Jeremy Ko

Author: Jeremy

  • The Load Shift: Twenty Years of Indoor Climbing in Singapore

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    When I started climbing in Singapore around 2005, I was sixteen or seventeen, and the gym looked nothing like it does today. The wall was just covered in holds. Hundreds of them. No tape, no colour coding, no grades. You walked in, looked up, and had to invent your own route — or watch someone…

  • The Ironies of Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur

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    Jeremy
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    I was at the Läderach counter with my son recently, buying chocolate at S$22 for 100 grams. He watched me pay, and I found myself explaining — half to him, half to myself — that this is what work is for. Not to hoard money endlessly, but to be able to enjoy something indulgent once…

  • The Client Who Threatened to Burn My Warehouse

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    The friend whose first order started my trading business also introduced me to the client who would one day threaten to burn my warehouse down. I’m still grateful to him. I was in my early twenties when a friend — a coach I’d met through mutual circles — placed a small order with me. Equipment…

  • Compounding Does Not Only Belong to Finance

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    When people speak about compounding, they almost always mean money. They mean savings, investments, interest, and the quiet arithmetic of letting capital sit still long enough to multiply itself. That is one form of compounding, and an important one. But it is not the only form, and I suspect it is not even the most…

  • The Joy of Entrepreneurship

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    Jeremy
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    A lot has been said about entrepreneurship, and most of it tends to fall into one of two camps. Either people warn you away from it — because it is uncertain, difficult, and the odds are low — or they romanticise it too much, as though it is some glamorous act of self-invention, full of…

  • The Silent Benefit of Delayed Founder Compensation

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    Jeremy
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    One of the less discussed parts of building a business is that society and business often speak in entirely different languages when it comes to success, and because of that, a founder can spend years doing what is rational in one domain while appearing irrational, unimpressive, or even suspect in the other. Society, understandably, relies…

  • 9 Books That Shaped How I Think

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    I have always been a bookworm. Not because anyone made me, but because I was curious and restless and looking for answers that school was not designed to give. By the time I entered university, I had already started and failed my first business. By the time I graduated, I had started my third. Today,…

  • The Asymmetry of Starting Young

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    Jeremy
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    The best time to start a business is while you are still a student, because the opportunity cost is lower than it will ever be again. You have more room to explore, more room to think, and more room to fail before the consequences become truly expensive. Business ideas rarely arrive polished. More often, they…

  • The Condo Question Is Not Really About Property

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    Jeremy
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    There comes a phase in adult life, somewhere in one’s thirties and doing well in their career, when property ceases to be merely shelter and begins to masquerade as judgment. It becomes a referendum on whether one is progressing at the correct pace, whether one is becoming the sort of person Singapore expects him to…

  • Why So Many High Achievers Feel Lost After School

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    TL;DR: Awards are not evil, and most teachers mean well, but when recognition becomes a scarce, ranked, public currency, children learn to chase approval first and purpose later, and that trade-off shows up years down the road as anxiety, passivity, and an inability to self-direct once the system stops handing out rubrics.   Every year,…