Steven Goh | CEO

Dear hiring managers, one of the important roles you might have is hiring, to identify and recruit top talent for your organization. However, we all know...

If you tend to keep up with the tech or finance ecosystem, you've probably come across the term, FAANG. But have you ever wondered what it stands for? Or...

We will be restructuring Proxycurl, the product, under Proxycurl LLC, a US-based holding company, in the coming weeks. The restructuring exercise is an...

Updates (so far) * As of 17th May 2022, 6.22PM SGT, we pushed out an update that should bring Person Profile Endpoint back to normalcy. * As of 19th May...

* Steven: I have something new to share * You: What is it? * Steven: I want to tell you that if you are bored in the wee hours, you can come to SharedHere...

Are you like me and you post on EDMW Hardwarezone forums, and end up spamming the refresh button in pursuit of validation for someone to quote/respond to...

The cadence of delivery. Last month, I dismissed the employment of a software developer who oversold himself during the interview phase. He turned out to be...

We learned drown-proofing as a trainee in the Naval Diving Unit. Throughout the training, we were drilled to remember three words - Stop; think; breathe....

The title is apt in these times. I experienced a database corruption, and I can't seem to find the backup for it. I can fix it by starting anew again, but...

In this series, I will begin writing my thoughts on startup news in Singapore/Asia. Here are the news today! With fresh funding, Snapask expands tech-driven...

I just had the revenue carpet that I stood on, pulled out under me. It is sudden, but not unexpected. I started feeling exasperated, but over the evening,...

Walk down Chinatown, and you will see a row of shophouses that says OCBC. OCBC owns them. Major business owners, with some foresight, made their wealth when...

ShareDong is SharedHere for Indonesia. In Indonesian, it is a casual way of asking for a link. I would approximate it to the English phrase to "share the...

I tried sharing some news on Facebook today, and I got blocked from posting in other groups. I had figured that I needed a better growth engine instead of...

With a clear and discrete objective for SharedHere of 66k views per day, I am working hard to achieve a 10% day on day growth on pageviews. The first week...

Let's start with something I got wrong in my last post. I mentioned that my efforts in growth hacking led to 1000 views. I was wrong. It was a 1000 unique...

The difference between fifteen minutes of sleep and getting one last piece of todo item checked amounted to 1000 views for SharedHere.com. Yesterday, I...

Which works out to be 2 million views per month if you do the math. A figure I believe will bring SharedHere to profitability. It is day two since launch,...

Premium content, previously guarded by paywalls, is now readily available on SharedHere.com [sharedhere.com]. These include premium articles from Straits...

I had lunch with my CEO friend, who runs Ubersnap. I'm helping him to take the business into Indonesia, and Ubersnap Indonesia is up against Holograil....

I have been trying to grow high end ridiculously expensive hei bi (Cantonese for shrimps) for almost a year now. These shrimps that are no larger than 0.7cm...

Something devastating happened to me lately. I conformed. Fuck. I admit that some Facebook comments that were posted on my posts got to me. The commotion on...

The Chinese market opened today with a sharp -9.6% tear with no thanks to Wuhan's Coronavirus. The coronavirus is a disaster through and through. Just last...

The problem with the author-reader relationship is the implied authoritarian role. The writer as the expert, and the reader as the student. I will like to...

When I was younger and naive, I believed that companies should have a flat hierarchy [https://nubela.co/blog/the-chinaman-i-hired-that-sneered-heckled-and-mo...

In 2011, I left Singapore for Sweden for an overseas exchange and internship programme. And in my short year there, I found Sweden to be a homogeneous and...

I was reading the comments on this Reddit thread [https://old.reddit.com/r/singapore/comments/es5sab/sporean_tweets_about_people_glorifying_ot_life/] on the...

It is a funny sight when tech-illiterate CEOs attempt to build tech companies. They thump the beat by appending or prepending buzzwords in their elevator...

My company is a place of pleasant surprises for great employees. The bad hires relish with equal glee. Right after the first week, the poor hires must count...

I have had my heads (and fingers) down writing all day, all night in the past few days. The reason why you have not seen my recent posts is that the words...

Hey, I started a post with a non-clickbait title that sounds more sophisticated than it should. But guess what, I am betting that the usual trolls are not...

A senior engineer in the Bay Area makes US$400+k annually. And yes, I think my experience and products would seat me in that tier of engineers. I am...

First things first, this is not a guide for murder. This post is a guide on how you can stay covert in Singapore. Specifically, a guide to good OPSEC...

Startup porn dictates that you should just build the product [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21934358], and that blogging is the best form of...

I was reading Hacker News today and came across a thread to predict future trends. One prediction was the advent of biohacking — bio-hacking beginner kits...

This story does not have a good ending. So it's day 0 at work, and I was supposed to have three new staff to onboard. The first one got the starting date...

I spent the entire year writing about 2019. On the second last day of the year, I have my eyes set on 2020. So, how will 2020 be different from 2020? A...

Right after I graduated, I contemplated a move to Silicon Valley, and I would if public transport was like Europe's; if the homeless situation was like...

I have a serious crush on Nancy Pelosi. No, it is not because she impeached Trump. Because honestly I am impressed at how far Trump has come. But this post...

Specifically, doing nothing. I finished my tasks for the year last week, so I tried to do nothing over the pre-Christmas weekend. I failed catastrophically....

As a hypochondriac with self-diagnosed ADHD syndrome, I manage my restlessness with videos playing in the background. Having something (useless) in the...

Where N is usually three. Given 3, pick 2. This is a classic dilemma of compromise. That neither you nor I can have our cake and eat it at the same time....

How do you know someone does CrossFit? He will tell you. Anyways, as I was doing CrossFit today, I thought about how my workouts are manageable now in...

Some topics, such as religion and politics, are better kept within the confines of heated in-person arguments. But if you notice, the products I have built...

A European telco wanted to work with us to bring Sapiengraph to fruition. The CEO found us when the CEO read our post titled "Open-sourcing Sapiengraph CCTV...

I do not try to go out of my way to make work fun for my staff. So it makes my day when I receive random messages like these: > sorry, but fuck I'm so...

Met a buddy for lunch today, and we have been great pals. So a few weeks ago, when he asked if I could help him expand his business to Indonesia, I said yes...

I consider myself a creative. Better yet, I consider entrepreneurship a creative endeavor because, more often or not; breakthroughs occur when a business...

I have written a few posts on giving up. Here, I wrote a story about a friend who found success through perseverance...

I read a well-written post [elijames.org/the-two-tiers-of-singapores-tech-companies/?fbclid=IwAR2Dk4aRf0U7GVCTDS-OAfOLN0vqsVi1zowRX8gs8UWBLom9e0v8cXQMejA]...

I used to console myself that the journey is all that matters. Bullshit. The only thing that matters is the result. Sure, the journey can be memorable, but...

If you failed an interview at Nubela, it is because you were unable to deliver a WIIFY. Our recent product Sapiengraph...

Adam Neumann of WeWork was the largest advocate for "optionality." A term he coined to describe the availability of options. For example, if Softbank did...

Nobody is obligated to work for me (or you). It is not even about money. Poor culture fit; poor performances; there is a multitude of reasons for anyone to...

I find holidays annoying because flights are intolerable, and being always on the move is exhausting. But because it is jam-packed with touristy activities,...

Because I want to build a company that someone like myself will be proud and happy to work. This is the dull reason I give when people ask why I started a...

Warning: This is a technical post. We decided to adopt Kubernetes as the company doubles down on container-based deployment. I am probably the last...

> Warning, this is a technical post. I have been busy in the past two days picking up Kubernetes and boy this new technology will need a third day for me to...

Ba-boom, ba-boom. A relentless beat in life to remind you to tone the fuck down. I hear it constantly, and I find it impossible to get it to stop. Against...

I had to study hard and get to a university because my mother said so. I had to tuck in my clothes in school because those were the school rules. Never do...

I received a private message on Reddit today by a guy who asked if I know anything about another redditor that I replied to on Reddit. I do not recall the...

You might have come across this "GIF" printing photo booth if you have attended corporate events or weddings. The chances are that you just used Ubersnap's...

Building a product is not the same as playing chess. An egomaniac tried to impress upon me that I should be like him, to engage my brain before diving...

The Singapore government just banned e-scooters on all footpaths. This stacks on top of the existing e-scooter road ban. The regulation was announced and...

Last night, I caught a fever from a mild store throat, so I went to bed an hour earlier. Last month I caught a cold as well, so I took a flu shot right...

A few weeks ago, I spent $150 on 50 Pure Red Line (PRL) shrimps. These are the purest breed of what is a high-end shrimp for my aquarium hobby. They all...

I have been writing code, designing interfaces, and exploring Unix tools in the last two and a half weeks. I should not be coding. And yet I got my hands...

In one of my earliest articles, I wrote about building a position of continuous survival [__GHOST_URL__/the-bootstrappers-hierarchy-of-needs/]. Looking...

I wonder if it is a false dichotomy between demanding excellence and being liked. Being liked has it's perks and I am envious of those perks because they...

Growing up as a teenager, I consumed American drama exclusively and built friendships with fellow American hackers. Inadvertently, I longed to go to the US...

Straits Times is going bankrupt, so they made a paywall -- Straits Times Premium. Immediately r/Singapore on Reddit built a bot to repost the blockaded...

I was in the worst (performing) class in secondary school. I am not sure how well it does now, but Anglican High was a good school that ranks in the top...

Sometimes, I envy smokers because they always seem so relaxed while smoking. My drug of choice is programming. I am lost in my head when I am in the zone,...

Warning, technical post alert. I have been programming in the last two weeks, and boy do I miss it. We have been using a variant of CoffeeScript, known as...

I spent a significant bit of my teenage life on the internet. I trafficked pirated content that was sold downstream by pirated DVD vendors, otherwise known...

I watched an interview of Quek Siu Rui, CEO of Carousell, on Bloomberg TV. He spoke about being lucky enough to work on a product that he cares about...

Look what I put together today. I have had my fingers busy this week, getting involved in the actual productization process in our next experiment....

My brother is in Dublin, working for the DynamoDB product under Amazon AWS. Before Amazon, he worked for Skyscanner. My brother is quite an engineer with an...

I was pitching right up till I decided to stop working on Sapiengraph. Perfect setup for some awkward emails but it has to be done. This is the email that I...

It is time for the next experiment after Sapiengraph. I have a few ideas, but there are two that I am studying. The first idea is to productize TMP, a task...

I received numerous feedback from people I care about that I might have given up too fast. This is not the first time I have heard of this. So let us...

As a boss, I allocate resources in initiatives that will provide a return. Just like how an investor in a venture capital firm would. Instead of financial...

Pornography has painted a world by which women have disproportionally large breasts. With startup porn, we have the same problem with almost everything. I...

Business is people, and humans are irrational. Getting things done in a B2B company is about managing this complex web of inter-human relations. I am going...

I am doing something different this time compared to how I used to build ideate and build products. This time, I am not building anything until I see paying...

It is no secret that I fired my brother shortly after I hired him. And I dismissed him for two reasons. First, he was not a good programmer due to...

Genetically, I gain fast-twitch muscles easily. I am no different at work. I drive large movements in the company. And sometimes we move so fast that I can't help but to look back and force myself to regroup.

The title of this article is a story of a guy that I tried fund-raising from as a doe-eyed fresh grad. A while ago, he low-key flexed that he had bought...

But like most people, I am not connected, loaded, or pedigreed. But I have a brain and a grit.

By success, I mean I made money to support one person (myself). Most entrepreneurs do not even get this far. And what I do is no secret. For every new...

The real world frustrates internet geeks. In the real world, everything seems so much harder. In the real world, the geeks have to put on clothes. The geeks...

Inefficiencies irritate me. Most of the time, inefficiencies exist for a good reason. An economic reason such as cleaners being cheap makes R&D for...

I am what I am. But as time races by and collagen weans itself off my face, I have noticed the few times I cede control, were the few times things worked...

There was a time by which I made a concerted effort to stave off the intake of the news. That is because the primary intent of news reporting is to alarm....

The giant startups that shook up our lives such as Uber and Airbnb did so because they were, by nature, disruptive. But disruption is a nicer way of saying...

Especially so for someone like me who grew up trying hard not to take money from my mother because of tight financial circumstances. In a startup world,...

My investment track record, while limited in variety, has been pretty successful. They would be way more successful when I tune out my emotions. The times I...

I started the Sapiengraph effort by hiring a small sales unit. Historically, I always built the product first then attempt to sell it. The risks are...

In my second meeting with an angel investor, he told me straight up that he is not sure what exactly we are selling.

Last week, I dropped a job specification for our design team to design a demo for our facial recognition demo. The demo does two things with photos: 1. To...

"What is in it for you" - Do not sell. Instead, tell your prospect straight up what he stands to gain.

The origin story of how I decided to build my own company

A designer with a soft pink cap. A programmer with a hair bun. These Indonesians have been growing proportionally in my product team. We speak different...

This post is hard to write because it means I have to come to terms with my autistic tendencies. But if I am honest with myself, blaming it to autism makes...

No, it is not the early onset of Alzheimer's [https://nubela.co/blog/i-have-early-onset-of-alzheimers/]. It was honest to goodness forgetfulness. I am...

Last week marked the start of the fund-raising process. It was a fruitful week, and it has shaped the work ahead of me in the subsequent weeks. This post is...

I am a Singaporean with chutzpah [https://www.yourdictionary.com/chutzpah]. A Jewish term for near-arrogant bravado. As a Singaporean Chinese living in a...

Yesterday, I texted a particular NUS professor seeking an introduction to a specific angel investor. That turned out to be a dud as the professor was not...

So I pitched to a VC today, and I got a same-day response after sending over the deck. > We usually invest at Series A and often write cheques of $2-3mil...

I am from the special forces, not because I served as a Naval Diver, but because my company operates as a small but lethal team. Two years ago, when it was...

This is my favorite question for people (over drinks). I will like to think that the craziest act that you sought out willingly defines who you are as a...

In the last month, I lost : * My car keys. It cost me $900 to replace it, thank you BMW. * Not one, but two Stojo cups. One of it got caught in my car's...

Some things cannot be rushed. I bought a few shrimps for my tank yesterday. And I have been drip acclimatizing them with water from their new home. But...

Two weeks ago, I announced that I was going raise 900,000USD for Sapiengraph. I am raising funds because I believe there is a serious opportunity for (your)...

I have an irrational hatred for bureaucracy. It is probably why I always find bones to pick with the civil service. But bureaucracy is only the symptom....

This is a rewrite of my original post by which I extolled the need for you not to build your business on somebody else's business. Instead, I have rewritten...

My staff and I were debating if Grab falls under our target audience, and she insisted that she had written Grab down previously and I had shot down the...

The new developer in the office encountered a development issue today, and he posted his question on Slack. The CTO stepped in and helped. But the new...

Our office is huge, and I carved out the empty portion of the office which had some empty tables lying around to offset our rent. We have a new tenant...

Nubela is founded by Steven Goh (myself) from the revenue of the company's first product - Gom VPN. I built Gom VPN as a response to MDA"s filter to block...

Today is the last day for 18-year-old Scott at LandX. So I will dedicate my blog post today to celebrate Scott. How we found Scott We found Scott because...

I am not good at fund-raising mostly because I struggle to empathize with investors. The genius of Elon Musk Elon Musk is a helluva entrepreneur. I do not...

Most people do not know how to write great titles. To write a great title, it boils down to "What's in it for you (the reader)?" In this post, I will be...

For far too many times in my career, I have felt a dreaded gloom as I thump away on my keyboard, wondering why my efforts were not translating into actual...

It was a > 10x returns in a few months. But I did not sell it, and I still hold my coins to this day. There lies the problem with me; I do not have an exit...

I am trying to grow shrimps. But the home for these shrimps is a planted tank. And it is not easy building a planted tank in Singapore. First, I need a...

The task to crawl Singaporeans on Professional Social Network was dispatched to a programmer two weeks ago. But up till yesterday, it was not close to being...

I received a response from my first CMO applicant today. He wrote a sample blog post which left me with more questions after I read it. I will attach his...

> Hi steven. I think we do not report ___ to the police. Just tell them that we find out he stole the money from us and we forgive him. Putra sent this...

In this article, I am introspecting about my daily blog posts. A link for everything These days, I seem to have a link to explain my thought, which is...

She was an SMU alumni and I wasted $20,000 on her wages over 5 months. She excelled in what SMU trained their students to be -- professional talkers. I...

Mario is my intern for this summer. A shocker on Mario's first day I did not interview Mario as I usually would for interns because he came introduced from...

We carved out 2 weeks to build this because all other CRMs suck. My team and I ain't got no time to manually enter every detail of our customers into the...

But the only thing I automated was insincerity with automated emails. Now that I am back focusing on sales for Nubela, why is is the sales process so...

Our little internal project got a customer without us asking for it. Remember TMP [__GHOST_URL__/we-automated-our-managers-away/]? Right after I shared it,...

It is my opinion that deadlines belong to an undisciplined company. I have no good stories of deadlines Against the backdrop of the Bitcoin bull run of...

Everyone has at least one inner demon, and it is usually an embellishment of one of the seven deadly sins. My inner demon is wrath, and anger is a helluva...

We will wait till Monday when the engineers are in the office. That is what. If you have been in the game long enough like I have, you will learn that it is...

I asked my staff why he stopped taking initiative Once, I asked my staff why he stopped taking the initiative at work. He replied that he learned not to do...

It was not interesting to me at all since I assumed: 1. That the entire world is already doing drop-shipping since the barrier of entry is so low 2. The top...

I have been using this excuse for the longest time as an excuse to speak my mind without care for the hurt that it might inflict on other parties. Last...

I cannot remember how many times I have told myself that I will find myself a comfortable job after X stint. I do not quit. The more rejections I suffer,...

> He who doesn't take risks, never drinks champagne An old Russian saying, quoted by Vladimir Putin in his Financial Time's interview on Russian...

I have not felt the flutter of excitement that I used to feel when I automated something menial away. Today I felt that again when my intern, Mario, demoed...

This is the line that I will preface my pitches from here on. People over product I was at the gym today, catching my breath in between sets, and I can't...

There is a sense of permanent strength in CEOs as we stride into the office every day, and I never go to work without this facade of strength. However, not...

It takes 10 hours a day, seven days a week, and two years of computer time to get good at programming. For a bootstrapper, it is that, and everything else....

That is a lie I earnestly believed right after I graduated. The goal was to build a product business that will make me $3000 a month, and that will mean I...

It is late and I am burning the midnight oil fixing a compatibility issue brought about because the platform that the product (which shall not be named) was...

No, It has nothing to do with Slack being the fastest growing startup. No, it has nothing to do with the fact that Slack went from product launch to IPO in...

We don't have to be friends on Facebook, but I can still see hundreds of pictures of you. You do not have to follow me on Instagram, but I can download your...

Hitesh is an acquaintance that I knew from university who bullshit-ed everyone that he is a partner at a venture capital fund -- of his own companies that...

This is a story of a stupid idea. In 2017, my company downsized to just Bach and me after shutting down Kloudsec and we were building SilvrBullet. Because...

Being a programmer is both the biggest bane and boon in my entrepreneurial journey. There ought to be more tutorials on how a programmer should run a...

A few years ago, I worked on a product called Kloudsec [https://giki.wiki/@nubela/Kloudsec]. It is a content distribution network (CDN) not unlike...

Right after I graduated, I had a belief that I have to "love" the company that I work at, "love" my manager, and "love" my job. It didn't help that the only...

Most days at work is straightforward. An email arrives, and it will take me a few minutes to respond. Another minute and a colleague will have a question...

I would not be who I am today if I had listened to what people have preached to be the "right thing". When I was 15, my mom caned me for using the computer...

This is my story of how I lost ownership of Unifide, my second company. I began my entrepreneurial journey in 2015 with Spawt, a Foursquare for Food. Spawt...

With the Bitcoin crash of 2018, NuMoney was at the crossroads. Do we persist with the vision of building the largest cryptocurrency exchange for Southeast...

Paul Graham's definition of a startup is a company designed to grow fast. But I hate startups, where do I begin? Let's start with Crystal Horse Investments...

(She didn't turn out to be the one, this girl in the picture did) Back when I was 15, my delinquent friends and I would go to our favorite mall to "fish"...

(Picture above shows Putra, who is CEO of LandX, and I incorporating the company in Jakarta) I am bad at fund-raising. A backchannel source told me that I...

He came sheepishly to me and told me he corrupted our Postgresql database, what do we do now? Ok, time to backtrack. A while ago, we built Kloudsec, a CDN...

Nubela (Corp) will be 5 years old this year