We speak to three pairs of honourees who connected at a Gen.T event and became business partners
Author and entrepreneur Porter Gale once said, “Your net worth is your network.” At Gen.T, we understand the power of connections. It’s always been our mission to bring together like-minded individuals to encourage collaboration and, in turn, greater innovation and positive impact.
Since Gen.T launched in 2016, we’ve introduced Gen.T honourees to each other through the hundreds of events we’ve organised across our eight markets in Asia. As a result, we’ve seen some pair up. As well as the professional partnerships, we've also been responsible for several relationships and even a marriage. But those stories are for another time and another article.
Here, we speak to three pairs of business partners who met through Gen.T.
Dean Ho and Oon Tian Sern
The honourees Dean Ho, director of The N.1 Institute For Health and Oon Tian Sern, founder and CEO of Acceset.
Their Cause Demystifying mental health through research and technology.
How They Met The 2019 honourees connected at a Gen.T dinner in August 2019, which featured a panel discussion on business sustainability.
“From the Q&A session during the Gen.T event, I could sense the energy Tian Sern—or Matt, as I call him—has as an entrepreneur and his commitment to bringing real impact to the community,” says Dean Ho. “So I decided to catch up with him after the event to let him know that my team at The N.1 Institute For Health would be interested in collaborating with his team at Acceset to develop a study to validate his platform, since we specialise in developing innovative human or clinical study designs to optimise outcomes for our users or patients. We were very interested in harnessing our expertise to impact the mental health space, so it was fortunate to have met Matt then.”
The Project The duo’s ultimate objective is to “develop a scalable, user-ready digital para-counselling platform with actionable algorithms to pinpoint additional risk factors for user triaging,” says Oon Tian Sern. “This will be complemented by an active and sustainable user base to drive the growth of the community and data at the foundation of the platform. We will subsequently develop financing and deployment methods to maximise Acceset’s reach and sustained use to help as many people as possible.”
To further their efforts beyond validating Acceset’s platform, the duo’s companies also jointly applied for funding from the Wellcome Trust, which is the world’s fourth-richest charitable foundation. In 2020, they were Wellcome’s sole awardee from Southeast Asia, and will be using the funds to study “how an increased sense of mattering enhances youth well-being”.
How They Complement Each Other According to an anonymous source the duo prefers not to name, “Matt lift spirits, Dean lifts iron. Matt crushes negative emotions. Dean crushes bench presses and diseases.”
“I feel like I have boundless energy but I can sometimes be a bobo shooter, which is a Singaporean slang for a person who is unable to aim properly and hit the target,” says Oon. “This is where I appreciate Dean a lot, as he’s very much the marksman between us. The blend of youth and experience is always helpful in pushing the frontier of innovations.”
Adds Ho, “Where I think Matt and I align most is our understanding that collaborations work best when they are first built on a foundation of collegiality.”
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