I'm 27 and based in Singapore. For the last seven years I've been trying to learn how good businesses actually get built — mostly by working inside them, and a few times by getting things badly wrong. I'm here to find people I can learn from and be useful to. I'm not looking for a job or to be paid. I want hands-on experience, and I want people who can take my best ideas apart. I should say up front that I'm not from the traditional pipeline. Neighbourhood schools, no family business behind me, no relatives at the big firms. I was a sports kid rather than an academic one, and I've always been far more comfortable doing the work than performing in the spotlight — which, as an introvert, is the part of business I've had to work hardest at. I'll come back to that. The short version of how I got here: My first taste of "business" was running Herbalife fitness clubs — the multi-level-marketing world. It didn't amount to much, but it taught me the lesson that's shaped a lot since: I'm not a natural salesman, and I've been working on that ever since. A friend then let me help with his family's hardware store. We digitised it, built a proper SKU system, and roughly doubled revenue to seven figures over a couple of years. The model couldn't really scale, but those people took a chance on me and I'm still grateful. Wanting to understand bigger businesses, I took a project-management role at a family office that controlled one of the larger land banks in Singapore. Most of my time went to operational fire-fighting rather than the strategy I'd hoped to learn, but it taught me how to handle people and pressure, and gave me room to finish my degree and take a remote internship with Andrew Stotz's investment research firm. That taught me something too — that I don't buy the standard tools the industry leans on, the efficient-market hypothesis and discounted cash flow, and that I'd rather study how businesses actually compound. So I kept doing that on my own. That led me to Jeremy Harbour's M&A course, where I met a few genuinely talented people, and we formed a partnership to invest in high-impact companies while raising capital. Over two years we worked toward a raise of around US$280 million and met a real mix — impressive founders and a few outright frauds. Through more cold outreach than I'd ever have believed I had in me, I also got to connect with people well above my level: among them the founder of one of Hong Kong's leading AI companies, and a serial entrepreneur who has taken seven companies public on the NASDAQ. Those conversations opened my eyes to how differently the best operators think. It ended when it became clear the capital we were raising was tied to money laundering, and I walked away. I lost time and a venture I believed in — but not the lessons about deals, trust, and doing your own diligence, and not the fact that I'd finally started getting better at the selling and relationship side I'd always avoided. Through all of it I supported myself as a self-employed personal trainer, dropping most of my clients when the investment work needed more of me and restructuring so I could still pay my way on less. The constant thread has been study. For years now I've averaged six to eight hours a day reading and researching how the best businesses and investors compound — probably more than was good for the rest of my life. Out of that obsession came the framework I call CRR: shorthand for a single idea, that income follows assets. I suspect it's half-right and over-fitted to the examples I admire, and I'd like people who know more to pull it apart. People reasonably ask why I haven't just taken a finance job. I've gone through interview processes at PE firms here, Seatown among them, and each time I hit the same fork: the role would be a good credential, but it would pull me away from the exact questions I want to spend my time on. I'll admit not landing those offers stung — and that in Singapore my resume often gets filtered before anyone reads it, because I don't have the school or the surname for it. Making peace with the fact that I'll have to build my own way in has taken longer than the rejections did. Where I am now: I've left the partnership. I've been turning CRR into something real — a site, an offer, the calculation built into it, and a few tools I've already shipped, including an AI CFO for small-business accounts. It's very much a work in progress and rough in places, and I'd welcome an honest critique, the blunter the better: redacted. I'm tech-literate rather than an engineer; AI is what lets me build any of it. One of my training clients runs one of the faster-growing SaaS companies in the region and has been generous with guidance. Here in Singapore I also have a small circle — about three small-business owners I trust — and an idea I keep circling but haven't actually started: building a kind of community with them to put the framework to work together. I'm not sure it'll land, and I won't charge anyone until I know I can deliver real value. After a run of things that didn't work out, I've come to treat them as tuition rather than failure — the only kind that would really count is quitting. My honest weakness is the one I flagged at the start: I'm better at the work than at the performance around it. Selling, networking, putting myself forward — that's the edge I'm most deliberately trying to grow. Add real money pressure as my parents age and a fair amount of imposter syndrome, and that's a fair picture of the hard parts. The one place I've put my own ideas to a live test is the public markets — a small experiment testing the investing concepts I've been developing, which has averaged around 80% a year over three years, and not by riding the AI or crypto hype. It's a tiny base, about S$10k grown to S$60k, and it runs more risk than I'd want at any real size; it also isn't yet the disciplined, CRR-based investing I'm actually aiming for. But it's the closest I've come to evidence that the thinking holds up. The interest hasn't faded, and I'd rather act than keep stewing. A few questions for anyone willing: — Given this background, what would you actually do over the next 6–12 months to turn study into something durable and useful? — If you've built a framework you believed in, how did you stress-test it honestly instead of just collecting evidence you were right? — For someone who learns best by doing and contributing, how would you go about finding the right people or projects to attach to? And if you're in Singapore or the region, I'd value the chance to connect — over a coffee or a call. I'm trying to surround myself with people I can learn from and be genuinely useful to. Thanks for reading. I'd love to connect with anyone and bounce ideas. You can reach me at: redacted redacted