Wai Hong Fong is the co-founder and CEO of StoreHub. They're the all-in-one platform that helps F&B and retail restaurants grow and automate successfully.

👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

I help restaurants and retailers become more successful by using technology to run better and engage their customers.

🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

I am in the top 3000 best Dota players in South East Asia.

🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

Reaching 15,000 stores on our platform because of the importance of the work we do and how it directly contributes to helping businesses be more sustainable.

🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?‍

Food tech, because of the challenges of labor and food shortages, it'll be incredibly important for both restauranters and consumers to find a way to run sustainably.

💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry?

I would ask them to count the cost.

For most people that are seeking to build startups today, it's often the VC-funded variety. This approach naturally demands hyper-growth and large scale.

The cost attached to this style of building startups versus, say, a bootstrapped, organically grown one is similar to the comparison of wanting to be the High School Basketball Champion versus winning the NBA Championship.

To play at the NBA level means to train at that level. An NBA athlete has an entire village of support crew putting them through a rigorous and highly disciplined routine. They give up on eating junk food and many other things that regular folks do. They make big sacrifices.

Young budding entrepreneurs, on the other hand, tend to only focus on the big dream. But most don't count the cost associated with getting there. They don't realize how rigorous of a training regime or how much sacrifice is required in the journey. These are important considerations for anyone starting out because the earlier we can expect these, the better we'll be at following through with them.

🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours?

Food in all its expressions, where the best restaurants are, cooking methods and ingredients, and which countries have the best of them and why.

🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show?

One Punch Man.

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🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?‍

Raspberry Sorbet.