Being an entrepreneur is a lot harder than I thought — and things are even harder in Asia where there’s more stereotyping of women in society.

I thought being an entrepreneur was all about building a product or service you believe in, filling that gap in the market, and marketing and selling it as hard as you can.

But as an Asian female entrepreneur, you have to work twice — maybe five times — as hard to make people take you seriously, or let alone, believe in what you are capable of.

Not until I entered the startup world did I think women empowerment and female support was more important than ever before. With that said, here are some things I’ve learned about being a female entrepreneur in this part of the world:

1. You’ll have to surround yourself with the right people

People are what make the company — but people are also what makes your life a lot easier. Surrounding yourself with people who don’t believe in what you’re doing, whether in business or in your personal life, is a real time-waster. And I can tell you that from experience. You don’t have to convince these people why you’re building this company — that’s what you have to do for customers and investors.

Also Read: The importance of working with great co-founders

Your life shouldn’t be one giant pitching session. This is obvious for employees, but sometimes women don’t understand how important this is for people who are involved in your personal life. as well.

As a female entrepreneur, you’re already trying to beat the odds, there’s no point in adding more odds to the equation. On the other hand, surrounding yourself with people who support and believe in what you’re doing can really help your business multiply.

2. You’ll want to build a product you can talk about for hours

It doesn’t matter whether you want to build a compression algorithm or a wedding platform, you’ll need to be seriously passionate about it. My first startup idea was in finance — I really believed in it (and I still do), but it’s not something I can talk about for hours. Weddings, on the other hand, are something I’ve always loved and dreamt about as a little girl.

Just because we’re ambitious women doesn’t mean we have to prove something extreme to make a statement. If you like baking cakes or handcrafting jewellery, you can still be a fierce female entrepreneur.

3. You’ll need to use your strengths to outdo competitors

Use your femininity as your advantage. I’m not talking about sex appeal, but the ability to relate. When I first started Asia Wedding Network, I understood that there were tons of older male founders in the wedding technology space. I tapped into my femininity and really looked at the product and the world from a female perspective — after all, we are building a platform for brides.

The ability to understand your strengths and what only you could bring to the table is what will make your company better than others’.

4. You’ll need to trust your intuition

Coming off of the last point, you’re going to be intimidated by your competitors. I know, I was — they were twice my age and armed with a handful of experience. But once you learn to trust your intuition and once you see customers switching over to your product, you’ll learn to take control and trust your instincts.

5. You’ll need to learn to brag

Nobody likes people who brag, but as a woman, you’ll need to brag when the time is right. I feel that women, especially in Asia, are too humble — and that’s okay in normal circumstances. But when you’re talking to an investor or selling you product, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be bragging about how great your company is.

Also Read: Bootstrapped and proud: Companies that don’t need VC money

Talk about the awards that you’ve received or which big company is using your product (if it’s not confidential). As Asian women, we were taught to not brag and be loud- but when you enter the male-dominated startup world, rules do not apply.

6. You’ll need role models

This sounds cliche but I feel that role models are extremely important, even if you don’t know personally know them. For me, I look up to role models, because they show that they have defied the odds, and the things I want to achieve are actually achievable. I’m not defying the odds — they’ve already done that.

Role models show you that the things you want to achieve are actually possible and that if you put your mind to it, you too can do what they’ve done — and maybe even more.

7. You’ll need to use your emotional intelligence

I’m about to stereotype us but here it goes: Women are sensitive. Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Use this emotional instinct to your advantage. If you trust your gut instinct, you can read people, customers, and investors. This will help you forecast their next steps.

Also Read: 5 lessons in leadership from top female executives

8. You’ll need to learn ‘tough love’ leadership

Women in leadership roles tend to either be pushovers or strict and unyielding to the extreme. I find that women need to show more love to their employees — tough love, that is. Yes, you need to make sure people are meeting deadlines and working hard on their projects, but you’ll also need to show some compassion when it is most needed.

I’m not talking about befriending your employees or letting them walk over you, but I’m talking about showing leniency when it matters. Nobody wants Cruella de Vil as their boss but you’re still building a company here.

Females in the Western world are founding companies, leaning in, and taking control of their #girlboss lives. It’s time for women in this part of the world to also start building great businesses, fulfilling their dreams, and start chipping away at the invisible glass ceiling.

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Smart credit startup Flowcast snags US$3M Series A funding co-led by ING Ventures, BitRock Capital [Press Release]

Flowcast, a smart credit startup powered by AI that helps financial institutions and corporates make decisions, announces that it has raised a US$3 million with additional funding from existing investors including Katalyst Ventures and Alpana Ventures.

The company noted that the proceeds of this round will be used to fund the acceleration of Flowcast’s go-to-market strategy, global market expansion especially in Singapore and the APAC region, and the continuing product development and improvement.

Flowcast offers an AI-enabled platform to power smarter credit decisions for financial institutions and corporates. Flowcast’s API-based machine learning platform harnesses alternative data to unlock credit at scale, which helps empowers lenders and corporations to extend and monitor credit that is historically unavailable with conventional lending and credit scoring methods.

Flowcast shares that it is also participating in the SAP.iO Foundry Singapore program, which aims to accelerate startups via providing them access to curated mentorship, exposure to SAP technology, and application programmable interfaces (APIs) with opportunities to collaborate with SAP customers in the Southeast Asian region.

Lao ride-hailing service app LOCA to showcase business model at Thailand’s Mekong Innovation Startup in Tourism [Eleven Myanmar]

LOCA, a ride-hailing service operating in Laos will be showcased at the Mekong Innovation Startup in Tourism (MIST) meeting in Thailand next week, as reported by Eleven Myanmar. It will represent Laos in the final pitching competition at MIST on October 8-9 in Bangkok, Thailand.

Also Read: Mekong regional initiative aims to help travel startups

LOCA is a Lao startup that claims to dominate the ride-hailing business. It has been operating since early 2018 with more than 300 cars.

The co-founder and CTO of LOCA, Souliyo Vongdala, said that tourism is a major contributor to GDP and that innovative startups will help attract more tourists to Laos.

Right now, there are two ride-hailing services in Laos – LOCA and the Cambodia-based Drive-up. These two were recently launched and it is expected there will be more in the future.

Mekong Innovative Startups in Tourism is jointly managed by the Mekong Tourism Coordinating Office and the Mekong Business Initiative.

The initiative is supported by the Australian government and the Asian Development Bank and organised by UNWTO Affiliate Member Chameleon Strategies.

Indonesian logistics startup Paxel reportedly gears up to close series A round from East Ventures, SIG, SMDV [Tech In Asia]

Indonesian logistics startup Paxel is reportedly in the dawn of closing a Series A funding round that will likely be US$7 million in total, as reported by Tech In Asia. East Ventures reportedly leads the round, with participation from Susquehanna International Group (SIG) and Sinar Mas Digital Ventures (SMDV).

In September, Paxel reportedly raised a seed round led by one of its founders, Johari Zein, who is also a founder of omnipresent logistics provider JNE. One person familiar with the matter adds that the founding team put in US$10 million of their own money in the seed round.

Paxel was founded by Bryant Christanto and Zaldy Ilham Masita. It is an app-based logistics startup providing same-day delivery services for a flat rate to several major Indonesian cities, promises customers to get their money back in the event of failure fulfilling the delivery within a certain time limit.

Nikkei acquires a minority stake in Singapore’s AI startup DC Frontiers [Nikkei Asian Review]

Japanese media group Nikkei announces that it has acquired 14.79 percent of DC Frontiers’ stake, a Singapore’s AI startup, looking to enhance data and news service scoutAsia with the collaboration.

Nikkei and the Financial Times launched scoutAsia last year, creating an extensive database of Asian companies and regional business news. Nikkei acquired the FT back in 2015.

Also Read: Singapore Press Holdings unveils AI initiative and stock photo marketplace

Founded in 2011, DCF offers the use of AI for tasks like article tagging and creating maps that illustrate relationships between companies, individuals, and investments. DCF’s AI and machine-learning technologies are aimed at improving the accuracy and efficiency of searches for news and corporate data.
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Having pioneered Singtel Ventures, a corporate venture capital arm, in the late nineties and through the subsequent years of working with social enterprises, I’ve observed some commonalities and unique qualities that set successful social entrepreneurs apart.

In essence, they are extremely talented people who see opportunities in building sustainable and viable commercial businesses with a prime focus on solving social issues.

Take Singapore’s online marketplace, Bompipi.com, for example.

The business was founded on the premise of encouraging more people to give back to society, and it developed a creative and sustainable revenue stream anchored on the growing demand for affordable online grocery shopping. The founders’ passion for giving back to society then inspired an innovative reward system that allows customers to offset a part of their online shopping costs by volunteering with partner charities.

Bompipi.com was one of seven social startup ventures shortlisted to be part of a six-month-long social innovation programme called Singtel Future Makers. Its novel pitch won the hearts of the judging panel from Singtel, Singapore’s National Council of Social Service, SPD, raiSE, 500 Startups and Adrenalin Group of Social Enterprises.

Also Read: Revealed: 7 Singtel Future Makers winners set to create greater social impact

To become and stay successful as a social enterprise it requires all the essential capabilities needed in running a commercial enterprise while creating social good. The business challenges are compounded as often the social cause which they support is niche, lacks the scale or is costly to serve at the onset.

Bear in mind that you could also be serving a need where the risks, stakes (and mistakes) can be a lot higher for the end beneficiary they serve, depending on the inherent vulnerability which they face.

So, what have I learnt from two decades of working with commercial start-ups, and more recently social start-ups? They all have the same ingredients needed to become successful entrepreneurs, albeit social entrepreneurs come with the additional factors of:

Empathy

Having an extremely deep sense of understanding for the social issues that they seek to address. Often they have personally experienced the issue or through someone, they know.

Many of those whom I have met can tell a very personal story behind their causes. It’s analogous to having deep customer centricity in your business model. Going back to Bompipi.com, two of the founders grew up in families with financial difficulties and could not afford daily necessities.

Even as both men became successful businessmen, they never forgot their origins and have turned their insights into a business opportunity built upon the social cause they champion.

Purpose

Having a deeper and more grounded sense of PURPOSE that may be missing in non-social entrepreneurs. It’s this sense of purpose that will be their core foundation of resilience when the going gets really tough.

Many a time, they will ask themselves: Am I blinded by my cause and purpose, and will I ever make it through? Where do I draw the line between my purpose and cause, and the realities?

Courage

Having the capacity to deal with the paradox of making money, sometimes from the needy and vulnerable ones. Sustainability is key to staying in business and achieving positive social impact. The successful ones are those who dare to challenge the stigma of profiteering from and helping those who are vulnerable and needy.

But, vulnerability may not always mean one cannot afford. Sometimes the solution just doesn’t yet exist, even if one is willing and able to pay. Regardless, for those who cannot deal with this inherent paradox, it’s best to consider staying in the charity model.

Also Read: For social enterprise, how to balance social good with the realities of business?

That said, there are potential attributes of social entrepreneurs that can undermine their success, when:

1. They become too fixated on their cause that they cannot adapt to the realities of the situation and are unable to see opportunities to ‘pivot’, especially when their solution is too customised to a cause, making it difficult to find scale.

2. Their sense of purpose and passion toward the cause may undermine their openness, agility, and adaptability, thereby holding them back from collaborating, synergising and sometimes ceding to others who might hold the key to bringing the venture to the next level.

3. They lack organisational skills to run a growing team and don’t know how to build diversity and talent in their teams that can complement their own competencies.

Unfortunately, there are no panaceas to circumvent all of these potential pitfalls, but no successful social entrepreneur ever gets to the top alone. For most, if not all cases, there is always a mentor guiding them from behind.

What a mentor can provide is the much-needed guidance and alternative perspectives to overcome common pitfalls as the ones I’ve highlighted earlier. It’s with this belief that the Singtel Future Makers programme puts a strong focus on mobilising a diverse set of mentors from every sector. Building capability and capacity goes beyond just providing cash funding.

No doubt, the social enterprise business model will continue to be refined and evolve. But, here in Singapore and Australia, the ecosystem of social enterprise is starting to take shape and will grow from strength to strength.

Successful social enterprises can also demonstrate to larger corporations that profiting and effecting positive social changes are not mutually exclusive concepts. Only time will prove our fundamental belief that doing good is good business in the long run.

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OYO Hotels & Homes, one of India’s largest hotels aggregators with significant operations in Southeast Asia, today announced that it is raising US$1.5 billion in Series F round.

RA Hospitality Holdings will infuse approximately US$700 million as primary capital, with the remaining US$800 million coming from other existing investors.

RA Hospitality is owned by OYO Founder and CEO Ritesh Agarwal. Earlier this year, RA Hospitality received Competition Commission of India’s approval to invest US$2 billion in OYO.

In order to facilitate this transaction, existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sequoia Capital are selling a part of their shareholding in OYO to help Agarwal increase his stake.

Also Read: Token sales being abused as a fundraising tool by many, will mostly go away: LuneX VC’s Kenrick Drijkoningen

A huge chunk of the money will go into continuing its growth in the US and Europe.

This round comes about a year after OYO raised over US$1 billion led by SoftBank Vision Fund. Existing investors Lightspeed, Sequoia and Greenoaks Capital also participated. New strategic partners like Airbnb also co-invested.

In a short span of six years, OYO has expanded its presence in 80-plus countries. It includes China (with presence in 338 cities and over 590,000 rooms), followed by Indonesia (presence in 100-plus cities and over 27,000 rooms).

In the UK, OYO has a presence in 30 destinations and over 3,500 rooms, and in the US in 60 cities, 21 states and over 7,500 rooms.

At the moment, OYO employs over 20,000 people.

Agarwal said: “The growth across verticals in India and globally has been phenomenal and we truly believe that we will be able to build a truly global brand out of India while ensuring that the business is run efficiently and with a clear path to profitability. Our immediate goal, however, is to make forward-looking investments so we can achieve our mission while delivering on our fiduciary responsibility to our investors by building a sustainable business.”

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Mobile game company TouchTen has secured an undisclosed amount in fresh funding from investment firm Prasetia Dwidharma.

Indonesian business leaders Sheila Tiwan (CEO Carsurin) and Indra Leonardi (Kingfoto Group) also joined this round.

Existing investor CUEBIC, a leading digital marketing company in Japan, is also investing this round, as TouchTen boosts its efforts to address the often-ignored women gamers market.

“Gaming has often been considered a male-centric pastime, but our world is changing,” said TouchTen CEO and Co-founder Roki Soeharyo. 

Also Read: Token sales being abused as a fundraising tool by many, will mostly go away: LuneX VC’s Kenrick Drijkoningen

“Today, half of all mobile gamers are female. And the data shows despite lacking content that appeals to them, more women are playing games than ever before. This is what truly excites our team — to bring joy to underserved players globally through games that we love.”

Prasetia CEO, Arya Setiadharma commented: “TouchTen has extensive experience in developing mobile games. Prasetia is excited to join this round because we believe TouchTen is the perfect team to tackle the huge market of female mobile gamers. TouchTen is very data-driven in developing their games, and this is what we find most attractive about the company.”

TouchTen claims its revenue and user base grew 238 per cent and 93 per cent, respectively, in the past year. 

The company has added to its portfolio a new flagship game focused on the intersection of puzzle gamers and pet lovers for the US and European markets. The game will feature the most adorable pets in the entire puzzle genre while bringing a fresh twist on the familiar match-3 puzzle gameplay. 

The team is also working on an undisclosed project for the Indonesian market slated for release in late 2019.

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