Category: Uncategorized

As a startup founder, you are constantly juggling multiple priorities and making decisions that impact the future of your business. However, it can be challenging to optimise along all three constraints: cost, speed, and being right. In many cases, you will only be able to focus on two of these factors. When you’re in the…

I’ve been trying to find a good home for my beloved MacBook Pro 13. I’ve had this machine since 2013 (!). This workhorse saw me through Evernote, SeedPlus / Jungle Ventures, and then some. It’s probably one of the best laptops I’ve ever had, and it still works pretty well after ten years. I am…

The lunar new year is one of my favourite festivities and it’s especially nice this year when it feels like we have moved past the pandemic. I love seeing friends and families being able to gather, happy and smiling faces all around. Even though it’s been raining in Singapore for most of the past week…

I try not to spend too much time prognosticating, primarily because: I am not the most intelligent person in the room to make the most informed predictions. I am almost certainly going to be wrong. My answers are boring 🙂 That said, there are a few areas that the team and I at FVC are…

One of the things I want to get better at for the new year is to permit myself to disengage and not feel like I’m responsible for every damn thing. Semil Shah and Jerry Colonna actually had a pretty great conversation around this on Jerry’s Reboot Podcast (see:https://www.reboot.io/episode/81-identities-rule-us-semil-shah/). So on my birthday today, I decided…

I have the ritual of doing an annual review toward the end of each year, and setting goals for the next year for the past decade or so. Much of this work is done in Evernote. I was (almost) religious about it until 2020 came around and fundamentally upended the world and impacted the way…

I started my journey in startups & tech more than 10 years ago. The year was 2009, but the world was still reeling from the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis. It didn’t matter to the bunch of us who were in Silicon Valley as part of the NUS Overseas Programme (NOC) though; we…

I was recently asked what my current thinking is in finding great startups in a socially distanced environment by someone new to the venture industry. It’s a topic that I’ve been doing some thinking about. In a nutshell, different entry points (angel, seed, venture, growth, re IPO etc) stages implies different strategies, which further implies…

Previous iteration here (2017) and here (2015). Always prioritise your family and important relationships over everything else. Never underestimate your ability to augment your immediate reality. If you want something, go get it. If you want something to happen, make it happen. Never take yourself too seriously. Be kind, which is different from being nice.…

“Good work, done well, for the right reasons.” There is no playbook in the face of unprecedented times. This implies that conventional wisdom need not apply forward, and one shouldn’t be bogged down by dogma. “Pace yourself now; come 2021 (or when the crisis is resolved & when the economy returns), you need to sprint.”…