Navigating Founder Personas: From Frugal Founders to Salacious Spenders
We’re coming to a pivotal point in the early-stage ecosystem in Southeast Asia where a number of businesses that have been scraping by will need to s...
Founders Taking Chips Off the Table
Contrary to popular belief in some parts of the market in Southeast Asia, I believe it’s healthy for founders to start taking some chips off the tabl...
The State of Early Stage Valuations in Southeast Asia
There has been a slowdown in the start-up ecosystem and as a result, early-stage valuations have been curtailed. Having been involved with the early-...
The Present Problem in the Southeast Asian Funding Ecosystem
There has been a significant slowdown in the early-stage funding ecosystem in Southeast Asia with fewer start-ups getting funded and fewer funds bein...
Climbing the Totem Pole: The Challenges of Scaling in Southeast Asia
Recently, the Singaporean founder and CEO of Visier remarked that the reason there aren’t more Singaporeans running large companies is that culturall...
CVCs Imploding: What Early-Stage Founders Need to Know
There’s an issue plaguing the early-stage space at the moment: a lot of the Corporate Venture Capital (CVC) firms that exuberantly invested over the ...
Swiss Army Knives vs Specialists: Early Hiring Decisions
Continuing from last month’s article on hiring, another issue that founders typically face when making their first hires is whether to hire **general...
Hiring the Best: Building a Strategy for Recruitment
Hiring is one of the hardest things to do at start-ups, and without a strategy, it’s even more difficult. Once a company achieves some level of produ...
Metrics Matrix: Streamlining Early-Stage Due Diligence
Ideally, a seed-stage due diligence process should add value to the companies the VC is engaging with, not just be a waste of time for entrepreneurs....
The Hierarchy of Funds: Building Businesses That Generate Cash
Backing entrepreneurs that want to “take over the world” is out, and building profitable businesses is back in vogue. There’s a waterfall of cashflow...
Finding Stars
There’s probably never been a better time to hire high quality people. Over the last few years it has been difficult to hire quality talent at the rig...
Why Founders Hire Ex-Founders
Hiring is unquestionably one of the hardest challenges that founders face. Something that we’ve been thinking about a lot lately is “Why do high perf...
Moral Hazard
To understand when private market valuations will reach similar levels to what we’re seeing in public markets, there are a few factors to consider. A...
Handicapping in SEA
When Limited Partners (who investor in funds) are picking General Partners, they need to be able to identify which investors are actually good at han...
The Early-Stage Opportunity Set: Public vs Private Markets
The shine has definitely come off the early-stage space as investors begin to question whether the reward is worth the risk. There's a significant di...
Getting Rekt with the Cap Stack
“Watch your step, kid (c'mon, baby baby, c'mon) Watch your step, kid (yo, you best protect ya neck)” Wu Tang Clan – Protect ya neck After a recent ...
Convergence
There’s a transition that occurs in the life of a company, where it graduates from being a “dart-up” to a “company” and the valuation methods that ar...
Getting Rekt with the Cap Stack
How did low-income families which lack access to financial services historically get access to credit. Has technology made it easier for traditional ...
Changing Direction in Early Stage Valuations
To avoid disappointment, you need to be able to bridge the gap between expectations and reality. However, at the moment, there appears to be a relati...
New Year’s Resolution for Startups
New Year, New You! The start of the year is always a good time to sit down and revisit your goals and for any self-respecting entrepreneur, they shoul...
Flirting with Investors: Structuring a Round
Sometimes when raising funding start-ups feel like they’re the prettiest girl at the prom, swatting of suiters with a flirtatious flick of the hand. ...
Navigating the Stormy Seas of Startups
> Soon may the Wellerman come > To bring us sugar and tea and rum > One day, when the tonguing is done > We'll take our leave and go It's an indisput...
Creative Control
> Why are organisations, everywhere, political, commercial, and social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs? > Why are individuals, everywhe...
Successful Entrepreneurs
A number of investors will say that there's a key profile or specific traits that they look for when they're assessing founders. I'd argue that there...
Mastering Negotiation: Navigating Early-Stage Business Deals
Negotiation is a difficult skill to learn, made even more so because the times that we need to call on it are typically time constrained with some me...
Building the Right Team: Strategies for Hiring in Start-ups
> It's a wonderful thing to be clever, and you should never think otherwise, and you should never stop being that way. But what you learn, as you get ...
Balancing Uncertainty and Confidence: The Leap into Entrepreneurship
Starting anything requires a leap into the unknown, making the assumption that you can create something that for a great majority of people is the fir...
Work from Home
The tension between being prevented from brunching and breathing reached crescendo in the US recently. It’s sad to see the effect that systemic racis...
Selling the Big Picture: Using the A-B-Z Framework in Investor Pitches
When start-ups are preparing a pitch deck, it’s difficult to get the right messaging across. You want to show the grand vision, while at the same tim...
B2B vs B2C
There have been a number of well-known start-ups that initially started out as B2C and pivoted to B2B, including Plaid, Slack, and somewhat closer to ...
Take a Chance
Every day, I’m presented with a range of new business ideas. When one of those ideas is something new, something that I hadn’t previously considered,...
Building Start-Up Ecosystems: Bottom-Up vs Top-Down Approaches
Forward thinking countries are aware that they need to be focused on developing emerging technologies. Ever since Marc Andreessen coined the phrase “...
Exploring the Boundaries: The Spirit of Lindbergh and Independent Thinking
In the pre-dawn hours of 20 May 1927, a custom-built, single engine, fixed wing plane was being prepared at Roosevelt Airfield in New York state. Fou...
Navigating Investors and Advisors in Early-Stage Start-Ups
It’s been a difficult couple of months for most start-ups. Even if people aren’t back in the office, things are starting to normalise and I’m seeing ...
Probabilistic Reasoning: Embracing Uncertainty
#### Introduction Probabilistic reasoning is the combination of probability theory with deductive logic to formulate solutions to uncertain situatio...
Navigating a Crisis: Insights for Startups and Investors
In early March, Sequoia Capital released a [memo](https://medium.com/sequoia-capital/coronavirus-the-black-swan-of-2020-7c72bdeb9753) with tips for ...
Internal vs External Consultants
Considering that I spend a lot of time at incubators and accelerators, I thought it would be worthwhile to talk about the different approaches I see ...
Valuing SaaS
The way that we look at valuations, specifically, the multiples that software companies trade at is disconnected from the reality of running a softwa...
Understanding CAC: What Investors Really Want to Know
A number of times over the past month, I’ve been asked about how best to present Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) when investors ask about it. This is ...
Embracing The Dip
Recently, I’ve been talking to a lot of entrepreneurs about The Dip – The really hard part of starting something new, where it feels like nothing is g...
When Venture Capital Isn't the Answer: Building Resilient Businesses
Venture capital funding should be a “nice to have” not a “need to have” for most businesses. There are some really exceptional businesses being built ...
Framing Investments: The Power of Perspective in Early-Stage Funding
What if I were to tell you that there’s an early stage fund that’s charging investors a 25% management fee, is that something you might be interested...
Why Most VC Funds Underperform: Relative Skill and Adverse Selection
Venture as an asset class has posted some relatively poor results lately, as evidenced by the image below. Numbers would look even worse if we conside...
Staying in the Game: Why Resilience and Luck Matter More Than You Think
What if success in life isn’t purely a result of hard work and determination but a combination of luck and resilience? I’d argue that being able to st...
Backing the Edge Cases: Heuristics for Early Stage Investing
When looking at investments it can be difficult at a glance to determine which ones are worth more time and effort. Personally, as an early stage inv...
Opportunity Cost in Early Stage Investing
It’s well known that there’s an inherent opportunity cost to investments. However, the opportunity cost that’s considered is usually a financial one ...
Why Rules of Thumb Can Be Dangerous in Early Stage Investing
Currently, there’s a lot of froth in the early stage investing scene. A lot of people are applying “rules of thumb” to various early stage investment...
99% of All Effort is Wasted
Recently, in a tweetstorm, Naval Ravikant mentioned that “99% of all effort is wasted (in the long-run).” Does this mean you shouldn’t try because so...
Linear vs Exponential Thinking in Early Stage Investing
Lately, I’ve been thinking about linear vs exponential thinking as I’ve changed my focus from investment in publicly listed companies to early stage ...