The Bruce Lee Startup Mentality —Lunch with Wes, Founder of Casetify

Sometimes the most inspiring conversations happen over casual meals. The Time Auction Blog is a snippet of our meetings with people who have found passion in their life and career, where we get a glimpse into their mentality behind their stories.

Started just 5 years ago, Casetify has become the world’s 3rd largest tech accessories brand with fans including Lucy Hale, Snoop Dogg and Pharrell Williams. We had lunch with the founder Wesley Ng at the Casetify office, who shared with us how an idea to empower self-expression through tech and design has grown a raving international fan base.

Do you have a life motto you live by?

“Speed — moving fast is important. As the Chinese saying goes, 「天下武功，唯快不破。」.

It means in Chinese martial arts, having speed makes you invincible. Like Bruce Lee said, speed comes first, then accuracy, and then power. The same applies to startups, where we move fast and break things.”

At this stage, what advice would you give to your 25 year old self?

“At the age of 25, I worked in a corporate world. Then I worked super hard and I do not regret for that since without these skills, I would not have what I have today. In media companies, I became an expert in graphic-designing and user experience, and these skills are both very important for me to create Casetify.

What I could do better is to talk with more different people as this increases my self-awareness, opens me up to fields that I am not familiar with.

To be frank, I had no will to start my own business until I was 30. So work hard and be open to any possibilities, find a company that shares the same values with you if you can.”

How can people impress you?

“People who are hustlers.

Another kind of people who can impress me are those who take things as if they own them — people who work like a boss. This quality makes them a great problem-solver, who can make decisions independently. They don’t wait, they do first, they learn from mistakes. This attitude is particularly important for working in a startup.”

What is one thing that you hope all of us can take away from meeting you today?

“(To all mentees) What do you think then? I think we’ve talked about quite a lot of things today?”

“Speed” “Communication” “Self-awareness”, says a few in the group.

“It’s important to take some time to understand yourself and what makes you happy, then reverse engineer it.

Entrepreneurship is not for everyone. I didn’t aspire to become one either when I was in my early 20s. All I wanted was to find a good job in a decent company. But when I found that the company that I worked for no longer accepted my novel ideas, I quit and started my own business to do what I think is right. So coming back to the question, firstly you need to identify your passion then reverse engineer it.”

Thank you Wes for raising 120 volunteer hours to Redress, FoodAngel, Hong Chi Association, Yifan Mandarin and more, as well as everyone for volunteering!

For more experiences, visit Time Auction, a platform featuring inspiring mentors while encouraging volunteerism.

A few messages from the volunteers:

Chiara D'Cruz

Hey Wes! Chiara here! Thank you so much for meeting with us and giving us insight into your journey with Casetify. Your life advice and the advice you gave me about starting my own apparel store really helped and is something I will definitely be thinking about! Thank you so much and I wish you all the luck with Casetify and its growth.

Danny Advani

It was nice to meet Wesley Ng. Your way of explaination was really cool and easy to understand. In case there will be some future business opportuniutiues whch needs cases and cases I would knock on your door first. Your company together with the lightning speed will win a lot of future product clients and leave a good message as you gave the snoop dog experience that will be iun our hearts for a long time. Thanks and all the best.

Imbert Fung

Thanks for sharing your journey and insights. It was a good event.