UIB-Best IoT Startup at ASEAN Rice Bowl Startup Awards 2018
“You’re going to come up with a better solution faster if you’ve created a team of people with different academic, professional, and personal backgrounds.”
Toby Ruckert, Chief Executive Officer at UIB, has answered our questions.
What was the best advice someone gave you, that really stuck with you and helped along your path in becoming a successful entrepreneur?
“The tougher the problem, the greater the diversity you need to solve it. When you have a truly complex problem to solve, you’re going to come up with a better solution faster if you’ve created a team of people with different academic, professional, and personal backgrounds.”
How do you work together with your corporate partners? Is there any case study that was a huge success and you are particularly proud of?
“As extended team members, our corporate partners add to our company’s diversity. One case in customer service shows how our technology decreases the costs of a call center by moving the conversations to automated, chatbot-based flows on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Other studies we’re working on show the increase in the number of warranty registrations by using our SmartContact® technology instead of pen and paper, and the fact that people are more comfortable using their already-trusted chat apps to talk to their smart devices than a smart speaker that always listens.”
You have been around for quite a while, how did the regional startup landscape changed and evolved in Singapore over the past couple of years?
“The Singapore and regional startup ecosystems have matured quite a bit. Capital is more readily available (and deployed!) at all stages of a company now and (albeit a few) first exits have happened with fund managers raising their second, third, or even fourth fund. One outstanding challenge is the lack of experience on the fund managers’ side — most have never built/founded, run, grown, and successfully exited a company themselves. A big difference still compared to Silicon Valley. So the ability to assess risk and opportunity is left with a very small number of people in the market who often aren’t working at funds so it remains a challenge to find them.”
Can you tell us about a customer success story that you are especially proud of?
“Using our UnificationEngine®-powered SmartContact® to deliver customer service in English and Arabic, we are very proud of our work with UAE-based du Telecom. Their 9+ million customers can get their questions answered from “Blu” on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.”
What do you value most in people? Especially those in your team?
“Loyalty. It’s something that we’re losing as a society and hardly anyone cares about it. But loyalty is something you need if you want to build your big idea into a phenomenal success story. You need the time and the people, the right people in your life long enough to make it happen. Coming back to the beginning of the interview, I also really value people who think differently than I do. The secret sauce for startups comes from ideas and the ability to execute them. To survive and flourish, you need people who look at the world from a perspective different than your own and have both the courage to clearly articulate their own point of view as well as perform as part of a team, especially after decisions are made that may not align exactly with their own approach.”
