Category: Business
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The Silent Benefit of Delayed Founder Compensation
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…
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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…
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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
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Making Sense of Car Ownership in Singapore: A Personal Experience
Why Share This Now? As we appear to be moving past the peak of COE prices in 2025, I wanted to share my experience of buying during the previous price trough and how it has worked out financially. My Approach to Car Ownership I’ve always opted for COE cars (Certificate of Entitlement renewed vehicles) rather…