His parents thought he had become a delivery driver. In a sense he had. Lai Chang Wen, a former derivatives trader at Barclays, was driving parcels around Singapore himself in 2014, one of three young founders of a logistics company they barely understood.
It did not start that way. Lai, born in 1987, went to Raffles Institution and Raffles Junior College, then studied finance at SMU. He turned down a government scholarship because he always wanted to go into business. As a student he bought used phones and resold them at a markup, and put together bicycles from parts. In 2010 he co-founded Marcella, a made-to-measure menswear brand born from his own trouble finding clothes that fit. It opened its first store that year and later ran five shops.
With co-founders Shaun Chong and Boxian Tan, Lai concluded Marcella was not going to go far, and the three turned the pain into the product.
His mother called leaving a five-digit salary for fashion a real shock. Then he left fashion too.
The problem that changed everything was a van. Marcella had to deliver clothes, and deliveries were a mess. With co-founders Shaun Chong and Boxian Tan, Lai concluded Marcella was not going to go far, and the three turned the pain into the product. They had no logistics experience. To learn, they paid couriers to talk about their jobs and mailed parcels to one another. They wrote algorithms to plan better routes. The name came from the way Singapore's armed forces slang referred to food trucks that turned up in restricted military areas.
The cost was personal. The founders took 90 percent pay cuts and worked 22-hour days; Lai has said he even cleaned the office toilet. He later admitted that as a trader he had saved so little that his bank account could not top up his EZ-link card.
Monk's Hill Ventures led a US$2.5 million Series A in March 2015. Later rounds brought DPDgroup, Grab and Alibaba. By September 2021 the company raised US$578 million and crossed a valuation of US$1 billion, with about one million parcels a day moving by 2019.
The price came later. In 2023 Lai said he would hold off on an IPO until profitability improved. There were two rounds of layoffs in 2024, and Vietnam operations were suspended in September 2024 over delayed salaries.
The takeaway sits in the first scene. His parents saw a driver; he saw a company. Knowing nothing was the starting condition, and doing the job yourself, for a while, was the school.