Syed Irfan Ajmal
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The SIA Wire
Est. 2004 · Global · Friday, May 29, 2026Open for projects, Q3 2026
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§ 02About this episodeVol. XV · № 02
Elvin Zhang on the realities of building a startup: what works, what doesn't, and what founders consistently get wrong in the early stages.
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INTRO: (00:01) You're the average of the 5 podcast shows you listen to the most. Learn to run your business well with the SIA Business Show, where our host, Sayed Irfan Ajmal, interviews entrepreneurs, marketers, and speakers of all colors and creeds, revealing their biggest secrets and lousiest mistakes.
Irfan: (00:24) Hi listeners! Welcome to this next episode of the SIA Business Podcast Show. Today, we have a guest from Singapore. He is a serial entrepreneur and I came to know him via his Facebook updates, which are always very interesting, very insightful and I could see that not only is he an ardent reader, but he also has a very curious mind and topics which are very diverse in nature from quantum physics to blockchain to Fintech and much more.
(00:54) Elvin Zang is someone who is interested in all of that. And today we are fortunate to have him on this show based on some of the basic research that I have done via the information available online, I can see that he has been a star performer in academics. He has had multiple startups.
(01:12) Like I said, he has I believe one, or more than one successful exits for his startups as well. And to top it off, he has also, I think, won an award for a relatively unknown Chinese musical instrument. Is that correct, Elvin?
Elvin Zang: (01:27) Yes, yes. It's called the Er-Hu.
Irfan: (01:30) Nice. So, welcome to the show, Elvin. So, you are based in Singapore, right?
Elvin: (01:35) Yes, I am. Most of the time, at least, for now.
Irfan: (01:38) Right. So, tell us a bit about your educational background and how you started, how you got interested in entrepreneurship. So, I'm talking about times when you probably didn't even know what a startup is. What was that Elvin like? How you shifted from being that Elvin to the Elvin that you are right now?
Elvin: (01:56) Well, I think… Okay, so I don't want to start off, like… you have a very high praise for me, but I'm honestly just a random dude who's just a little bit more curious about things that's happening around me. So, I'm not like spectacularly smart or anything.
(02:09) And I'll say, at school, I had to study really, really hard. So, I was from one of the top schools in Singapore for high school. It's called Hwa Chong Institution, and I had the chance to actually represent the school for a physics competition but it's only because I had good grades for physics.
(03:00) But the two of us are like, dude.. if you had just like, average IQ guys who just somehow managed to stick into the team and got this under our belt. So yeah, I just want to… that's how… from an IQ perspective, I don't deem myself as someone who has like alien, like Einstein-ish kind of IQ, but I guess, I spend most of my time just working hard.
(03:19) I guess it's part of the whole Chinese… so, I was born in China and my parents were very, very like tiger moms and tiger dads. So, it's like a ton of assessment books and just math, science, math, science. So, that really helps to be a little bit better in math and physics and sciencey stuff.
Elvin: (07:16) Right. So, it wasn't an American scholarship. It was… so, I got accepted into UC Berkeley's. Okay, for the record, I got rejected by Harvard and Stanford. All right? So, MIT, Harvard, Stanford rejected me once, yeah.
(07:30) Right. So, I got accepted to Berkeley's and then there was a post… my junior college, this is JC preparation kind of program and I got a government scholarship it's a government institution in Singapore. And at the same time, I got this local university called NTU at Nanyang Technological University, I got a college scholarship from that.
(07:50) And so the government scholarship in Singapore has a bond scheme. So, it's if you do this, you spend 6 years post-graduation working for the particular department. And I guess, most of my friends who scored like, who was high enough to score straight A's for A levels. They went overseas, they took scholarships.
(08:32) So, I actually got involved with this scheme called multilevel marketing, the company was actually called Amway. So, is it pretty large? Like, second largest multilevel marketing company in the whole world. And my mentor, by that time, told me I'll be financially free and I read, Rich Dad Poor Dad, and other stuff, financially free before I graduate from university.
(08:51) So like, "Dude, you should take the scholarship, right? Why did you buy 6 years of your life if you want to be financially free?" And I was all about making money back then. So, I believed him and I turned down the UC Berkeley offer with the 6 years bond scholarship and I actually took the local scholarship instead.
(09:20) Interestingly, I didn't actually tell my parents about it because my parents brought me from China to Singapore for me to go to the states or the UK. That was the sole reason why they gave up a good lifestyle in Beijing to move to Singapore.
(09:34) So obviously, I must be nuts to tell them that at that time. So I just said, "Ah, my grade is not good enough. Look at this, I got a rejection letter from Harvard. I got a rejection from Stafford. Okay. So, I didn't get any of all of this stuff and I'm going to NTU." And I told my parents 10 years later at the age of 28, last year.
Elvin: (13:10) So, that's how I got started in real ownership-based. I guess something I can call my own. So, I eventually joined him as a co-founder. He needs to… he was a Malaysian. He initially used my name to register the company because he's in Singapore.
(13:36) So, the industry itself back then in 2000 and… I think, the industry in 2014, it was about like 800 million close to 900 million USD worth of private tuition going around. And we did okay-ish, we had 15,000, 16,000 tutors and that's our supply side.
(14:07) And on the demand side, we had… we basically made up, like on good months, is very seasonal, we bid about eight to 10 k a month, at the very, very good months. But for bad months, it's 1, 2 k kind of stuff. It was an okay side income for a student in school.
(14:20) And I guess, the electoral, the part-time job portal, where we eventually spun out off and we end up selling that for an undisclosed sum to another larger company.
Elvin: (17:43) Yup. It was an okay, 6 digit… 6 figure amount. Yeah.
Irfan: (17:47) Okay. Wonderful. And exit was in 2014 is that correct?
Elvin: (17:52) Late 2013 to early 2014, it was finalized. Yup.
Elvin: (18:31) Yeah. So, we took a grant along with us, a little bit of seed funding from Crystal Horse Investments to… so, I guess that's my first time taking in external money. And that whole thing crashed and burned. I thought I knew enough about business building. It's just, you can never know enough. So, that crashed and burned.
(18:48) Then after that, I felt quite bad. So, that was the bit, I think, we returned the money back to our investors. So, even up to today, I'm still pretty good friends with the partner, the former partner of Crystal Horse Investments.
Elvin: (21:06) Right. I think, the most recent example, Toucan is the best example, because I made a shit ton of mistakes, then even. So, I started Toucan, it was 2015 December. It was actually a B2C startup. The first learning point was that, do not pivot to enterprise startup unless you really know what you're doing.
(21:23) Don't get driven by revenue or promised revenue just because it seems ready to get. But every single pivot, either early-stage or start phase is very, very expensive. In what sense? Monetary-wise you have to build an entirely new stack and at the same time your morale of the team, which is the intangible value that you lose, it's huge.
(22:03) It might be just like, "Hey, this is just one simple logical feature. That feature for it to work properly, it takes a long time to actually, for the tech team to build, even a competent one. So I guess, you lose two things, right? One is money, a lot of money and a lot of wasted time, of which time is a much more valuable resource at the early stage than actual money.
(22:25) So, these 3 things are the only things that an early-stage startup have and one pivot, if you actually, pivot wrongly, you will actually screw it up. So what happened was that we actually went from business to consumer, from B2C startup, which is doing a payments lending to overseas Filipino workers and also Filipinos in Manila in the Philippines to actually serving Filipino lending through an enterprise lender.
(23:06) A baseball swing is a play of Google, Amazon, Apple who has a shit ton of resources. They have a lot of time, a lot of money, and a lot of people who are very, very stable. But you do not have that kind of resource. So, you do not take baseball swings as a startup. That was my key takeaway.
(23:24) So, don't pivot into a baseball swing kind of model. Before your pivot always think through it and understand fully. The other thing was that because it wasn't lending space… so, lending and payments are fin-tech space. It's extremely regulated space. Very, very hard to navigate.
Elvin: (26:43) Yeah, definitely. I think, his concept of 0 to 1 applies to a lot of situations. In fact, our situations, but 0 to 1, what the definition of 1 in Southeast Asia is very different from what the definition is of 1 in San Francisco, in Beijing, in Israel, in Europe. Right? So, it's very, very different. When the concept is the same, I guess, the context is different.
[Transcript continues with discussion of Toucan Pay, Token Pay, and Blockchain Technology details...]