Co-Founders Matching & General Assembly have a monthly session whereby founders of aspiring startups and Startup enthusiasts with core expertise in business, marketing, design, business or web development come together on the same platform for collaboration or form a team.
Back in the round-up for Nov 19, I mentioned about collaboration across FinLit / FinTech companies in Singapore to raise the Financial Literacy level in Singapore. I guess I was too myopic in this aspect. Even till today, I could be wrong on some approaches, and that is where we learn, progress and move on.
One key responsibility of a founder is to bring seemingly unrelated but indirectly relevant opportunities to the organisation. For example, hiring forms one of the biggest costs for new startups, the other possibly being office rent. You can still debate between the work-from-home concept or renting the cheapest co-working space out there. However when it comes to manpower resourcing, you want to spend more time delivering the higher value work and delegating the lower value work to your hired staff or experts.
I was having a good conversation with an entrepreneur who has startups in Singapore and Myanmar. Jeshua provides a remote-hiring service from Myanmar whereby a local company could hire accountants, designers, admin assistant and even photo and video editor for a fraction of the cost in Singapore. Don’t get me wrong — I am a firm supporter of local businesses and employment but I am also an advocate of returning good back to society. Jeshua highlighted that many of the skilled workers in Myanmar had good paper qualifications but job opportunities were not plentiful back home.
There are many money-saving apps out in the market, some with good initiatives, others being copies of the market. Sergey Nikonenko specifically targets parents saving money for their children’s future. What makes it more personal is the added valued feature of “true sense of care” — it enabled participants to not only record the acts of saving money for their children, but also congratulatory videos — even if your kids cannot watch them now, they can get tons of warm words (and love) when they grow up.
I am sold on some of these innovative ideas out there. Can we not be continued to be surprised by some of these ingenious minds out there?
Theory of Constraints 