Yat Siu, Founder and CEO of Outblaze, gives his thoughts on what makes a great leader and entrepreneur and also shares with us the highs and lows of his illustrious career.
1. What do you think are the most important qualities in a great entrepreneur?
To me the most important qualities in an entrepreneur are determination, willingness to break norms, and the ability to find and hold on to good team members.
2. What’s the best piece of advice you were given and by whom?
Work hard, persevere and don’t give up. I can thank my mother – a professional musician – for that advice and it’s something that really clicked when I was a young boy learning to play the piano: no matter how difficult the obstacles in your way, a goal can usually be achieved given enough dedication and effort.
3. Tell us about your big break?
My big break that led to everything else was the great team we set up when we started Outblaze. We’ve had commercial exits and countless business milestones in the years since, but none of that would have been possible without the strong foundation provided by the starting team.
4. What was your biggest failure?
There are many, and singling out one failure in my life wouldn’t be fair to all the others! I don’t dwell on failure much, beyond (of course) treating it as a valuable learning experience. If you happen to be born with the amazing ability to do something perfectly the first time, that’s fantastic; for the rest of us, failure is just a normal part of growth and learning. And yet too often people refer to failure, this great life teacher, with shame or embarrassment.
5. What role will technology play in the future of your business and business in general?
Technology is vital to us in particular because we are a tech company. Given that every day the field of technology grows broader, it can be confusing to treat the word “tech” as a catchall term. My own area of expertise is information technology, and even that has become too vast to be comprehended fully by a single person.
Technology shapes the modern world in too many ways to count – everything from unlocking medical advances to enabling popular revolutions. There exists a multitude of technologies, each with various possible business applications, so it will become more and more important for businesspeople to be technology literate. But that’s only the beginning: as technologies continue to develop, it will be increasingly necessary to unlearn what we know as we embrace new paradigms.
6. What’s the next big trend on your radar in technology?
Wearable technology is (finally) becoming a reality and I am very much looking forward to the next few years! I also think we are seeing the start of a global technology shift that will be pivotal over the next decade: technology influence has started flowing from East to West instead of the other way – and I don’t just mean the classic example of Japan but also newer tech powerhouses like South Korea and China.
