big
DREAMS
X-MINI at rmit
How did you bring x-mini to life?
It started with $30,000 loaned from my brother. I had worked in the technology industry for about six years, so I got together with some friends from industry to start the business.
Our first office was a fake office – we had an office you could rent for the day with no signs, so when someone comes along you shake hands and they think you’re Mr. Big. We started with very limited resources. We got another $50,000 investment, so the total investment was $80,000 in the first year. And it went on from there.
You call yourself The Dreamer – if you are The Dreamer, what was the dream?
On my business card my title is "The Dreamer", because I spend a lot of time thinking about the vision – how do we want to grow our business in future. We didn’t know what the product would be when we wanted to start a tech company – we launched a few different products at first. But the portable speaker took off, so we decided to focus our resources on that.
We’re still working on the dream – I don’t think we’ll ever get to a point where we feel we’ve reached it. So we are conscious the success doesn’t go to our heads, and we stay down to earth. I keep telling myself to keep it real while things are growing at this fast pace. We’re always thinking about competition, how to build this business and how to keep it growing.
By age 30, RMIT's Ryan Lee was the CEO of burgeoning Singaporean tech company XMI, producing the hottest portable speakers on the market, the x-mini. At a special alumni event in Singapore, Ryan spoke to AAS, about what he has learned about leadership and why he calls himself The Dreamer.
"No man is an island. When you create a really great business or product, you need a whole team of people.
Whether you can relate to a CEO or a cleaner or a factory worker – how you relate to every different level of society is important. "
A leader needs to lead a whole team.”