"I always make the joke with friends that the two things that have taught me most about myself are relationships and startups" - Hsu Ken Ooi
"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others" - Hsu Ken Ooi
"One of the things that I try to do with that leadership part is that: appreciate that they are making a choice to follow me on this. I'm not forcing them to do that. They are making that conscious choice themselves." - Hsu Ken Ooi
"For startups, specifically, there's just a lot of doubt, self-doubt. I don't know how much founders talk about this. This is something that I want to address at Iterative, is that we need to build safe spaces for founders to be able to talk about the self-doubt." - Hsu Ken Ooi
"Honestly, a part of my thesis for why we're doing this in Southeast Asia is that I find no difference in terms of raw material or intelligence or work ethic or any of that between founders in Singapore and founders in San Francisco." - Hsu Ken Ooi
"To get started you just need to find a problem that some people have and honestly, in the beginning, don't even worry about how big of a problem it is. Just find some group of people who has some problem that they feel acutely and solve it for them. And I want to make a note of my formulation of what I just said. At no point did I say product, and at no point did I say software." - Hsu Ken Ooi
"My mother is the dreamer. I don't think I would be doing startups without my mother's attitude towards stuff. She was the one that was like, “You can do anything that's possible," which is very cliché, but also a great thing for your mother to tell you. My dad was the one that was like, "Okay, if you're going to do that thing, here are all the things you need to do. Here's all the hard work it's going to take." - Hsu Ken Ooi
In this episode, Jeremy Au speaks with Hsu Ken Ooi on growing from rebellious child to Chief Product Officer, building Decide and Iterative, and accelerating the next wave of SEA founders.
Keywords: Product, Iterative, Y Combinator, Singapore Startups, Southeast Asia, Founder Journey, Acquihire, Decide
