Hian Goh, co-founder of Openspace Ventures, Singapore pens a tribute to the man he says started it all – Sim Wong Hoo, CEO and founder of Creative Technology, passed away January 4 and is widely regarded as the father of tech in Singapore. His success was not without its struggles.
In 1999, I met Sim Wong Hoo for the very first time. Creative’s share-price was 32 dollars, it was a billion dollar company, the sound blaster card had 60% of the global sound card market share.
I was working for Salomon Smith Barney’s technology investment banking team in Singapore. Heck, between me and a Vice President, we were the technology investment banking team! There I was in my mid 20s, and Creative’s CFO had summoned us to meet with them, to discuss ideas for M&A and other issues.
To say this was an exciting moment for me was an understatement. It was a lucky break for our franchise, I believe Goldman had been their principal bankers and did their IPO (I could be wrong), but the relationship had turned sour and we had a chance to pitch our services.
The next few months we regularly met Sim and his management team. We discussed many ideas, including acquiring Diamond 3D video cards, (adding video capabilities to sound would be an interesting idea), and finally he handed us a list of startups they had invested in for us to see if we could do their fundraises.
So off we went, squirreling and trying the be the best investment bankers we could possibly be. But that’s not the point of this story.
One fine day, we had another meeting, and it ran into lunchtime. Sim said he’d buy us some lunch, and so four packets of chicken rice appeared in the conference room. We all ate silently. Sim started to talk about the founding days of Creative. He was negotiating an investment with Walden, Lip Bu Tan, and Sim said. “I had the product, I had launched it, and Lip Bu still wanted to invest in my company for 20 million dollars.”
His tone was one of disdain. “20 million Singapore Dollars!” he sputtered. “So I asked Lip Bu what was the fastest selling product and he said it was the Apple iMac. I said if I beat that sales volume can I get half of my shares back. He agreed, and I beat it, and I got my shares back.”
Now I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this interaction. In fact I would love it if someone told me the backstory behind this memory, and if it actually was true. The point is, in my mind, all I could think of was, “This guy is no smarter than all of us, he just had the gumption and vision to start a company”.
And that was what started me on my journey to be an entrepreneur.
Two years later, I would stop being a banker, start my first company, have it fail, have another few projects achieve lackluster outcomes, go back to business school, lick my wounds, start Asian Food Channel, run it for 10 years through the global financial crisis, almost go bankrupt 3 times, sell it and then start Openspace Ventures in 2013.
I wanted to put this story out there, because I’ve always wondered what Singapore would look like if not for Sim. Whilst we celebrate his achievements today, when he was running his company, I felt he was not given much support. In fact, he moved to Silicon Valley after doing the investment deal with Walden, built the company there, and found success outside of Singapore.
I was told that when he wanted to IPO the company on the Singapore stock exchange, the stock exchange rejected his proposal, and so he IPOed it on Nasdaq. After that success, SGX wanted his billion dollar company back listed in Singapore, and that’s why Creative Technology became listed in Singapore. (I think it was a secondary listing at that time).
Let’s not celebrate Sim Wong Hoo, the illustrious man with much success, after all he did the whole digital music thing before Apple. Let’s celebrate the entrepreneur who did not have a university degree, who built a company when everyone else thought he could not do it, and despite all the ups and down, never gave up and ran his company for more than 3 decades.
Thank you Sim for being the force in my mind to do what I do. You’ve probably inspired and touched more people than you actually knew you did.
