Author: Jeremy

  • The Asymmetry of Starting Young

    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

    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

    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,…

  • Ark Bloc in the news!

    Sometimes it takes the market a few years before they recognize a gem.  We built Ark Bloc in 2022, but in the last few weeks we have coverage in the news suddenly. Here are the videos for posterity.  Ark Bloc on Mothership Ark Bloc on Channel News Asia

  • My First Podcast

    Here’s the transcript for those who prefer to read.  Gerald: Welcome to another episode of Work It Podcast. I’m Gerald. Nat: And I’m Nat. We’re your hosts. We’re bringing you fresh perspectives on the world of hustling. And Gerald, speaking of hustling, it’s been a hustling and bustling week for me. I cannot get a…

  • 2025 | Perspectives from Burn out

    This year, the people closest to me—and the people closest to our businesses—know we’ve been on an absolute tear. In May, we pivoted our café business. We revamped Stoked.sg into Pastaaah!, hoping a refreshed menu with more affordable options would revitalise things. That meant menu changes, cooking at home, recording recipes, and teaching our team…

  • Four Hours of Sleep and a Van: My Early Founder Years

    TL;DR for founders:The early years of my business looked like four hours of sleep, a beat-up van, and doing school, internship and startup all at once — with zero guarantee it would work.If you want to be a founder, don’t just romanticise “freedom”; be ready for years of hard, lonely, uncertain work powered only by…

  • Run Toward the Hardest Problem: Why Purposeful Internships Beat Collecting Them

    The job market is brutal. Graduates are collecting internships like Pokémon cards, hoping volume turns into a full-time offer. But without purpose, those stints blur together—and rarely convert. The lever that moves careers isn’t the number of internships you rack up; it’s whether you create unmistakable value where you land. A Project That Opened a…

  • Alternative Skills Pathways Beyond Academics

    It’s 2025, and people are finally talking about alternative pathways to success, as if government-mandated routes are the only ways forward. I now run more than four businesses spanning fitness equipment trading, sports equipment, rock climbing gyms, and fitness centers. What led me here wasn’t purely academics—it was the long, natural process of building multiple…

  • Breaking Down the Cost of Fitness in Singapore (and why we are opening more)

    By the end of 2025, we’ll have opened at least eight new gyms across Singapore, adding over 30,000 square feet of training space under our group. That’ll bring us to more than 25 locations islandwide—and I wanted to take a moment to explain why we’re doing this. Rewind ten years: gyms were few and far…