The intrapreneur who works within his company is an entrepreneur. The social entrepreneur building a non-profit is still an entrepreneur. And high school students looking to make wallets out of laminated pages of old magazines are entrepreneurs too.

And that was I had to come to terms with when I served as a judge for the 5th BUILD Annual Youth Business Plan Competition at the Oakland Technical High School. Sitting at a panel as team after team of high school students pitched their ideas, I was reminded of how entrepreneurship serves as a vehicle for change.

BUILD (www.build.org) runs the nation’s largest youth incubators with a mission of using entrepreneurship to excite and propel disengaged, low-income students through high school to college success. The high school students who were pitching their ideas were students perceived as not “college material”. The Oakland Technical High School is a public high school with a racial makeup of approximately 52% African Americans, 18% Asian and 15% Hispanics. Many of the students are from less privileged communities.

Sitting on the judges’ side of the table was a refreshing experience as I grappled with the decisions of whether an idea deserved funding. At times, their data and research were dodgy and pricing models questionable. Even as I asked difficult questions, I had to remind myself that they were high school students for whom public speaking was a new endeavour.

Yet what I saw were teams of passionate students in the process of gaining self-confidence and learning how to succeed as they pitched simple ideas such as selling snacks at football games and selling scented bags to their peers. These were ideas that were non scalable, but also ideas that would instill pride and leadership skills.

100% of BUILD’s graduates go on to enter college; 80% of them are the first in their family to go to college. Definitely impressive considering that many of these students grow up in the ghetto. The question is, can this be replicated in Singapore?

We have a similar problem in Singapore. 90% of children from families living in one to three room flats do not make it to university.

What BUILD has proved is that expectations are self-serving. Students with low expectations end up performing poorly. What makes BUILD different from existing youth business plan competitions in Singapore is its targeted approach towards underserved communities as well as easy access to mentors. The BUILD approach may be an answer towards getting more low-income children into our universities.

- Yixiang Liang, NCSV18

But what is open source?

The first thing we have to realize is that open source is different from free software. Let’s take Internet browsers for example, all of them are free, but only about one and a half are open source. IE and Safari are free to use, but still essentially belong to Microsoft and Apple respectively. Firefox (which is the open source one) is free to use and at the same time belongs to no single entity or individual. (For the record, Chrome makes up the other half an open source browser.)

We also cannot simply assume that open source software is free to use. Sure it’s free to compile edit and run however you please, but then that means you’d be the only person in the known universe who’s running that exact version. Compatibility becomes a big issue. And for our friends who have not actually tried downloading code from a revision controlled repository, adding a feature in Java or C++, compiling the code and running the application error free, it’s not exactly as easy as you think.

Because of these aforementioned issues, more and more companies are charging for the use of stable, pre compiled versions of their open source builds for which they also provide technical and customer support. A company that uses this effectively as a business model is Pentaho, which writes a Business Intelligence Tomcat Web Application. They provide their paying customers with their latest build, exclusive user guides and access to forums but most importantly, an expert who will fix whatever goes wrong. The rest of the world, which includes me at LendingClub, is left with a heap of un-compiled Java code and perhaps a working build from a few versions ago. We are our own user guide, forum and technical support. Sometimes we even help identify bugs and solve them for the Pentaho team. A convenient way for them to use crowd sourcing to advance development!

Oh no! Software still isn’t free! Why is open source good then?

Open source provides the benefit of being able to build on each other’s work. Imagine an operating system with Windows’ functionality, OS X’s user interface and Linux’s stability. Imagine killer efficiency because we didn’t have to work out some contrived solution around some crummy patent.

Governments try to promote the development of software by granting patents and copyrights to their writers. They seem to be rewarding them exclusive rights to their own hard work, which is fair and good, but in a field as new and intangible as software, are the decision makers really qualified to judge whether a candidates’ work is novel, free from prior art and non-obvious? What copyrighting has done is to prevent the re-creation of a program through another’s hard work. This limits the ability to enhance already existing software to solve problems that are intrinsically the same but have superficial differences. Additionally, development is even more unnecessarily frustrating with all the royalty payments one has to consider. When regulation makes progress economically unviable, it’s a step in the wrong direction I say. It may work in other fields of engineering where the end product is physical, but in the world of software, it’s like having a monopoly on Pythagoras’ Theorem. Kill it with Open Source!

So, could programmers make a living in an Open Source world?

Yes, but we will have to work for our pay instead of watching discs fly off the shelf and feeling our pockets fill up. A chef is paid when he cooks, not every time someone uses his recipe. Companies will have to shift their focus from selling the consumer software to selling a service to customize software to specific needs and supporting it thereafter. And in a world where a company with better service wins, the customer also wins.

The grim reality of things is that the proprietary model is hard to break. It has been proven extremely profitable and there is much mistrust and animosity in the industry. A good first step would be to stop issuing patents. Software companies, like chefs then won’t be obliged to disclose their recipes, but if someone else figures it out on their own, they really shouldn’t be able to sue for it. Perhaps then, when we respectfully recognize each other’s efforts, we can start trying to work together. Come on, we can do it!

Open Source? Yes please!

- Gareth Gabriel Yeo, NCSV18

I was told that most of the famous founders in Silicon Valley are people you would overlook on the street. It’s not merely that they do not dress up. They do not project any kind of aura of power either. They are really not trying to impress anyone.

And it is true! We met with Jack Dorsey one afternoon in our Spirit of Entrepreneurship class. Jack is one of Twitter’s co-founders and is now moving on to his next project named Square. He shared with us his ambitions and the path that has led him to become an entrepreneur.

What impressed me about Jack was that he was able to find joy in every single thing that he does. He did not just say it, he showed us that through the stories since his childhood and how he moved on in life to different entrepreneurial projects to pursue his passions.

I was fascinated by how he was able to see opportunities in the everyday problems and then committing himself into solving these with unbelievable zeal and passion. With Twitter, he created a platform for real-time sharing after seeing that instant messaging can be made easier to share among friends. And now, he is on his way to build a beautiful payment service after losing money to a glass merchant friend.

Jack impressed me with his simple style of delivering his presentation. There was no jargon, nor prepared PowerPoint slides but his true real-life stories. Indeed, he has lived up to his personal motto – “Expect the unexpected; and when possible, be the unexpected.”

- Nguyen Xuan Thu, NCSV19

It was the second or third class in Spirit of Entrepreneurship by Prof. Steve in Stanford. Apart from being a crazy, blunt man and a serial entrepreneur, he is also the author of the book, Four Steps to the Epiphany. Although, the book, practically speaking just says one thing, “Talk to your customers before you build your product”, it spans over 300 pages and the font is not mesmerizing enough for it to be a casual read. Nevertheless, I took on this task and read a third of the book.

At the same time I was working on a project with some friends building a platform for children to communicate through. Something from the book must have permeated into our minds, because we suddenly started spending a disproportionate amount of time for people in their early 20s at kids’ birthday parties and houses of families with 8 -12 year old kids.

Well, thank god we did! Because when the time came for us to sit down and decide exactly what we would be building, every second sentence out of our mouth was “Oh, in this birthday party I went to “, “This kid I spoke to”, “Her mom said she’d like to”. And that’s when it struck us. So many of our vital insights and ideas had come from talking to parents and children, understanding their needs and concerns. For instance, security was always a big issue as was monitoring. Kids do not like their parents spying on them, but parents would not be comfortable with children doing whatever they liked without some understanding of their actions.

Dinner at Shiok restaurant with Prof. Steve Blank

These insights played a big part in what we finally proposed as our product, and since then, I always make it a point to keep one ear open in class. Who knows what nugget of wisdom we might pick up in the process!

- Akshita Ganesh, NCSV18

VSee's Company Ski Trip at Lake Tahoe

Just before the ski trip, VSee held its annual all-hands meeting where the globally distributed team of 25 came in to the Silicon Valley office. The week was spent on grueling and intensive meetings ranging from goal setting, product roadmap discussions, to marketing planning and to sales processes. It was also the first time I met my colleagues whom I’ve only interacted through the VSee video window. Having in person interactions and discussions with the whole team was invaluable.

To top it all off, the entire team, along with their partners (if any), adjourned to Lake Tahoe for the annual ski trip! The company rented a large house with ten bedrooms a stone’s throw away from the ski slopes.

Our days were spent skiing (my first time!) and evenings were spent playing on the Wii, enjoying the great food prepared by a colleague and her husband, and in awesome company!

Watch the video below (Credits to Kenny Chan, NCSV16). Needless to say, I’m already looking forward to the next mandatory trip – wakeboarding here I come!

- Quek Siu Rui, NCSV19

VSee Ski Trip from Kenny Chan on Vimeo.

It was a day trip to LA for an event we were supporting – “Haiti Today, Haiti Tomorrow” – a Facebook Town Hall, Featuring Linkin’ Park and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

Linkin' Park and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon taking part in the VSee video collaboration.

It was a 4 way VSee conference with the Secretary General, 4 members of the Linkin’ Park band, and UN Foundation’s CEO, Kathy Calvin, down in Hammer Museum in LA, along with Will Davis, Director of the UN Information Centre over in D.C., and 2 members of Linkin Park with Randy Zuckerberg (yes, that’s Mark Zuckerberg’s sister) moderating the session in SV.

The 3-way conversation was mainly about the ongoing relief efforts in Haiti, and how viewers can support the UN and its partners in helping Haiti rebuild and transform. While I was down in LA, my 16th batch senior, Penny, was supporting the event from the Facebook campus in Palo Alto, where the broadcast was taking place.

For me, it was both a nerve-wrecking, yet amazing experience getting to meet all these people face-to-face, and to support a worthy cause. Nonetheless, being on-site support also meant that I had to keep my fingers crossed all the time, just in case something cropped up.

Thankfully, the broadcast went great, and we had 15,000 viewers, and generated lots of feedback and comments through the social media.

I love how my work in a start-up has such a big impact in the real world. It made me realize that you need both grassroots initiative, as well as top-down initiatives to maximize the positive impact you can bring to the community.

The video recording is available for viewing below.

- Christina Ng, NCSV18