Meaningful Business (MB:) Please tell us a bit about your background.
Dustin Jefferson Onghanseng (DJO:) Born and raised in the Philippines, I moved to Singapore to do my Bachelor’s from the National University of Singapore, under full scholarship from the Singapore government. After graduating, I worked as a management consultant at Deloitte where I focused on strategy, market expansion and operational efficiency projects. After 4 years of consulting, I decided to move to Hong Kong and pursue my MBA from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
MB: What led you to start uHoo?
DJO: uHoo was founded by myself and my friend, Brian Lin, as we both share a passion for technology, health, and the environment. While taking our MBA in HKUST, we both often suffered from allergy and asthma attacks due to poor indoor air quality in our school. Frustrated, we dropped our classes and built uHoo to help people with similar respiratory problems and to ultimately promote health, safety, and wellbeing for all.
MB: What are the main problems you are trying to solve?
DJO: Poor air is the world’s largest environmental hazard killing 7 million people annually. Yet people take the air they breathe for granted without knowing how it’s affecting their health, resulting in poorer immune systems and quality of life. We help people monitor and manage their air quality to reduce deaths and improve lives, health and wellbeing globally.
Dustin Jefferson Onghanseng, Co-Founder & CEO, uHoo
MB: What is your biggest challenge right now?
DJO: Our biggest challenge right now is educating companies on the important role they play in creating a healthy and safe workplace; that investing in the health of their employees and workplace brings forth long-term benefits and significant ROI.
MB: What is your vision for the future of your business?
DJO: We serve as staunch advocates of health, safety, and wellbeing. Our vision is clean air for all where we help people monitor, manage and make data-driven decisions in improving their homes and their workplaces and eventually the quality of their health and life.
MB: What is your advice to other leaders who want to combine profit and purpose?
DJO: Businesses should never be about just profits alone. There is profit in purpose and there has to be purpose in profits.
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Quickfire Questions
MB – What’s the best piece of advice you ever received?
DJO – “Grit”
MB – Who inspires you?
DJO – Concepts and ideas inspire me.
MB – How do you define success?
DJO- Making a positive impact on at least one person’s life and eventually being able to do that at scale.
MB – What is something you wish you were better at?
DJO – Networking.
MB – What is the one book everyone should read?
DJO – The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell
MB – What do you do to relax?
DJO – HIIT and cooking.
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Discover the other MB100 leaders recognised for their work combining profit and purpose to help achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in 2020, here.
