There is a fond joke in Singapore’s startup circles: give us a bold idea, and we will hand it back with a business plan, a risk register, and a steering committee, all before anyone has shipped version one. It is told with affection, and like the best jokes, it carries a grain of truth. We are world-class at getting ready.
That is only half the story; the better half is what we choose to do next. Preparation is a genuine strength, not a flaw. The next leap is to pair it with the courage to begin. What our system has unfortunately not yet produced is enough world-class founders.
By every structural measure, Singapore should be minting breakout companies at speed. It ranks among the world’s top startup ecosystems. It is home to some of Asia’s finest universities. It has deep technical talent and generous public funding. The foundations are not the problem. The opportunity now is to build the culture that turns those foundations into bold, breakout companies, and that is exactly the work we have set out to do at NUS Enterprise.
The ingredients are already here
Let me be clear: Singapore is no startup backwater. It is one of the world’s wealthiest economies by GDP per capita, and Asia’s richest. It has a well-capitalised venture market with more than 500 active VC firms, one of the highest densities in Asia, alongside a fast-growing set of deep tech programmes. Our leading universities, including the National University of Singapore (NUS), Nanyang Technological University, and Singapore Management University, all run dedicated innovation and entrepreneurship platforms.
Singapore now ranks fourth globally in StartupBlink’s 2026 Global Startup Ecosystem Index, up from tenth in 2021, the fastest five-year climb of any top-ten ecosystem.
What Silicon Valley gets right
Silicon Valley has sat at the top of the global startup map for decades. Its rise was not an accident. It was built on students who think beyond the brief, a willingness to explore unproven ground, and faculty who mentor rather than merely grade.
Walk into a Stanford classroom, and you are not just absorbing theory. You are defining problems, building prototypes, defending decisions to real stakeholders, and being pushed by professors who back potential over credentials. Failure is not a red mark. It is part of the curriculum.
I experienced this firsthand. When I was first rejected from Stanford’s master’s programme, a senior professor advocated for my admission because he had seen my work and believed in me, not in what appeared on paper. That is the culture in a single decision: bet on the person, not the paperwork.
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In Silicon Valley, investors back founders through repeated rejection, and students ship before they feel ready, because the ecosystem rewards the attempt, not only the outcome. The results compound. Companies founded by Stanford alumni now number close to 40,000 and generate some US$2.7 trillion (SG$3.5 trillion) in annual revenue. That is not a programme. That is a culture compounding over generations.
Compare that with the reflex that still greets many unconventional ventures here: “We need to study this further.” This response delays momentum, dampens ambition, and quietly shelves the long-horizon, research-intensive ideas that tend to change the world.
The Munich model and why it matters
Silicon Valley is not the only reference point worth studying.
The Technical University of Munich, through UnternehmerTUM, has been ranked Europe’s leading startup hub by the Financial Times for three years running. Since 2002, it has supported more than 1,000 startups and currently helps spin out over 100 high-growth technology companies a year. In 2024 alone, its ventures raised more than €2 billion (SG$3 billion). Its alumni include Celonis, Germany’s first decacorn, alongside companies such as Personio, FlixMobility, and Isar Aerospace.
It built all of this not by imitating Silicon Valley, but by making entrepreneurship the third pillar of the university, alongside research and teaching: embedded in degrees, credit-bearing, and wired into a dense network of corporates, investors, and operators. Not a module, not an elective, not an optional enrichment activity.
The lesson is simple: you do not need Sand Hill Road to build great companies. You need a university that treats entrepreneurship as core to its mission and means it.
A different strategy at NUS Enterprise
This is the gap we have set out to close, and we are doing it through a deliberately different approach.
We start with immersion. The NUS Overseas Colleges programme places students inside high-growth startups around the world for up to a year. The results make the point we keep returning to: Our cohort based in Sweden has produced founders at close to Silicon Valley’s rate, clear evidence that entrepreneurial outcomes are not geography-dependent. They are culture-dependent.
We have paired that with capital built for deep tech. NUS Enterprise has launched a S$150 million Venture Capital Programme, the first of its kind by a university in Asia, alongside a co-investment framework of up to S$20 million. The partners we brought on, Granite Asia, 4BIO Capital, Playground Global, and Matter Venture Partners, were chosen for how they build and scale research-based companies, not simply for how they write cheques.
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And we have planted a flag abroad. NUS Enterprise has opened its first global outpost in Silicon Valley, at The Studio, Playground Global’s incubation facility. Our team there will connect Singapore’s innovation ecosystem to one of the world’s most demanding markets bi-directionally.
We are also moving into the frontier where deep tech now matters most. Building on a decade-long partnership with Munich, we are collaborating with TUM Venture Labs, with a focus on defence and dual-use technology. For the first time, Singapore will host the Singapore Defence Tech Hackathon, co-organised with the European Defence Tech Hub and TUM Venture Labs, extending a platform that builds defence startups in Europe to Singapore. Our reference point here is Israel: a nation of comparable size that turned deep technical talent and hard necessity into one of the world’s most productive venture engines. The lesson we take from it is not about any single sector. It is that a small country with serious talent and serious resolve can build globally significant companies, provided it backs its founders early, decisively and without flinching.
None of this sits at the edge of the system. It is a deliberate redesign of the core: embed entrepreneurship into the institution, back founders through uncertainty, and give Singapore’s best ideas a global runway from day one.
The real shift is what we measure
Singapore has a world-renowned education system, and that is precisely where the next opportunity lies. It has been optimised for certainty. Assessments reward correct answers over interesting questions. Students learn to reduce risk rather than manage it, and many enter the workforce trained to wait for complete information before they act.
Entrepreneurship sits at the other end of that spectrum. It is forged in uncertainty: talking to users before you are ready, shipping imperfect prototypes, and iterating fast rather than waiting for every answer. When institutions optimise only for certainty, they do not remove risk. They postpone the learning. And in a global race, postponed learning is the most expensive choice of all.
The evidence is clear. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s 2023/24 report found that in 31 of 49 economies surveyed, experts rated entrepreneurial education at school as the weakest of 13 framework conditions. Singapore scores strongly on overall startup conditions, but the global pattern is unmistakable: the thinnest layer everywhere is experiential, mindset-building education. That is a gap we can lead in closing.
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From capability to courage
The pattern is familiar. In its early days, Google was turned away by the major internet portals and passed over by several prominent venture investors. The search market looked crowded, the founders looked unproven, and the commercial case looked unclear. A number of those who passed later admitted they had underestimated both the technology and the team.
That story repeats across every generation of breakthrough companies. Early-stage innovation rarely fits a conventional evaluation framework. It looks uncertain because it is uncertain, and the ecosystems that back it anyway are the ones that win.
Singapore has built a well-oiled system for entrepreneurs to survive and thrive. What it needs next is the institutional courage to treat curiosity, resilience, and bold attempts as real measures of success, not footnotes to flawless execution.
The goal is not to clone Silicon Valley. It is to build a Singaporean model of entrepreneurship where discipline and daring coexist, where ideas move from classroom to market with confidence, and where we stop asking “what if it doesn’t work?” long enough to find out.
Entrepreneurial ecosystems are not built on perfect plans. They are built on imperfect experiments, repeated at speed.
Singapore has every ingredient. At NUS Enterprise, we have stopped studying the recipe and started cooking.
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