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ALUMNI INTERVIEW — March/April 2005

By Deb Aronson

Ong

The serial entrepreneur says he spends his life "look[ing] for the ridiculous" and then finding a solution to it.

As an example of one such absurdity, Ong points to computer dating. "You shouldn't have to look through reams of paper to find a date," he said. So in 1995 he started match.com, which is now the Internet's biggest dating service.

When Ong saw how unbelievably complicated and inefficient it was for his own business to build a complex Web site, he formed Interwoven in 1996 to provide a means of managing complicated Web-based projects. "At match.com I saw this (inefficiency) many times," Ong said. "It was pretty nuts, with (employees) tripping all over each other, destroying parts of the Web site as they were doing it. When you have lots of people working together on a project, typically there could be a system to coordinate it."

And when he couldn't find a good security system for Interwoven, Ong went on to create Encentuate. That company provides a lifesaver for the ordinary business day  software that remembers your passwords for you.

"Lots of us have a lot of ideas," said Karen Orton-Katz, a member of Encentuate's executive team. "But an entrepreneur who can actually see it through to get it started, that takes a lot of tenacity, and — Peng will tell you — it's a lot of hard work."

And as writer Anne Field will tell you, tenacity and perseverance typify the serial entrepreneur. Such people, she said, "thrive on the high-pressure excitement of starting a business from scratch, but invariably, whether they stick with the business for one year or 10, they depart, only to start another."

Entrepreneurism seems to be in Ong's blood. A native of Singapore, he grew up seeing how his father "never held a job," as Ong put it. "He worked for himself, managing buildings, selling everything from shells to cars. He gave me the sense that I could always put food on the table."

That sense of security influenced Ong later in life. Today he combines the intensity of the serial entrepreneur with the more relaxed approach favored by his father. Ong is driven but generous, intense but not self-absorbed. And though he describes himself as "more of a geek than a sales guy," he works hard to strengthen his people skills.

While Ong, 41, started his first company just 10 years ago, he had had his eye on that goal for much longer. He had been "playing around" with computers since he was a 13-year-old 10th grader.

"Well, when you are a kid, and (a computer's) the only thing that listens to you exactly, that's pretty powerful," he said in explaining this early interest.

"I knew I wanted to start a software company when I was in high school," Ong said. "It was about creating something people could use; there was a whole new world of stuff you could create at that point ... Lotus 123 (one of the first database management/spreadsheet programs) hadn't even come out then."

Ong was in high school in the late 1970s and early '80s, just as computer visionaries Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Steve Jobs (Apple) were making headlines and the potential of computers was being realized. Despite what Ong recalls as being in the "Stone Age" of computers, with cassette recorders storing the data, he saw the enormous potential in software and set his sights on the United States.

"And," he said, "I wanted to see what was beyond (Singapore's) borders."

So, after serving two and a half years of national service in Singapore, Ong came to the United States for college, attending University of Texas, Austin. He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1986. From there he came to Illinois for graduate school.

"Being in graduate school gave you a certain level of freedom to think," Ong said. "That was invaluable. You were expected to think at a different level. You basically go to graduate school to learn how to think, to figure out how to build things, to problem solve."