He left a stable job to ride the global tech wave

Founder of Acme Technology thinks the best way to grow wealth is to build your own firm

- Timothy Goh

Mr Lye Junxu built his career and wealth by riding some of the biggest tech waves in the world. The founder of local fintech company Acme Technology left a stable job at the Singapore Economic Development Board in the early 2010s and moved to San Francisco to join fast-growing firms such as Dropbox and Lyft.

"It was the post-2008 global financial crisis tech boom in Silicon Valley. The pay at these companies was decent, but the real upside came from equity grants, which made up about 50 per cent of my compensation and became liquid when both companies went public," he said.

Mr Lye, who holds a Master of Science in management and engineering from Stanford University, then moved to China in 2017 and became a product manager at TikTok's parent company, ByteDance.

He returned to Singapore in 2020 to join digital wealth adviser Endowus as its chief product officer at a time when South-east Asia was seeing rich valuations, strong investor interest and rapid start-up growth that peaked during the Covid-19 pandemic fintech boom in 2021.

In 2023, he struck out on his own and founded Acme Technology.

Acme Technology develops software that links corporate bank accounts with enterprise resource planning and corporate internal systems, as well as enabling bank-based payments such as eGiro and PayNow.

"The world is now in a very different place and many of those tech waves have subsided, but I believe the best way to grow wealth is to build your own company with a sound product and grow it thoughtfully over the long term," said Mr Lye.

Mr Lye, 37, is married with four children.

Q What do you invest in and why?

A I keep a "boring" core portfolio via Endowus - mostly low-cost global equity index funds with a smaller allocation to short-duration government-bond exchange-traded funds. It is automated, diversified and a counterweight to the single-company risk I take running Acme.