How Billy Naveed is Democratising Entrepreneurship Education

How a passion for making a global impact lead him to become a successful founder and businessman

Karena Belin, co-Founder of WHub, sits down with Billy Naveed, Founder of Young Founder School and Head of Strategy at Zilingo to chat about his journey as an entrepreneur and how his passion lead him to making a huge difference in fashion value chain and entrepreneurship education.

What were you doing before joining Zilingo?

Before joining Zilingo, I spent 18 years in banking. Most recently I was working for Credit Swiss, running their hedge fund sales desk. Before that I was at Morgan Stanley in both Hong Kong and London.

So, you have a long history in financial services- How did the connection with the startup ecosystem and founding Young Founders School come into play?

I had originally started mutual business when I was 14 years old. I taught myself to code, and started this online “startup”, but it was basically a business back then- we weren’t called startups. My second business, the one that I poured my life savings into, was an early version of Houzz interior design business. To help people, with no interior design skills, like me. But it was a complete failure, I had zero customers, my mom actually tried to be a customer and the website crashed. So it taught me a lot of lessons and one of the lessons was it is very important to have a very strong eco-system, like WHub’s building.

“It is also very important to understand that you don’t need to be a millionaire or have very rich parents or be connected to some large VCs to start a business, you can actually just do it with grit and using lots of free tools.”

So we really wanted to bring that into the world. We’ve met a lot of tremendously bright and talented young people that really think they can’t start a startup without having millions of dollars in capital.

That’s great and that’s something that you talk about when you talk about contributing to the ecosystem, that young founders school really established herein Hong Kong giving access to even younger founders.

Yeah, we started three and a half years ago with our very first bootcamp and the winners were about 12 years old.

“You see these kids and they have such a tremendous passion for solving some of the world’s biggest problems, it’s surprising how few of them want to come up with the next Snapchat.”

They look at the world and see the problems that we have. We focus a lot of our attention the UN Sustainable Goals which have 11 years now until we need to meet them. These kids are coming up with wonderful ideas to solve poverty issues and environmental issues and what we do is we teach them how to take these big ideas and turn them into practical businesses that don’t need capital. And then we surround them with a mentorship network full of entrepreneurs and successful business people that want to give back to the community- so it all goes full circle. Some of these students have produced some amazing business and we’re very fortunate to be present in 4 countries- about to launch in Indonesia as well. We’re here in Hong Kong if anyone wants to join us.

There is actually a strong linkage to what you’re doing now at Zilingo and Young Founder’s School, tell us a bit more about that.

So what Young Founders School is doing is enabling young entrepreneurs, Zilingo is also enabling entrepreneurs. Our B2C site, enables anyone to set up an online shop and sell very fashionable clothes to anyone in Southeast Asia. That has been a tremendous boom for many entrepreneurs, more than half of the people on our shops on Zilingo.com are actually female. But there’s a bigger mission than that, and it is what got me really excited to join the team, and it revolves around the people who work in the garment industry. 75% of our business is actually B2B so we actually work on behalf of brands,celebrities and influencers to help design clothes.

And you said the market is huge…

The market is 3 trillion US dollars, so it’s not a small market. What’s interesting is that 75 million people work in the garment industry, most of them are female and most of them perhaps don’t earn what we would consider to be living wage in their country.

“What we’re trying to do is shift the value chain so that we can provide as much value to their employees as possible- to cut out middle men, to make budget more efficient- and by providing value to their employers we can hopefully get them better working conditions, better pay.”

Young Founder School will connect to people in those cities, and hopefully provide hope and education to children the factory workers as well.

So continuously creating impact…So you’re the Head of Strategy at Zilingo and also the head of an initiative called Zilingo Labs tell us a little bit more about that because it’s not an acceleration program.

So, Zilingo Labs is looking to create disruptive businesses across the entire fashion value chain. Those businesses might be valuable properties that we find will deliver value today or maybe in 3,5, 10 years time. So we really try to predict the future of fashion, predict how are businesses going to grow and build things that are going to unblock that growth and really be valuable properties for our platform. We are already working with startups that provide solutions to certain parts of our software stack. Zilingo is really building this platform for the fashion value chain and we don’t pretend to think we can be the absolute expert in all of the multiple ways in which we can help our clients. So if there’s a startup out there that has an interesting proposition, please do get in touch with us we are very happy to look at it.

So you have founded your own companies, you have mentored companies, you accompany them in their growth- what is that one piece of advice that you give young founders or students or even experienced founders.

Well, I’m not sure I’m at the place where I feel like I can give advice to people. I have many years to go before I can give sage advice. But one thing I’ve always found is the absolute best learning is doing. That is why Young Founders School focuses on getting people to build quickly. There’s definitely theory that you need to know, but the MBA you can find is picking up your laptop, creating your site and get going.

Is that also your Startup Passion?

My Startup Passion, when you look at the work I’ve done at both Young Founders School and Zilingo, is really making the world a slightly better place than I found it.

Unfortunately I think too many entrepreneurs these days are starting business’ and getting involved in business’ that maybe they don’t have a deep passion for. Finding what that passion is- whether it’s cooking, fashion, photography- for me it’s having that impact. When you’re having those long nights, and you haven’t had much sleep, thinking about the men and women that are more and more reliant on a platform like Zilingo.

The indirect people that we employ through our platform and knowing that one extra thing that you could do, that one extra email could make a huge impact on their lives then it really becomes worthwhile.

We’ve got one more “burning” question, can you tell us about your experience at Burning Man?

So Burning Man, I’ve been once in 2016 with some tremendous friends kind enough to invite me along and I must say I am always a skeptic when people invite me along to events that are “life-changing” this that and the other. I think when I came back, I told everyone it was life-changing. But it was, it really was. I think what’s interesting in Zilingo and the startup environment is never judge a book by its cover. We were meeting the most tremendous people who, perhaps if you weren’t at Burning Man you’d never talk to them, had the most interesting stories and I was just fascinated and learning. But the second thing I think was the humanness of everyone. Once you strip away the religion and the wealth and even what your name is, people are just humans. We share a common bond and connection through that humanness. So I came back from Burning Man thinking about how I can help that thread and I think that’s how Zilingo fits into that whole cycle.

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