Four years ago, Jeffrey Goh left a good job at Microsoft to start his own company. He invested $50,000 of his own savings and launched Lightspeed Technologies. Today the home-grown company--which uses the Linux operating system to provide low-cost Internet-access systems--is one of Singapore's private-sector success stories. In a conversation with the REVIEW's Singapore correspondent, Trish Saywell, Goh reflects on what it takes to become an entrepreneur in conservative-minded Singapore.

IS THERE ANY COMMON TRAIT AMONG ENTREPRENEURS IN SINGAPORE? Every single entrepreneur I've ever spoken to in Singapore skipped school. We never found we fit into the school system. The only way that we ended up as entrepreneurs was we escaped the brainwashing that goes on at school. I made it through most of my classes at primary school and to about half my classes in secondary school. By the time I hit junior college I only turned up for exams. I don't think kids can get away with it these days, though, because the policing is much tighter than it used to be.

HOW DO YOU COMPARE SINGAPOREAN CHINESE AND CHINESE FROM MAINLAND CHINA IN TERMS OF ENTREPRENEURIAL BEHAVIOUR? About 70 percent of Singaporeans are ethnically Chinese, so by all accounts we should have the same genetic blueprint that enables us to be fabulous entrepreneurs. But somewhere along the way the nature and nurture thing did something strange. Singapore is not an entrepreneurial nation.

WHAT HAPPENED? Broadly speaking there is entrepreneurship that comes by way of necessity and there is entrepreneurship that comes from opportunity. By having been very effective in raising the standard of living and providing lots of jobs, Singapore has raised the bar to the point where necessity-based entrepreneurship has been virtually wiped out. That's a function of being a wealthy country. Is that a bad thing? Maybe, maybe not.

BUT LOOK AT WEALTHY COUNTRIES LIKE THE UNITED STATES WHERE THERE IS LOTS OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP THAT IS NOT DRIVEN BY NECESSITY. Yes. There are still people seeking that dream and willing to take a risk. What is it about Singaporeans culturally that has taken away that desire? It is partly a legacy of British rule. It's the post-colonial hangover: Our entire bureaucracy, the distaste for discussing money, all of that is very British.

BUT LOOK AT HONG KONG, A FORMER BRITISH COLONY, WHERE YOU HAVE MORE ENTREPRENEURS PER SQUARE FOOT THAN ALMOST ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. But that's because Hong Kong was never as tightly run as Singapore. Singapore is a much closer approximation of the state institutions you'd find in England than Hong Kong is. Hong Kong managed to find an interesting meld of East and West. Singapore has always been known as one of the easiest countries for Westerners to adapt to and to be comfortable in. And that's because for the most part, the way things are done here in terms of the notion of transparency and all our institutions are of the West, not the East. You can't necessarily say all those things are bad. But as a side effect of that, and all the things the Singaporean government has been doing over the last 35 years, the government, through no fault of its own, effectively wiped out entrepreneurship in Singapore.

IS THE MINDSET CHANGING? It's only been in the last couple of years that a profile and recognition of entrepreneurs has gone up. Ten years ago the word "entrepreneur" wasn't even in the Singaporean's vocabulary. You had "businessmen." And they were generally thought of as sleazy and money-grubbing. I think we've produced a lot of great workers and managers, but the ability to think independently has been removed.

HOW DO YOU FIND PEOPLE TO WORK FOR YOU? I have a tough time. I can't hire people whom I have to do the thinking for. I've started hiring people from outside Singapore to encourage diversity and some ability to execute independently. On average, you'll find that graduates from foreign institutions have slightly greater ability to think out of the box. They have been exposed to alternative ways of thinking and they don't take everything exactly as what it's said to be; they tend to look at things from a different point of view.

HOW LONG IS IT GOING TO TAKE SINGAPORE TO CREATE AN ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET? It will probably take five to 10 years to change mindsets. We need more role models, more success stories and critical mass. It's not just finding and grooming more entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur's first dozen or so employees really have to be co-entrepreneurs in a way, too. They may not take the full risk, but as members of a small and young team, they have to have a slightly different mindset. If they think that everything will be neatly laid out for them in terms of what they should be doing, it won't work.

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