A: Thirty years ago, when traditional businesses were looking at being tech-enabled, a technopreneur was an entrepreneur + technology. But from the late 90s, it started taking on more layers. People were then talking about: “Am I B2B, am I B2C? Do I monetise to consumers, or do I monetise to corporates?” So we have to combine the ‘business model’ mindset as an additional layer to the concept of the technopreneur.

And in more recent years, we see another layer in ‘partnership’. People began thinking about: “How do I export my products and services overseas? How do I achieve success at scale and beyond my domestic home country?” And one of the ways to do that very efficiently, is to develop your own partner ecosystem where you can collaborate and co-create with other players in the marketplace. This is essential, particularly in technology, because you are looking at achieving scale and speed-to-market. In the last three to five years, I have observed that there is another layer around ‘purpose’. Purpose is important because today’s new generation of employees want to do meaningful work and contribute to society.

Hence, the technopreneur concept has seen a nice evolution to what it is today: entrepreneurship + technology + business model + partnership + purpose.

Grace Ho (centre) with colleagues at SWAT Mobility.

A: The leaders need to build a very strong foundation for the core technology and the technology stack. This is non-negotiable when you want to be a technopreneur. And you need to keep it agile enough to accommodate adaptations, not just about integrating with infrastructure through APIs, but being able to take your core stack and very quickly modify and pivot your product to something else.

This was a lesson for SWAT Mobility as well. Our core technology is a high-capacity dynamic routing algorithm to optimise route planning for the large-scale transportation of people. But when Covid-19 hit, countries were locked down and nobody was going to work. What was really growing, however, was e-commerce and food delivery. So we actually had to quickly adapt our technology stack to place ourselves strongly in the logistics and delivery sectors. Today, we have active logistics customers in Japan and Thailand.

A: When the market is quite crowded, you really don't want to lead with a cost-competitive play because it is not sustainable. If you're a small start-up, you don't have enough competitive advantage or persistent bargaining power for the talent or resources that you need.

Hence, technology differentiation of the product and service is a number-one priority, and the focus is to achieve repeated consumption of the product and/or service over a long period of time. Think about how the consumer actually benefits from your service or product; and more importantly, what is going to be compelling for the consumer to want to repeatedly consume over a long period of time? It is very enticing for people to try the product once because everybody likes novelty, but is it going to be a persistent adoption for a long period of time?

A: Small start-ups tend to lack discipline in a few areas. As a technopreneur, you should always have a good understanding of your business drivers. And you need to define what your critical business numbers are and constantly focus on them.

With SWAT Mobility, it’s not good enough to look at how many riders or how many downloads. Instead, we need to focus on our critical numbers. We have to look at how many net new customers we are attracting. What is our monthly recurring revenue if we are a software-as-a-service model? What is our churn rate? What is our burn rate? What is our cash flow? If you don't know your critical business numbers and your business drivers, the business won’t go very far.

A: I would broaden it to alignment, accountability and good corporate governance, which smaller start-ups don't think about enough. You should be very clear about your business purpose and your execution plan because once you have clarity, you can be action-oriented to drive alignment and accountability across all functions of the organisation.

If your founders think one thing, but your software developers don't understand it, there's no alignment. Accountability is the other thing. What we practise is establishing objectives and key results, or OKRs, for alignment and clarity on what we need to focus on day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month in order to drive the larger business objectives and hold everyone accountable for their objectives and key results.

Finally, there’s corporate governance, and one example is the business continuity plan (BCP). When I first joined SWAT Mobility, my co-founders asked me to help put a BCP in place. Then two weeks later, we were DORSCON orange. In retrospect, thinking about good corporate governance early is important. You may not get the perfect BCP in place, but at least you have something to anchor the team when an emergency arises. More importantly, we now have the process and discipline to guide us to be proactive and reactive to respond to crisis.

A: Firstly, it’s very important to ascertain the go-to-market strategy for your product or service. How do you effectively promote and sell? Many people think about promoting, but they forget about the “sell”. If you promote, and nobody buys, the business is not going to be viable.

Next, I would advise technopreneurs to do everything with speed and at scale. How can you get things out of the door faster? It’s about speed over precision. You don’t need to get it 100% right. If you think it's 85% or 90% there, get it out of the door first because the customers will teach you what you need to refine and improve. And to do things at scale, look at partnering with different partner types who can sell or co-create with you. Co-creators are helpful because they enable you to modularise your technology, and help you gain access to a broader breadth of parties who can take your technology, adopt it, adapt it and scale it for you with your branding.

A: We have discussed about having clarity of business purpose and always knowing your critical business numbers. These are all very important considerations for a technopreneur.

We also talked about being open to collaborate and co-create. You may be small, but you can be very powerful with partnerships, to achieve strength in numbers. If you can have the mindset of collaborating and co-creating, you can achieve speed and scale. Related to this is building your network. For technopreneurs, this includes building a community of like-minded people because you can learn from them.

Finally, it is very important to invest in your team and your leadership, and to do this early. When you can build a strong team of diverse talent capable of running the business collectively, you will be able to navigate any ambiguity and successfully overcome any challenges ahead.