In my last post, We spoke about ‘screw it, ship it’ as our second core value. We’re onto our third core value. As simple as it is, it’s about friendship.

The idea of this core value bring us back to the roots of this company; it was founded on friendship. A passing advice I noted from a big VC was that they look out for the relationships of the founders. If the founders had a history of friendship, they tend to find that positive. It’s not to say that the inverse is completely negative or that the former is always…

Previously, I talked about honesty as our first core value. Moving on to our second core value, I introduce the art of “Shipping it”. Generally in tech, we use the term ‘ship it’ when we want to deploy our code and implement a feature. You tend to hear or rather read stuff like “can you ship the code” or “have you shipped the feature” when software teams communicate.

Yes, the grapevine has it that it’s important to push your code up regularly to stay agile and to mitigate risks of breaking your app but what we’re trying to exemplify with…

“A shark that is disingenuous and tries to keep you feeling good when they know your idea has no merit is doing you a huge disservice”

— Kevin O’Leary

It’s not an easy thing to go down the path of honesty and openness especially when you find yourself in a fix. We’ve all been there; when the easiest way out of a situation is to lie or manipulate the truth. I find it takes a certain character to be awfully honest — not just to others, but especially to yourself. ‘Keeping it real’ is our first core value. …

I was recently posed a question about hire. I relayed that we are actively looking to hire and the response that I got went something along the lines of “oh wow, it’ll be a good life and you can offload whatever you don’t want to do!” — I completely disagree with that statement. Of course, I understand it was a light hearted comment and it didn’t come across as offensive as it may sound but this was an epiphany of the impression that is still out there.

As part of a clarification but more so the premise of this writing…

Growing up in Singapore gave me the impression that spending long hours and ‘cramming’ were the ingredients to doing well. Having stay in school for the whole day and finally getting home to be greeted with tuition (supplementary lessons which were m̶a̶n̶d̶a̶t̶o̶r̶y̶ optional). It seemed like hours were needed to be clocked.

It’s not a race

While I believe it’s important to have that dedication and resolve when necessary, generally this is not a race. It’s a goddamn marathon. There have been days where I needed to commit those hours but the next day is just dreadful and unsustainable. …

Having ran our studio during our University days in London for just under a year, we finally set foot in Singapore to go full time. All we had was a landing page, some clients and a fun branding of our identity twopack — cos we like hip-hop and we were a pack of two.. I know, how creative.

Moving back just felt like we needed something different and to be fair, Jack was having a bit of a headache with rebranding twopack (he handles most of the design stuff). So we sat down, threw out names we thought were cool…

The Premise

We’re born into an environment where paths seem predefined for you. Those were the days, I would say, where I didn’t have to be ‘aware’ of what’s going to happen. The days where ignorance prevailed. The days we call bliss. The days where I wasn’t consciously visualizing how I wanted things to turn out. For me, it was high school > national service > university (which brought me to London). Then the question arises.. What’s after that?

I recently had a presentation discussing my life hitherto and talked a bit about my choice of inspiration. Frankly, that sounds pretty dumb…