Unlocking Human Potential
In a world blindly pursuing pedigreed education, UC Berkeley dropout Oswald Yeo chose to step away from a privileged position to ask the burning question: What about the rest of us without branded degrees? Today, the talent ecosystem he built is one of the biggest in Southeast Asia and has recently acquired Series D funding of US$50 million.
Elena chatting with Oswald to bring you this special story
One of the first things most people mention about Oswald Yeo is that he is a college dropout. In the tradition of legendary entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, he began his career by going against the grain and turning his back on a prestigious degree at the University of California, Berkeley in 2016 to build Glints, originally an internship portal. Fast-forward seven years, Glints has grown into the leading Southeast Asian talent ecosystem.
What many don’t mention is that Yeo is a first-generation college student. “My parents didn’t even graduate from high school,” he confided.
So it certainly wasn’t out of a sense of entitlement that Yeo ditched his expensive education. He was fully cognizant of the importance of education and the opportunities it gave him. Yeo simply had a more unorthodox view of the different ways opportunity could come knocking.
“The Straits Times called me Singapore parents’ worst nightmare.”
For Yeo, what prompted him to quit college was the opportunity to build a business and the great potential for personal growth as an entrepreneur. As a college dropout standing on the other side of hiring conventions now, he hopes to help other talents who may also not have Harvard, Stanford or Berkeley on their resume find matches with the right start-ups that will propel their career.
“There are 120 million professionals in Southeast Asia. Less than a few thousands went to pedigreed universities. But everyone else needs a job and many are very driven,” he said. Glints was created to realise human potential by giving these talents who sometimes fall through the cracks the right opportunities.
Take Rangga for instance. As a fresh graduate from Indonesia with a computer science degree, he didn’t have the right skill sets to be a software engineer and ended up working as a computer repairman. Three years ago, he attended a three-month skills education programme by Glints while part-timing as a dishwasher to support his family.
Three months later, he went from dishwasher to developer, working remotely for a Singapore start-up funded by Google. And three years later, he is on to his second job, also through Glints, at a large multinational insurance company. His income has risen by almost seven times since his first job.
These are the stories that keep Yeo going. Had he stayed his original course and graduated from UC Berkeley, chances are, he would have landed a cushy job and enjoyed a comfortable start to his career. Instead, he began his entrepreneurship journey bunking in a small room on top of a four-storey shophouse in Indonesia with two other co-founders.
“We crammed three beds into the small room so it felt almost like a camp. The moment we woke up, we’d all head down to the office together. When our early staff travelled to Indonesia, they’d also often share the room with us to save on hotel costs,” he recalled.
“As we grew from a company of 10 to 100 within almost a year, some staff even worked on top of the washing machine because we didn’t have enough tables in the office. Those were some my fondest memories,” he added.
As they say, all that is history. Today, Glints has just crossed the 1,000-employee mark, and recently raised US$50 million in a Series D funding despite the challenging market globally. Growing from 10 employees to 1,000, Yeo shared eight of the biggest lesson he gleaned from building a successful business as a first-time entrepreneur in Southeast Asia.
#1 Identifying the inequality in talent distribution
“The problem I was trying to solve by starting Glints was the employer-employee mismatch. We noticed that talents tend to apply to a few large tech companies, and likewise, companies tend to go after a small group of candidates with specific profiles and qualifications.
“But the employment market is so much more than just Facebook, Google and the unicorns. The longtail of startup SMEs form 95 percent of the employment market in Southeast Asia and it’s really difficult for this longtail to hire. We want to help these companies build the right team so they can achieve their missions. We also want to help the 120 million professionals who have not gone to Harvard or Stanford, but who are equally driven, to find the right opportunities.”
#2 Solving the tech talent crunch
“Previously a lot of employers only looked for talent locally in their home markets, however this is starting to change and a lot more employers are looking regionally. Beyond hyper competitive markets such as Singapore, there are huge hiring opportunities elsewhere in Southeast Asia, including Indonesia and Vietnam. There are a lot of raw talents who are very driven and can go very far if given the right opportunity. This also benefits companies because building a regional team is more cost-effective and also creates more diversity within the company.”
#3 The most expensive mistake many first-time entrepreneurs make
“The best and worst decisions are always people-decisions.”
“I’m a big believer in having the right people on board because I've been through the painful experiences myself. During the first three years of the business, we were not thoughtful about our people decisions. We would build a management team without much thought and recruit employees quite haphazardly.
“Even though there wasn’t COVID-19 or a recession from 2015 to 2018, and externally, it was a bull market, those were tough years for the business. We were always struggling with people issues. Some people didn’t have the right motivations and had big egos, which created a lot of problems because they tended to want to be right rather than do the right thing. They usually wanted to optimise for their own short-term career growth rather than doing what’s best for the whole team in the long run. So my advice to other first-time entrepreneurs is to be very thoughtful about people decisions. It will save you a lot of time and pain.”
#4 Resetting the business…and people
“In 2018, we decided to reset the business by resetting the people – including our management team. It was very difficult because we had to let go of people. We became more deliberate about people and rebuilding the management team.
“We also codified a set of company cultural values such as the beginner’s mindset – the attitude of being humble no matter how smart you are. We recruited based on these values, and 50 percent of employees’ performance grading is based on these values. Employees get promoted, rewarded or fired based on these. Since then, even though there have been a lot of challenges externally such as COVID-19 and the current recession, the business has had its best years.”
#5 Finding a repeatable and scalable model
“The first three years were a long struggle for us. We had users signing up every month, and we had revenue through recruitment, job postings, employer branding and white labels. But there was no product-market fit. We were trying different types of models but had no idea what was happening. As a company, we have had three near-death experiences from 2015 to 2018 because of cash flow and runway.
“A big turning point was when one of our mentors shared with us that our focus should be on building a repeatable sales engine, essentially a single model that could scale in a large enough market. We decided to shut down all our product lines except pay-per-hire recruiting and also shut down the Singapore market to focus on Indonesia.
“Our revenue plummeted by 80 per cent in a quarter, but it was the right thing to do, so we bit the bullet. This decision has helped us grow a hundredfold since.”
“It was quite scary because revenue plummeted and some investors started asking questions. But we finally found product-market fit and a repeatable sales engine that we could scale and grew tremendously from there. Without the courage to pull the trigger, that wouldn’t have been possible.”
#6 Turning inexperience to power
“Looking back, I’d say that my naivety was very much power in itself.”
“I would say that the decision to drop out of school seven years ago was very much due to a lack of experience. Because if I had known how difficult it would be, I'm not sure I'd have done it. In the early days, there was the pain of uncertainty – not knowing how we would survive and how long it’d take. We just jumped in with a big wishful thinking that we will all be very busy but we'll make it work. And that’s what we did.”
#7 The secret to success…
“...Is that there is no big secret. What I found to be true is this concept of building a flywheel from the book Good to Great by James Collins. It talks away how great companies are often are fuelled by a single moment, or a single silver bullet, but it is through years and years of focus on the flywheel that you accumulate so much momentum through small actions that you eventually have a breakthrough.
“That is certainly the case for us. It’s years of focus and discipline in helping people find better, faster and cheaper matches that attracted more employers to us. This led to more job opportunities, attracted more candidates and drove more overall matches. More than any special tactics, building a good sustainable business is what helped us achieve some of these external milestones such as our Series D fundraising and market expansions.”
#8 One piece of advice for other first-time entrepreneurs
“One lesson I've learned is that the most difficult decisions in start-ups are typically very straightforward intellectually. If you have co-owners who are not aligned, employees who have not been performing for a long time, or too many product lines, it is very clear what the right thing to do is. It just takes courage to pull the trigger on them.”