A few years ago, Quek Siu Rui huddled with the board of his Singapore start-up to consider whether to sell. Quek was only 26 and the US$100 million offer would have made him wealthy beyond his dreams. But he said no: He wanted to keep building the business. Quek's company, an app for selling used goods called Carousell, is now valued at about $500 million, according to a person familiar with the matter. "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,'' Quek said in an interview. "We want to build an enduring company." Six-year-old Carousell operates in seven markets including Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia and is one of the region's most popular virtual flea markets. People use it to sell everything from second-hand cars and couches to game consoles and, as of this week, purple wigs. After raising US$85 million in a recent funding round, Carousell plans to build out its existing markets, which also include Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan, before expanding to more countries. It's part of a league of classified marketplaces, including Seattle-based OfferUp Inc and Japan's Mercari Inc that are aiming to challenge eBay and Craigslist. "Carousell started in a fresh market with a new product offering that was tailored for Southeast Asia,'' said Vinnie Lauria, founding partner at Singapore-based Golden Gate Ventures, a long-time Carousell backer.

When the 300-foot Maersk Launcher docked in San Diego early Monday morning, it unloaded a cargo of hardened black blobs scooped from the bottom of the sea. The blobs are not rocks, but naturally-occurring metallic nodules that could one day yield metal deposits of cobalt, manganese, and nickel--not to mention scarce rare earth minerals. As worldwide demand rises for electric vehicle batteries and wind turbines, along with next generation technologies and weapon systems, demand for these metals has taken off. And the seabed is a prime target for those mining operations. Of course, it's no small feat to bring these potato-sized nodules from the bottom of the remote Pacific Ocean, and then sail them to a processing plant where the metals can be extracted.

LONDON – For many U.S. allies, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is the last of the Trump administration's so-called grown-ups in the room. So at Asia's main annual security forum he got a warm reception for his firm defense of the rules-based order the U.S. helped to build after World War II. Increasingly, though, Mattis' reassurance is not enough. The U.S. -- as much as China -- is seen as a threat to that system, undermining the very solutions the retired Marine Corps general offered to counter Beijing's rule breaking in the South China Sea. On Sunday, tiny Singapore, one of the United States' most like-minded partners in the region, drew a direct equivalence between the U.S. and China.

SINGAPORE – India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has renewed calls for a maritime agreement that would make international waters more secure amid increasingly tense territorial disputes in the South China Sea. After meeting Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Friday, Modi says they reiterated their commitment to a rules-based order for maritime security and called for an open, fair and transparent agreement. China is pitted against smaller neighbors in multiple disputes over islands, coral reefs and lagoons in waters crucial to global trade. Beijing has rejected accusations it's militarizing the area and has been working with the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to reach a code of conduct to avoid frictions. Modi will give a keynote address on Friday at the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual security conference.

By Vitchyr Pong You've decided that you want to bike from your house by UC Berkeley to the Golden Gate Bridge. It's a nice 20 mile ride, but there's a problem: you've never ridden a bike before!To make matters worse, you are new to the Bay Area, and all you have is a good ol' fashion map to guide you. How do you get started? Let's first figure out how to ride a bike. One strategy would be to do a lot of studying and planning.

"Ted came up with the breakthrough idea that got rid of the computer so you didn't have to have a computer to make the game work," Allan Alcorn, one of Atari's first employees, said in an interview this week. " It created the industry." Samuel Frederick Dabney, Jr., was born in San Francisco on May 2, 1937. His parents, Irma and Samuel Frederick Dabney, divorced when he was young, and he was raised by his father, an accountant. A brother, Doug, died in 2013.

We heard in January that Waymo was expanding its agreement with Chrylser for'thousands' of additional hybrid minivans, which would start being delivered in late 2018. Apparently, that was an understatement. Today, news emerged that the automaker will supply the autonomous car company with 62,000 its family vehicles. We knew Waymo's existing fleet of 600 Chrysler Pacific minivans it used for testing will be repurposed to launch its ride-hailing service in Phoenix later this year. The next city it will set up shop in is, unsurprisingly, the San Francisco Bay area.

This terrifying footage shows what it would be like to be eaten by a great white shark. Researchers got more than they bargained for when a great white shark took a bite of the underwater camera drone they were using to film in the Pacific Ocean. The resulting footage shows a shark powering through the water, before attempting to swallow the drone in a single bite. Inside the mouth of the predator, the camera continues to film and shows the muscles inside the shark's jaw contracting with effort. The shark eventually spits out the camera and swims away, defeated.

These venture bets on startups that "returned the fund," making firms and careers, were the result of research, strong convictions, and patient follow-through. Here are the stories behind the biggest VC home runs of all time. In venture capital, returns follow the Pareto principle -- 80% of the wins come from 20% of the deals. Great venture capitalists invest knowing they're going to take a lot of losses in order to hit those wins. Chris Dixon of top venture firm Andreessen Horowitz has referred to this as the "Babe Ruth effect," in reference to the legendary 1920s-era baseball player. Babe Ruth would strike out a lot, but also made slugging records. Likewise, VCs swing hard, and occasionally hit a home run. Those wins often make up for all the losses and then some -- they "return the fund." "If you do the math around our goal of returning the fund with our high impact companies, you will notice that we need these companies to exit at a billion dollars or more," he wrote.

During my first project in McKinsey in 2011, I served the CEO of a bank regarding his small business strategy. I wanted to run a linear regression on the bank's data but my boss told me: "Don't do it. Artificial Intelligence is the most general-purpose technology of our time. New products and processes are being developed thanks to better vision systems, speech recognition technologies or recommendation engines based on Machine Learning. In fact, most recent advances in Artificial Intelligence have been achieved in the area of Machine Learning. Long before McKinsey, in 2004, I started my career as a mobile software developer. At that time I had to write precise instructions for every step of my code. Developing the voice recognition system of today's phones would have been tedious and error-prone back then. It would have required literally hundreds of thousands of detailed instructions to codify every single step, including identifying phonemes from sound waves, grouping them into ...