With men in their early 20s dressed in T-shirts and bermudas, a pet dog strutting through the grounds, drawing “oohs” and “ahhs” from more casually dressed people hanging out at the corridors with their laptops and smartphones, JTC LaunchPad @ one-north feels more like a college dormitory than an office space.

But here is Singapore’s answer to Silicon Valley. Housed across three non-descript industrial buildings are some 700 startups, incubators, accelerators, and venture capitalists that have their own definition of “corporate image”. Since 2011, the “world’s most tightly packed entrepreneurial ecosystem” (according to The Economist) has grown in this space at one-north, and it has even spawned a similar model in San Francisco, the original mecca for startups.

We recently checked in with four startups at Block 71 — the building that started it all — to find out what makes “71”, as they affectionately call it, their place for entrepreneurship in Singapore.

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Text by In Plain Words.