Category: Uncategorized

If we treat founders like startups, supporting their learning, their networks, their capacity to grow, why don’t we treat early-stage investors the same way? That’s the quiet argument at the heart of a Startup Genome piece I came across last week. The title was unassuming, The Forgotten Layer in Startup Ecosystems: Investor Capacity, but the…

I’ve been sitting with a piece by Aditya Agarwal, co-founder of South Park Commons, that made me pause and reflect. Read it here (The Information, paywalled). It’s nominally about his personal reckoning with Claude as an engineering tool, but the real meat of it is about talent and what we now actually value in people.…

It all started with a belief that technology is the single greatest lever to nudge the world towards a better place. That belief brought me home to Singapore from Silicon Valley in 2010, into my first startup role, and eventually, through a series of fortunate detours, into venture capital. Today, as we rename Forge Ventures…

I started using Claude Skills when Anthropic launched the feature last year in Oct 2025. For context, Skills let you teach Claude specific workflows: how to query your CRM, how to format a pitch deck triage, how to write in your voice. You build these by conversation, not code. Within a few weeks, I had…

A recent podcast summary from Tech in Asia suggested I believe “the VC playbook that built Silicon Valley is failing SEA” and that the power law is fundamentally broken here. That’s not quite what I meant, so let me clarify. The power law absolutely exists in Southeast Asia; it’s just operating at a different scale…

I was doing some digital housekeeping last week when I got to my Claude conversation history. Scrolling through months of prompts, I realized I wasn’t just using AI to get things done—I was accidentally prototyping products. This might be hyperbole, but consider the anatomy of any AI prompt you’ve written recently. You’ve likely structured it…

You must focus on the narrative/story as much as the product. If you don’t actively craft and update the market, the market will create a narrative for you based on its initial impression, even if it is years old and no longer relevant. I used to not want to do this as I felt it…

I often describe my career in venture capital as something of a happy accident. I didn’t set out with a grand plan to be part of Southeast Asia’s startup story. Like many others, I simply followed my curiosity and ended up in the middle of a generational shift. In a recent conversation with Michael, my…

Four years ago today, we quietly launched forge.vc with a simple website and a big idea: that Southeast Asia deserved a new kind of seed investor. That was the beginning of Forge. A couple of believers trying to rethink what seed investing in Southeast Asia could look like if we started from scratch. We wouldn’t announce the…

I was reading The Information’s latest newsletter and caught this paragraph: For now, few investors seem worried about losing money. Just over the past few weeks, Anthropic closed a financing at over a $60 billion valuation and OpenAI has been in talks to raise at a $300 billion valuation including the investment.  While both are…