Item — HN Reader

not directly related, but the article mentions Singapore many times: can any non-Singaporean with experience in running (ramen) startup in Singapore give some information? maybe in a blog post like this?

EDIT: to clarify, esp. if you're not there (e.g. you're an Australian in Australia thinking of starting up in Singapore).

1 comments

The gist of it is: if you have residency, it's a no brainer. Incredibly cheap and easy, the only issue (as anywhere not the Valley) is funding, which is still not at Valley levels or with Valley culture. This is changing as more entrepreneurs exit and become angels.

A lot of people have written long posts about it on Quora, so try a quick search there. The regulatory environment is changing somewhat this year, particularly regarding visas (apparently the EntrePass was abused by people buying themselves residency on the cheap and the government is cracking down).

In my experience the talent pool is quite small in Singapore compared to Australia. That being said there isn't a lot of good opportunities available to the top talent so you can probably employ a significant chunk of it.

Definitely not going to be a tech hub anytime soon though.

It is (out of 120+ applicants, we had 1 PR and 1 EP holder, rest foreign) but it's also incredibly easy to import talent. Pay them enough for an EP, and you get the EP approved in hours if not days.

In one case, the guy was in Colombia when we made him an offer and sent him his flights, his EP was rejected when he was transferring in New York (because he didn't have a degree, so the government thought we were "overpaying" and asked us to explain), his appeal was approved just before he landed in Hong Kong, where he downloaded the Letter and showed it to border control in Singapore. Total time from offer to walking into the office: 36 hours. Good luck doing that in the US.