Face to face with Lim Wai Mun's cheerful demeanour, it is hard to picture this tall, strapping man anything but confident and upbeat.
But 20 minutes into our meeting, he casually mentions how he was almost sexually attacked by a man when he was in Secondary 2. He was then living with his grandmother after his mother died and his father went to jail, and had taken on part-time jobs to help the family finances.
"The guy asked, 'Do you want to have some food' and brought me somewhere," he says. "I was lucky I ran away."
It was a horrible experience, but it taught him to be less gullible. "It cascaded down to even today. When I do business, or even simply when I go into a room, my very basic instinct sometimes is to ask myself, 'Okay, so what do they all want? Can I trust these people?""
His instincts have served him well and today, he is the chief executive of Doctor Anywhere.
The fast-growing company provides telemedicine and other healthcare services in six countries, including Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia.
It does more than 2.5 million transactions a year and has 3,000 general practitioners and specialists signed up with it, including about 150 GPs and 50 specialists in Singapore.
More than 15 regional insurers are also on board, and Doctor Anywhere owns about 20 brick-and-mortar clinics, pharmacies and health screening centres. Regionally, it employs about 20 doctors.
Mr Lim, 40, founded Doctor Anywhere in 2017 after a career in banking and at Temasek Holdings, where he was involved in setting up liquefied natural gas company Pavilion Energy. In November last year, he was named Singapore's Entrepreneur Of The Year 2022 by professional services organisation EY.
His PR team has chosen Le Jardin restaurant in Fort Canning Park for lunch. I arrive to find tables occupied by young mothers with babies. It's going to be a noisy lunch.
This story is from the March 26, 2023 edition of The Straits Times.
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This story is from the March 26, 2023 edition of The Straits Times.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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