Love of coffee and technology pays off

“We were having coffee in St Ali and the taste was so different from anything I had before, even though I’ve been a coffee drinker for many years,” Eugene Chen said.

“We started thinking of bringing that taste to Singapore.”
It took two years before he and Keyis Ng founded Cafebond. com, a speciality coffee bean e-commerce platform, which went live in June.
The roasted coffee beans come from 15 well-known Australian cafes and roasters, including Melbourne favourites St Ali and Market Lane Coffee.
A bag of speciality beans can start from 14 Singaporean dollars (Bt362), depending on the weight.
Chen, 31, has personally invested $50,000 so far and the platform is enjoying 50-per-cent month-to-month growth.
With Cafebond.com, he was able to marry his love for coffee with his 12-year experience as a web and mobile developer, which began from his polytechnic days.
He took over his father’s creative business after graduating from the National University of Singapore.
From there, he spun off a web development called Unicom Interactive in 2011, which has grown into a 12-man team.
He also co-founded Unicom Marketing Consultancy and invests in precious metals.
Chen also invests in Bitcoin.
“As a developer, I was interested and I wanted to learn the technology so that I could appreciate it,” he said.
“After I achieved that, I even tried to set up my own Bitcoin miner in Singapore, but the electricity bill soared.
“I’d set up a computer at home and placed a lot of graphic cards in it, and the heat generated was 60 to 80 degrees Celsius. You’d need a cooling system.”
Bitcoin mining refers to a computing process that makes transactions with the cryptocurrency possible, says Bloomberg. But it requires a lot of energy.
“The cost of running that was about $150 a month and the amount I earned was less than $100 a month, and it didn’t offset the electricity bill.
“When that didn’t work, I looked for arbitrage opportunities to buy and sell Bitcoins from different exchanges.
“I came up with a program to do that and it still looks for trades as and when. I hope the Bitcoin cryptocurrency will become more accepted by business in Singapore.”