Graham Lean has worked in Asia for more almost 25 years, with diverse experience as an entrepreneur and as a venture capitalist, particularly with start-ups and SME’s. He has set up a number of companies, and therefore has direct personal experience of the issues and challenges associated with funding, development, and managing growth. He is now based in Singapore where in 2007 he established a new strategic and investment advisory company and business accelerator which works with Government and with companies in the creative and digital media industries, in particular those that create, acquire, intermediate, distribute, trade or sell creative IP, services or products. Sector focus includes animation, computer games, TV and film production, design, advertising, publishing, mobile gaming, content distribution, and intellectual property rights management.

He first came to Asia in 1975, working with the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Thailand, where he spent 4 years dealing with refugees from Laos and the Vietnamese boat people. After the UN, he completed his MBA in INSEAD in 1981, before returning to Thailand where he set up an investment business that was eventually listed on the Thai Stock Exchange, and then ran a London-listed direct investment company focussed on unlisted investments in Thailand.

Apart from his INSEAD MBA, in 1997 he attended one of the INSEAD AVIRA courses held on Sentosa, while his first business degree was from Heriot Watt University in Scotland.

Steve HASLETT is Managing Director, Asia Pacific, for Memjet Home and Office. Memjet has developed a new generation of color printing technology which produces office and photo-quality documents at breakthrough speeds, with affordable hardware and running costs. Steve joined Memjet in 2008 after 30 years in the IT business, including 24 years at HP and 3 years at Dell. His international general management roles took him to the UK, Hong Kong, Germany, California, Tokyo and Singapore. At HP, Steve built billion dollar businesses including the Asia Pacific PC business and the printing and imaging business in Japan. While on the leadership team at Dell, Steve helped grow Dell's Asia business from $80 million to $2.5 billion, including a successful entry into the China market. Steve's early career at HP included sales and marketing management roles in the LED, semiconductor and technical workstation businesses.

Entrepreneurial by nature, Steve assists high-tech start-up companies to commercialize and globalize their technology. As an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship, Steve teaches international MBA students and executives at INSEAD's campuses in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi. His subjects include Entrepreneurship, Private Equity, Venture Capital and computer-based business simulations. He is the co-author of "Japan Market Entry" published by the American Electronics Association and sits on the Board of Directors of private and public technology companies.

Steve holds a B.S (Hons), an M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering and a D.I.C. from Imperial College, London. He is an Associate of the City and Guilds Institute of London.

Fred Combe is the founder and Managing Director of NATUS Pte Ltd, a corporate management consultancy, set up in 2005 to optimize clients’ business results in Asia. He brings the rare experience of blending 18 years working in Asia for a major multinational in marketing and senior general management roles with a personal style, which is highly people focused, straightforward and culturally sensitive, while also achieving the desired corporate results.

Originally from Ireland, Fred has lived and worked in West Africa, the UK, Venezuela, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and, for the last 6 years, Singapore, where he has focused on growth strategies in ASEAN markets. Fred’s prime areas of expertise lie in creating breakthrough strategies, aligning winning organizations and delivering stretching business results. He has identified and executed winning organic and business development growth strategies in Vietnam and Cambodia. He has led and turned around businesses in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Singapore through realistic and impactful change management programmes. He has also managed successfully a major merger integration.  He works with a diverse group of both European and Asian clients.

A passionate believer in sustainable leadership development, Fred has transformed underperforming senior management teams into highly focused and successful leadership groups, which energize and mobilize the rest of the organization through powerful vision, value, communication and reward strategies into top and bottom line improvement. He has worked extensively on the talent development and coaching of Asian managers into senior leaders, thus breaking down the misperceived glass ceilings between Western and Asian values and behaviours.

Fred has other business interests as an investor in Asian start-up companies and in educational development. He is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at INSEAD, Singapore. He is also co-writing a book, “Global-is-asian: Business Journey to the East. An East-West Perspective”, with Prof. Wee Chow Hou of NTU, Singapore. He balances an intuitive understanding of people with highly developed analytical skills and a strong belief in the value of teamwork. Clients, colleagues, business partners and friends value Fred’s humanity, pragmatism and integrity in overcoming business or personal challenges to achieve corporate goals.

WONG Meng Weng recently moved back to Singapore after three years in Silicon Valley, ten years in Philadelphia, and three years in Vancouver.  During this time, he founded two Internet dot-coms, led the SPF opensource standard to successful worldwide rollout, and learned several lessons about early-stage entrepreneurship.  His two previous ventures, pobox.com and karmasphere.com explored the email security industry and developed reputation systems for the Internet.  Being an expert on email authentication and Internet reputation systems, he was the keynote speaker at the Japan Anti-Spam summit in 2004 and has participated in IETF, APNIC, and MAAWG working groups.

In Singapore, Meng is an active angel investor and a member of the board of directors of the Business Angel Network of South-East Asia.  His business network spans Beijing, Shanghai, and Malaysia, but he is most familiar with the startup ecosystem in Singapore, having designed a map of the capital markets for the Media Entrepreneurs Guide to Singapore. His current investment strategy focuses on Internet start-ups in Singapore and China that are based on deeply original technologies.  These start-ups must exploit or answer a fundamental human need.  He believes that after Web 2.0, energy, and biotech, the next rich wave of investment will be in the area of secular ethics, or Religion 2.0.

As one of Tim O'Reilly's "alpha geeks" and an enthusiastic community organizer, he helps to put on Barcamps, TEDx, and invite-only Foocamp events, spanning infocomm technology, energy, biotech, media, and next-generation investment sectors. He volunteers as a mentor and Entrepreneur-in-Residence with the Singapore Mangement University, with the NRF's A*Star/Exploit arm, and with INSEAD.  He is in the early stages of developing a pre-seed accelerator program and community hackerspace.sg.

Meng earned a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania (SEAS '97), took MBA classes at the National University of Singapore (2000) while simultaneously taking classes toward a Master of Knowledge Engineering.  He programs in Perl, edits in emacs, totes a MacBook, and works in Illustrator, InDesign, and Lightroom.  He subscribes to the software development practices of Agile programming and opensource software, and to the business development philosophies of Geoffrey Moore, Clayton Christensen, and Steve Blank.

By day, he works with a Red Herring Global 100 company as VP for Strategic Development in the anti-spam area, a role that combines VC fundraising with new product development.