Neil Singh

Disclaimer: This interview was conducted before the coronavirus pandemic.

Name: Neil Singh
Current Job: Director of Technology at Team NEO
Favorite restaurant in town? Melt for Sandwiches, Mables for BBQ, Stancatos for Italian, Fengs for Asian.
Favorite thing about Cleveland? The community here is very welcoming, as an import to Cleveland originally from New Zealand. I was very impressed at how kind, caring and helpful people were when I first arrived, it helped me settle quickly here and get networked. From a scenic point of view, It’s a well-organized and beautiful city being by the lake is a wonderful asset, and you don’t need to drive too far to reach farmland, skiing, and a number of other activities, Ohio and Northeast Ohio is a great place to live.

Q: Neil, you are from New Zealand, what are some of the biggest cultural differences between the United States and New Zealand? From a business point of view, the US is much more entrepreneurial, tech savvy, better for investment and generally more stable economically and has several industries that simply do not exist in New Zealand, advanced manufacturing, automotive and aerospace are examples of this.

I think the strength of the economy and a fair cost of living vs. earning capacity here in the USA makes it easier for people to progress because comparatively speaking New Zealand is very expensive compared to the USA.

If we put the focus back on people and define culture as far as diversity, then I would say I have discovered many more ethnic groups here in the USA and for the most part, people regardless of their ethnic background seem to get along here, I know there are things here which need work too but it also seems people are prepared to speak out and work on them in the USA rather than cover them up and pretend they don’t exist.

In New Zealand, there are 4 main demographics Maori (the indigenous people of NZ), Europeans, Polynesians (people from the south pacific islands) and Asians. New Zealand strongly maintains a politically correct stance on everything, but in all honesty, this often hides the true feelings of the local population, as discrimination is obvious in many ways.

Q: Neil, you spent time programming and then shifted to a management role when you joined Mirari, what were some of the biggest challenges transitioning to a management role? Mirari is a startup and having been in the hustle of previous startups in what is now nearly a 20-year career for me I did not find it too difficult to make the transition. The biggest challenge tends to be raising money for projects or securing the larger or more sustainable deals.

As a developer, you are problem-solving most of the time in an attempt to perfect your code so that the app you are building works as it should, and as a CSO you are also problem solving and attempting to identify strengths and weaknesses all the time within the business model and taking appropriate actions as necessary to help the business grow.

In terms of challenges for the company, reducing lead times, knowing who is or isn’t genuine about a project, being able to correctly read the situation, there are many soft skills I had to learn, closing the sale and deal flow are two skills I continue to work on but learning how to do that while building a relationship is critical, you do not want to be pushy in any situation, its about adding value.

For Mirari, founder David Pollock and I have collaborated on a number of POC’s for companies like Acura, Ford, Bosch, Unity, Reflekt etc.

From a pragmatic point of view management roles whether it was with Mirari or now with Team NEO, means continued learning, and improvement of my own skills especially in areas such as deal flow, strategy and communication.

Q: Last May you joined Team NEO. Many folks are familiar with the organization but don't necessarily know what you do? Can you talk about both your role within Team NEO as well as the broader objectives of the organizations? Team NEO is an economic development organization and also the official partner of JobsOhio within the 18-county area of Northeast Ohio. Our directors all have backgrounds working in different industries and our role is to seek out companies within our specific market segment “in my case technology companies” and support business retention and expansion for companies in Northeast Ohio and on occasions business attraction for companies in other states or countries who we would like investing into Ohio.

Q: If you had a magic wand, what is one thing you would do to change the Cleveland technology community? Free up capital resources for early stage pre-seed investments. There is a significant gap which many of our startups in technology suffer from when it comes to raising enough money in the early days of a business when it’s in innovation mode or has only a small bucket of clients but not enough revenue to consider it lucrative or attractive to investors. Often enough however the startups in this ‘black hole of funding’ tend to need the most help to scale their business.

Our investors locally tend to see this as very high risk, but when examined carefully the investment community locally does not seem to employ more sophisticated strategies for early-stage investing such as syndicating amount invested and taking less equity at an early stage. We also seem to lack genuine accelerators which can churn out not just 1 or 2 good startups every few years but dozens of them per year.

There is a method or intelligence involved in creating or duplicating the results that markets like Silicon Valley have, in fact, its an exact science, there is a structured way to invest in pre-revenue innovation startups to help them grow, scale and create value quickly.

I would say we need to think long and hard locally about why we are not pragmatically employing strategies which already exist and have been proven nationally and globally in other areas.

We need to focus on the founders and focus on building an ecosystem around them which helps them thrive, otherwise we will lose that talent to other places that do provide them that environment for creating success.

Q: You met your wife playing video games, how'd that happen? Since around 2014 we both played Guild Wars 2 together, many of the US players in that game are from the Midwest. In New Zealand and Australia, you had to join a US server in the early days just to play.

My wife and I shared the same server and our guilds collaborated in battlegrounds, that’s how we got to know each other. Gaming led to more normal email exchanges which then led to me visiting her in 2016, the rest is history we worked out, and I found my new home in Northeast Ohio.