Paul Vega: From Reel to Real

UrbanWire chats with Singapore’s latest entrepreneur, Paul Vega, on CineNow’s success.

By Caleb Ng • UrbanWire
• email reporter • email story • printer friendly

Paul Vega may not be a household name in Singapore, but he definitely has reason to crow. And who can blame him? His CineNow success story is one positive case-study for all aspiring entrepreneurs.

At 30, Paul, a Filipino raised in Germany, with work experience in the United States, started his own company, CineNow Singapore. CineNow Singapore has now brought the local movie industry to newer heights with a local first “24-hour automated movie rental chain” concept, according to the press release. Although operations only started in April, CineNow now has 4 outlets strategically located in the heartland, in areas like Clementi and Tampines. UrbanWire catches up with Paul to find out just how this aspiring entrepreneur hit the big time.

In your own words, what exactly is the CineNow concept?
How do you feel about being the pioneer in this field in Singapore?
Were you ever afraid this whole idea would fall through?
How did the idea come about?
Why did you decide you wanted to do a movie store?
So what future plans do you have for CineNow?

UrbanWire: In your own words, what exactly is the CineNow concept?

Paul Vega: CineNow will not charge you up front or in blocks, or deposit or deduct membership fees on your card. We don’t do that. Whatever you top up on your card only gets deducted when you return the movie. We believe that’s pretty fair to the customer, and it makes it very easy for them. Compare this to your conventional movie store, where they will say when you sign up pay $20 or $30, or that you have to pay $20 or $30 a month to rent movies from us, or if you browse around on the web there some new competitors who do movie rental by mail. You register and pay $35 a month and they send you movies by mail. But honestly that’s not very practical. You have to wait 2 or 3 days for the postman, and you don’t even know what movie you’re going to get. You submit your wish-list of favourite movies, and based on that they send you whatever is available. and you never know what’s coming for the weekend. We at CineNow feel that this is not feasible in the long run. The $20 to $30 you have to pay each month – not that many typical heartlanders will want to pay that much. Whereas here, it’s pay as you go, use as much as you can, and you’ll always know how much money you’ have left on your card. You control how much you spend, you control how much you top up, and that’s not the case with many of the other movie rental concepts in Singapore. CineNow is basically about 3 things: Availability, Accessibility and Affordability.

UrbanWire: How do you feel about being the pioneer in this field in Singapore?

Paul Vega: “We’re very pleased with the phenomenal success we’ve had, and the positive customer feedback we seem to be getting on a daily basis. Of course as a pioneer you undertake risk, and we highlighted the risk when we originally started on this project. If you think about it, there are a lot of things speaking against launching something like this here in Singapore – we have the problem of piracy from across the border, we have the problem of people having VCD players, not DVD players, [and] we have the issue of people not willing to pay for DVD rental, because it just wasn’t the accepted norm here, [as] illegal movie disks [are] readily available all over the place.

“When I first came here in 1997 as a student, you could easily buy illegal DVDs and VCDs from every street corner and hawker centre. But the government has been very successful on cracking down on this, so these days you have to find out what nook and cranny they sell these things in, or you have to cross the border. The government has done a lot to support an environment where a company like ours can become very successful.

“We can now look back on 3 or 4 months of operation, and we’ve proven a lot of sceptics wrong in the terms of the numbers of sign-ups we’ve had, the customers joining CineNow, which now numbers the thousands. We are empowered by the fact that they’ve been renting regularly, so it’s not just a one-shot deal.

“As a pioneer you have to go against conventional wisdom, against conventional norms, but as far as CineNow is concerned, it’s been a resounding success.”

UrbanWire: Were you ever afraid that this whole idea would fall through? How did you push yourself to carry on?

Paul Vega: “With any business venture, you have to believe that it will work, that you have the right idea and the right team to execute on it. These are not things you can go into half-heartedly. So you have to live, breathe and really stand behind [it].”

UrbanWire: You said earlier that you came up with the idea with your 2 partners – how did the idea come about?

Paul Vega: “For one, INSEAD Business School has always been very strong at entrepreneurship. A huge proportion of INSEAD graduates go on to found their own businesses. I believe there may be about a dozen INSEAD spin-offs, MBA graduates who went out to start their own businesses in Singapore, and the government has done a lot to encourage entrepreneurship.

“[This] is very positive and, as part of this drive to push entrepreneurship at INSEAD, there are lots of courses on entrepreneurship, on how to raise money, on how to launch a business, on how to buy a business, [and] on how to grow it and take it to IPO. Half our students were taking those courses, and we were also on those courses. This idea basically developed whilst we were at INSEAD, and we decided to take this from the concept and bring it into reality, which led to our first store in Clementi. We also had an existing relationship with the people who make these machines and distribute these machines, and there are over 7,000 of these units all over Europe.”

UrbanWire: Why did you decide you wanted to do a movie store, out of all the businesses you could have chosen?

Paul Vega: “There are many different businesses we could have done, [and] the 3 of us could easily also have gone back into the industry. We were all doing quite well in the industry before. All 3 of us have backgrounds in consulting; we also worked in venture capital finance. José studied engineering in Germany, Wendy studied in the United States, and I was at the London School of Economics but we decided to come to Singapore and start a business. We met at INSEAD here and we found that number one, the environment and conditions for starting a business here are near perfect.

“I have not seen any other country where the government has a better programme or more support for young entrepreneurs and people who want to start a new business. The infrastructure provided by SPRING [Standards, Productivity and Innovation Board] the EDB [Economic Development Board], and other support associations here was extremely good. CineNow also works extremely closely with the government. We were in discussion with SPRING who has various support schemes for supporting young businesses.

“IPOS (Intellectual Property Office of Singapore) invited us to join their “Hip Alliance”, and we have joined the ranks of Nokia and Microsoft as working with the Singapore government in protecting and respecting intellectual property in Singapore.”

UrbanWire: So what future plans do you have for CineNow?

Paul Vega: “We’re looking into having a Chinese Language interface, [and] a web interface where you can browse all the content in our machines, so from the comfort of your homes you’ll be able to select and reserve movies in the machine and once that movie becomes available you’ll be sent an SMS.

“Now, not that many stores have that capability in Singapore, and we have been able to combine the best of both worlds, because so far in Singapore, either you have a brick-and-mortar conventional old-fashioned video store, or you have a pure internet-based rental service. And both of them have their shortcomings. So what we want to do is merge them together, take the best of both of these concepts, to be able to offer the Singaporean customer something that is really unique and quite innovative in terms of service and technology.”