Finally found the time to put this up. These are my slides from my keynote at Tech in Asia Jakarta 2017 (procrastinate much?).
I plan on updating this soon with added commentary, in the meanwhile hope some of you might find it useful as a guide to kickstart your first institutional fundraising journey.
“The game we play at VC is knowing which rules to break at the right time.” Oldie but goodie http://pca.st/episode/9f176d90-5ad0-0134-cf69-7b84bf375f4c
Pretty much summed up here:
“Books have always been time machines, in a sense. Today, their time-machine powers are even more obvious – and even more inspiring. They can transport us to a pre-internet frame of mind. Those solitary journeys are all the more rich for their sudden strangeness.”
A great piece here: I have forgotten how to read
To me, it’s about practising mindfulness and being conscious on focusing my attention. We do live in an increasingly distracted world, the tweets, the posts, the timeline, notifications, little red alerts, chat bubbles and talking heads.. Endless little attention grabbers gnawing at your attention span. I believe this situation is especially pronounce in tech and venture, empirically speaking.
My strategy is helping me develop mindfulness:
1. I read two books in parallel, one fiction and one non-fiction, a chapter each day.
2. Daily meditation in the morning. Headspace is my app of choice.
3. Run. I try to run two to three times a week, clocking 6km ~ 7km each session. Clears my mind with what i dubbed “active meditation”.
I believe in this increasingly noisy world, mindfulness isn’t just crucial for well-being, it can also be a very real competitive advantage. To be able to do great, deep work, mindfulness and focus is key.
It’s been one year since I, like Harry Stebbings would describe in his podcast, stumbled into the wonderful world of VC. I couldn’t ask for a better set up and colleagues, in the likes of Michael and Gabriel , and the wonderful support and mentorship from the team at Jungle Ventures.
I’ll like to share a few quick notes on some lessons learned, and also observations along the way. These are far from exhaustive I am sure.
Pace.
The pace of decision making is quite different. When you are an operating executive, especially when you are in a start-up, you need to make decisions quickly as the cost of not moving fast enough is higher than the cost of mistakes. In most situations, the downside cost of mistakes can be limited, as the feedback cycle of each decision is fast and you get a chance to course correct. On the contrary, one almost has to slow down decision making in investing as the cost of mistake here is high, and the feedback cycle is long. It should be a calculate and deliberate decision, and to a large extent a very uncomfortable environment for me. A lot of the time I wonder if I’m actually making progress, or I’m just getting busy without moving the needle.
It’s about people.
What surprised me is how much the people factor weights in the business, from building relationships with founders, colleagues in the industry from other VC firms and potential (and current) LPs, VCs spend a lot of time managing these different stakeholders and relationships. It’s interesting to think of the VC industry of the few industries which incentivize participants in the ecosystem to be good actors for the long run (H/T: Anjney).
(Not) knowing it all.
This sounds cliche, but I truly feel that VC is a really humbling profession. Day in and day out I work with truly smart and driven founders, and I meet many more from different pitch meetings and demo days. It’s both humbling and scary to learn about many cool new technologies and innovation gaps in many industries, and at the same time I can’t help but think about how much I don’t know. In some sense it’s a really subtle but important shift in mindset between operating and investing – in that when you are executing, your job is to provide the answers but when investing the job is about asking the right questions and getting comfortable with not knowing it all.
Bitter work (苦活）
I recently had the opportunity to have lunch with the legendary Jenny Lee from GGV, and what she shared struck a chord with me:
VC is hard work. In Mandarin, we call that 苦活, which literally translates into bitter work. The real work starts post investment when you are working with the founder, it is a 24/7 service oriented work. One minute you could be interim CFO trying to help the founder with cap table modeling and budgeting, the other you are playing the head of HR, listening to founders and providing emotional support. It’s highly unstructured work, and the glory (should the company succeed) belongs to the founder, not you (rightfully).
I am sure there’re much more lessons to be had, and much more work to be done, and we are just getting started. Interestingly my one year anniversary coincided with this piece of wonderful news: https://techcrunch.com/2016/05/31/seedplus-is-an-early-stage-fund-focused-on-finding-global-startups-in-southeast-asia/ so that’s one happy happenstance.
On that note, if you are a founder looking to build a globally disruptive start-up from Singapore and beyond, I look forward to partner with you. If you have questions about fundraising, or start-ups in general, I am happy to talk to you. You can find me on Twitter at @tianglim.
10% into my next decade today. If there’s one word that i can use to describe 2016, in my own life and the state of affairs in the world, that will be ‘flux’. Throwing out some keywords here, in no order of priority and definitely some recall bias at work here: Brexit, Trump, A.I., CRISPR, 1MDB, ISIS, Deep Learning, Blockchain… and the list goes on. It’s difficult to resist the feeling that the ‘new world’ is coming, and collectively we as a species are both excited and nervous at the same time.
Personally it’s been an interesting year as well – most markedly due to me hopping to the other side of the table. To be honest venture capital was never really a career consideration. In some sense I sort of stumbled into the industry. For that I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity that i was given by the crew at Jungle Ventures and SeedPlus. Looking forward to kicking things up a notch for sure, in honing my craft and hopefully play a part in the technology ecosystem building of Singapore, the region and beyond.
Now that I’ve set the context of 2016, i want to take the opportunity to review the list i wrote for myself last year when i turned 30 (The first iteration of the list is here: http://tianglim.net/wp/30-things/). Not sure if this will be an annual thing, but i do want to build some sort of habit of self-check, and perhaps this will serve as an opportunity for me to revise and solidify some principles and axioms i think make sense as a guiding list for me. It will be interesting to compare and contrast how some wordings will change over the coming years, i think.
Here goes:
Just read a very insightful blog post by Mark Suster (Why I Look for High Conviction, not Consensus, in Venture Capital Decisions)
My biggest takeaway from the essay is around having the courage to build conviction and intellectual honesty around an investment opportunity.
It’s relatively easy to understand if an investment opportunity is good or not from pure intellectual reasoning (as i wrote about previously). However to build real conviction around a team, it is often a very emotional decision. The challenge here then is try not to fall in love with an idea / team / market or whatever it is, but at the same time once there’s conviction you as an investor will need to be passionate and committed to see it through with high conviction.
In some sense, one almost needs to have the ability to hold conflicting ideas (and emotions) in your head at the same time, and have the discipline to recognize that if data and signs show that things are not likely going to work out, have the intellectually honesty to say no.
More and more I believe that brutal intellectual honesty is one of the core ingredients of building a great venture capital firm. It is extremely difficult, given that venture capital is such a relationship and more importantly human business. (Again, borrowing from Suster’s great post here), and it definitely goes against human nature to be saying no to smart, driven founders, most of the time.
Much to learn and do, indeed.
No matter if the company is big or small, resources are always scarce and limited. In fact with limited resources it helps start-up to focus and have clarity on goals and milestones i.e. if you only have one bullet left, which target will you aim your shot at?
Rather not give generic advise or commentary, since it’s highly dependent on the unique space & time in which the start-up operates in, also dependent on product/service & market dynamics.
That being said, for internet / digital products distribution cost is almost negligible, and entering a new market is mostly a function of lowering the friction of adoption (payments, language, platform availability etc) and increasing the demand generation (awareness, community building, PR, media etc). Both of which entail allocating resources. Again if you only have a given set of resources, which lever should you pull to ensure that you move the needle?
That is why I don’t generally subscribe to the “..because Google can enter the Indonesian market tomorrow” argument therefore it’s easier for them to do it. If you can throw money to make problems go away, they world will be an easier place to operate in, no? ;)
If you think about it, every investment thesis from every VC firm is a combination of team, product, market and economics (of the deal).
The supposed secret sauce, then, is how the firm prioritize and weight each element.
Don Valentine from Sequoia Capital believed that you should look at big markets.
Marc Andreesen, who coined the concept of product market fit believes that a great market will pull the product out of a team.
On the other hand Y-Combinator is famous for preferring founding teams as opposed to solo founders.
If i have to guess, i think Peter Thiel will have a bias towards a great product / technology than anything else. (See being a monopoly)
Obviously the economics of the deal must make sense (funding round, cheque size and valuation etc.)
Again, when push comes to shove, all the above will change when it’s a hot deal in a heated market capturing the zeigeist of the moment. (Airbnb for X anyone?)
I can’t say for sure in our specific time and space, what the winning combination will be. I’m definitely seeing the interplay between all four factors from the founding teams and founders i’ve met in the past 4+ months.
One things for sure – fundamentally the VC business is a business based on human relationships (then again, isn’t that what all business activities should be?). You can do all the due diligence, cash flow analysis, market sizing etc but ultimately the decision to invest or not is a leap of faith and a bet on the person. To paraphrase Jenny Lee from GGV:
Hello world,
4 months+ into VC, I’m pretty much still in learning mode. With no previous background in VC the learning curve is as steep as it gets.
In other words, I’m trying to reduce the number of unknown unknowns, and increase the number of known unknowns. By knowing what I don’t know, I will be able to optimise for:
a. Continue to capitalise on my strengths and use that as leverage and;
b. Decide if I need to spend time on areas of weakness or experience gaps that can be fixed and;
c. Rely and defer to colleagues and extended network for areas of weakness or experience gaps that are inefficient for me to fix.
It’s been a very interesting ride so far, and I definitely look forward to seeing how the adventure unfolds.
I am cognizant that publishing a list like this on my 30th birthday seems hollow. Truth is, I am writing this for myself. This is a collection of best 30 advice I have received in the years leading up to now. You might find some of these applicable to your own life. Some less so.
When I started to curate this list a few weeks ago when I was in Mongolia, it felt deceptively simple. It was not. I took care to reduce redundancy, so that I don’t repeat myself. It was also challenging to really distill all the lessons learned and the advice I took to heart into 30 things. This is my best effort.