A book on a desk helped CheeTung Leong find an early customer. He was talking to someone on a company’s team when he noticed what its head of talent was reading. He mentioned the book, invited the talent leader for coffee, and began a relationship. The business came later. For a founder selling software about understanding people, it was an appropriately low-tech start.
Another early customer emerged from a consulting pitch that went nowhere. The proposed project failed to sell, but the business owner liked EngageRocket’s concierge prototype: an early version delivered with human effort behind the scenes. Both customers became friends, offered advice, attended events and read the company’s writing before buying its product. There was no tidy sequence to put on a slide. There were conversations, experiments and reasons to keep talking.
A different sort of commission
Leong’s earlier life had a more clearly marked route. A Singapore Armed Forces Overseas Scholarship took him to Cambridge to study economics and to Columbia for a master’s degree in political science. He served in the Singapore Navy, completed his scholarship bond, and then joined Gallup. The move carried him from military service into a business organised around asking people questions.
His education crossed disciplines and countries before his company ever did. Economics gave him a formal subject concerned with choices and incentives; political science concerned institutions and power. Those subjects make an interesting prelude to his later work, although a degree certificate cannot explain a person. The more specific connection is the one he made himself: employee decisions deserved the analytical attention already devoted to finance and customers.
At Gallup, he became regional director for Southeast Asia. His work included performance management, organisational development and workforce analytics. He led consulting teams that grew the business by more than 20 percent in each of three consecutive years. Dorothy Yiu, his future co-founder, worked on the operational side, managing the execution of consulting projects across several markets. They came to the same problem from different desks: leaders needed usable information about their people, and delivering it involved a great deal of labour.
The pair had seen companies make consequential decisions with patchy evidence. Promotion, development and retention could depend on instinct while employee feedback sat in separate systems, arrived late or was never collected. A manager might have a confident opinion about a team without having heard much from it. Leong and Yiu founded EngageRocket in 2016 to collect and analyse employee feedback, giving leaders a way to examine experiences that otherwise remained difficult to see.
The practical obstacle was also mundane. Survey logistics had consumed substantial effort in their consulting work. Simplifying administration and making feedback easier to collect online offered a concrete place to start. Leong still recognised that people had to do the work of making a management process useful. An automated questionnaire could remove clerical effort; it could not relieve a leader of the obligation to respond. The company’s subject was human experience, and its mechanism was a more dependable flow of information.
Collect the experiences people can describe.
Find patterns worth a manager’s attention.
Give someone a useful next step.
When a local win travels badly
By 2020, EngageRocket had announced a S$3 million Series A led by Qualgro, with existing investors participating. The company reported more than 50 active enterprise customers and over two million employee answers analysed across 20 industries and 14 markets. It had added a Jakarta office to its Singapore headquarters. The numbers described a business finding an audience, with a regional expansion already under way.
Company-reported figures at the funding announcement. Answers are responses, not a count of unique employees.
There was recognition, too. Tatler selected Leong for its 2019 Gen.T Leaders of Tomorrow list in Singapore, highlighting his use of employee feedback to improve workplace culture. Its account named Sephora and GIC among the platform’s users. These were encouraging milestones for a founder whose product asked employers to take an often vague subject and inspect it more carefully.
But success in Singapore came with a complication. EngageRocket won business against larger, established competitors, including Qualtrics. Local customers also wanted particular features. Building those features helped win accounts at home. Later, some proved so specific to local circumstances that they were of limited use elsewhere. A pleased customer and a portable product were two different achievements, and the company had to learn to judge both.
Leong’s account of US expansion includes another correction. Outsourced sales development agencies brought prospects that often failed to convert or even attend calls. He changed the hiring brief. The first US representative needed to combine sales with community building, helping create relationships, conversations and advocates around the product. He and Yiu also divided responsibility geographically, with him developing the US business while she led the home market and Asia. Separate reporting lines and honest financial tracking helped them decide where to commit resources.
“Learning and being inspired by people better than me.”
CheeTung Leong, on the satisfaction of entrepreneurship, 2019
California, some assembly required
In late 2023, Leong moved with his wife and children to Palo Alto. A market entry had become a family relocation. His March 2024 account contains details that a business plan would probably omit: bicycles and furniture arrived needing assembly; scheduling meant keeping track of several time zones; a professional network cultivated over years in Singapore had to be rebuilt.
He missed the ease of having colleagues nearby, the coffee conversations and the shared whiteboard. He also found things to enjoy: a community willing to help, different perspectives at his children’s schools, and cycling through the neighbourhood together. The family had chosen to make the journey with him. He wanted other founders weighing a similar move to understand how much of the decision lived outside financial projections.
The bicycle is a useful detail because it is stubbornly particular. International expansion can sound weightless when described as entering a market. Then a box arrives, and someone has to assemble what is inside. That part of the adventure has its own timetable.
Five pages, three children, one dad joke
Leong had already described a smaller set of daily commitments in 2020. Dinner and bedtime were favourite moments with his three children, giving him an hour or so to put work aside. His reading target was five pages a day. He kept a bullet journal and played Roblox with the children. For someone whose work involved measurement, the scale here was agreeably manageable.
He and his wife shared parenting responsibilities while both worked full time. He described their task as noticing each child’s natural strengths and finding ways to encourage them. His children’s desire for autonomy, friendship and meaning had made him more forgiving of adults, too. Office politics, in that view, had an ancestor in the playground. The toys changed; the need to find a place among other people remained familiar.
His dad joke turned on “faux pa”, a small linguistic offence he volunteered himself. The pun sits comfortably beside the Cambridge degree. A profile can allow room for both.
His childhood hero offers another clue to his interests. Asked in 2019, he chose Leonardo da Vinci, pointing to curiosity across different fields and an attachment to logic and evidence. It is an ambitious choice of role model, but the reason he gave was specific. He admired the way curiosity could coexist with disciplined inquiry. His own public work would range from employee experience to education, business operations and the mechanics of selling software.
At TEDxYouth@SAJC in June 2019, he brought his career changes into an argument about the future of work. Data fluency, flexible working and changing forms of employment would require people to develop adaptable competencies. Entrepreneurship, which can look like a particularly risky career choice, could help someone build that adaptability. The argument had personal history behind it: he had already worked in the public sector, a multinational company and a startup. Safety was a question he was willing to reopen.
Building something the next person can run
By 2026, Leong’s public work had taken another direction. As founder of The GTM Architects, he was building sales and marketing systems for B2B businesses. His offer addressed companies with traction whose growth still depended heavily on the founder. The infrastructure lived in the client’s accounts, with documentation and a handoff intended to let the team operate it. Ownership was part of the design.
In an April interview, he described connecting buying signals, contact enrichment, outreach and customer records. Human judgment still mattered: choosing which signals deserved attention, deciding the message and improving the system. The emphasis was on tools working together. A collection of subscriptions could leave a business with plenty of software and several gaps between it. His work addressed those gaps in the existing setup.
A July podcast supplied a pleasingly concrete example: narrowing a market of car washes by examining public records of their water spending. It also described his work connecting customer and product data to identify useful next actions. These are sales problems, but they have a family resemblance to his earlier employee analytics work. Both begin with information scattered across places and end with someone needing to make a decision.
He was also writing practical workflow articles and working with Benjamin Reed on a community teaching sales and marketing operators to use AI tools. The activity carried forward his interest in explaining what he was learning. His writing had previously documented the experience of crossing markets; now it examined how to build systems that other people could use.
Leong’s own later advice includes a blunt admission. He had sometimes enjoyed operational details because they let him remain inside work he understood, avoiding the more unfamiliar business problem. His newer rules included concentrating on one customer group and letting go of tasks he liked doing himself. That is a useful complication in a career devoted to better information: having the data does not make acting on it comfortable.
The book on the desk remains a good place to return. Before the funding, the move and the newer systems work, there was a detail he noticed and a person he took the trouble to know. His career has expanded the means of paying attention. The original problem still requires someone to decide what matters.