Driven to put Singapore on the world map, ex-GIC scholar co-founded business with Zuckerberg's sister

CNA

3 days ago

When Debbie Soon arrived in Los Angeles at the start of 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic had brought the world to a standstill.
While family and friends were hunkering down in Singapore, Ms Soon had other plans.
Leaving behind a stable role at mixed martial arts organisation ONE Championship – where she worked after completing her scholarship bond and also at Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC – she packed her bags and moved halfway across the world to the United States without a job waiting for her on the other side.
The 36-year-old: 'I'd always wanted to experience living and working in the US ... I was just, like, 'You know what? I'm going to take a leap of faith and I'm just going to move and I'll see what happens'.'
That seemed to be her approach to most things – just take the plunge and see where it would lead.
I stumbled upon Ms Soon's profile online and was struck by her varied curriculum vitae and unconventional career trajectory. Curious to learn more, I spoke with her to find out how a Singaporean who once followed the traditional academic track ended up forging such a unique path.
While clocking full-time hours at GIC, she opened one of the first boutique spin studios in Singapore. After GIC, she pivoted to the world of mixed martial arts before moving to the US and diving headfirst into the uncharted waters of Web3, a blockchain-based internet that uses decentralised technology to operate.
While cooped up in Los Angeles during the pandemic, a chance online meeting with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg's older sister Randi led to the duo launching HUG, a social marketplace for artists to showcase and sell their digital and physical work.
Today, she is the marketing head at Privy, a cryptocurrency wallet provider and startup recently acquired by payment technology firm Stripe.
Speaking to me over a video call from her home in New York City on Jul 2, where she's now in the midst of relocating, Ms Soon immediately struck me as a spirited and determined go-getter who doesn't let ideas remain mere ideas.
Asked how she would describe herself, she said she was 'definitely ambitious' and 'kind of unconventional'.
'I think I always look to do things a little bit differently from other people. And deep down, I'm pretty optimistic. Even if, in the moment, I feel like things are really bad, at the back of my mind, I (still) believe in a better future and a better outcome.'
A combination of these traits and her appetite for risk – which she tells me is 'more calculated than people think' – has shaped every chapter of her life.
GROWING UP IN THE LITTLE RED DOT
The younger of two children and the daughter of a civil servant and lecturer, Ms Soon spent most of her childhood living in Clementi.
Throughout her schooling years at Raffles Girls' School and Hwa Chong Institution, she picked up several co-curricular activities and hobbies, from robotics to choir, being a librarian to building her own websites. She also played football and was in the drama club.
As she spoke candidly about the various things she had dabbled in or pursued, it soon became clear to me – over two hour-long conversations on separate days – that she was immensely curious about many things and this likely underpinned her career choices after her scholarship.
Despite her interest in the arts in school and technology outside of it, Ms Soon decided to take up a GIC scholarship to study economics at England's University of Cambridge, followed by a postgraduate degree in financial engineering at Columbia University in New York.
'I think it's quite common in Singapore, and just in Asian upbringing, to always pick the practical path. So even though my favourite subjects in school were history and literature, I think I ended up picking the most practical thing to study, which was economics, and then, became a GIC scholar.'
While at GIC, Ms Soon worked as a portfolio manager on the global equities team covering consumer brands including luxury goods conglomerate LVMH, fast-food chain McDonald's, sporting goods company Nike, as well as e-commerce giant Amazon.
Her interest in entrepreneurship, she said, came from her work at GIC after spending time speaking to the higher management of various companies.
Her role involved gathering as much information as possible from stakeholders in order to assess how their businesses were performing.
'And while I think I was decent at stock picking and pretty good at making calls, there was definitely a part of me that felt a bit like a fraud. What made me think that I, as a 20-something-year-old, can have a better idea of how to run a company than (these) very senior executives, and I've never even run a company myself?'
FIRST TASTE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
A few years into the job, Ms Soon still felt unfulfilled despite doing 'all the right things' to do well at GIC.
So midway through her bond, she opened 7Cycle with a colleague.
The pair rented a three-storey shophouse along Boon Tat Street – a five-minute walk from her office.
'Back in the day, I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know all of the things that I didn't know … I was just so young and had so much bravado that I was, like, 'Oh, this is so easy, I'm sure anyone can do it, right?',' she said.
'But I mean, that ended up being probably the best experience of my life.'
Besides running the operations of the indoor cycling salon, she also doubled up as an instructor.
'I was originally not planning to be one of the instructors, but ... I thought, 'this seems really fun, I feel I could do it and I think I'd be pretty good at it',' she said, punctuating that sentence with her signature laugh.
Her optimism and can-do attitude were infectious. I often feel self-conscious about being bad at new hobbies, but listening to her, I found myself inspired to adopt the same mindset to simply give things a go.
Even with her go-getter spirit, Ms Soon knew she had to call it quits on the spin studio in 2015 – which she sold off – when it was too difficult to juggle her full-time job and side hustle.
Somehow, she could not shake the feeling that something was still missing at work despite ticking 'starting a business' off her list.
'For the first 20-plus years of my life, everything was very extrinsically motivated in terms of needing to check every single box and doing the sensible and realistic thing,' she said.
With that lingering sense of dissatisfaction, Ms Soon eventually left GIC to become chief of staff at ONE Championship – a move she saw as a 'great opportunity' to learn from its chief executive officer Chatri Sityodtong.
Over three years, she led multiple projects, including helming the company's expansion into e-sports, overseeing its consumer merchandise arm and setting up its e-commerce store, which later thrived during the pandemic.
CHANCE MEETING WITH A ZUCKERBERG
When the pandemic struck and live sports events were put on hold, Ms Soon said she had the time to reflect on what she really wanted out of life.
She recalled how much she had enjoyed living in the US when she was in university and realised she still wanted to work there.
With just two suitcases and her dog Guinness, she took a one-way flight to Los Angeles. She had set aside six months of savings, fully prepared to go without employment for that period.
Asked what her family thought of her move, she said: 'I think they would definitely think that I take risks.'
Although she would deem herself a risk-taker, the risks she takes are 'calculated' and she's 'totally prepared for the downside', she said.
Although she had already had her first taste of entrepreneurship, Ms Soon was determined to push this even further.
In the US, she was accepted into a Founder in Residence programme, an initiative by a venture capital firm aimed at supporting early-stage entrepreneurs by providing resources to develop and scale their businesses.
This opened doors to potential investors and business mentors. One such mentor she met there introduced her to the world of cryptocurrency and sparked her interest in the emerging field because it was a refreshing change from the traditional finance background she had.
'The thing that made me really excited about crypto was that people were really open to meeting people on the internet, because it's still a very native internet community type of thing, which was reminiscent of those days when I was in secondary school and I had my websites and I was meeting all these strangers on the internet,' she said.
At the same time, unable to meet people in real life because of lockdowns, she began to get active in online communities.
It was also in one of these communities with an interest in Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the Discord platform that Ms Soon first got acquainted with Ms Randi Zuckerberg.
Ms Soon had published a post sharing that she was keen to move into working full-time in crypto. She included a summary of her background and appealed to the community, asking if anyone was looking for a collaborator or knew of any openings.
Ms Zuckerberg responded to her post and the pair quickly hit it off over a Zoom call.
'I think we were both really excited by crypto at the time it was taking off,' Ms Soon said.
'Obviously ... now we know it is a much more volatile industry. But at the time that we met, crypto prices were soaring and it was like a bull market,' she continued, adding that they saw the potential to build a profitable business.
The two of them discovered a shared passion for the intersection of art and technology. Ms Zuckerberg had already spent about seven years working on Broadway since leaving Facebook and they both agreed that NFTs seemed like the 'perfect' way to blend art and technology.
This led to the birth of HUG, a consolidated social marketplace allowing creators to showcase and sell both physical and digital works, including NFTs, through a single storefront – a business Ms Soon described as 'Facebook meets Etsy'.
Things swiftly picked up momentum. Together, the pair ran the business for about three years until it was acquired at the start of this year. They no longer run a business together now but they are still in touch.
Around a year ago while working on HUG, Ms Soon relocated from Los Angeles to Miami to live in her then-boyfriend's hometown.
PUTTING SINGAPORE ON THE WORLD MAP
In the meantime, Ms Soon's active presence on social media platform X posting about crypto caught the attention of publishing house Wiley, which approached her about writing a book on the subject.
Titled Digital Mavericks, her book was published earlier this year and serves as both a guide to the crypto industry and a collection of interviews with people in the space.
Outside of work, Ms Soon developed a keen interest in 'vibe coding', a practice where technology powered by artificial intelligence generates code that is based on user prompts. She used this to create an online personality quiz promoting her book.
In an almost serendipitous turn of events, Ms Soon said she built the quiz using Privy, a crypto startup specialising in e-wallet infrastructure that was recently acquired by digital payments giant Stripe.
This initial connection eventually led to her joining Privy earlier this year, shortly after she and Ms Zuckerberg sold HUG.
Today, Ms Soon is preparing for her next move to New York City, where she will work in person at the Privy office.
It is a move that brings her almost full circle, back to the city where she once studied as a postgraduate, and a dream she has held onto ever since then.
On what motivates her to continue making her mark in the digital and crypto space, Ms Soon said she remembered how during her college years, there were people who did not even know where Singapore was.
'In some ways, that always motivated me to want to do something bigger. It also made me hungrier for working on things on a global scale,' she added.
'Growing up in this small, (often) overlooked country, the little red dot ... it's always been the underdog.
'And I feel very motivated to put Singapore on the world map ... I think (that) could mean different things to different people. To me, I definitely feel like I'm working in an industry where there is the opportunity to really shape things.
'I don't know what the end state looks like, but I think at the end of the day, I want to be working on meaningful things.'
Ms Soon also loves hearing people 'say nice things about Singapore' while she is in the US.
Admittedly, she once felt slightly self-conscious about being a Singaporean, but she now begins every self-introduction by proudly stating that she is 'Singapore-born and raised'.
'At the end of the day, Singapore for me will always be home. My parents are there, my brother is there, my two young nephews are there.
'As I've grown older, my perspective has changed a lot. I'm very proud to be Singaporean and I will talk about it any chance that I get.'