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Singapore's economy had been built around attracting multinational corporations, and for decades that was enough. But when the economy turned, those companies left; during the Asian financial crisis, the global financial crisis, and even COVID, foreigners were the first to move out. Singapore needed to produce its own entrepreneurs, and at the time, being one was widely viewed as a consolation prize for people who hadn't done well in school.

NUS's answer was to build the founders it didn't have. The NUS Overseas Colleges program took the most promising students and placed them inside early-stage startups in Silicon Valley, Beijing, and Stockholm, to live and breathe them, even though joining meant graduating a year later than their friends. The first cohort, sent to Silicon Valley in 2002 under a partnership with Stanford, was just 14 students.

One founding member called the program, without irony, "the brainwashing machine." Henry Chan, who would later co-found ShopBack, was placed as the fourth employee of a small American startup. On his first day, he came in after lunch for a half-day orientation and left at 1 a.m., because the whole office was still working.

A decade later, the talent pipeline had proven itself. What it lacked was a physical place to collide. That year, NUS partnered with Singtel's venture arm iNNOV8 and the government's Media Development Authority to take over a condemned factory block in the Ayer Rajah industrial estate, a 1970s building slated for demolition, with a three-year window to try something.

Nobody expected it to work, which gave the team room to move. "Nobody cared or provided that much control," one founding member recalled, "so we could, just like a startup, just do it. Seek forgiveness, not permission." There was no marketing, only word of mouth. Early founders told their friends, who told more friends. The building was full within nine months.

Then the three-year contract expired, and the experiment had outgrown its trial run. Instead of clearing the site, the government kept Block71 standing, rebuilt the neighboring Block73 that had already been torn down, and refurbished Block79. A second phase followed. The wider estate now holds 800 to 1,000 startups at any given time, and The Economist called it "the world's most tightly packed start-up ecosystem."

The density was the point. "You walk two steps, you bump into a VC. You walk two steps, and you bump into a co-founder." Within a few years, the parking lot outside had begun filling up with supercars, a visible sign that successful founders had returned to the community as investors.

Capital followed the proof. Government co-investment programs supplied liquidity the private sector wasn't yet willing to risk, corporate partners brought resources for specific verticals, and foreign investors arrived as the ecosystem grew. By 2023, Singapore startups were raising $6.1 billion a year, with 64 percent of investors coming from outside the country.

The most durable source of capital turned out to be the alumni themselves. Darius Cheung, one of the earliest NOC participants, sold TenCube to McAfee in one of Singapore's first notable exits, then angel-invested in Carousell's seed and Series A. Zopim's co-founders backed StaffAny after their Zendesk exit. ShopBack alumni mentored the Seedly team as they built their company.

The network became known as the NOC Mafia, a nod to the PayPal Mafia. The difference is that this one was engineered: designed over two decades through a program that deliberately exposed students to risk in places where the culture already existed.

The alumni network now numbers over 5,000 people. Nearly a third have founded their own companies, and 79 percent work in the startup ecosystem in some capacity. Block71 has incubated more than 1,600 startups and helped produce 10 unicorns. The loop closes: talent leaves the buildings, becomes capital, and funds the next generation.