Rumpelstiltskin with the Singapore Innovation circuit, Anne is a young entrepreneur and business development extraordinaire who is tasked with turning hay to gold. With extensive experience in the financial and healthcare industries, Anne aspires to attain the highest sense of nirvana in the Himalayan mountain range. In the meantime, she helps other entrepreneurs achieve their goals and aspirations.
Start Up Nation is a company that was built to unite start ups worldwide, on a global platform. Through her work in the entrepreneurial landscape worldwide, Anne (now known as Astrogirl) decided to build a simple website to help start ups worldwide scale, connect and interact. StartUpHabitat.com was borne out of wanting to create the perfect digital ecosystem for entrepreneurs worldwide. While these are indeed early days of StartUpHabitat.com, some traction in attracting players in various countries has been made.
It turned out that many start-ups worldwide faced the same problems in scaling and early market adoption. With her skills as Rumpelstiltskin (turning hay to gold), Anne now focused on helping start-ups reach for the stars (hence Astrogirl). Start Up Nation continues to offer assistance to start-ups worldwide in their operations, business development and management strategies. Through various formal and informal arrangements, StartUpNation Ventures is a division that is dedicated to assist start-ups and their founders make the right connections in order to get to their goals.
Start Up Nation currently has two actively operational divisions – StartUpHabitat and StartUpNation Ventures. The management team is made up of the following Superheroes -
Anne Cheng, Astrogirl – Astrogirl spends as much time as she can helping start-ups through StartUpNation Ventures. She also spends some time strategizing for StartUpHabitat, and doing some business development for her own start-ups. She has retired since her wedding and spends much of her time performing her wifely duties. She can be reached at astrogirl@startuphabitat.com.
George, Wolverine – Wolverine spends much of his time speaking unknown languages in order to sharpen his skills for clawing through new markets. As the head of the Northen Hemisphere of our little StartUpHabitat, he builds strong local partnerships and physical presences in new markets on behalf of StartUpNation Ventures. He can be reached at wolverine@startuphabitat.com.
Christopher Lane, Professor X – Chris is an intellectual property specialist with an IP consultancy, IP Matters, in Singapore. Chris has worked in a variety of capacities in IP, both in the UK and Singapore, from assistant patent attorney to IP analyst in a venture capital company, to in-house IP manager, both in industry in the UK and academia, in NUS. He has experience as an IP mentor for startups at SMU’s Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. His area of expertise is in patent prosecution and portfolio management, trade mark filing and searching, and IP intelligence, using Thomson Reuters’ Innovation software. He can be reached at profX@startuphabitat.com
Rachel Yang, Gremlin – The Gremlin works together with Astrogirl in helping start ups think about early market adoption. Having enough experience of being shouted at by clients, the Gremlin attempts role playing as the typical and the not-so-typical client with start-up founders. These role-playing sessions have mortified many start-up founders. In the meantime, the Gremlin is really an advertising person and a full-time wife to someone. When help is needed, the Gremlin’s other half will check her email at gremlin@startuphabitat.com.
Jack Yang, Mighty Mouse – Mighty Mouse really only turns up when it’s time to save the day. The superheroes themselves usually seek his assistance. Most other times, he dives and runs his dive business, Deep Fathom. However, you can try emailing him at mightymouse@startuphabitat.com.
Vincent Yong, Ironman – Ironman helps out the operations for StartUpHabitat.com, and is in training to be the biggest business legend in time to come. His interests include gym training, inspirational reading and interacting with new people at the now infamous No. 5 Emerald Hill bar. He can be reached at ironman@startuphabitat.com.
Brendan Seow, Dark Knight – The Dark Knight runs the operations for StartUpHabitat.com, and is in training to be the biggest superhero in the gaming industry. In the meantime, he is also in training on being the Superhero Start Up Entrepreneur through StartUpHabitat.com. He can be reached at darkknight@startuphabitat.com.
If you need to reach the entire team, you may wish to email superheroes@startuphabitat.com to save yourself the grief of reading through all our profiles.
Anne has attempted to be an entrepreneur a couple of times. She has often been unsuccessful, but has sold a few of her more successful companies for valuations which are very unfortunate, despite them being sizable. In 2011, Anne transferred her remaining stake in her holdings company, Expatriate Services Limited to the owners of her competitors’ website, after being paid a small amount of money that she promptly gave to her social impact institutional trust, the Bean Sprout Project.
Some of her more successful businesses were -
Behavioural technologies – B2B sales tool which creates microsites for each end-user purchasing customer, with embedded intuitive learning that delivers a new experience for business purchasing managers. In simple language, the software predicts what the business purchasing manager is thinking and pushes information that is relevant, useful, and timely. Track records show that the software increased sales volume by 300% yoy for five larger MNC clients. The company that developed the technology has since been sold, despite making a nice profit in 2010. Anne credits much of the success of the company to her friend and partner, Evelyn, who has since gone on to bigger pursuits.
Expatriate services – localization of expatriate health insurance policies, which prevented the duplication of purchases, as well as the transfer of patient data in a secure manner. The innovation was in getting expatriate wives to do the sales of these insurance transfer programs at their playgroups and tea parties. The company later grew into an expatriate forum, then a magazine, and an events manager – totally out of league for Anne. She gave up and sold the company to her competitor, and donated the proceeds to charity.
The Bean Sprout project – attempting to feed SOME deserving people. Not much innovation, except that we actually do spend some time hanging out in the neighbourhoods we want to feed, to determine the highest index of needy people (no, who are we to judge, we just try to determine how many people are “gaming the system” and do inverse indexing). We recognize that we cannot feed everyone, but we try to feed some, specially the hungrier ones. Other than food, we bring volunteer doctors, and sometimes pay for the school fees of some of the children. Anne attempts to train some of them in vocational skills like bootstrapping for businesses.
Anne is attempting yet another project. You can read more about it under Start Up Nation.
Those who know Anne know that her best asset is the person in her life. Anne relishes being a wife, and is enjoying every moment of married life. She also enjoyed every moment of the wedding that was previously written about. Very little should be said about this. Those who know, know. Those who don’t, well, don’t.
Anne thinks of herself as a technology idiot. However, between sips of vodka and multi-tasking on twenty open tabs in her browser, she actually does help build some simply self-hosted e-commerce websites, powered by WordPress (and one by Joomla).
Here are a few links to some sites she has built:
annecheng.com is supposed to be Anne’s little calling card. Really, it’s never meant to be anything more than a little bid for Anne to simplify her calling card.
Savoir Faire is a business run by Delene Lee and Sharon Tang, which offers wonderful customized gifts for every need. Really, how would you like to finally receive a gift you REALLY want, and something you wouldn’t recycle at the first available opportunity?
Deep Fathom’s site is being populated at this point, and is hosted on a mock website, heckcare.com. Its real domain should be deepfathom.com.sg. In any case, Deep Fathom is the kind of dive school that teaches you everything that no one would teach you – how not to get in trouble. Would be a great start, considering there’re few escape routes underwater.
Innova Technology is a business which designs, builds and sells gadgets that solve everyday problems. Their first product, aL (short for anti-Loss), has just been launched for pre-order.
Start Up Habitat is the web division of Start Up Nation. You can read more about Start Up Nation here, or visit the site to find out more.