working in a startup would require much effort and a hectic working timetable.
It does get tough at times but you have to regularly update your family about what you do.
Be that as it may, I have no regrets in my decision – the opportunity cost is far lower right now as I do not have to worry much about taking care of my family. I also don’t have any liabilities other than school debt.
Q: How have your previous work experiences before Pitchspot helped you?
I ventured into F&B tech during NOC. It was also my first foray into the entrepreneurship scene, where I discussed a lot of ideas and concepts with my mentor, Zwee – He taught me how best to deal with B2B clients, and not just from a sales perspective (eg. met with Yakun, Texas Chicken), but also from an investment perspective. As a Marketing and Communications – it was only natural for me to be proactive in design and I manage to revamp the webpage design from scratch and worked on several UI/UX projects for clients based in Taiwan.
I took it on my previous role at Capital Match because I wanted to learn what exactly was invoice-side marketing, which is a huge market. It really deals with the cash flow side of things, which crucial for any startup / SME. Picturing assets and income statements is quite hard in a classroom. You will only realise its importance when you are doing it.
One of the founders, Pawel, taught me a lot and was very straightforward with me through my journey with Capital Match. They had just raised Series B, 6 months ago before I left. Since I was about to graduate, I decided I work on Pitchspot full-time. Since then, it has been thoroughly challenging – but also very rewarding – getting some revenues in, and managing operations, recruitment, design, and the like in Pitchspot.
On the whole for all the work experience I have accumulated, the key takeaway was that I went into the NOC programme as a business student, but graduated as someone who really wants to challenge the status quo.
Q: What advice do you have for those doing internships?
When you go for internships, strive to be the one who is “out of the norm”. Be proactive and take the initiative. It’s not just about working on whatever that was assigned to you but rather, making yourself stand out. For example, at Eunoia, I was known as the pun master and I would invite people to jamming sessions. You need to make the effort to really hang out with peers or higher up’s to build good working relationships. That said, you will need to know when to speak up and when to give due respect.