Company: eXtropia
Location: Singapore
Contact: Eric Tachibana

The story of eXtropia- making it happen in Singapore

July 2006

For Canadian companies its hard to imagine a market outside of North America, 87% of our external trade is with the United States and we export more to Home Depot than to France. International business is not exclusive to Multinational companies it can be done by a startup, a mid sized company or companies looking for additional revenue growth.

We have heard a lot about the rising powers of China and India. What we have not heard is that Canadian and US expertise is also needed in these countries. It is no secret that North Americans can offer higher value added services in process quality (in services/software). The consequence of not entering these markets is to create more competitors.

Below is a story of eXtropia a company that entered Singapore in 1999, grew quickly and was acquired by a Singapore listed System Integrator.

Extropia actually had its start in 1994 pre web browser, when the web was just a big bulletin board in green and black. It was not long after that Netscape and others came in and changed the Internet forever.

Extropia was started by Eric Tachibana who attended UC Berkeley and then UCLA and was introduced to the internet by one of his professors. He then became infatuated and subsequently wrote code for online shopping carts, calendars and other web applications. Soon eXtropia grew into an online community for web developers and its open source code project began. All the information was free, why not-- developers needed a resource and eXtropia was it.

It was not planned it grew from demand -- Eric continued to work on the code at night and met another "hack" Gunther at the Electronic Frontier Foundation "EFF" in Washington. Eric then moved to the Human Genome Project where he developed databases to analyze the human genome while attending George Washington University (1996).

In business there tends to be some seriousness as to having a business plan--Eric and eXtropia were benefactors of good karma, the follow your heart mentality and a lot of work. He moved to Singapore after graduating from George Washington University with a Masters degree in 1996-as his girlfriend and future wife was from Singapore.

He always worked on his side project eXtropia while he worked full time in Singapore. After leaving his employer (Electric Eye) in Singapore he shopped eXtropia to the Venture Capital firms in the US based on the open source model--things did not go that well. So in 1998 he and Gunther got a job offer in London with Barclays Bank designing the Foreign Exchange trading system as an Associate Director for 1 year.

This job provided the capital to commercialize eXtropia--not in the US but in Singapore. Remember Singapore was not the ideal place to start a tech company in 1999. Everything was happening in the US not in Asia--Asia was still recovering from the 1997-8 financial crisis.

What looked like a bad move ended up being a very smooth move. eXtropia received media attention and Eric was a regular contributor in several publications in Singapore due to the "newness" factor. It actually went against every business instinct to move to Singapore at that time--there were other personal reasons for being in Singapore. Aside from that Singapore is a nice place, it's small but the companies have money. Getting paid on time is another story.

eXtropia positioned itself as the high end IT service firm working on custom projects -using a consulting model in 1999-2000. It then moved into selling open source based banking applications (cash management, treasury, and trade financing products) first in Singapore then in Malaysia (2000-2003). It used a very effective marketing strategy based on bringing in key people with access to decision makers, reducing the time wastage of chasing dead end leads. It was acquired in 2003 for roughly 4-5 million by PK Tech a Singapore listed Malaysian based systems integrator.

Along the way from 1996-2004 Eric published 6 programming books including Entrepreneurship in Asia in 2004.

Read how to run a profitable company by eXtropia