In 2000, Shao-Ning Huang co-founded JobsCentral with Der Shing Lim (whom she married in year 3 of the business) in Singapore. The two met at the University of Michigan where she studied business and he studied electrical engineering. In the United States, they encountered Monster and thought that Singapore needed a similar job portal solution.
Unlike most startups today, the couple bootstrapped their entire 11-year journey. After pooling together US $13,200, the co-founders raised another $145,000 from their families. The investment paid off handsomely. In 2011, CareerBuilder contacted the co-founders, which by then had eight million page views a month and processed 150,000 job applications from a user base of 700,000 job seekers.
After four months of negotiation, the team exited JobsCentral to CareerBuilder for what was rumored to be one of the highest exits in Singapore at the time. The couple remains active in Singapore’s tech ecosystem, this time as investors at the helm of the angel community, with AngelCentral.
Gracy Fernandez: Since the story of JobsCentral is framed by your partnership with your husband, we ought to begin with your personal history. Can you share the story of how you met in college?
Shao-Ning Huang: Chronologically speaking, we started the business in 1999, together with a few other friends. We tied the knot only in late 2001. Though we were both from Singapore, we actually met at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1996. He went there to study engineering, and I studied business. We met at the freshmen orientation organized by the Singapore Student Association on campus. We hit it off well and became a couple in sophomore year.
Fernandez: Outside of being a couple, did you work on any projects or jobs together that helped you get a sense of one another’s working style long before founding a company together?
Huang: No. Although we were both holding exco positions in the Student Association, we never had the experience of working together.
Fernandez: What formative experiences did you have at IBM that would ultimately help you in building JobsCentral?
Huang: I was hired as the only business control person at the IBM technology group in Singapore, reporting directly to the CFO. Basically, I studied past audit reports to figure out what’s going on. I did process reviews and workflows, redesigning stuff to ensure control and governance. I was required to review process across all functions—finance, logistics, procurement, and HR. It quickly exposed me to how businesses are run and the importance of control and governance.
But the “hard lesson” in being the only business control person on site meant that I had no friendly relationships at the office. No one would have lunch with me, as everyone saw me as the “internal police” that could be trouble for them. It was a tough job for a fresh grad, honestly. I learned very quickly how to make small talk and get myself invited to lunch.
After we started up in 1999, even though a two-person team couldn’t have much separation of duties, I was very particular about proper documentation, tracking, rules, and guidelines. I came to realize that not many small companies at our stage really cared about such things. But it really helped us when it came to scaling, as we had clear-cut processes mapped out, and we could easily trace all histories and records. I was also quite particular about how we structured our finances and ensuring that proper accounting and audit were done along the way.
Fernandez: Who first came up with the idea of the jobs platform, and how was it pitched to the others?
Huang: Three of the original group of six founders were studying in the United States between 1996 and 1999, which was the time when the Internet was booming in the US. We read daily about Internet successes and instant dot-com millionaires. The hottest stories then were Amazon, Yahoo!, Monster, and eBay. Naturally, when WebFactory was birthed as our company [JobsFactory was a product], we looked at these successful models and tried to see what would be relevant for Singapore. And jobs were something that we could understand very well as new graduates. JobsFactory [later changed to JobsCentral] was launched as a mass job portal, but since we were self-financed, we couldn’t really afford mass marketing.
Just when we were struggling to figure out how best to acquire jobseekers, and honestly, on the verge of giving up, I received a postcard invitation from the UM Business School. It was holding a virtual career event for business school alumni. That gave us the idea to convert what we had built by then, to become a virtual campus career fair.
It’s worthwhile to note that career guidance and job search services were not provided at Singapore universities then. In fact, only one university catered to internship support. It took us a while to convince our first school partner to work with us, but after that, it was a path of no return. We niched into campus jobs, and consciously moved away from mass market for the next three or four years.
Fernandez: Choosing a name for a startup is crucial to its branding. You toyed with multiple possible names, such as JobsFactory, before arriving at JobsCentral. Can you share the thought processes involved in brainstorming and finally choosing your brand name?
Huang: JobsFactory was the original brand, and was a collective decision by the original six friends who came together for the business. In fact, the company name was WebFactory as we were crazy ambitious, and we thought we could do anything to do with the web. The thinking then was that JobsFactory would be the first product, and we would move on to BookFactory and so on. But “Jobs” kept us very busy for fourteen years.
JobsCentral came about in 2006. It was a conscious decision to create a new brand. By then, we were already well known in the Singapore market as the campus career specialist covering first jobs for graduates and for scholarships. JobsFactory was synonymous with campus recruitment in the minds of our HR clients. As such, it was not an ideal brand to use for a mass market job portal that targets the PMET experienced white-collar professionals. It was very obvious we needed a second brand.
But it was definitely a decision that our staff did not easily accept. By then, we had a team of close to 30 people; we divided the team and resources to build the second business, which was to become a new core. We spent a few months explaining and convincing our staff of the necessity for this move, even though there was a possibility that the new service could cannibalize our campus services in coming years.
Fernandez: I’m sure you already had a very strong dynamic as a co-founding team who were also partners. What was your relationship like with your other co-founders?
Huang: Of the original six co-founders, only two of us converted to full-time when we launched in April of 2000. We returned the funding to some of those who did not come on board. The two of us persisted and learned to sell very fast! We sold hard to get cash flow, and with the launch of our first campus career fair in mid-2001, we closed our first official financial year with approximately $250,000 top line revenue. After that, we went on to bring on board our CTO, Eric, in 2002 and our CMO, Michelle, in 2003.
We had a sales co-founder who came on board in 2002, but she left around 2007 and bought out her shares.
Der Shing, Michelle, Eric and I worked together for 11-12 years. We had our ups and downs, and we fought at times, especially during the early years. The most beautiful thing between us is the near complete faith that no matter what Der Shing or I managed to sell, Eric and Michelle would make sure the product was delivered and on time! We had limited resources at the start, so we had to do everything in the cheapest possible way. They always could manage to do it. While we had our respective functional roles, when it came to crunch times, everyone would roll up their sleeves and help. I remember all of us sitting with our event team at the back of the site office folding flyers the night before the fair. And I remember our silliness in the stretch limo when the four of us flew to Chicago to visit CareerBuilder’s office.
Fernandez: There were already several dozen job platforms in Singapore at the time you founded JobsCentral. Why did you think you could distinguish yours by focusing on recent college graduates?
Huang: We first were validated as a viable business as a campus recruitment specialist, and then used that client base, jobseeker database, and know-how to start a mass market job portal in 2006 onward. By niching as a campus service and partnering with the universities and polytechnics, we had a captive user audience, and did not need to spend huge chunks of money for marketing. And being the first mover in this campus space, we gained traction very fast. We signed exclusive partnerships with all tertiary institutes in Singapore by the end of 2002 and turned profitable by year end 2001.
Fernandez: What were the biggest challenges as your dynamic shifted from being just partners to business partners, and how did you overcome them?
Huang: The initial challenges were more in terms of decision making, and who should do what [functions]. We quickly learned to play to each other’s strengths, so he headed up system and engineering, while I did testing, customer support, finance, and admin. But this was work reserved for after six p.m. Our day jobs were both sales. We were out seeing customers all the time. As we had no external funding, we were very clear that if we couldn’t sell, we would not survive.
The real challenges came when we had kids. Our first boy was born in 2002, and the second one in 2003. We planned a lot on business front, but not so much on the family front. We are lucky that our families were behind us and really helped to look after the boys when they came along. We wouldn’t be able to focus on work so much if not for the help from our parents. Also, 2004 was extremely stressful due to the SARS outbreak in Southeast Asia. The economy came to a standstill, and really put a brake on our growth. Almost all the MNCs held back their management trainee hiring. And we were not even able to meet customers. SARS was highly contagious, so most companies stopped holding external meetings.
We fought a lot during those years, of course. But one thing that was quite miraculous was that we never thought about parting ways. We tried many things to avoid conflict, like not talking about work after we got home, but those things never worked. We talked work all the time, to the extent that our boys identified with our company even when they were just two or three years old. I think we were clear that we needed to provide for the boys. We really did our best to make sure the business worked.
While it’s hard for two alphas to work together, in hindsight, I realize it was actually an extreme luxury that I enjoyed for many years. I know my partner never had second thoughts about me or our family, and me him. I only realized how invaluable this was when I started another business with another partner after we exited JobsCentral. I had the constant nagging worry that my partner was not dedicated and plotting something against the business, and it turned out I was right.
Fernandez: When there was tension between you and your partner, how did you ensure it did not affect other people on the team?
Huang: We tried to keep our home conflict to ourselves. I don’t know if we were successful on this front (I will make it a point to check with my old colleagues in our next gathering!) but we tried very hard to make sure we were professional at the office and did not bring home stuff to the office. We definitely had work-related conflicts, too. So at home we tried our best to keep those issues away from the kids. So our car really was our personal board room. Out of the car, we tried to be all smiley!
Fernandez: How did you manage to convince schools to partner with JobsCentral, rather than turn to any of the other job platforms already on the market?
Huang: I remember there were three bidders for the university to choose from. One was Monster. The other was a software firm. The third was us. We were the least experienced and had the least backing. I would like to believe it was our sincerity and commitment to excellent service, but truth be told, it was because we offered our services for free. We took a big gamble with our business model. While the career e-fair would be held in the school’s name, we did not charge the school partner at all. In return, we got to keep all the advertising revenue from the participating employers. It was a matter of the number of employers we could bring onboard—sell to. The school partner’s job was to ensure the event was marketed to all graduating class and alumni. We committed to bring in good, brand-name employers and jobs relevant to degree holders. We each bore our respective costs. It was a win-win partnership that worked for many years.
Fernandez: As you were a digital startup first, were there any challenges in selling offline exhibition space to these employers?
Huang: Interestingly, no. In fact, we saw very quickly that we had to be a multi-channel career search and information platform. Our second channel was print. We went into the career magazine publication in 2003 and did that brilliantly. Career exhibitions were our third channel. Selling was not difficult because there were print and exhibition budgets. The challenge was in our internal operations. We had to learn editing, designing, printing [for the magazine], and then exhibition management work [for the fairs].
Fernandez: You initially tried several business models, like headhunting and placement. Can you share the story behind these aborted business models, and how you eventually came to be a jobs portal?
Huang: We were a job portal at the core. Headhunting and placement services were experiments to help us extract more revenue from our jobseeker databases. Neither worked out—not because of the model, but more due to our personalities and preferences for simple and efficient business models. Placement and headhunting are pretty much “relationship” businesses. A lot of effort is needed to build relationships with both the customers and the candidates, with no guarantee of outcome. In addition, both segments suffer from bad collection problems. Not to mention, within just the SG market, there were easily more than twelve hundred headhunter and placement firms. It was extremely crowded with low or no barriers to entry. Within a few months of experiments, we quickly learned to double down in the blue ocean and left the red for good.
Fernandez: You achieved ramen profitability—or a break-even point—about eighteen months after your founding. Did this milestone come sooner or later than you initially expected, and why?
Huang: Looking at the current tech scene, breaking even in eighteen months is unheard of, but back then, I would have wanted it sooner. We launched in April 2000, the month when NASDAQ crashed, and the Internet went bust. We had no funding. If we didn’t break even, we couldn’t survive. I would have preferred it to be sooner.
Fernandez: You’ve mentioned that one of your lowest points was having to negotiate the buyout of one of your former partners. Can you share this story?
Huang: We had the unspoken understanding that we would have only working partners. So when one of the partners decided to take a one-year sabbatical for personal reasons, we were upset, but we agreed, with the understanding that she would be back with the team at the end of the year. This happened when we had just launched JobsCentral in 2006. We were profitable but not stable yet. It was crucial that all hands stayed on deck. But when she asked to extend the sabbatical at the end of that for another year, I personally felt very betrayed. I can’t speak for the other partners, but I was very emotional and upset, as I felt cheated and betrayed by a close comrade.
We made a business decision to buy her out, but she was unwilling to sell, as she was also equally emotionally attached to the business. And it’s double complicated because we did not have a shareholder agreement to provide a framework for such situations. It was a very emotional and hard thing to do. But I’m happy to say that, in the end, we managed to work out a fair offer and we are still friends.
Fernandez: How do you think founders can more proactively prepare for these type of situations with their co-founders to better deal with them when they do arise?
Huang: Talk about all that could go wrong before you start, and what you each would do to resolve those differences, and have all the decisions documented. Most crucially, if you have to split, know how you would split and what would be done to ensure that the business could continue. Do the scenario planning and have the relevant action plans mapped out, with mutual understandings and everyone signed off. So the shareholder agreement is a must and especially the deadlock clause/management . The idea is to make sure that you make the rational business decisions now, instead of later when the parties could be clouded by emotions. Think of it as signing a prenuptial agreement before you get married.
Fernandez: In 2004, JobStreet tried to acquire you. Founders all over the world, of course, dream about this moment. Can you share the story of how you turned them down, and why?
Huang: The whole episode with JobStreet was a very big learning experience for me, personally. I learned a lot from Mark in the few months that I spent with him. But at the end of the day, it was a mathematical decision. They gave a valuation offer that was just fifty percent more than our annual sales that year, so it was a number that we could not accept.
Fernandez: You first expanded overseas to Malaysia in 2009. What were the challenges of replicating your job portal in your first foreign market, and how did you address them?
Huang: The first of the challenges was finding the right local partner. We started with the premise that we wanted to partner a local business that was already either in the HR space or the advertising space. It took us a whole year of search and exploration to find the right JV partner. After that, it was trying to drive internal alignment between the two businesses, recruiting the right management team to run a brand-new business, how to make use of existing resources to help the new business grow without compromising the growth of existing businesses, and so forth.
Even though Malaysia and Singapore are similar culturally, it was a steep learning curve because our business practices and expectations are very different. To address these cultural and practice challenges, Der Shing and I traveled monthly to meet, train, and review with the whole team there. It was demanding and very taxing, especially since I just had my third baby in 2008, but it was necessary. Later, this experience proved very useful when we opened our joint venture in Indonesia.
Fernandez: So many startups, even in the job space, choose to go it alone when expanding internationally rather than partnering with another company via a joint venture. Why did you feel it was necessary to put up a JV to navigate the business landscape of other markets?
Huang: For the job space, we had to deal with both HR and jobseekers. We believed it was crucial that we spoke the local cultural language in our operations and marketing outreach. Our ideal JV partner would be an existing business already either in the recruitment or advertising space so they would already know the local practices, or what the HR/jobseekers are like, and ideally have existing assets (databases, customer list) that we could tap into. Setting up shop directly without local partners was our plan B, if we were not able to find a like-minded JV partner within the target time frame.
Fernandez: Can you share an example of how your JV partners helped you better navigate the local landscape in a way that wouldn’t have been possible for you and your team to do alone?
Huang: Technically, anything could be learned, but with a local partner, the learning curve is greatly shortened. For one, our partners spoke Bahasa and that greatly helped in dealing with the government agencies. Governments are usually the biggest employer in the respective economies. Getting their contracts as a foreign pure play usually would take much more time. Also, when it came to hiring and firing, the local GM who knows the local practices and insights—not just the published legal guidelines—probably saved us a lot of headaches.
Fernandez: Both you and your husband have a background in sales. How did you try to grow as product developers? Which product changes, features, or developments are you most proud of that you stewarded?
Huang: We were self-taught sales people. He was trained as an electronic engineer while I was trained in business and finance. However, I think most of what we know was pretty much learned on the job.
When we started in early 2000, the concept of product teams for websites was new. We basically designed everything from scratch, based on market needs, common sense, and iteration from successes and failures. I think what really helped was our constant contact with clients. We were basically “translators” of client requirements for our tech team. And because we were detail oriented and used to go strictly by request frequencies—or data-based decision making, we pretty much designed our systems based on customer feedback and requests.
What I am most proud of in the product design process is the mindset I acquired. It’s “common sense” now to say that we have to listen to customers. We learned it the hard and expensive way during our early days. The very first version of our portal was designed on idealism and pure imagination—what we thought HR wanted. We were so wrong.
Our first version—in addition to full job-posting and application-processing tools—had applicants tracking job ad usage and e-invoicing capabilities. Only after we launched and started talking to HR users locally, we were shocked to learn that many HR teams in Singapore had to share their computers! Yes, we didn’t talk, and we didn’t survey any of our target customers during the design phase! What a joke!
The next humbling lesson… while many HR were curious about this new way to recruit and impressed with what we had built, we spent easily the next few months visiting customers to teach them how to log in, how to post jobs, and how to receive applications in their inboxes. This taught me a precious lesson: do not over build. Many features are good to have but end up being white elephants. We improvise to drive efficiencies and address pain points. Do not over assume the pain points.
Fernandez: While it’s important to listen to users, the converse of that principle is that sometimes they may not know what they really need. This dovetails with the idea that people at the turn of the twentieth century would have asked for faster horses rather than cars when forced. Did you ever conceptualize features based on intuition that your users did end up needing?
Huang: I would think that it was the rollout of our mobile app in 2009. We were the first job portal to do that because we saw the sales of smartphones increasing and how we were using mobile phones more and more for both personal and business life. We started with a job alert push system to help users stay on top of new opportunities, and then one-click applications that did not need desktop access.
Fernandez: In addition to learning how to become product developers, how did you learn product marketing?
Huang: Later, as we expanded, we caught on to two main trends before our competitors. First, was the use of Facebook marketing to get users. This allowed us to get jobseekers rapidly. Second, as previously mentioned, was the development of our mobile app once it was clear that the iPhone was a game changer.
Fernandez: Can you share the story of how CareerBuilder acquired you? Why did you choose to finally go with them, especially after rebuffing the earlier attempt of JobStreet to acquire you?
Huang: Between 2003 and 2009, there were three to four investment and acquisition interests from media firms both locally and overseas, and also one PE firm. Nothing materialized, as there was no meeting of the minds most of the time. But those were good learning episodes that helped us realize what was important to us. Also, we were very cash-flow positive and profitable, and were able to fund our own overseas explorations. In fact, we used our own cash reserves to invest in other classified plays from 2009 to 2011. Those helped Der Shing and I learn to evaluate other businesses and served as the foundation for our angel investing careers now.
After the last negotiation fell through in 2008 with a UK firm, we set a local IPO as our liquidity goal. So when CareerBuilder called in mid-2010, it was a big surprise, and we approached the negotiation with a rather indifferent attitude. We met up with the Asia Pacific President who flew in a few weeks after that. We took those meetings purely as learning meetings, and we were not expecting much. Then we were invited to visit the headquarters in Chicago, and we met with the CEO and the full management team. It probably helped that we were educated in the Midwest, and we had a common language in terms of job board technologies, sales team management, the NCAA, football, deep dish pizza, and so on. They very soon gave us a term sheet, and we negotiated a little, and decided to work together after they gave an offer that all four of our partners could not say no to.
Fernandez: What happened after the acquisition? To what extent did you both remain involved at the newly acquired entity, and in what capacity?
Huang: The first year, post-acquisition was pretty much business as usual. Other than financial reporting system changes, we were just trying to learn from the US teams and what good or bad things we could adopt or avoid for our growth here. The major struggle started in year two, where we had to integrate the core technologies. By then, our CTO had decided to leave. Der Shing’s scope was transitioning to own the Southeast Asian expansion plan, while I had to shoulder the whole Singapore P&L and launch new product to Singapore and Malaysian markets. It was stressful then. We were always working together as a team, supporting each other in the boardroom and the bedroom. But with this role change, he had to travel a lot, and I was basically responsible for close to eighty percent of CareerBuilder’s AsiaPac revenue.
Fernandez: When did you finally decide to leave post-acquisition, and what were your immediate plans?
Huang: I was very depressed between 2012 and 2013. I went to work every day as usual, but I felt a big part of me was missing. I took a sabbatical in the second half of 2013 to attend classes at Harvard. After I came back to Singapore, I realized that I had never learned a crucial corporate survival skill—managing up.
After being a business owner for 10 odd years, I knew how to manage my co-founders, different functional teams, internal or even cross-border teams, business partners, etc. But I never learned how to manage UP, and how to navigate office politics. Long story short, I got so stressed fighting for resources and issues with the Chicago office that I had no idea what I signed up for. I was under so much stress that I did not realizes that I was not putting on weight (I was pregnant with my 4th kid then). All the years of market share and competitor fighting did not prepare me for such “in-fighting.” When I finally caught on to the signal that my body was giving me, I decided to throw in the towel. I figured that my health was the most important thing. By then, my other co-founders were also in the last month of their notice to the company. I did not have any plans after leaving. I thought I would just chill and spend more time with my kids. I was pretty sure I would do some other businesses after a while.
Fernandez: Post-acquisition, how did you try to focus more on the personal relationship with your partner that you had to focus less on by necessity while building the business?
Huang: It’s still a work in progress today. When we were running the business together, we were aligned without needing to say too much. Which meant that we did not communicate much as a couple about our life goals and intentions. We thought we understood each other, as we were on the same boat and sailing in the same direction. But after we stopped, our conflicts really grew and only then did we realize that we were on the same boat but for very different reasons. Now that we are not on the boat anymore, we have to figure out what we are about as a couple, and as a family.
Right after we stopped working, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with cancer and she deteriorated very quickly. It really hit us how fragile life is and how random, too. My husband’s outlook changed a lot after his mother’s passing.
Over the last two years, we went through a lot of re-discovery, and new “forming and storming” in our relationship as a couple. We learned and relearned a lot about each other. I know I am very lucky to have him. We have learned new insights about me that I am not proud of, but he is willing to work with me to become better. I think we just started our “performing” phase.
Fernandez: Can you share more about your current work as an angel investor? It’s particularly interesting that you turned to venture capital since you bootstrapped JobsCentral the entire way. In what ways are you trying to provide the capital and know-how that you yourself wish you had back when you were starting and scaling the business?
Huang: Our angel investing work was not intentional. We started seeing a lot of startups in 2015 because we had a lot of time on our hands. Our older boys were all in school and I, as an Asian mom, did not like the idea of traveling and leaving my boys behind. So we were “grounded” during non-holiday months.
We allocated some of our sales proceeds for private equity plays and in earlier stage venture funds. And as we met with more and more startups, we decided we were relevant for them—founder mindset and been-there-done-that experience sharing could really help to shorten the learning curves—and some of them were interesting investment opportunities. We did not intend to be professional angels or even venture investors. We both founded other startups and tried out different work before we realized that we seem to be getting quite good at it. Most probably due to our open and frank feedback and advice to founders, our “deal flow” grew simply by word of mouth .
By the end of 2017, we realized that we had a “following” of both startup founders and investors who were curious/keen on angel investing. We realized that we are good “translators” for the two groups. With minimal efforts, our casual pitch events helped 14 companies raise US $2.6M in 2017. So in 2018, I decided to form an angel group, called AngelCentral. The intention is to support more investors and for them to be smart angels, so that our Southeast Asia ecosystems grow.
The times are quite different now vs then. I won’t go into the “wrong” trends and behaviors I have observed in this space. I believe that if we could help more angels invest smartly and better, the startups will gain, and our ecosystem will flourish. There was a fair bit of not-so-good early investment practices that were unfair to early founders. But angels are really a good potential source for what founders need in their early days: first dollar of investment, first sales referral, and first employee. We just need to help them discover each other and have fair and better ways to connect them.
Fernandez: What unconventional advice do you have for founders who want to build a successful startup like yours?
Huang: Keep the revenue model simple, especially if you have limited resources in the first few years. Give your model a fair amount of time to run before deciding if it’s working or you need to pivot. I see many founders nowadays experimenting with two or three revenue models together and never giving fair time for the market to react and respond.