Watt's up!

I am Hardik, and I have recently graduated from Electrical Engineering at NUS. Currently I am pursuing a startup idea that aims to build Southeast Asia's first one-stop portal to custom manufacturing: https://factorem.co.

During my 3rd year at NUS, I got to ride on a once in a lifetime opportunity by travelling to and working at a startup in North America. This was part of the NUS Overseas Colleges (NOC) program, which is highly competitive to get into, but the unique experience promised drove me to pursue it.

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My NOC journey became especially unique, having been part of the pioneering batch for the NOC Toronto program. The most unexpected part of the journey was having my company move out of Toronto the week I landed and over the year move to 3 different locations, with me accompanying them to each one of them. One of these places was the Silicon Valley where I got to live and work for 4 months during the yearlong internship. The startup I worked at was called AuroraQ, making breakthroughs in the field of quantum hardware. Here to my surprise, my knowledge on basic quantum physics, magnetism and computer science attained from the first 2 years at university proved to be useful! It was challenging but equally rewarding working closely with the 3 co-founders, and as the only employee, there were many hats to be worn.

It was during this NOC stint that the idea for my startup (factorem.co) came about. The thought of starting a business was daunting to me at first. But as I saw my founders at AuroraQ get through the various struggles starting a business entails, complimented by the entrepreneurship courses at the University of Toronto, I began to realize how doable it was.

I started working on Factorem alongside 2 of my NOC batchmates from other faculties, with complementing skillsets. Factorem is built around the idea of reducing time wasted in the inefficiencies of hardware prototyping, and we are doing so by creating one-stop portal for custom manufacturing in the region.

We started validating this idea as soon as we came back from Toronto in August 2019. The validation was being done side-by-side with our final year commitments in school, but it was manageable. In fact, some of the modules I took as part of my 4th year coursework at ECE proved to be useful to building the startup! A good example was the final year module on "Harnessing Intellectual Property" taught by a Prof. that has filed multiple patents himself.

I believe entrepreneurship goes hand-in-hand with engineering, given that both fields are fundamentally there to create and make things work, often starting from nothing! I highly recommend any aspiring engineers to consider taking up this pathway and see where it leads for you.

As for Factorem, in April 2020, around the same time as I finished my final year thesis, we got to launch our MVP (app.factorem.co) and since then have used it to transact more than 90 customized components fabricated by small machine shops (our partners) for hardware designers (the customers) in Singapore. Going forward, we are focusing on solidifying our business processes before scaling into the rest of Southeast Asia.

I believe that the engineering knowledge attained over the years at NUS ECE has helped a lot in quickly picking up the intricacies of this custom manufacturing business. Electrical Engineering is a highly versatile field, from semiconductors, to computer vision, robotics, power management, embedded systems, there is a lot one can learn! As I went along taking in knowledge from each of these sub-fields, I got to experience and play with the various methods of learning. Soon I realized that regardless of what sub-field it was, I could absorb much better simply by writing down the things I learnt while

revising. Applying this same lesson to my manufacturing business, although the terms were more mechanical than electrical, there were similar types of parameters to watch out for and I could apply similar methods of learning to understand better. It was easier convincing customers and partners to trust us so long as I had the engineering background. It's really quite something when you get to apply the things you have learnt in school to solve real world problems.

My final advice to all juniors is to use their time at ECE and university to explore as much as you possibly can. University is a place where you can make mistakes without much consequence while having opportunities to experience a wide variety of things. Your experiences, no matter how small, will go a long way in helping you figure out the person you are and understanding what drives you the most.

Here are the words a senior once spoke to me back when I was still a first-year student trying to figure out what I should do during university: "Take the path of most resistance". 😉

Have a fruitful journey ahead. 😊