‘Many dark times': How this startup founder overcame self-doubt and started a $100-million-a-year business

Many entrepreneurs will say that building a successful startup is costly — both financially and emotionally.

Just ask Jeffrey Tiong. The 40-year-old is the founder and CEO of intellectual property and research and development startup Patsnap, a Singapore-based unicorn company that has surpassed an annual recurring revenue of $100 million, Tiong said in a statement in June.

Tiong's journey in building Patsnap has been far from easy. He started the company straight out of college at age 24, and has been working on it ever since, for the past 17 years.

"Up until now, Patsnap is my first and only job," he told CNBC Make It. "Let me put it this way: For the last 17 years, building the business, there have been many dark times [and] low times. I will not want to go through it again, but I'm grateful for this experience."

"I have really [learned that] what cannot kill you will make you stronger," said Tiong.

Light bulb moment

Tiong was born and raised in a relaxed coastal city in East Malaysia called Kota Kinabalu. Growing up in a typical Southeast Asian household, he thought he would become a doctor, engineer, lawyer or accountant.

At 18, he moved to Singapore, where he attended the National University of Singapore and studied bioengineering. During his studies, Tiong was accepted into an overseas program by his university, which granted him the opportunity to study abroad in the U.S. while working full time for a year.

As part of the program, Tiong moved to Philadelphia in 2005 to study business at The Wharton School while working at a local medical devices startup. During his time at the startup, he helped handle research and development, as well as intellectual property due diligence.

That meant digging through free public databases for information in old patents, which contained the "secret sauce" on how inventors created their inventions, he said.

After months of patent research, Tiong realized that the process was highly time-consuming and "messy," which made the research more difficult than it had to be, he said. He wanted a better tool, so he thought: Why not try to make it myself?

In one of his business classes, which involved learning how to write up business plans, he decided to check if there was a market for a new kind of patent database that would be more streamlined and easy to use. As it turned out, there was.

"I was really thinking to myself, these patents are so useful. If I ... learn how to read, decode, extract the key information [and] make this patent information available to as many people as possible, I think that will be really useful," he said.

So, he took the idea and ran with it.

Self-doubt as an entrepreneur

In 2007, Tiong returned to Singapore and started Patsnap with the help of a government grant worth 55,000 Singapore dollars (about $42,000), as well as some incubation support from the National University of Singapore.

However, he encountered many challenges when starting the business.

"I remember I pitched to many people, and imagine... someone like myself, a fresh grad, no track record — it was just impossible to raise," said Tiong. It didn't help that he was introverted, and was trying to find investors during the height of the 2008 financial crisis, he added.

It wasn't until 2010 that Tiong raised his first $1 million for Patsnap. That year, he grew his team from 15 people to about 50 people. But because of his inexperience with hiring and leading a team, Tiong had to layoff two-thirds of the company within half a year.

"Back then, I didn't know how to properly interview and hire a person... so a lot of issues happened, and the product broke down," he said. Within about six months, Tiong spent about half of the funding he had raised — half a million dollars — and thought about closing down the business.

"I definitely had a lot of self-doubt," he said, "I [was] thinking: Should I just return the money to our investors and call it a day?" But he was motivated to see things through and continued to raise funds.

For about a month, Tiong and his investor traveled between major cities in Europe, Asia and the U.S. to try to gain investor support, but to no avail.

"We couldn't get any interest, so I remember, we were in a meeting room and he just banged on the table and criticized me and said: 'Hey, [you're] not fit to be CEO,'" Tiong said. "So that was one big setback, because I respected him a lot, and it's true, I didn't have enough conviction or confidence back then."

"That was a personal low point," said Tiong.

Big lessons learned

It was only after years of overcoming challenges and developing his own leadership style that Tiong found more confidence as a business owner.

He discovered that he wasn't the outgoing "rah rah" type of leader, but "you can still lead a team even if you are an introvert," Tiong said.

"Throughout the years... because I went through so many dark times, low times, and still persisted — that is really when I look back [and realize] there was really great drive in me," he said. "I just wanted to build something great that leaves something with the world."

Today, Patsnap employs over 1,000 people globally and is backed by the likes of Tencent, Sequoia China and SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Some of their clients include Disney, NASA, Tesla, Adobe and more.

Tiong's biggest dream for the company is to help make innovation easier for the world.

"In a nutshell, I think what we are doing by democratizing patent information, is we [are] actually [helping to] accelerate making innovation in the world easier and better," he said.

"For any aspiring entrepreneurs out there, if you strongly believe in something, then just give it a try. Just go for it, because we only live life once."

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