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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.”…

There are a lot of debate and discourse today, as a reaction to the state of the work today brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The global society as a whole has been under tremendous stress today; fault lines which had been simmering underneath the veil of a 10 year market bull run now appear…

This interesting bit of venture history appeared in a recent Pro Rata newsletter: Fourteen years ago, venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins raised $200 million for a fund dedicated to “worldwide pandemic preparedness and global health, with a focus on surveillance and detection, diagnostics, vaccines and drugs. Why it matters: Several companies from that portfolio are…

I’ve been asked many times through the years what the ideal founding team size is. Arbitrarily, the common answer seems to be 2-3 people. After being an angel investor as well as a venture investor for the past 5 years, I’ve come to realise that the real question should be, what is the ideal team…