Krystal Choo comes from a low-income family, which she used to be ashamed of, but now she is proud of it. Her father, an air traffic controller without university studies who worked hard and, therefore, she hardly saw. However, when he was with her, his father read to him, worrying that his daughter would improve her diction and use of language. His mother was a Kampung woman, uneducated and utterly dedicated to the home.
Not having many toys at home, Krystal Choo was dedicated to reading. She points out that she got to read up to 200 books in a year while practicing critical thinking at the same time. Choo considers that he was lucky to have the opportunity to develop his mind, which helped him in the following years to overcome severe depression, learn to program, and start his own companies when he was 21, which was criticized at first.
For Krystal Choo, entrepreneurship is a way to create solutions and have a real impact on people’s lives. She is the founder of Wander, a platform that brings together people who think similar to form better communities in a city from their mobile devices.
Wander was a universe of multiple chats for strangers to meet through virtual space and conversation. She hoped that this behavior would replace passive scrolling, envy, or routine that only looks for likes, causing psychological problems to increase.
Through Wander, Krystal Choo was looking for intelligent ways to build a humanistic design through a digital platform and allow authentic connections. At the same time, it was also valuable for companies and profitable. However, Choo was not able to raise the necessary funds to sustain the company or reach the point where it was useful before being able to find ways to introduce methods of natural language processing and machine learning that could provide alternatives to the reward psychological Although he still believes in the idea, he thinks he is not the person to carry it out yet.
Krystal Choo has earned recognition in Singapore as “Most Awe-Inspiring Women” (Cosmopolitan), “the Gritty Entrepreneur Singapore Needs” (E27), and was awarded as one of the 50 leading women in Asia. She has also been recognized as a speaker at TEDTalks.
