Profile: JFDI.Asia's Hugh Mason

Hugh Mason started out like many tech entrepreneurs of his generation: as a spotty teenager sitting in his bedroom fiddling around with electrical components and playing with code. In fact, Mason was only 12 when he built his first computer kit. "I was a total geek in my teenage years," he recalls.

"Back then if you wanted a computer you couldn't buy one, so you had to build and program your own - in binary, which probably reveals my age."

Unsurprisingly, Mason's earliest ambition was to become an engineer, and this took him to Bath University in his native UK to study physics, supported by a scholarship from GEC Marconi Research. However, undergraduate life brought with it new distractions and a career in engineering was soon no longer a priority. "I was fascinated by technology but I realized to be an engineer you have to be super-diligent," Mason says. "I was always more interested in the bigger picture than the detail."

Instead, Mason's attentions turned to television. He nursed this interest by co-founding Bath University student TV station, which is still broadcasting to this day. The experience was Mason's ticket to a graduate job with the BBC working on Tomorrow's World, a live program that showcased the latest technology developments, attracting up to eight million viewers every week.

"I think people watched it for the same reasons people watched Formula One - for the crashes, when the gadgets went wrong live on air," says Mason. "But it was also a time when technology was doing amazing things. Mobile phones were still new, about the size of a car battery, and only bought by posers and bankers."

Changing skins

In 1995, aged 26, Mason launched his own production company Invincible Films. It made science programs for clients such as the BBC, the Discovery Channel, and National Geographic. On exiting six years later, he turned to investing. "I got an offer from a bunch of friends to set up an investment and advisory firm," recalls Mason. "By that point I realized I loved film-making, but there were better film makers out there than me. What I was really interested in was business."

Pembridge Partners was founded in May 2001 as a consultancy firm offering services to the companies in the creative industries. It subsequently began providing finance and advice to entrepreneurs looking build - and ultimately exit - business.

Mason admits that with no formal business training, the leap was from television to investing was a daunting one. "I think there have been two times in my life when I felt a complete fake - one was when I joined the BBC and other was when I started Pembridge. What was a TV producer doing trying to run an investment advisory firm?"

However, he soon learned that the gulf between his old career and his new one was not large as previously thought. Just as a TV producer uses narrative to bring complicated ideas to a wider audience, so does the investor.

"I have spent my career trying to get people to explain complicated ideas in simple ways and turn those ideas into reality," says Mason. "I tell people that a business plan is really just a story about the future, where the entrepreneur is the hero. It might be written in a weird style, but then again so is a movie script."

It was at Pembridge, in 2006, that Mason's own story took an unexpected turn with a visit by some civil servants from Singapore. The group had been on a fact-finding mission and was interested in what Pembridge was doing and how it could be applied to start-ups in Singapore.

"I remember they got really excited about this benchmarking tool for creative companies we had put together and they asked if I would come to Singapore and mentor creative companies," says Mason. "So I came out for two weeks and remember I found it incredibly exciting to see what was going on. I returned home and said to my wife, ‘hey, let's emigrate!'"

Mason took one more trip to Singapore with his family before taking the plunge and moving permanently. He vividly recalls arriving with his wife on January 25, 2009, accompanied by two suitcases, three cardboard boxes and a two-year-old son. He had no job and no business partner. This changed a few months later when he attended a presentation and met his current business partner at JFDI.Asia, Meng Wong Weng.

"Meng was speaking and he made me laugh so I Googled him and eventually we had dinner," says Mason. "We spent six hours talking and we realized we were both fascinated by innovation."

Accelerating

The initial plan was to do some angel investing but then they became acquainted with David Cohen, founder of US accelerator Tech Stars. The Singapore government had been courting Cohen in the hope he would set up a similar model in Singapore. "They tried to persuade him but he had a young family and didn't want to make the move to Singapore so he called us up in 2010 and said, ‘Why don't you guys do it?'" says Mason.

And so JFDI.Asia, an accelerator that takes start-ups from idea to investment within 100 days, was born. Mason adds that the pair applied the same principles to JFDI.Asia itself: if the venture was to have any credibility, they needed to find backers within 100 days. On day 94 JFDI.Asia got its first capital injection in the form of government grant. Fours year on, the company is launching its fifth start-up batch and has backed a total of 26 start-ups.

"It feels like a crowded time now and there are a lot of accelerators out in market, but I am proud to part of the first batch," says Mason. "I think we will see some interesting moves away from software to hardware in the future. The next 10 years will be interesting and I suspect I will be doing this kind of thing for the rest of my career."

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Early-stage
• People
• Singapore
• JFDI.Asia
• Venture