Ryan Chew of Tribe
Every entrepreneur has to start somewhere –and somewhere along the journey, their approach to running a business might differ depending on the challenges that they are facing.
Starting off his journey at 19, Ryan Chew, Co-founder and COO of Tribe, had faced different kind of challenges that required him to adapt and adjust the way he is running the business. And these challenges seem to have brought results.
His company Tribe –which consists of Tribe Accelerator, innovation and educational ecosystem Opennodes, and Tribe Academy, an academy focused on developing job-ready deep tech talents– counts leading government and corporate organisations such as Enterprise Singapore, IMDA (Infocomm Media Development Authority), Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Dubai government, AXA, BMW Group Asia, Citibank, EY, IBM, Intel, Nielsen, PwC, R3, SGInnovate, Temasek, Ubisoft, and WeBank.
In addition to that, together with co-founder Yi Ming Ng, Chew has also been named in the Forbes 30 under 30 Asia 2020 list.
Chew sits down with e27 to share his views on taking up challenges –and what he sees will be the next big thing in the tech startup ecosystem.
The following is an edited excerpt of our conversation:
What has been the toughest challenges that you have to deal with throughout your entrepreneurship journey?
At every stage of my career, or entrepreneurship journey, I have faced different challenges along the way. When I was at the very, very early stage of my entrepreneurial journey, at 19, the challenge was the ability for me to be able to meet groups of people or different individuals … and to align them on to a single kind of vision.
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You have this grand vision of the kind of business that you want to build, the kind of application it should be, and the purpose of this application. But as you communicate it, sometimes things get lost in translation. Or sometimes, whatever you say down the road just get forgotten. You know, like a broken telephone scenario.
I had to engage designers, app developers, and different stakeholders for just one particular app. The challenge was, how do I get them in line to the vision or to the goal that I have? Also, at the same time, allow them the flexibility to leverage their own creative inputs, so that we can make this better together as a team.
Is there any specific approach that you took to deal with these different parties?
So, the first-ever app that I learned to build when I was 19, 20 was a social app inspired by Ellen DeGeneres’s Heads Up!. Basically, it’s an app that you put on your head and the person opposite have to try to guess exactly what the name of the person is.
I created it in the first place because I realised that a lot of these characters in the Ellen DeGeneres game were Americans; a lot of my friends didn’t know who exactly they were. And I thought that it would be quite interesting for us to have a local version as well as to allow having our friend’s name on the app, so you can see how this person is perceived and acted out from someone else’s point of view.
What I didn’t do back then was understanding the entire application building process.
The first iteration came out quite bad. I then implemented what we call a “single source of truth”. How do we put this single source? So, everybody, no matter from which different stakeholders, can refer to this and go on to the wireframe to see how the action looks like, and how to actually behave to the intended target audience of the app, to the deadlines that we are expected to achieve.
The Tribe team
It is no secret that this year has been a challenging one for entrepreneurs worldwide. How does it affect your approach to entrepreneurship?
[The pandemic] is a Black Swan event, so we try to look at things that are most affected and the things that we cannot change. And then we try to understand it from that point of view.
What are the opportunities that lie beyond here? Based on research, it has been shown that more and more startups are usually born after pandemics –because that’s when people feel the most pain. That’s when people feel a lot of discomforts. And that’s where people want innovation to come. So from that point of view, pandemics usually offer opportunities for change … to spur innovation.
From this particular pandemic, we have seen that.
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With the global pandemic, we are going to see more government investments in the startup scene, and right now, the approach will be to identify how we can leverage such a resource?
Let me give you an example for Tribe Academy. When the pandemic hit, we realised that … inevitably, the economy will be affected by pandemic. What it means is a lot of jobs will be lost, a lot of people will be left stranded.
So the opportunity here is, okay, now we have a pool of people that are looking for a job. What we can do is to push on this right and to train up these people, to ask them to improve their social mobility, so that they will be hired and continue to maintain relevance in this particular industry.
There are multiple government grants that the students can tap to attend these classes to upskill themselves.
Any specific advice for entrepreneurs who are undergoing this difficult time?
It’s important to main flexibility, whether internally or externally. For example, if you are in the travel industry, there won’t be many customers out there.
You always have Plan A for when things are going smoothly, but what happens when things are not?
In January, when the news hit, because we have partners globally, [we thought], “Hey, this is not to be taken lightly.” So we sat all the upper management down and we realised that we need to start a few contingency plans.
For example, if something happens that triggers a potential cash flow issue, what is the Plan A that we should do? And the Plan B, C … so that we won’t be caught off guard.
So the advice is to, number one, give yourself options. Number two, prepare a contingency plan.
Pandemic aside, what are the most influential events in the startup ecosystem today, in your opinion?
The one that will influence the startup ecosystem the most is the global emphasis on ESG –environmental, social, and governance. The model is essentially a set of guidelines that investors will look at when investing in startups.
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So with this shift in focus in identifying startups, the focus is on identifying whether this startup is doing something that is environmentally moral, socially moral and has very strong governance. This will likely dictate the kind of startups that will get investment, and the kind that does not … So it’s important for us to really understand.
Where the capital goes, the majority of the time, the startups will have to follow. Because startups want to raise investments.
We also realised that there is more attention placed in the energy and environmental sector.
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Image Credit: Ryan Chew
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