By SGN | 24 Feb 2025
For Edwina, her 89-year-old grandmother is the OG super connector.
Mary Ho – also affectionately known as Momo – is an influencer who plays the electric guitar, has millions of YouTube views, and appears in BBC and Samsung advertisements. She’s also a creature of community.
“She meets up with her friends to learn computer skills or to go dancing together,” Edwina shares. “Through her, I found out that Facebook has a maximum of 5,000 friends, because she actually hit the cap.”
When the world was plunged into a pandemic in 2020, Edwina saw people around her grow increasingly disconnected. A year later, as social distancing restrictions eased, she decided to co-found a community platform that fosters interpersonal connections through common interests and real-life meetups.
In tribute to her grandmother, she named the platform Supermomos.
Landing in the Big Apple
After graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsyulvania, Edwina embarked on a career in management consulting and investing that deepened her knowledge of tech – a passion that eventually led her to become a founder.
Though Supermomos was launched in Singapore, she knew she wanted to take it to the world’s largest tech market: the United States. To locate her new base, Edwina explored the potential of five tech hubs – San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Miami and New York – spending a month or two in each city before finally settling on the Big Apple.
“I think it is a city that has the greatest depth and diversity of industries and areas of interest, no matter how niche,” she explains. She met inspiring community builders and saw the metropolis as fertile ground for launching a platform where people can make friends, trade ideas and find support.
“Whether it’s artificial intelligence or Broadway singing, everyone here is really passionate and good at what they do. And so I thought: Wow, this would be a great place to start with, where we could be very free to experiment,” she says.
Curation builds trust
Because of Edwina’s background and connections, many Supermomos communities are in the realms of business, tech and finance. In the long term, she hopes to include people from more industries and walks of life, as well as groups based on a shared ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, or religion.
Rather than being run as a free-for-all platform, Supermomos builds trust by curating its communities and verifying members via work email addresses. An AI algorithm sorts each new member into a community based on their experience and expertise, one where connections are likely to be relevant and sticky. This could, for instance, be a group of Series A founders or Big Tech product managers.
“We have had people finding best friends, landlords, roommates, jobs, business partners, even romantic partners on the platform,” Edwina reveals. “There’s all sorts of magic, all sorts of serendipity that happens when you bring a group of like-minded people together.”
Host to hundreds of events
While post-pandemic realities have been marked by the ubiquitous rise of remote work and virtual meetings, Supermomos hopes to revive the idea that genuine human connections are best formed face to face.
“Ten Zooms can never beat one in-person interaction, where you eat, drink, laugh together,” Edwina proclaims. “Online communities are a dime a dozen. You can join a group of 10,000 people from all over the world and never really get to know them. For us, the starting point for deep and authentic connections is always the offline interactions.”
Supermomos keeps a busy calendar, with hundreds of events taking place in a year. Most of these are community-led gatherings for socialising or self-improvement. Examples include hikes, beach hangouts, band jam sessions and Toastmasters events. At the same time, Edwina’s team organises many sponsored events targeted at professionals, ranging from fireside chats, intimate dinners, to 1000-person galas for FAANG employees.
In between events, members can interact on the Supermomos app. One of its signature features is a currency known as momos. Everyone starts off with a stash of 1000, and a penalty of 100 momos deters them from dropping out of events at the last minute. “When your account hits zero, you can no longer RSVP for any event,” Edwina says.
“Momos are also a fun way for members to reward hosts they appreciate. Occasionally, they can be redeemed for exclusive tickets, restaurant vouchers, or free helicopter rides.”
Meaningful memories made
Over time, Edwina and her team saw the need to make conscious efforts to encourage diversity among participants. “When we first started doing tech events, we realised that a lot of the attendees were men,” she says. This created a vicious cycle: with women in low attendance, more women were less likely to join. To fix this, Supermomos began organising women in tech events and ensuring female representation among panellists.
Their Women’s Leadership Summit, held at the New York Stock Exchange in March 2024, featured accomplished leaders such as Pauline Brown, the former chairman of LVMH USA, Suneera Madhani, the founder of Stax and WorthAI, and Birgitta Tazelaar, the Ambassador of the Netherlands to the US.
Another memorable and meaningful event for Edwina was the mentorship programme held in collaboration with the New York Public Library, where tech professionals provided career coaching for underprivileged teens.
She vividly recalls a funny misunderstanding. “We had a member who shared how she went from Wall Street to working at DoorDash. One of the kids was like, ‘Oh, wow. Why did you move from a job in finance to become a delivery driver?’”
From zero to 30,000
Supermomos members today number more than 30,000 – a far cry from the early days when Edwina had to tout for signups.
“Getting the first 100, 200 users was very tough,” she recalls. “I reached out to UPenn alumni and all my Singaporean friends in New York. At my WeWork building, I went door to door, offering cookies to everybody and asking them to download my app.”
Edwina is now faced with her next big challenge: growing the startup beyond one city.
“Now that we have found some level of product-market fit in New York, the goal is to replicate this in San Francisco and Boston,” she says. “What do we standardise? What do we centralise versus localise?” Once these processes are ironed out, Edwina believes scaling beyond two cities will simply be a matter of applying the same playbook.
The give-and-take of networking
The power of networking was something Edwina experienced from the very beginning of her time in New York. “In my first week, I remember meeting Qian Hui Chia, then the Regional Director for Singapore Global Network, and getting plugged into the community,” she says.
In the group chat of Singaporeans in New York, she saw how members constantly offered tips on available rooms or new restaurant openings. Some connections also helped to grow her business. “With that kind of support, I was able to very quickly feel at home in New York. It’s like experiencing a little piece of Singapore here,” she recalls.
Having overseen the formation of countless communities and the organisation of innumerable events with Supermomos, Edwina has become a seasoned connector who can offer a tip or two with regard to networking.
“The first thing is to be curious about others, to be genuinely interested in what they do,” she says. “In a diverse place like New York, it’s very fun talking to people you meet. They all have an interesting story to share.”
One should also be mindful of their value to others. “Have some substance and be good at what you do, whichever field you’re passionate about. That’s what makes you interesting,” she says.
Although networking events can be intimidating, Edwina’s advice is to start small. “Try approaching someone who isn’t talking to anyone or join a group of three. Introduce yourself and start asking questions,” she advises.
“And try to be helpful. Learn what they are looking for. Is it friendship, roommates, professional advancement? Are they in some phase of transition that you can be helpful with? And of course, invite them to your events to further develop that relationship.”
Meet Edwina
Edwina is the co-founder of Supermomos, a New York-based tech startup that curates communities of like-minded professionals to exchange ideas and form lasting connections.
Connect with her here.
