In 2007, e27 started as a community group among passionate tech and startup enthusiasts who wanted to build the Internet ecosystem in Singapore. e27 was so named as a result of a white paper written by Paul Graham on investing in companies where founders were 27 years old or younger. The “e” stands for entrepreneurs.

In 2012, Mohan Belani and Thaddeus Koh decided to run e27 as a proper media startup serving the regional tech ecosystem. The goal was to provide a platform to empower founders to build and grow their companies, with media as a start. As an online publication, e27 aims to provide this generation of entrepreneurs with the news and knowledge they need to successfully start and scale their business. e27 covers news from Southeast Asia as well as emerging markets across Asia Pacific.

One of e27’s key differentiators is its focus on community. Founders, investors, and other stakeholders can contribute content for editorial review after making a profile on e27. While other publications have guest contributions on the side, e27 may be one of the few that makes growing this community content channel a core focus of their content strategy.

In addition to its f lagship publication, e27 also organizes Echelon Asia Summit, the largest tech and startup conference in the region, gathering over 15,000 attendees from across region. e27 also runs the regional Echelon TOP100 program, gathering 100 of the most promising startups from across APAC. e27 has raised over US $2 million in funding from strategic institutional and angel investors.

Gracy Fernandez: What were the benefits of studying business in the heart of Silicon Valley at Stanford University?

Mohan Belani: Stanford provided a strong theoretical foundation to what was happening in Silicon Valley. The business cases that we studied were from companies that were literally in our backyards. Some of our lecturers were previously entrepreneurs or running companies while teaching, so the knowledge shared came from real-world experiences, and not just theoretical concepts. It was also refreshing to meet students from different backgrounds—tech, business, sciences—coming together to learn about business and building companies. Stanford is truly a melting pot of ideas and innovation.

Fernandez: What was your first exposure to the startup and tech ecosystem while at Stanford University?

Belani: I was studying part-time at Stanford as part of the National University of Singapore Overseas College Program, a one-year program in Silicon Valley, while working full-time at a startup company. The company was called Kriyari and renamed to iStorez a few years later. It was started by a serial entrepreneur, Anand Jagannathan. I was employee number one. I was very lucky to be given the opportunity to work with such an esteemed entrepreneur. It was a phenomenal experience, as I was exposed to many different aspects of a startup, from marketing to attending board meetings, to participating in trade shows. My evenings and weekends were spent attending various tech events and discussing ideas with friends—not to mention some pretty amazing road trips. One of the most valuable experiences that I had was volunteering at events.

Fernandez: What kind of events?

Belani: Startup events, mostly. Although there was one event that I really wanted to attend when I was still an intern, that was going to be held in New York. So I tried to ask my boss if he needed an extra hand for his visit there, he said no, since airline tickets were expensive. So I did the next best step: I asked the event organizers if they needed volunteers, and told them I really want to learn from the people who were attending. Fortunately, they said yes. What was really surprising was when I got there, the organizer just gave me a VIP pass, and said: ‘Hey, just go and have a good time.’ I ended up reaching out to 30 contacts who I connected with my boss. He was very happy with what happened that he reimbursed my expenses and even gave me a raise. From that time on, I imbibed the mantra that there are many different ways to solve a problem, and you should not always accept no and give up. It is important to try and it is important to ask. You just have to see if it works.

Little did I know that my volunteer experience will help me further into my career. It allowed me to meet a lot of people and get a better idea of how to build a community. It is while volunteering that I got a better idea of the ins and outs of running tech events.

Fernandez: Why did you decide to found e27 as a community site?

Belani: e27 was founded by a group of people—more than twenty of us—in 2007 as a community for people keen on startups and building the tech ecosystem. The goal was for people to come together, discuss ideas, and potentially found a startup. It was never intended to be a real startup or business. All of us were in it for community reasons. Some of our early e27 founders included the founders of MoneySmart, Zopim, PointStar, and MindFi, all of them are really amazing startups today. Through our community activities, we were able to meet a lot of like-minded individuals and some of the early pioneers of the Singapore startup ecosystem. We were also able to work with the Singapore government and forward-thinking corporations and organizations to help build the tech ecosystem locally.

Fernandez: In hindsight, what do you think were the advantages—as well as disadvantages—of having started e27 as a community site rather than an explicit startup?

Belani: I don’t think there were specific disadvantages, it just so happened that's how we started—as a community. We were a group of friends who believed in one purpose which was to help the startup community to flourish and grow. That purpose helped us to do anything and everything under the sun to learn and grow. We learned about pitching, we learned what investors wanted, we learned the ins and outs of the startup community, which eventually became beneficial for the success of e27 and to our personal growth as well. It was not our core focus at that point to make money. We saw this as a means to something else—our own startups. In fact, that’s exactly what happened to me because I ended up leaving for almost two years to work on a gaming company, Gokil Games.

Fernandez: What made you leave e27 to found Gokil Games?

Belani: I left e27 in 2010, when it was more of a tech community. Just like the other co-founders of e27 that started their own companies, I was inspired to do the same. My interest was in social gaming, and it stemmed from an early interest in gaming. I’ve always been interested in the gaming industry. I had the opportunity to start a company with someone who was well known in the social gaming industry in the US. I decided to take on this challenge and start a new company focusing on building mobile social games for the Southeast Asia market.

Building Gokil Games was a rewarding and challenging experience that taught me how to manage product teams remotely and better understand how social gaming mechanics work. This experience also allowed me to work with engineers and designers, to build a product. It was very different from the content- and events-related work I had done at e27. I used to code when I was younger and really enjoyed building things. This brought out that side of me.

Fernandez: As you were running Gokil Games, what made you feel that e27 had the greater potential, so much so that you would eventually decide to return to it?

Belani: To some extent, e27 was always at the back of my mind. There is a lot of fulfillment in working with founders and seeing their startups grow. That is something I definitely missed when running Gokil Games. Gokil Games was rewarding in its own way. We had a good team of engineers and designers, and it was fun coming up with design ideas and features. However, there came a turning point when I was fundraising for Gokil Games. I questioned how much I enjoyed doing what I was doing. While it was fun, there was very little purpose in the company.

At the end of the day, I was working on a product that was not really needed or making a difference in people’s lives. I am a purpose-driven individual, and Gokil Games did not fit well with my core values. I kept in touch with one of the investors interested in what I was doing, and chatted with him about e27. I also sat down with Thaddeus to see if he was keen to work together on it. We decided to focus one hundred percent of our efforts in building e27. We had enough money for about six months, which we felt was a good timeline for us to try things out to see if we could make this work. That decision led us to where we are today.

Fernandez: How much had e27 changed during your hiatus? And what issues or challenges did you immediately set out to fix?

Belani: The team that was involved in e27 then had done an amazing job with the limited resources that they had. I was fortunate to be able to build upon their work and bring it forward. When I took over, I had the task of figuring out what e27 stood for, what are our core values were, and what our mission was. It was important for us to focus and concentrate our efforts on the most meaningful activities, while keeping the company afloat. As I took over, we were trying to do many different amazing things, but I believed that focus was important for us to truly succeed. Some of the ideas we looked at included how to better cover the ecosystem with our media platform, events we could do, potential products we could build (Jobs, Database, Investor platform), and markets and regions we could localize into.

Fernandez: What made you realize that the potential for e27 was much larger than a community site and could serve the broader Asian tech ecosystem?

Belani: To be honest, it took us a while to get to that state, because the tech ecosystem needed some time to mature. My co-founder, Thaddeus Koh Jit Siong, and I decided to put our heads together in late 2011 to give e27 a shot at becoming a “real” startup. The startup ecosystem was starting to get more serious around that time. The government was heavily supporting it, and there was an influx of global investors coming in. We were also starting to see some good ideas solving real problems. We knew that startups would be the organizations that would solve the big problems in Southeast Asia, not corporations or governments. And hence, we wanted to do anything we could to support the growth of the startup ecosystem. Our initial belief was that startups can make the world a better place, and this is something we still believe in today.

Fernandez: In previous interviews, you mentioned that your dad was against you starting e27. Why were you certain that you wanted to start the company despite your parents’ wishes?

Belani: Unfortunately, this is not true and has been positioned incorrectly. My parents, especially my dad, have always been one-hundred-percent supportive of e27 and what I do. At no point in time did they ask me to stop e27 or do something different. They have been supportive of me at many stages in life, from the types of schools I wanted to go to—polytechnic instead of junior college—to the interests I wanted to pursue. They just wanted to make sure that I was fully aware of what I was trying to do and ready for the challenges involved in building companies, as opposed to something more stable like having a job.

My dad was a businessman himself and worked very hard to support a large family at a very young age. He started out in sales and opened up an electronics store, subsequently branching into jewelry and tailoring. He was astute in realizing what his customers wanted. Unlike me, he had to start a business to help the family, and not to solve a problem he was passionate about. For him, starting up was a challenging experience that took his time away from family and a balanced lifestyle. His hope was for me to not have a challenging life like him, but instead to have a good education and a more holistic life—something he could not afford to have. He probably did not realize this, but I spent time at his shop observing him and learning what it was like running a business, and I am sure that played a part in me wanting to build e27. As they saying goes, the apple does not fall far from the tree.

Fernandez: As e27 grew its readership, what did you try to do consciously differentiate from the coverage of other tech-focused publications in Asia and abroad?

Belani: I always believed that we had to focus on what was most important to us and our users. While we are aware of the fact that we have competitors, and they are working hard to be better than us, we also did not want to get distracted by what competitors are doing and to always be reacting to them. We had not raised much funding, and our team was very small, so we were also careful to not stretch ourselves too thin and try to do everything. Our focus on our users made us realize early on that articles and content should not be our only focus, and hence, in 2014, we launched the startup database and the jobs sites. This was something heavily requested by our customers, and if we had simply followed what our competitors were doing, we would not have realized these opportunities.

Fernandez: Many founders do stretch themselves too thin in the interest of trying to seize every opportunity.

Belani: Definitely. Even today, we have to turn down many opportunities and ideas on what we should do as a company. I think that is one of the biggest challenges in the life of a founder. Founders should be open minded to listen to ideas and feedback, but they have to internalize them and see what makes sense from users. Founders cannot shut themselves off from feedback and ideas. Once the internalization is done, then comes the focus and execution. What has helped us immensely is imbibing John Doerr’s “OKR” system, which stands for “objectives” and “key results”. It says you have to have goals every quarter. So every time you have an opportunity that comes up, you have to ask yourself: Does this help me achieve my goal? If it’s a distraction to your goal then it’s an easy no. I always have a list that I look at every quarter to revisit past ideas and see if they are relevant to where we are now. An idea might not be relevant today, but might be very relevant three months from now.

Fernandez: How do you balance the need for views with the need to provide helpful content to Asia’s founders, investors, and other ecosystem players? These are two goals that can sometimes be at odds with one another.

Belani: We believe that if you do the right thing, the traffic will come. It was important for us to build the right culture in the content team from the start, such that the team worked on stories that the ecosystem needed to know about, and not just stories that get traffic. It is very easy to fall into the traffic trap, and we are cautious not to do so. We believe in providing the best possible coverage of the ecosystem, and in order to get there, the writers need to be flexible in covering different types of stories—startups, investors, and government-related matters. Traffic is just one measure of success, and we did not want to get overly caught in gunning for traffic. We also did not want to have a culture in the content team where writers only wrote stories that would potentially do well traffic wise.

Fernandez: If traffic was only one measure of an article’s success—and at times, a superficial one at that—how did you measure the success of a particular piece of content?

Belani: I've come to realize that the success of any piece of content cannot be based on website traffic alone. It may sound corny but for me success is when we see an article from us that engages the community. It may not always translate to views, but it may translate into valuable, constructive discussions.

In particular, I feel how effective our content is when we get feedback from the founders themselves and when they share how our work has helped them.

But I know it wasn’t always the case. In our early years, I had an experience when a friend of mine wouldn’t even send our team any copies of his press releases, saying he doesn’t appreciate our writing. It was constructive and helped us do better in coverage.

Now we get more story pitches than what we can handle. So the constructive feedback has definitely helped e27 grow.

Fernandez: When did you decide to start your flagship event series, Echelon? It is almost like running a startup within a startup.

Belani: The very first Echelon—it was called e27 Echelon—was organized in October 2009. It was a one-day community event that we put together to host the founders of Techstars. We published an article to announce the event.¹

We organized it with the intention of it being a one-time event. We were approached by a government agency—Infocomm Development Authority—to host it, since they were hosting the Techstars founders. We brought together speakers from some of the popular startups then—SocialWok, HungryGoWhere, iTwin—and had a few companies pitch. There really were not many to choose from then. It had just over one hundred people, and we were quite happy with how the event went. Little did we realize that the moment it was over, the first question everyone asked was, “When’s the next one?”.

From there, we very quickly moved forward to get Echelon 2010 going. That is the first time we set our sights for it to be a regional event with a conference, exhibition, and pitching element.² It was the community and our users that drove the growth of Echelon.

Fernandez: Though the event was enjoyed by the community, you certainly had the highest possible standards, as someone who had a background in events. What did you realize you could do better based on your first Echelon?

Belani: Our team has zero background in events. We knew how to bring people together, but we had virtually no experience running a conference and exhibition. Everything was trial and error for us. I still remember carrying cocktail tables for the exhibition and laying wires for the Internet access. A lot of the team members stayed until late at night to pack the goodie bags. It was hard work but a lot of fun.

The first Echelon was simple: we gathered different members of the startup community and let them connect and pitch to potential collaborators and investors. It was an intimate, productive gathering. I knew while organizing the event that it was going to be a simple so I had no regrets about it. If anything, it just allowed us to think of the importance of such events and why we have to keep on doing them. We always made sure that in the next year we’ll have a better slate of speakers, or we’ll have talks that will be relevant to the community. It’s always about sending the best content forward.

Fernandez: What are the challenges of running a company that is equally online and offline, like e27? How have you overcome it?

Belani: We are still continually evolving and learning how to do this better. In the earlier days, we were definitely more events-focused, which was quite clear in terms of the number of events we did versus the number of articles we published. The structure of the teams and overall culture of the company was very events-centric.

Along the way, we realized that in order to execute our mission more effectively, we needed to spend more effort on the online parts of e27. This required a cultural shift—training and some changes in our teams—to execute.

In today’s e27, we believe that it is important for all team members to wear an online and an offline hat. Hence, content team members are actively involved in the organization of Echelon, and Echelon team members create content on e27. I believe that it’s important to integrate the offline and online activities to deliver one holistic experience.

Culture building requires time and constant reinforcement of expectations from everyone. Culture is about how you do things as an organization and not about free lunches. And that takes time, so it’s important for founders to be patient. We are still working on building and evolving our culture.

Fernandez: How do you recruit journalists for e27 who are not just great writers, but truly concerned with the welfare of the tech ecosystem in Asia in order to be aligned with the company’s mission?

Belani: I believe that it is important that everyone align with the mission and the core values of the company. We repeat our mission and the core values during every town hall that we run. We refer to it during our discussions, and at times, we reflect on our mission to decide what we should and should not do. Our number-one core value is “respect the ecosystem.” It is there for a very good reason. In the past, we had some bad actors who behaved like they were above the ecosystem and believed the ecosystem would not be where it was without them. This included writing articles that were detrimental to the ecosystem or behaving like their work was above everyone else. This definitely caused a lot of damage internally to the morale of the teams and was a wakeup call for us to drive hard on what our mission and core values are.

I am always cognizant of the fact that e27 would not exist if not for an amazing startup ecosystem. This is something I constantly emphasize to the team. I remind them that we should feel blessed to be given the opportunity to work with the ecosystem, and this is something that should never be taken for granted.

We don’t want to be a media company that rains on the parade of startups. We want to be a champion for the ecosystem, and play a positive role by giving them constructive feedback.

Fernandez: What are the challenges of being both a startup and an organization that covers startups? How do you address this?

Belani: I believe a major challenge that we have is balancing the need to make money with the desire to serve the ecosystem. While we do need to generate revenue to sustain our activities, we also need to be mindful that startups do not have that much money to spend.

We need to make sure that the programs we make are affordable and effective. We are also cognizant that startups do not just pay with money, but with time. Founders are typically fighting to execute as much as they can within a short runway. If our activities involve too much time, or they don’t provide enough value based on the amount of time invested, then founders will not want to participate.

We are outcome- and impact-driven. We believe in providing results to the startups and not just goodwill.

All of this has to balance with our own personal growth and ambitions as a company.

Fernandez: Can you explain in more detail how this challenge plays out—the need to balance revenue generation with the need to serve startups, who don’t have much to spend—in terms of pricing your offline and online products?

Belani: It is important for us to deliver sustainable value to companies. For example, Echelon is a valuable platform. However, it is not possible to create such a platform too many times in a year.

We diversify our work and efforts and do more sustainable activities. Diversifying means working with other players in the startup ecosystem, not just startups, to generate revenue. An example is working with corporations on their innovation programs or with governments on market access activities. The revenue generated from these activities could be used to subsidize the work we do for startups.

In terms of sustainability, it is important that our work be scalable and impactful. This would mostly be via our online site e27.co. One of our efforts was to launch our contributor program. This gave founders a voice and avenue to grow their thought leadership efforts, while making it free for them. We in turn monetize via corporations and governments that want to advertise on e27.

Fernandez: What do you feel is e27’s greatest achievement to date, and why?

Belani: I would not peg our achievement to one specific event or product but more to our culture and desire to support the ecosystem. Throughout the years, we had many ups and downs, and while it was tempting to give up, we stuck to our guns and focused on delivering on our mission. I believe my team’s relentless and selfless desire to be better at executing our mission is our strongest achievement, and this is something we will continue to work on in the years to come. For example, team members are always on the lookout for how to help startups in our network, even if they or e27 do not benefit directly from it. This is mainly through introductions to investors/founders and supporting the ecosystem in intangible manners.

Fernandez: What is on the roadmap for e27?

Belani: Our mission drives our roadmap and activities, and our goal is to figure more ways to execute our mission. We believe that e27 as an organization needs to be less events driven, due to the time and space limitations with events. We believe that we can impact more entrepreneurs and startups by having more scalable ways to execute our mission. We are working on ideas on our online platforms that help entrepreneurs build and grow their companies. We would like e27 to be more of a self-serve platform for founders to achieve their goals. This would include tools that allow them to share more updates on their companies, reach out to investors, and match-make with customers.

Fernandez: What unconventional advice do you have for Asia’s founders who want to build a platform as iconic as e27?

Belani: e27 still has a long way to go. If I were to share just a couple of things that really helped us get to where we are, first, I would advise founders to work on a mission that they are genuinely passionate about. When the going gets tough, it will be the mission that drives the company forward and holds the team together.

Second, do not keep to yourselves when building your company. Build a network of founders whom you can share your problems with. Always realize that every problem you are facing, other founders have faced too. No problem is unique to you. By tapping the wisdom of other founders, you will get interesting insights on how to tackle your own problems.