"For a lot of non-Singaporeans, they believe that they have to put their kids in an international school. That ends up driving up their living costs. On a startup founder's salary, it’s pretty hard to send my kid to an American school, and that's a challenging dynamic as well. This means you need to have a spouse working at an MNC or otherwise, you can't be a founder. I have pointed out that foreigners can go to local schools. It would actually be beneficial to have more foreigners in local schools. It would help their assimilation, and it would be beneficial for local kids to get more exposure to other folks." - Shiyan Koh
"I'm going to advocate for the tech, CTO pass. The EntrePass is for people who want to be a founder, but the employment pass doesn’t properly cover technical founders who are geniuses at engineering. So why don't we just create a CTO pass, or Head of Engineering pass, which basically says you are a genius or really good at engineering or you have a senior level of engineering experience at another company in SF or Asia. The argument that I’d make is that you want to have the leadership team in Singapore. That's one. And then two is that Singapore is dealing with total factor productivity, which is how we are not productive enough on a per pax basis. And when you let in a CTO, you're not bringing one person in, you're bringing in an army of robots and AI agents under this person." - Jeremy Au
"We've seen the benefits of various programs, like ASEAN scholars. It’s a long-time program of bringing students from our region to study in Singapore. And many ASEAN scholars have stayed. They've married Singaporeans or they've wound up running businesses that have gone regional. So one hiring hack is that you want to hire an ASEAN scholar to be the GM of your Thai entity, your Malaysian entity, or your Indonesian entity because they were educated in Singapore, but they grew up in their home country, and they speak the language. And those are the benefits of having a more integrated and diverse student population." - Shiyan Koh
In this episode, Jeremy Au speaks on Singapore's new prime minister transition, immigration assimilation, and schools and CTO and engineering pass with Shiyan Koh.
Keywords: Singapore, New Prime Minister Transition, Immigration Assimilation, Schools and CTO Engineering Pass, Shiyan Koh, Singapore, Southeast Asia, VC, Thought Leadership
