Jeffrey Tiong and the value of a difficult question

Jeffrey Tiong has asked senior job candidates to make a presentation about their lives. Before they began, he showed them his own. Childhood photographs. His first pay cheque. The cubicle where he once lived and worked. A line chart tracking his happiness through the years. The founder of a company built around organising information has found a rather personal dataset for the interview room.

He calls the exercise a “lifeline”. It began as a way for colleagues to get to know one another, then entered the senior hiring process in 2018. A conventional CV supplies titles and dates. Tiong wants the events behind them: what someone pursued, what went wrong, what mattered enough to keep going. It is an unusually revealing request from a chief executive. He volunteers to be the first exhibit.

There is a practical history behind that openness. Patsnap began with a young engineer who thought he could improve a cumbersome search task. Keeping the business alive required learning to manage people, take criticism and sometimes abandon his own preferred answer. The slide show puts those lessons on the screen. The glossy version of a founder’s career would have much less useful information.

Growing up in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, Tiong did not imagine a future pitching investors. He wanted to be an engineer. Entrepreneurship entered his life through the National University of Singapore, where he joined the NUS Overseas Colleges programme. In 2005 and 2006 he worked in Philadelphia and studied at Wharton. The geographical distance was considerable; the change in what he considered possible was larger.

“I wanted to be an engineer.”

Jeffrey Tiong, reflecting on his early ambitions

Google’s acquisition of YouTube in 2006 caught his attention. Here were young businesses whose beginnings seemed imaginable, even ordinary, suddenly becoming consequential. He had encountered another side of enterprise during his internship: patent information. Searching it required patience with technical language and legal wording. The task was slow enough to invite a question an engineer might naturally ask. Could a better tool do this?

Thirteen patents, one opening

In his later account of the internship, a particular transaction stayed with him. The startup paid $1 million for 13 patents from a bankrupt business. Ideas survived the company that had owned them, and another company could put those ideas to work. Tiong saw valuable information surrounded by awkward retrieval systems and language that discouraged the people who might use it.

That observation became the starting point for Patsnap, founded in Singapore in 2007 after he graduated. Its audience included engineers, scientists and business teams who needed to understand inventions without becoming specialists in reading patent documents. The proposed improvement sounds modest: make complicated information easier to find and understand. Modest improvements can occupy a surprising amount of someone’s working day.

Patents also offered a view of what other organisations were developing. A research team could examine a technical landscape, identify possible collaborators or notice work already done elsewhere. Tiong was interested in the decisions that followed the search. A database was useful when it helped somebody decide what to investigate, where to put effort and which questions to ask next.

A smaller room, then a smaller company

The initial student startup grant was S$55,000. In the early years Tiong went looking for further backing and repeatedly came away without it. He moved the fledgling business to Suzhou, where costs were lower, and assembled a seven-person team in an apartment that doubled as their working space. Space was scarce. The idea had to earn its accommodation.

The living arrangements were austere even before the move. For six months in Singapore he slept and showered at the office, paying himself S$500 a month. His Mandarin, learnt at a Chinese school in Sabah, helped him make the transition to China. This part of the story contains few glamorous objects: an office, an apartment, a salary small enough to demand careful arithmetic.

Funding eventually arrived in 2010 from Accel-X and NUS Enterprise. Then came a mistake that complicated the rescue. Tiong expanded the team from more than ten people to more than forty while the product failed. He had hired salespeople for software they could not successfully sell. Growth had produced a larger organisation before the underlying business could support it.

He cut jobs and brought the company back to roughly its earlier size. In his recollection, about half a million in funding disappeared in less than six months. His explanation went beyond blaming a bad hire. He accepted that he had failed to build the team properly and had lacked leadership. Money had given him the means to expand; it had also made his weaknesses more expensive.

He persisted with a smaller, stubborn goal: finish a working product. Even if the company failed, he wanted to have completed something he could show. That aim is telling. It asks for a piece of work that survives an unflattering verdict. For an engineer, a functioning product offers a more concrete answer than a polished account of how promising everything once looked.

The founder goes first

In 2014, during another difficult fundraising period, an investor told Tiong he was unsuited to being CEO. He was too open about his doubts. The advice was to project more confidence. Tiong respected the person giving it, which made the criticism harder to dismiss. The business needed financing; its founder was being told to revise the way he presented himself.

He eventually chose a version of leadership that left room for admissions. “I admit it when I don’t know something or when I screw up,” he said. He also recognised a limit: a leader’s concerns can unsettle a team, and honesty needs judgment. The resulting position is less convenient than simply being candid about everything. It requires thinking about what other people need from you.

Hiring supplied another correction. After the Series C round, he recruited experienced managers from large software companies. Their credentials were substantial, but some struggled in a startup where systems still had to be built. He later described those wrong hires as costing millions. Experience with a finished machine did not necessarily equip someone to assemble its missing parts.

He began looking for evidence of entrepreneurial behaviour in other places: a venture, a new business line, competitive sport. He paired newer senior staff with founding team members on initiatives, giving each a chance to learn how the other worked. The lifeline fits this broader interest in people’s histories. An impressive title can tell you where somebody stood. It takes more conversation to learn how they got there.

An introvert with offices across time zones

Tiong describes himself as an introvert who enjoys time alone. By 2020 he was talking publicly about leading a company of roughly 800 people. Those facts sit comfortably together once leadership is understood as work that can be learnt. Patsnap required conversations across countries, while its founder remained someone who liked a measure of solitude. The company did not need his personality to become a different product.

Outside work, he has spoken of spending time with his children, watching films and reading. His earlier travel habits suggest someone who enjoys removing small frictions: avoiding checked luggage and even choosing a plastic belt buckle. There is a little of the search-tool designer in the traveller who would prefer the airport to ask fewer questions.

His listening habits were equally purposeful. He used pockets of time for podcasts, including Harvard Business Review and The Tim Ferriss Show, alongside Oprah’s interviews. In 2017, around Patsnap’s tenth anniversary, he took his family to Australia for what he called his first real break in a decade. He put away the phone and internet. For once, information could manage without his supervision.

The business, meanwhile, developed across regions rather than along a tidy expansion ladder. London followed the company’s entry into the Chinese market, and customers spread through Europe, North America and Asia. Tiong’s later advice was to adapt locally. A management practice that travels well on a presentation slide may still need translation when it arrives in an actual office.

The numbers get bigger. The question stays practical.

In March 2021, Patsnap announced a $300 million Series E round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Tencent Investment. The funding was intended for product development, specialist expertise, sales expansion and employees’ development. By then the company reported more than 10,000 customers in over 50 countries. A student’s search problem had acquired a substantial international address book.

Recognition arrived along the way. Tiong was EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Singapore in 2018, received an SCS IT Leaders Award in 2019 and appeared among The Software Report’s Top 50 SaaS CEOs in 2020. In 2025, EY’s profile recorded that Patsnap had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. That is revenue on a recurring annual basis, a different measure from a funding round.

The software kept moving toward the original frustration. A 2023 update to Eureka introduced PatentDNA, which extracts problems, solutions, methods and summaries from invention documents. The promise was closer cooperation between research and intellectual property teams. A useful explanation can make an unfamiliar document less forbidding. It can also save two colleagues from conducting the same conversation in incompatible vocabularies.

AI agents are now part of Tiong’s plans for that work. He has described specialised agents taking on routine innovation tasks, with domain knowledge and detailed data behind them. In July 2026, Patsnap announced cooperation with ASEAN intellectual property offices and other service providers, exchanging access to regional data for tools and assistance. Its stated customer count had reached more than 18,000 organisations.

The scale has changed, but the question of usefulness keeps returning. Sophisticated features had once failed to match what customers actually needed. Tiong learnt to pay attention to their working routines. The current AI ambitions carry the same test: what can a researcher or inventor do more clearly after using the tool? A clever system still needs to earn a place in somebody’s day.

In July 2025 he returned to NUS as a commencement guest speaker. The graduate who had left with a search problem now had years of mistakes and revisions to bring back. His lifeline could have made a suitable visual aid. Childhood, a cubicle, a pay cheque, a company. And, between the dates, the difficult questions that kept changing his answers.