Serial Entrepreneur: Peng Ong (Part 4)

After founding Interwoven, Peng Ong become involved in some unique projects with the government of Singapore and even tried retiring. However, he discovered he still had a passion for entreprenuership and founded his next company, Encentuate. We also gain some insight into his future goals.

SM: After Interwoven did you found Encentuate right away, or did you take a break?
PO: I tried to retire. I moved back to Singapore in 2000 which was actually very timely because Singapore had some economic hardships during the Asian crisis, so the administration convened an economic review committee and I was invited to be on that 20 person committee to study entrepreneurship and give recommendations. I headed up a focus group on entrepreneurship for that committee. It is eye opening working with an entire country opposed to a company. I spent a couple of years on various dealings in that area, and then I started Encentuate.

SM: So you wanted to retire, but that was not exciting so you decided to start another company?
PO: After a while you start asking yourself, “I am 36, what am I going to do?”. I decided to do what I knew how to do, and that was start another company.

SM: So, the situation with Encentuate, what is the idea and what stage are you at – what did you put in and what is your plan?
PO: Encentuate’s key idea is very simple. Today most enterprises have existing systems in place. If you try to implement something across these systems like single sign-on, authentication management across these systems, on of the biggest challenges you find is that you have lots of systems and they are all different. I call it the asymmetric problem. So, every system you have, needs to integrate in such a way that requires a significant amount of project time which is a disruption to the business.

The problem exists because each system requires a different type of integration. When we asked ourselves, “Where in the IT infrastructure can you plug in something that is symmetric?” we realized that it is not at the backend, but it is at the end point which is where the user comes in. That is where our technology sits, at the end points – the phone, the PDA, the PC – these are all end points where human beings come into contact with digital systems and that is where we can aide the enterprise and aide the users in doing what they need to do.

The way people think about IT will evolve to include a very concrete IT endpoint strategy, how to implement certain functions across the entire IT system. So we started off doing a single sign-on solution with authentication management. We have been identified as one of the hot companies for 2006.

SM: Great, congratulations! And you are still running the company?
PO: I am in transition. For personal reasons, I am moving back to Singapore.

SM: When you transition back to Singapore, are you still going to have an executive role in the company or are you going to hand over the operational part?
PO: I will be involved, and I guess it is a matter of how you define operational. I will go meet customers. My personal restrictions, I can’t travel too much.

SM: So what are you looking to do in the next phase of your life as Encentuate kind of gets a bit more on autopilot?
PO: It won’t get on autopilot for a while. My passion is entrepreneurship. I believe entrepreneurs, and the entrepreneurial mindset, is what brings about the bulk of progress on the planet. Whether it is on the social side or the business side, or frankly you can be entrepreneurial politically. So I would like to spend at least a chunk of my life pursuing that, and grow that both in Singapore and Globally. I am engaged with the government of Singapore trying to do that.

SM: Is that going to take the form of mentoring young entrepreneurs and investing in them, and that type of opportunity?
PO: It might include that. One of the challenges for Singapore, if you look at our population and our history, we have been very successful at brick and mortar businesses. Which means the business entrepreneurs we have are more from traditional industries. The next generations of entrepreneurs we need to have in Singapore are like what India and China are producing, the high gross margin IT entrepreneurs that produce businesses that customers pay a lot for in IT, not in cost of goods.

(next time, final part of the discussion, with comparison between India, China, Israel, and Singapore)

[Part 5]
[Part 4]
[Part 3]
[Part 2]
[Part 1]

This segment is part 4 in the series : Serial Entrepreneur: Peng Ong
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