Opening Remarks by ACE CEO Florence Neo at the Microsoft x Ingram Micro x ACE Entrepreneur Launchpad Event
8 December 2022
Microsoft x Ingram Micro x ACE Entrepreneur Launchpad Event
Mr Kevin Chan, Chief Partner Officer, Microsoft Singapore
Distinguished Guests, Ecosystem Partners
Ladies and Gentlemen
1 I am very privileged to be here, and my colleagues are here as well. We are all from the Action Community for Entrepreneurship, ACE for short. ACE is the trade association that represents all startups. We work very closely with the Ministry of Trade & Industry as well as Enterprise Singapore to drive and promote entrepreneurship in Singapore, and we advocate on your behalf.
2 Our main mission is to drive entrepreneurship and make sure that we have a healthy pipeline of start-ups that are ready for growth. We want to build champion enterprises, potential unicorns, and that is truly the mission of ACE.
3 We organise many activities all year round, about 80 per year. One of the popular ones is our roundtables. These are essentially regular opportunities for you to share the pain points, issues, gaps and needs that you experience as entrepreneurs with ACE. There are also many things we do in support of the whole ecosystem, and we work around 5 pillars. Apart from start-ups, both local and international ones, we also work with the Institutes of Higher Learning, corporates, investors such as venture capital firms, the Government and the public sector. Roundtables enable us to build communication between start-ups and the Government. We also try to influence policies in support of all start-ups.
4 Very importantly, corporates are vital and valuable to our ecosystem because they offer expertise, growth opportunities, and sometimes, direct funding to accelerate start-ups’ growth. So, we are very privileged to work with Microsoft and Ingram Micro who are all forward-looking corporates to partner with innovative start-ups.
5 I encourage you to speak to my colleagues over here. They will share with you our latest membership schemes which offer lots of privileges and benefits, so please continue to engage us so that we can advocate on your behalf to uplift the Singapore start-up ecosystem.
6 Thank you and please enjoy the networking.