The Lessons We Learnt

It's the end of season one and to round it up, we've releasing two special episodes compiling some of the best lessons that our guests and business leaders have learned in their personal and business lives. Part One features our favourite moments from the first four guests: Ankiti Bose, Tjin Lee, Tan Shin Hui and Karl Mak. For Part Two, we feature our favourite moments from our final four guests: Joel Leong, Anna Lim, Magnus Grimeland and Leonica Kai. The lessons span from female leadership to the vagaries of social media and everything in between. These are the lessons they have learnt. For more business and luxury insights, visit a+ Singapore. The Lessons We Learnt Season 1 is brought to you by Leonica K, Singapore’s homegrown trichology centre that focuses on effective scalp and hair treatments.

It's the end of season one and to round it up, we've releasing two special episodes compiling some of the best lessons that our guests and business leaders have learned in their personal and business lives. Part One features our favourite moments from the first four guests: Ankiti Bose, Tjin Lee, Tan Shin Hui and Karl Mak. The lessons span from female leadership to the vagaries of social media and everything in between. These are the lessons they have learnt. For more business and luxury insights, visit a+ Singapore. The Lessons We Learnt Season 1 is brought to you by Leonica K, Singapore’s homegrown trichology centre that focuses on effective scalp and hair treatments.

The poised and well-dressed Leonica Kei might not look it now, but the entrepreneur was quite the rebel growing up. She barely knew English when she moved to Singapore at the age of 5, but never let that stop her from doing her best in school and rolling the dice and heading to London to study hairdressing without her parents' knowledge. In a world of heady valuations and meteoric rises (and even more epic drops back to Earth), Leonica Kei's eponymous trichology business—Leonica K—is a throwback to an era when doing business was about keeping costs low, recouping your initial investment and bootstrapping your way to profitability. The entrepreneur tells us about her struggles when she was young, how she pushed to keep the business growing while raising children as a single mother, and why she's not yet ready to retire, as she prepares to unleash her newest venture, hair and body products. These are the lessons she has learnt. For more business and luxury insights, visit a+ Singapore. The Lessons We Learnt Season 1 is brought to you by Leonica K, Singapore’s homegrown trichology centre that focuses on effective scalp and hair treatments.

Magnus Grimeland believes that it's easier to be liked if you are average. "The more successful you are, the more detractors you will have because you are standing up there and doing something that no one has done before," says the founder and CEO of global venture capital firm Antler. From a small town in Norway, Grimeland served in the Royal Norwegian Navy Special Operations - Marinejegerkommandoen (Navy Seals) and went to Harvard to study economics, Eventually, he found his way to Singapore, working in several corporate organisations before starting online shopping platform Zalora. Now, Grimeland is leading Antler. As a venture capitalist, Grimeland makes big bets on the future. He believes that the world will be rosier than it is today, with huge advances in carbon capture technology and healthcare. "But it all comes down to people choosing to pursue these problems. None of these stuff unless great people decide to make progress inevitable, which is what we are trying to do at Antler." This conversation is a must for those who think about the future and the direction that the world is heading towards. Listen to the song that Magnus refers to in the podcast: Mentos National Night  For more business and luxury insights, visit a+ Singapore. The Lessons We Learnt Season 1 is brought to you by Leonica K, Singapore’s homegrown trichology centre that focuses on effective scalp and hair treatments.

You must have eaten a bowl of soup from Soup Spoon at least once in the past 20 years. That's how long the soup chain has been around. Unlike many other start-ups that like to "go fast and break things", Anna Lim prefers the process of taking it slow and perfecting each stage first before moving on to the next thing. The business owner is still deeply focused on making sure that a good bowl of soup "tastes the same yesterday, today and tomorrow" even as she diversifies Soup Spoon's offerings. In this conversation, the effervescent Lim talks about how naysayers fuel her growth and why she still wants to build the Starbucks of soup. For more business and luxury insights, visit a+ Singapore. The Lessons We Learnt Season 1 is brought to you by Leonica K, Singapore’s homegrown trichology centre that focuses on effective scalp and hair treatments.

Eight years, 10 countries and US$355 million funds raised later, Joel Leong is still deeply zealous about ShopBack and creating the best possible shopping experience for his customers. The fast-speaking entrepreneur has always exhibited entrepreneurial tendencies--spotting arbitrage opportunities in his school's stationery shop, selling art supplies to his classmates after realising the demand before everyone else, and more. But, the Newcastle United fan took a safe path after school by joining the government, only to leave two years later after being seduced by the heady world of entrepreneurship and start-ups. In this wide-ranging conversation, Leong talks about the growth of ShopBack, the company's wide-ranging challenges, his business and life mantras, hiring philosophies, why he's been on the cable car over eight times in the past six months, how marriage has changed him, and more. These are the lessons he has learnt. For more business and luxury insights, visit a+ Singapore. The Lessons We Learnt Season 1 is brought to you by Leonica K, Singapore’s homegrown trichology centre that focuses on effective scalp and hair treatments.

Karl Mak’s burning desire to be an entrepreneur consumed his entire life. However, he’s the first to admit that he wasn’t interested in the “concept of money”. He was successful in real estate, but didn’t want to pursue it. An initial blogshop business he started with his close friend and current business partner Adrian Ang failed and wrecked their relationship. A software firm Karl started also went down the drain. The co-founder of Hepmil Media Group, which owns and operates multiple digital media brands, reveals how both Adrian and he turned a Facebook meme page into a multi-million-dollar digital empire—by accident—and how the growth of SGAG also coincided with his growth as a husband and father. For more business and luxury insights, visit a+ Singapore. The Lessons We Learnt Season 1 is brought to you by Leonica K, Singapore’s homegrown trichology centre that focuses on effective scalp and hair treatments.

At the height of the pandemic, Park Hotel Group executive director Tan Shin Hui faced a difficult decision: let go of people or let the ship go down. She went for another option instead. Publicity-shy and elusive, Shin Hui comes out of her shell to tell us about her decision making matrix, being a female leader and the lessons that she has learnt in business and life. For more business and luxury insights, visit a+ Singapore. The Lessons We Learnt Season 1 is brought to you by Leonica K, Singapore's homegrown trichology centre that focuses on effective scalp and hair treatments.

It was a simple Instagram post, imploring young Singaporeans to work hard and not take the country's success for granted. Her words went viral, with supporters and detractors waging war in the comment section. Local papers even covered the online storm. But, this isn't the first time Tjin Lee has waded into social media's murky waters. In 2018, her post about pre-school bullying went viral, too. The founder of Mercury Social, one of Singapore's top marketing agencies, doesn't regret putting up that post. In this episode, she reveals her insecurities about her success, why she still feels like an imposter despite so much success, and why she'll continue speaking up for what she believes in, backlash be damned. These are the lessons she has learnt. For more business and luxury insights, visit a+ Singapore. The Lessons We Learnt Season 1 is brought to you by Leonica K, Singapore's homegrown trichology centre that focuses on effective scalp and hair treatments.

In 2019, Ankiti Bose could do no wrong. She was leading unicorn fashion tech start-up Zilingo, had scored multiple global business accolades, and was the embodiment of a young, hungry and fearless female leader. In 2022, everything unraveled in spectacular fashion - allegations of financial mismanagement and mismanagement dogged her and she was unceremoniously fired from the company she co-founded. Ankiti still remains defiant. In this episode, she shares with us her growing-up years, why she remains "foolishly courageous", and her thoughts on her embattled two years at the helm of Zilingo. These are the lessons she has learnt. For more business and luxury insights, visit a+ Singapore. The Lessons We Learnt Season 1 is brought to you by Leonica K, Singapore's homegrown trichology centre that focuses on effective scalp and hair treatments.