Is it necessary to sell your soul in order to get ahead in business?

Not if you're Peng T. Ong, founder of Interwoven. This seasoned veteran to the hi-tech startup world is a role model to others who are trying to balance an active conscience and the bottom line. In fact, Ong's personal philosophy in creating a successful business is one in which conscience shapes sound business practice.

He urges founders to build a culture you want to thrive in. For Ong, doing that involves self awareness, self control, and ego control. A key way to create such a culture is to be generous in sharing ownership of your company.

In Ong's eyes, startups are like religion. For him, the correlation is that in both, you strive for perfection, emotionally determined to get there, even though you know intellectually that perfection is impossible.

While perfection may be impossible, Ong has proven that creating a profitable enterprise is not. In 1995 he founded Interwoven. His idea for the company stemmed from understanding the different roles of corporate websites. He realized that Web developers for large firms have to assemble and manage websites that do everything from updating product data to filtering information for select users. TeamSite, Interwoven's product, supports Web content management, application web development and workflow for enterprise Web production. It even allows non-technical users to create and edit content from a browser. Interwoven currently boasts an impressive client list that includes Federal Express, Nortel Networks, and Cisco Systems.

Ong's entrepreneurial spirit started early. Even while attending high school in his native Singapore he knew that someday he would run his own company. He came to the U.S. to complete a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He then led and managed engineering teams at Illustra Information Technologies, Sybase and Gensym Corporation. His experience founding Electric Classifieds, Inc., a company providing Internet-based classified advertising, provided the springboard for making Interwoven a reality.

Ong now assists others who are looking to create successful hi-tech startups. He took time to share with Eyemine his recipe for success.

Eyemine: Maybe you can tell us a little bit about your personal philosophies to being a good founder, as well as running a company, as you experienced from Interwoven.

Ong: Basically it comes down to recruiting and hiring good people, and allowing them to build the company for you. It's as simple as that.

Eyemine: What do you look for in the people you hire and in the people you bring into the company?

Ong: Intelligence and maturity. They're both equally important. Maturity allows you to realize when you don't know something and intelligence allows you to figure out things.

Eyemine: How do you see this when you see someone's resume?

Ong: Good GPA, top schools usually indicate intelligence. But the opposite's not necessarily true-if you don't come from a good school, if you don't have a top GPA, it doesn't necessarily mean you're not smart. Maturity is a lot harder…You spend time with the candidate over a period of time, you get to figure out if that person has the ability to think, to be magnanimous, to think in terms of the team, and still have that drive to be incredibly successful. All this high IQ stuff, it comes down basically to maturity.

Eyemine: What do you think has molded your life?

Ong: I think the most eye-opening was when I left home to go to college after the army. To be fair, the army was also pretty eye-opening. So the army sort of prepared me for going to college, in that it was more independent. So it wasn't like a big step each stage, but was a gradual web development. Working at startup companies also helped a lot. My first job was at Gensym Corporation. And there were a few people there who really taught me what it meant to be a startup.

Eyemine: Who were your mentors at that point?

Ong: A mentor is someone you just go to all the time to figure things out…there's a little bit more reliance on a mentor, whereas a coach you just go to on and off, when you have issues. You sort of train with that person. One of the best coaches I had at Gensym was a guy by the name of Brian Matthews, not necessarily because I spent a lot of time with him, but because of his attitude toward the work and toward customer satisfaction, particularly, and his drive.

Eyemine: You'd grown up in Singapore during high school. Was that unique, that you knew you would be coming to the U.S. and that the opportunity to run a startup would be a little bit more straightforward?

Ong: I knew I wanted to do a high tech startup. All that stuff about Silicon Valley, all filtered out to Singapore, and some of us geeks were dreaming of companies. This was late'70s, early '80s.

Eyemine: How many of your friends in high school followed the same path? Or similar paths?

Ong: Not that many actually. But there are quite a few [Singaporeans] nowadays, in the Valley.

Eyemine: Do you still keep in touch with them?

Ong: Some of them. But the problem with being in the Valley is, it's all work. You spend your time working, so you don't know what's happening around you, in terms of your friends. Maybe that's one of the disadvantages of [being here], you get so engrossed with doing the startup.

Eyemine: Do you think in retrospect you would have changed any of the decisions that you made…any of the critical time management roles you played?

Ong: If you're referring to regrets, they probably centered more around hiring and management style, working with people, especially people of different backgrounds and personalities...identifying people who tend to stick up too much and be too individualistic within a group, and actually weeding them out sooner. The intelligence part is easier to figure out, it's the maturity part that's harder to figure out. You need to clean shop sooner than later.

Eyemine: Do you think that there is a distinction in the fact that you're a Singapore-American at this point in what you see as the team versus the individual right to stand out?

Ong: If I look at how I worked through high school, it's not necessarily about inventing things, it's about learning/memorizing a lot of stuff, or, and working very hard for the exams, and following rules, and obeying the regulations laid down for you by the government, etc. So you tend to learn how to work hard, and you learn how to, I guess, follow the guidelines society has laid down for you. The work hard part is actually very good. I think creativity is over-rated in that it's a lot of hard work to be creative. So the hard work part is good. And to be competitive we have to figure out how to generate ideas instead of providing well-measured services, including manufacturing services.

Eyemine: I don't know of any other Asian country right now that's made such a consolidated effort to increase entrepreneurial efforts in a very, very accelerated fashion.

Ong: The entrepreneur's fund?

Eyemine: Yes.

Ong: There was at least, there's been at least one VC-type person that raised the question if the fund is actually that good for the country. Because it makes money too easy to come by, so entrepreneurs don't learn the importance of finding, you know, coming up with a good business plan so they can find money. If you're an entrepreneur, it's a lot easier to get money around here, probably as easy as it is to get it in the U.S.--in California specifically.

Eyemine: Did you see balloon valuation of dot coms and the resulting NASDAQ devaluation coming?

Ong: I've been saying the market's going to crash for the last four years. People that listened to me and invested like I did wouldn't have made anything. I didn't know the market was going so big so fast. But I did know that the market was really over-valued; I think what happened in April was a good thing for the industry in general, because it's shaken out a lot of those who were in there for just a quick buck. I think in terms of traders and builders. There are those who are in the market because they see that they can buy something at a high price and flip it around for even higher. That's a trader mentality. Then there are the builders, who realize this is a real strong market that's coming up, and it's a real inflection point in the history of the world. And they are building, despite the ups and downs, they're building for the future. If you get a VC make sure it's a builder, because there are too many VC's who are traders.

Eyemine: Are you thinking about bringing Interwoven into a greater Asian expansion?

Ong: Definitely. We have an office set up already, we're growing as fast as we can here. But that's different from starting the company. We have a well-known, proven product, and we're just making it more reachable for more people in the world.

Eyemine: Are you looking at the successful Singaporean entrepreneur who's already created a lot of support for himself or herself and their company and try to bring that over to Silicon Valley?

Ong: What would you do as a business? As a business you would go as close to your customers as possible. When you build a company, one of the important things you keep in mind is, what are your competitive advantages? And people who grew up professionally here [in Singapore], don't typically have a lot of experience building teams and businesses in the U.S. So they have competitive advantages understanding the economies in the Asian countries and how those countries do business. You tend to want to leverage that instead of going into the Valley, where you're competing with the best and the brightest from all over the world in an environment you don't know anything about. Then there are Singaporeans, like myself, who have spent a few years in the States, who actually understand what's going on. I think one of our challenges in Singapore is that we've got too many ideas chasing the problems, looking for problems to solve. I did not start Interwoven with the idea looking for a problem to solve. We figured out the problem first and then built the technology around it. Again, it goes back to Singapore culture and history, why we have more technical solutions rather than the general business solutions. Therein lies the weakness in our economy. Because of our past, the evolution of our industries, we don't have a country of experienced entrepreneurial executives who have taken three people to IPO. And that's what we've got to develop. The Valley has lots of those.

Eyemine: In the U.S., if you build up a startup it's relatively easy capturing the entire U.S. How do you do that in Asian markets?

Ong: It's a lot harder work. That's a disadvantage…but it's also an advantage because there's a lot of friction in the economies. It's hard work to go into a country and figure out how to set up a company. But once you're done, somebody else will find it just as hard to get in. Once you've built up a network, you've built up the barriers to entry for your business.

Eyemine: For example, you see Europe trying to unify because they're running into the same issue. Do you see Asian countries trying to do the same thing?

Ong: Not as much. The European governments have had a history of heavy dealing with the economy; they try to control it, regulate it, and do a lot of things with it. As a result, Europe is a very slow-moving area to do business in. Just try--imagine--just try to fire someone in Germany and you discover how difficult it is to do business there. If you can't hire and fire easily, what else can't you do? I think Asia tends to be more oriented towards the entrepreneurs. Although Japan, I think, has a tendency to be more like Europe. But the rest of Asia is freer. And therefore we can move faster. I think the best way for economies to develop is through the free enterprise systems.

Eyemine: I agree with you in the sense that Asian markets tend to be a lot freer for the entrepreneur. However, the problem people run into is the lack of control.

Ong: They're two things: there's the rule of law and predictability. And they're related. If you're doing business in an environment that's not really predictable, like you have to bribe people to get things done, then you don't have the rule of law…therefore it's not a very convenient place to do business. I think Singapore is successful because of the rule of law. If you do A, you know B and C will happen. A lot of countries in Asia don't have that.

Eyemine: There's definitely a lot of Singaporean funds getting put into Silicon Valley to encourage growth. What about the relationships between Singapore and its neighbors, especially Kuala Lumpur? Is this the Singaporean effort to be the epicenter for technological growth, and what are they doing with the neighboring countries to make this even more appetizing?

Ong: Singapore is one of the financial centers. Although compared to what Tokyo does and what New York does we're a small little backwater town, but we are one of the centers in Asia. That could be, I think, improved. Singapore has an advantage in that a lot of lines have already been made here, and it's easier to make more lines. But it needs to try to be the hub for information exchange.

Eyemine: Do you think it's language? English?

Ong: I think that's an advantage. Countries that don't have English as a first or second language policy have a strong disadvantage. Governments actually make big differences, whether they just stand by or they start to take a more active role in terms of guiding the private sectors in certain areas. Singapore has always done that--give tax breaks, fund companies to [do business].

Eyemine: We didn't realize it was such an incentive for Singaporean angel investors to believe in young companies, even if the young company doesn't make their first benchmark. Could you tell us a little more about that? Is that a tax write off?

Ong: I'm talking about incentives to set up companies in particular industries. They give you a five-year tax free status or low tax status.

Eyemine: I think you're setting up an even more robust Singaporean presence. What are your five year goals for the company [Interwoven], yourself, and how does that relate to Singapore and Silicon Valley?

Ong: I've actually sort of detached myself from the day-to-day operations of the company, but I still am the Chairman of the Board. One of the reasons Interwoven is successful is because when we started it, there was some conscious thinking about what would allow us to build a very significant company. I believe we do have the potential to be a Fortune 500 company if we execute it right. The company needs to focus on owning the market we're in now. You can measure our success by share revenues. If we're doing the right thing, the industry would be paying us to do it. So Interwoven in the general sense is easy, just grow, and success can be measured by growth.

Eyemine: The Valley is pretty much a fully grown market in the sense that there's the infrastructure of the whole dot-com phenomenon, as well as hardware, software; it's pretty much all there. How do you see Interwoven being positioned in that arena, and how do you see it positioned in the Singaporean and Asian markets?

Ong: We are in the process of trying to figure out where our Asia Pacific HQ should be. I'm a Singaporean, and I'm scratching my head as to whether to put the HQ here or not. One of my friends, who's a business guy in Singapore, has done his research and found that it's actually cheaper in Hong Kong, which is a big problem for Singapore.

Eyemine: I've been hearing that in Asia the two competing markets are going to be Hong Kong and Singapore. How do you see this playing out, especially for Interwoven?

Ong: It comes down to what's the best place, the more strategic place to do business in. That's what our company is trying to figure out. That includes tax structure, even political stability, etc.

Eyemine: Do you feel that you're in a position, not only to help Interwoven but to also help other potential multinational companies make the obvious choice be Singapore versus Hong Kong?

Ong: If Interwoven locates its HQ in Asia here, it's not going to be because I'm Singaporean, it's going to be because it's the best place to build an HQ in Asia. And if that's the case for us, it will be the case for other companies. And then the problem will be making sure the other companies know about it. Making sure the infrastructure is in the right place, and making sure that people know the infrastructure is in the right place are essentially two very tough problems. The first one is not necessarily harder than the second. There's some marketing that needs to get done.

Eyemine: In your future, do you find yourself wanting to fit the CEO hat, or founder hat again? What's Peng T. Ong's five year balance?

Ong: Now it's just right for me because I'm still unwinding from about four, five years of really hard work. So I get to dabble in a little bit of business, a little bit of technology and not have to work 80 hour weeks. I do get a lot of satisfaction out of helping entrepreneurs be successful. That's one of the reasons I like startups, you see people mature in front of you. It's the same with helping companies, you see entrepreneurs learning. That to me, gives me satisfaction. I don't think necessarily in a year or two years from now I'll be doing the same thing. I have no idea what I'll be doing. I think I'm too much of an operational person to be an advisor or coach. I want to play the game too much to be on the sidelines. But I know the cost of playing a game in terms of your free time. It's now like you play two, three hours and go back home, you play 24 hours a day.