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. How to…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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.…