 Okay, cool. Hi guys, how are you guys doing? Good, okay cool. Just to show our fans how many of you don't have any technical background. Oh, just one, three, okay cool. So unfortunately for you guys with tap background, you still have to sit through my talk. Okay, but I hope this will be useful for you or any of your friends who want to make a jump into like the tech industry. So I'm basing this off my journey into the tech industry. So yeah, that's just a chronology. So I actually started off with being a law student so I graduated last year but prior to that I was doing a lot of social impact projects so like mental health issue, environmental issue, like female empowerment issues. So if you guys are into CSR or volunteering, you can come speak to me yourself. And I went over to the UK to do my university, graduated last year, didn't know what to do because the law industry was also getting disrupted by AI and so I thought okay, this thing seems powerful, like this tech industry, what is it? So I took a year off to figure my life out going from country to country basically just bumming around. So I went around but I also did conferences in different countries and wrote myself in university programs in Japan and also in the US. And that was when I also did my interviews and everything in different countries as well just to get a sense of what I would like to do it through the interviews. Understanding what industry this is about, what's the different roles that's in it for me for someone with no technical knowledge. So I joined this company in Singapore in March this year as a startup analyst looking through the different startups in the Singapore industry and also in the Southeast Asia markets. Although we do sometimes touch on like the global markets and I just recently left as well because I'm heading back to the UK for short while next month. So I guess you guys are all quite familiar with this terms. Are you guys cool with that? Okay, so I don't really have to go through but I think if you want to start from a startup industry these are the necessary terms so you have to familiarize yourself with. And so what I actually did when I was at this stage when I'm really lost and they know where to start I did a program called the Startup School which is run by Y Combinator. If you don't know what Y Combinator is they're a really prestigious accelerator that's located in US launching some of your biggest startup like Airbnb. And this is a 10 weeks course that you do it online it's for free and through that they had like different modules so you could see like a whole list they tell you like why would you want to found a startup what's an MVP, what's a product market fit so like really essential knowledge they break it down and they run this course every year. So if you want to further like your technical skills I would suggest going to this website I basically have tried this out there are many more out there but these are some of the ones that I've used and also my friends and I think it really help they run courses on like coding, programming, Python I think it's for free but for some of the more premium one or if you want a certificate to show to your employers that you have this skill it comes at additional cost but it's really cheaper than what you can get traditionally in a retail model setup but if you want to go for like offline if you want that relationship the teacher student relationship and the classmates network these are some of the institutions that they have so I guess you guys are all in university or you're working so I must say I think it's not very effective because it's very theoretical base and I don't think it catches up to the real life application I would say a short course would be great I've attended some of the ones by Sheila's data that FB they are a bit more boutique but the courses are really good there are some other ones that I've seen Hackwagon General Assembly and they could tailor it but what I would suggest is that really going down and talking to a consultant to see what you want and to see what you want out of your career to see what the course is going to put you through will it help you further whatever you want to do in your professional life so another way I think it's great to find out about the tech industry would be meeting people and these are the 3 ways I meet people through conferences, events and the various tech groups so this was what I did when I was in the US if you see this picture I was over at Harvard I was under the track called entrepreneurship and technology so they get 300 delegates from different countries and they will be split into 5 different tracks so one of it is technology and entrepreneurship so I made great people they had really cool speakers so this guy here his name is Luke Han and he was Forbes 30 under 30 he founded a startup when he was in Harvard he drop out of Harvard I think it was a sabbatical and then he went back to study and then he dropped out again to find another startup they had a really lag system with regards to how you want to plan your academic path so in Harvard when I was there this startup scene was really amazing over at Harvard Square there were a lot of startups and they really specialized in biomedical MIT was there Harvard was there lots of your top institutions was basically congregated around Boston and then in this picture I was at Silicon Valley so I was visiting my friends who were working at Facebook and Google so they kind of brought me around and explained to me how the Silicon Valley scene was going and it really gave me a good perspective of how the taxing was like in the US just in Singapore so the other one it was with luxury brands and they are looking into how to use technology so these two people there this girl and the guy so they are from Chanel and LV and they are looking at ways in which they want to use technology to authenticate like they are merchandise to tell counterfeits and the real ones so and this was me in Singapore I've already started working in this startup scene with my previous firm called Padang & Company but this was some of the things I did we went to Facebook on like a little study trip and this other one I was at a hackathon where we use engineering and coding solutions to help disabled people so what I did was I code really like engineer or like code so I help them with more of the back end role like we did this wheelchair design we had a cover for people in wheelchairs you don't normally think much about people in wheelchairs but people have told us that they can't go into the rain because they are using the electric wheelchair and when it rains they just can't go out and it spoils the whole machine so we thought of a cover to protect the whole wheelchair and the system and then I helped with the sewing because the wheelchair was constructed using the 3D printer and they did other stuff like making the cover they used the metal bit and you have to really have that knowledge so I did more of the back end role but it really gave me they really taught me how to use it even though I couldn't really be there but it really helped me to see even if I don't have the technical skills I can still get involved in it so events so I like to go on event bright because they tell me what other things that's available and you can also sometimes I think you can see your friends when they sign up for it and recently they have merged event bright with Facebook and you can see the events that your friends are going and it's the algorithms actually track what are the similar events that you have interest in and they actually prompt them up which is how at Marina Bay Sands where lots of startups are in and it's pretty cool in fact I just saw Halima Yako when I was rushing over here so groups so like women who call is basically on made up there are other groups on Facebook, Telegram and WeChat so those are some areas in which I find my community really helpful I was quite surprised by how supportive people are in this industry and I haven't put it but Lincoln Lincoln is a great source of fine people sometimes even if I don't really know the person and I need help when I message them they will actually like take time to reply me or even schedule like coffee just to talk through the problems so yeah that's the end of my talk so so you talked about books and online courses for me personally I start a lot of courses but never end up finishing them so what do you suggest do it with a colleague that's what I did so I had an intern who was really into programming and coding so some of the links that he gave was actually how I came to know of it and I tried it so we kind of like motivate each other like hey how's your progress like how do you do it but of course you need to find someone you need to get someone who you could pace yourself with yeah so yeah anyone has any questions okay so I was in law school and at that time so we had conferences which I organised and the lawyers were basically saying that AI is going to take a while you don't need lawyers next time you can just run it through like a computer so it was like oh no my rice bowl is getting disrupted so I was like I think I need to find out what this is about and how to future prove myself and it's been great I've met law firms in Singapore who have started adopting AI and and they were like they really like it because it's on a productive base a value added billing system but in Singapore and a lot of countries for lawyers it's hourly based billing but I think in Singapore it's still quite insular so you can still protect governments trying to protect themselves from the effects of AI but I think sooner or later it's gonna it's gonna change so I think I think this happens I think the regulations are very slow to change basically you need like the parliamentarians to kind of debate over it and it takes really long but they don't have a structure in place which is why it's like in US and Facebook that's this whole big issue in Singapore I think they are trying to protect this and they are using the fake news law view to want to prevent this widespread rumor from spreading but I think they haven't really looked into like future proving like the laws so a lot of the laws are very outdated some of my friends who are involved with this whole regulatory they say that they want to change it but the system has been very rigid by the time they change it they whole industry has shifted again so it's also like on their end how do they do it but I think on a company's end it's also being upfront with what they're doing with data and they are doing that because if you do that you lose your revenue source it's a very tricky issues that I think I'm not really in a good place to say it but I definitely think that for the government they have to think ahead of how the industry is actually gearing towards yeah cool so any other question yeah at this point so did you pick up or what did you put in your resume yeah so okay so my role as a startup analyst was I looked at the different startups in the field and I looked at how their technology is so let's say you have a chatbot I'll look at your chatbot and see how is it different from the other companies and basically doing an internal rating and see what is different and what is how this can be applied to different companies so my company we do strategic partnership between startups and corporates and I'll look at how is this startup relevant to our client which are the corporates and I would say that I haven't because my role isn't really a very technical thing so I did learn some programming on the side using the causes that I did online but I won't say for me now I'm not trying to be a programmer I'm not trying to be a data scientist but it helps me in terms of data literacy and when I talk to people from startup like technical co-founders I can better ask them like what is your system running on and it gives me a better idea of what their technology is and there are questions cool so that's my Lincoln if you guys want to add me and I'm going to teach you guys a new thing do you guys have Lincoln so if you go to Lincoln if you go to people and if you click on the middle one you can find people nearby you if you guys want to try it out so I think this is a really useful especially at events yeah it's not tender don't worry but you have to on your Bluetooth so you can search like people nearby you yeah it's really cool I learned it from one of the workshops I went she loves data and that was a life changer because I don't have to go adding everyone I want to catch up with I would just be like turn it up and then I can see people who are already in the area and just add them on Lincoln so I hope this knowledge has been useful so you don't have to go and talk to 100 people and add them you can just get them to turn it on alright