Students Sharing – My Startups Experience
Chia Lih Wei (Class of 2018)
The past few years as an undergraduate has been a whirlpool of interesting experiences and unexpected access to many behind-the-scenes places in the electronics and space industry. What started out as joining two programmes related to fields I’m interested in: iDP Nanosatellite Programme (space) and NUS Overseas Colleges (entrepreneurship), led me down the rabbit hole of being part of a satellite launch (NUS Galassia) and starting my own company (TinyMOS).
The adventure started with launching our own “balloon satellite”, a simple satellite that does not launch into space but is instead tethered to a balloon and flown into the sky… and eventually led to building our own satellite radio ground station and the launch of our own nanosatellite into space in 2015.
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Along the way I also got to meet many people in the space industry, including NASA astronaut James H. Newman.
The NOC programme then gave me the opportunity to spend a year in Silicon Valley working out of a garage start-up and designing a product from scratch, while taking classes and receiving tutelage from business veterans at Stanford University.
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Back home, with the knowledge gained from the nanosatellite and NOC programmes, I started a camera company, TinyMOS, with my friends. This brought me to many places, learning and applying what I’ve learnt to manufacturing and selling products en-masse.
While working on TinyMOS, I’ve been to over 5 different countries to supervise the manufacturing of various components of our product, spent time in odd-looking testing facilities, and even set up our own manufacturing line for the assembly and programming of our product.
The cherry on top of this multi-year ongoing adventure? My most memorable experiences: spending two nights out in a desert, with a prototype of our product, doing testing under the moonlit sky; and witnessing a SpaceX rocket launch with the SpaceX team near the launch site.
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It has definitely been a very fruitful undergraduate life. Being exposed to these different real-world industrial environments and experiences has not only made me a better engineer but it also enriched my life; definitely something I highly recommend all undergraduates to strive experiencing for themselves.