Yearning for Learning – My TE Journey

by Sanjay Nair

I must admit that I didn’t expect to learn so much from my 14 weeks of Technological Entrepreneurship class. As a typical final year student, I thought I’ve seen and heard it all within the confines of a SMU seminar room. How very wrong I was!

Our Litbullpen business idea, which we succinctly describe as a ‘Facebook for literary artists’, brought eight individuals together on a journey I can only describe as epic. We had a CEO (Jeremy Michael Ching) who spent so much time smiling to himself as he typed away on his laptop that we all wondered if they were going to announce their engagement someday soon. We had two excellent accountants (Li Zhen and Jeanie) in our group that would put the ones at KPMG to shame.

We had marketing personnel (Krista and Myat) who were so good that I’m pretty sure they could see ice to Eskimos. We had Jane and Paul, our group enforcers who kept us in line and on course whenever making fun of our CEO got out of hand, although Paul was one of the main instigators of this activity, along with yours truly. We had so much fun trying to organize a common timeslot for eight extremely hardworking SMUggers to have a meeting that when we finally found one that worked, we wanted to have another gathering to celebrate this achievement.

As an accountancy student, I again must admit that I had very little knowledge hitherto of business mambo jumbo but it was nonetheless very exciting and meaningful to embark on my first serious business venture. Litbullpen was born out of the idea of filling the gap for budding local literary artists who have a dream of being the next Maya Angelou or J.K. Rowling. We thought it was the right time for such an opportunity as the government has been recently making big strides in transforming Singapore into a global arts hub.

In Prof. Pamela, we had someone in the business world who has been there, done it, and is still continuing to do it. I thought the way the classes were structured and gradually built up helped with the implementation of our business idea. It was extremely gratifying to see our website up and running. There was even a tear in my eye when our very first article went online, although the redness could have also been down to staring at the screen for too long, which is something we learnt from our esteemed CEO.

In conclusion, I had fun, I learnt a ton, the kid is not my son and now sadly, TE is all done.