Don’t be fooled by the people queuing up for a glimpse of Facebook’s Eduardo Saverin at Filter. They want his fame and fortune, but not, it would seem, to follow in his footsteps. Last week an NTU study revealed that, of 10,000 students surveyed, only eight percent aspired to an entrepreneurial career involving starting a business. Ouch.

So to suggest that the start-up scene here has never been in ruder health might seem like wishful thinking. But talk to some of the people involved and there’s a great deal of excitement about where things might go. And there’s no better hard proof of such optimism than the steady rise of co-operative working spaces.

Three newbies have opened across the city in the last three months alone, bringing the total number to around half a dozen (with several more that aren’t officially licensed). Some of them are higher spec’d than others, some are already close to capacity, but they all speak to a desire for something more stimulating than the traditional office environment. It’s like corporate hot-desking, just on a budget and a whole lot more fun. Perhaps it’s time you thought about signing up.

The appeal is obvious: Cheap rent, short leases, shared resources, the chance to bounce ideas around with like-minded people, and the kind of forced productivity that few of us could ever achieve working from home. The result is busy, stimulating environments, variously home to freelance designers, start-up founders, branding gurus and especially the kind of modern tech types who show up to work in Vibram FiveFingers running shoes, insist on working at standing desks, and do triathlons when they’re not building apps. Says Jeff Paine of the Founder Institute and latterly FounderHQ, many of these people find they simply can’t work at home: “They need structure, they need motivation, they need someone to kick their butts.” He points out that the group is already made of up outliers—he estimates there are no more than 3-400 people in the business of founding tech companies here—meaning, “they’re already very different, they’re a little bit nuts to begin with, so if you put them together they tend to gel fairly quickly.”

The Science of Sharing

The concept of shared working spaces is hardly new, however much it might seem like a natural extension of our twittering online lives. What is new is what can be achieved with them, now that everyone’s connected wherever they are (it’s no coincidence that these spaces are predominantly founded and filled by people in the tech industry).

One of the key figures behind the recent growth of the start-up scene here is Hugh Mason, co-founder of the Joyful Frog Digital Incubator. It was JFDI who helped set up the headline-grabbing Hackerspace. Now based out of Blk71, they’re also the folk behind the Startup Weekend. Mason suggests that “the idea of a co-working space grew out of the science parks of the 1960s. ”But, as he says, the crucial difference is that, in the digital era, “It’s no longer the physical asset of the incubator that’s important. You don’t actually need a special place, you just need to be together.” That’s why JFDI focus on the soft stuff, what Mason calls “the social capital you need to make entrepreneurship thrive.”

Bastian Döhling, Business Development Manager at interesting.org, a platform promoting creativity in business, works out of an unofficial co-working space in the Arab Quarter (and, of course, trains triathletes in his spare time). For him, this kind of environment offers a chance to “get ideas from other people, share my ideas with them, to connect other people.” There’s nothing formal about the process, either. When asked how that sharing works in practice, he says it’s simple: “I tell you about my lunch meeting, you tell me about yours. The only thing that matters is having the right people sitting in there.”

Networking, both formal and informal, is at the heart of the concept. Some of the spots, especially Hackerspace, regularly put on hackathons and other events; though if you go there expecting the kind of cocktail and canapé affair you’d find at a traditional networking event, you’ll be rather disappointed. The focus is squarely on cool new platforms, on banging 100 tech heads together and seeing what falls out, with a few drinks if you’re lucky. Across the board, the people working out of these spaces tend to take what they do very seriously (for many it’s their only source of income, for some their income stream hasn’t even begun yet), and the unbridled passion that’s evident at these events stands in stark contrast to tepid corporate mixers. That said, the really serious folk are often nowhere to be found. As Döhling points out, “You don’t really meet successful people at these events, because they’re the ones building products. The ones at the events are the talkers.”

Rolling with the Top Down

It’s important to note that the scene is not being built entirely from the ground-up by eager young geeks. Among the most promising developments in the start-up sphere was the launch, back in April, of the strategic incubation program known simply as Blk71 (the physical space, which opened only recently is at 71 Ayer Rajah Industrial Estate, part of the Mediapolis sprawl).

A collaboration between the Media Development Authority (MDA; whose building it is), SingTel Innov8 (the corporate venture arm of the SingTel you know and love)—both of whom have committed to investing up to $2m over the next three years—and NUS Enterprise, the Blk 71 program is designed to offer Interactive Digital Media (IDM) start-ups a one-stop shop for everything they might need, from meeting rooms and legal advisory services to seed money (up to $50,000) for those who can successfully pitch their idea. More broadly, it’s about building the kind of environment where such businesses can thrive; what Monica Tsai, Director (Investments) at SingTel Innov8, describes as “catalyzing the start-up ecosystem.” Tan Peck Ying, Executive at NUS Enterprise, hopes that together they can “create a collaborative community to work together in synergy; the goal is to bring institutions, industry experts, private funders and the government body together.”
This isn’t the only such government/academia/tech tie-up—it has much in common, in concept and aspiration, with the NTU Innovation Centre, which also benefits from MDA support in the form of the IDM Jump-start And Mentor (i.JAM) initiative—but it is, for now at least, the slickest. The money that’s been spent on it shows; the common space (known as ‘Plug-In@Blk71’ and described as a place for people looking for “a corner to hack, a room to ideate or a platform to collaborate”) is like the MDA’s own Googleplex (think pool tables, blackboard illustrations and Nespresso machines). And best of all, the hot-desking terminals are currently free and open to the public.

Sync in Progress

For all the positive signs, it’s not yet clear where the start-up scene will go from here. Most people admit there haven’t been many success stories out of Singapore as yet, and comparisons with the Bay Area and Silicon Valley tend to be unflattering—the financial infrastructure just isn’t the same. As Döhling observes, “You have a lot of people with money here, but they don’t necessarily understand technology or internet business models. For them it’s easier to invest in a bricks and mortar business.” There are other problems too, not least our risk-averse culture, and the more immediate rewards of a career in law or finance. The lack of ready funding is one reason Jeff Paine recently set up Cofoundify, an exclusive mailing list for founders to post requests for co-founders in business, design or tech to round out their teams; with the posts selected, curated and heavily reviewed by Paine himself.

For what it’s worth, Paine actually thinks that, for now, there’s probably “enough or close to enough” shared working spaces here. That’s because the growth rates of start-ups is not so high. “They launch, they die, then they start again,” he explains. “It’s the same people again and again, there’s only incremental growth.” But with more opportunities than ever for people with ideas to meet; and, best of all, more places for them to work out of, the future is bright (and probably wearing FiveFingers).

Singapore Co-Working Spaces