Startup company in Singapore

It is 10 years since I went to see Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore.

Asian entrepreneurs on how they built their businesses

He had stood down as prime minister of the neat and tidy city state a decade earlier, but he retained enormous behind-the-scenes influence in a job called Senior Minister. He is now called Minister Mentor and Singapore's prime minister is another Mr Lee, his son Lee Hsien Loong.

I was there because something Mr Lee Senior Minister had said about failure had caught my attention, and that is what we talked about.

Some history first: for 30 years under his guidance, the country had engineered a deliberate, government-inspired attempt to attempt to make Singapore a first world oasis in a third world region.

Israel provided the model, surrounded as it was by hostile Arab states, just as Singapore felt itself surrounded by hostility when the Malaysian Confederation fell apart in 1965.

"Like Israel, we had to leapfrog the rest of the region, and attract multinational companies, " he told me.

For 30 years, Singapore played catch up, but by 2000 there was nowhere to take a lead from. So the Senior Minister issued a new call to the island nation of five million people.

"It's time for a new burst of creativity in business, " he told me. "We need many new tries, many start-ups. Out of 10 maybe one will succeed, and eight will fail."

This was deliberately radical talk from a leader whose government had directed his country so closely for so long. The old ways would not work anymore, he said.

Singaporeans would have to stick their necks out and start to embrace risk as a way of life, without a government safety net.

So it was that in 2002, a government commission recommended a push for entrepreneurism in Singapore Then they designated a minister with special responsibility for it.

I suppose it is what many places do, but it does seem typical of the way this city state thinks.

“Start Quote

Is this really creating a city of risk takers prepared to set up on their own - true individual entrepreneurs?”

I found the place putting even more faith in real estate than a decade previously. Like Dubai, Singapore still seems to think that if we build it, they will come.

Inside many of the new buildings there are acres of retailing. Shopping is still one of the main leisure activities of the city state, a national form of self expression.

To encourage business to develop around the new technology that I found Lee Kuan Yew very keen on 10 years ago, there are government-inspired clusters of activity. Again, this drive is expressed in soaring brand new buildings.