This entrepreneur has always loved working in technology, despite his successful career in finance at one of the world’s largest banks. Ashish Singal was bitten by the tech bug after he created his first website in 1998 — a page for University of Michigan Wolverine fans. He continued to code throughout college at Northwestern University on the side, even on top of a full course load. The well-traveled former trader and avid racquetball player finally made the leap to start his own business about a year ago.
For this Member Spotlight, we chatted with the co-founder of Dentity to discuss how he and his co-founder Savinder Singh are transforming the way people keep track of contacts, the transition of working in a corporate environment to a startup, and advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.
I’ve always had an early fascination with tech, but I got swept with the whole finance world after college. I joined HSBC as a trader and spent eight years working in London, Hong Kong, and New York. But throughout the whole time, I always worked on side tech projects. Even though I loved trading, I finally decided to pull the trigger and do it full-time because I wanted to be in technology.
I knew that content management was a mess, so I decided to tackle that problem. I got the idea for Dentity during a trip to Hong Kong, and I had trouble getting in contact with a friend. I had three numbers for her under my contact folder, but none of them were working. One of my friends gave me her number, but I ended up with four numbers. There are so many ways you can connect with someone such as email, phone, and social networks, but isn’t a central place for all of that information. That was the motivation behind Dentity.
Dentity wants to make sharing contact information within groups better. I experienced this first hand at HSBC, where we had to maintain a spreadsheet of all the relevant traders’ telephone numbers and emails so we could easily contact them when needed. We just crossed 10,000 users just at the end of September. This is big for us because fraternities and sororities started school again, so they’re using the app quite a lot.
We didn’t plan on starting out with fraternities and sororities, but it just took off. Numerous startups have attempted to solve this problem of being a contacts book. The problem is trying to reach targeted groups of people. The unique thing about college Greek life is that they’re willing to try something new. Soon, we’ll be expanding to include other groups such as businesses, alumni networks, co-working spaces, and others.
My biggest mistake was spending too much time on my previous startup Web Espy. I kept it on the market longer than necessary, even though we weren’t growing fast enough. My advisors told me to move on, but it’s painful to cut something you’re poured so much into. Now, I’m much more agile and willing to change directions.
I learned that it’s okay to make mistakes in a startup. In corporate, it’s all about not screwing up. Working at HSBC, everything was highly-regulated and highly vetted. You don’t want to make a mistake. Even the growth rates are different between a startup and a big bank. At a corporate environment, you might be trying to raise your revenue 10 percent from last year; however, in a startup, you want to double your numbers every month.
My piece of advice for aspiring entrepreneurs: Make sure you are ready before you trade your relatively secure and stable career for something that is high-risk, but high-reward as well. Ask yourself if you’re okay with going two years without an income to see your vision come through. As optimistic as you may seem, you’ll face challenges and setbacks, so be ready to deal with them.
Photographs by Lauren Kallen