My Story, Part 1 (Speech for BlueSky 2006) - Introduction

This piece is a longer version of a speech that I will present at a pre-briefing for entrepreneurs who are pitching to VCs at this year’s BlueSky event. I thought to put it up on my blog because here you’ll get to know more about myself and what I’ve done and perhaps learn a few things from my experiences.

You can read Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

“My name is Coen Ching. I was the co-founder and CEO of Cafelingoes.com, an online education service for education institutions, educators and students.

I’m supposed to talk about failure today. In particular, my failure. I hope we can all draw lessons from my experience and learn something from it. I will also share with you what I believe are the crucial things you should concentrate on taking this entrepreneurial route and walking it, and how you pitch your business plan. I hope you will be able to crystallize some concrete ideas today, ideas you will now put into action to move closer to your dream.

The primary aim of Cafelingoes is to provide educators to manage their workload, the homework / assignments that they give to their students. Students on the other hand can log in anytime, anywhere to complete their assignment. When implemented in a school environment, the benefits of free-time learning becomes possible and will so make the classroom hours more flexible. That is the third benefit, to education institutions.

When I saw the business plan by my partners, I saw this was the future. I felt the idea was so good that I quit my job as a Regional Financial Analyst at Allianz Dresdner Asset Management, an international fund management firm, to pursue my dream.

When I joined Cafelingoes, I was the only full-time person working on the startup. My two partners were still having a job with other companies. Worse, one of them was in Tokyo and the other in New York. I am the person responsible for developing the business, and one of my partners the technical platform. My main job was to seek funding for the startup.

We didn’t have the money to hire someone to do sales and marketing. Everything fell onto my shoulders. We didn’t manage to get any schools in Singapore. I suspect the reason could most likely be that our product is not something that the Singapore market needs. We tried to get someone to market in the US, but that didn’t work out as well.

After spending some time traveling and talking to people, my money was totally spent. Moreover, we didn’t get funded. So we finally decided to pull the plug last December.

What lessons did I learn? Follow my story in Part 2 here.

1. Making the jump
2. Building a management team
3. Getting the right people to know you
   

To be continued…