This millennial’s startup raised $120 million. He reveals what helped him succeed — and says it’s ‘more crucial’ than hard work

Desmond Lim is no stranger to hard work.

At the age of seven, he fell in love with basketball, but when his family couldn’t afford to buy him his own ball, he came up with the money by himself.

“Money was always tight,” Lim told CNBC Make It. “My parents are both hourly workers. My dad’s a driver. My mom’s a cleaner.”

“I chose a sport that is free, so I can play any day that I wanted,” said Lim. “I saved up for 60 days not eating lunch, to [have] enough money to buy the ball. Then, I held on to that orange rubber ball and played it for five years, every day, until it was bald.”

That attitude has served him well in life. Today, the 39-year-old is the co-founder and CEO of Workstream, a human resources, payroll and hiring platform made for the hourly workforce. The company has raised about $120 million to date.

Lim was born and raised in Singapore and was the first in his family to attend university. From selling eggs at the local market to driving trucks, Lim says, most of his extended family, including his parents, were — and still are — hourly workers.

“[My parents] both only finished fourth grade,” he said. “My dad is up at 5 a.m. every morning, and he gets home by seven, and he works six and a half days per week. He barely stops for lunch.”

Lim saw the grit and work ethic that his parents had and applied those characteristics to his own life. In high school, not only was he a top student, but he also led his school’s basketball team, as captain, to win a national competition.

“When we won the High School Championship, I was the captain that carried our school flag and ran around the whole school as the school cheered for our victory … I think that moment changed my life,” he said. “Sports taught me that you need time, patience and a team of people to build something great.”

Lim was also selected to play basketball professionally for the Singapore National Youth Team while in high school. It quickly became clear that he had the chops to get into a top university, but his family didn’t have the means to support his education.

“My mom told me: ‘I cannot pay for your college. You shouldn’t go to college. You should go and work,'” said Lim. “That nudged me to figure out how to go to college on my own.'”

Ultimately, Lim’s entrepreneurial journey was largely born out of a need. He said he started businesses since he was young in order to be able to afford school fees.

On top of focusing on his studies and basketball, Lim started his own tutoring business in high school. Within two years, he says, that business brought in about $100,000 in revenue, which was enough to pay for his university education.

That tutoring company became just the first of several businesses that Lim began.

Similarly, while studying at Singapore Management University, Lim set his sights on a new goal — he wanted to move to the United States to get a master’s degree. To save money, he bootstrapped and started another business — a Thai food restaurant — while still working on completing his degree.

After graduating from university in 2010, Lim worked in investment banking for several years before moving to the U.S. for his master’s degree at Harvard University in July 2013.

While at Harvard, Lim zeroed in on establishing his own tech startup.

“I was so hungry when I was at Harvard, I felt like I was drinking from a firehose. Typical people take four classes — I was doing seven classes every term,” he said.

During his first year at Harvard, Lim cold emailed about 50 startups in the San Francisco Bay Area, hoping to gain some startup experience. That winter break, he flew to California, where he slept on a friend’s couch and worked at an education tech startup for free.

“And the following summer, I again worked for free for WeChat … before they converted me into a full-time role. So, I was just so hungry to learn about everything, about startups and company building,” said Lim.

In 2016, Lim sat in on a friend’s class at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business called “Startup Garage.”

“It’s the same class that companies like DoorDash and SoFi came out of,” he said. “Our job was to go out to talk to business owners, so we talked to tens, if not hundreds of business owners around Palo Alto, and we heard about pain points.”

One business they spoke with was Coupa Cafe, a family-owned coffee shop chain with outlets around Stanford and Palo Alto. It was during this conversation that Lim discovered the idea for Workstream.

He found that the company didn’t have the right tools to efficiently manage their hourly workforce. They were using seven different tools, including Google Drive and just writing things down manually with pen and paper, said Lim.

“I [thought] this is so much work. There must be something that we can do better for them,” he said. “So I think that was the moment, combined with my experience running my own restaurant, coupled with my parents being both hourly folks.”

After completing his graduate program at Harvard, Lim moved to the Bay Area in 2016 and co-founded Workstream in September 2017 with Lei Xu and Max Wang.

Three short months later on Jan. 4, 2018, Workstream had its first paying customer — Coupa Cafe paid Lim and his co-founders $100.

The early days of Workstream involved lots of door-knocking.

“It was fun … [I was] selling door to door, with some help from Max and Lei. So we were just three immigrants in the streets of Palo Alto trying to knock on doors and talk to people. It was kind of funny [and] we learned so much,” said Lim.

The company’s first investment was a $25,000 check written by Eric Yuan, the founder and CEO of Zoom.

“I first reached out to Eric about 9 to 10 years ago the first year that I went out to The Valley … I think it was a cold email [and] I said ‘Hey, can I meet you for lunch just to learn from you as a fellow immigrant founder?'” said Lim. Yuan said yes, and they proceeded to have a great one hour conversation at lunch.

From there, the two stayed friends for about a decade, and when Lim reached out to get funding for his company, the Zoom founder quickly became Workstream’s first backer.

“He didn’t even ask me what I was going to build. I said I was going to build a platform for the hourly space, and he was like: ‘Okay, I believe in you,'” said Lim. “Since then, [Yuan] has actually doubled down in every single round. He has now invested more than seven figures in the company over the past seven years.”

Today, Workstream is an all-in-one HR and payroll software built for hourly companies.

“Our company’s purpose is: ‘deskless deserves better.’ We believe that the hourly economy is very underserved. There’s not enough good software, both built for hourly companies, but also for many of these hourly workers,” Lim told CNBC Make It.

“There are many tools out there for payroll, but it’s all built for people who work in tech, who work in office, who [are] desktop first,” said Lim. “So what we have built is a mobile-first, AI-driven software to help [hourly companies] do their payroll, HR onboarding, all in the same place, to help them to save money and time.”

Workstream’s customers include brands such as Burger King and Dunkin’ Donuts. The company’s backers include Gold House, Peter Thiel and Ken Howery’s Founders Fund, Jay-Z and DoorDash’s Tony Xu.

Lim had a strong work ethic early on. He was inspired watching his parents and family members hustle as hourly workers to earn a living, but there is one trait that he says that can be even more important.

“Truly try to explore and find out what you really want to do. Sometimes I feel like making the right choice is even more crucial than trying to work very hard,” he said.

“I think one thing I did when I was younger was I talked to many people,” said Lim. “I was really curious, and I would write to professors at school, I’d write to founders. I was just having informational chats with people that I looked up to for 20 minutes, for 10 minutes, for lunch.”

“I was just very hungry to learn from people, and I think that really helped me shape how I think and who I’ve become today,” he said.

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