Don't ever teach a Pig how to sing - It is a complete waste of time and it annoys the pig!!!

I dont mean any disrespect to anyone who has worked with me or anyone else for I am just intrigued by this title and I hope you'll go on to read my post.

I used to run a startup before starting Protegesoft and it was a complete failure. Just as I sit down and reflect on what went wrong -- I just can't seem to put my finger on anything. There was nothing right about it from the word GO!!!

The company was well funded by the National Science and Technology Board, Singapore (now known as A*STAR). I had a professional Board of Directors, had $600,000 cash to develop a product. Hired a top class student to head the product development, a senior banker to manage the finances, an ex-banker to incubate the company and despite the best intentions and effort by all - the company failed to develop a product and ran out of gas!

I was new to business - so I got an Incubation Manager to manage my business. The result was nothing short of disaster. There was so much emphasis in recruiting a full management team. The priorities were all wrong. As a company focused on R&D, we should have spent more resources on product development and less on having a professional team.

Learning from these lessons, I have been extremely careful with the people that I hire. I insulate the engineers and the product development team from the rest of the corporate guys. I handle and direct the product development.

For the same reasons, I have also kept the company private and away from the venture capital firms. Having third party capital would put undue pressure on delivering revenue and profit targets with little regard for long term development of capability.

The structure of innovative young startups is very different from a large multi-national corporation. The corporate reporting lines are blurred and if you were to draw an organisational chart for a young startup, it should look more like a concentric model with the CEO/ Founder in the centre... because, the company is small and there is really no need to have formal reporting lines. This kind of structure also promotes innovation and invention through infomal lines of communication.

I find that smaller teams or groups are more effective and innovative than larger teams. Big teams are completely useless when it comes to product development. The most effective team sizes range from five to seven. Anything bigger seems to get too political and ineffective.

Unless you want to run your business aground - never ever hire a manager from a large company managing a large team to run your innovative startup. Somehow, they dont seem to appreciate that smaller innovative startups thrive on messy informal communication and organisation structures. They may be exceptions -- but you may need to kiss many frogs before you find your prince!!!