In the startup world, one record announcement chases the next. In the first quarter of this year, global venture funding exceeded US$100 billion for the first time in history, according to Crunchbase.

This massive increase in funding led to two new unicorn startups–  per working day, on average. This is well above anything we have seen in previous years– for comparison: roughly one new unicorn was announced every two working days in the whole of 2020.

These announcements fuel the media with exciting stories and raise public awareness for this unique opportunity as an entrepreneur. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that an increasing number of people across various professional and educational backgrounds is considering starting their own business– regardless of whether they are driven by the desire to build something from scratch, to achieve financial independence, to turn a life-long passion into a commercial product, or to become their own boss.

Having already gone through the journey of being a first-time founder and learned valuable lessons, serial founders are one of the most sought after groups of individuals for investors.

After partnering with several fascinating serial founders through our work at Picus Capital, we are now excited to share lessons from founders about starting and building ventures from scratch, what keeps them motivated, what they learned throughout their careers as founders and early employees at different ventures, and what advice they have for future entrepreneurs.

We spoke to Sebastian Schuon, who founded Stylight and Alasco; Carsten Lebtig, who founded Sanubi and Workmotion; and Guilherme Pinho Bonifacio and Diego Libanio, who founded Mercê Do Bairro together after having founded ifood.com and Zé Delivery, respectively.

Also Read: In brief: ADPList bags US$1.3M funding, Sunway iLabs unveils 5 startups joining its accelerator

As founders, focus on finding the right hires instead of compromising

“I learned that it is easier to find people with the right culture and vision that can learn the necessary technical skills than the other way around”  – Diego, Co-Founder of Mercê do Bairro

Once you finalise the ideation process and officially found your company, you will most likely want to expand your team in order to accelerate your venture’s development and traction. Your early key hires have a crucial impact on the long-term culture and success of your company, so you should not just hire anybody.

You should keep in mind, for instance, how they can influence your ability to attract more employees and grow the organisation. Also, these first employees will be key factors in determining the company’s culture and values.

So, take the time you need to look for the right people and find individuals who are fully aligned with your long-term vision.

And be aware: As a founder, you then automatically become responsible for these individuals who put their trust, time, and effort into your vision and your ability to convince them that their ambitions and vision are achievable as well.

Partnering with the wrong people – especially in the early days – might jeopardise your progress. But even if you pay a lot of attention to your hiring process, every now and then you will realise that certain colleagues you hoped would take your company to the next level, might end up failing to meet your expectations.

In this case, don’t waste too much time and find a solution, even if the conversation is not very comfortable for either of you. Because more often than not, managing the performance of your employees can be crucial to securing the long-term success of your organisation.

Validate your idea with experts and customers and accept that they know it better

“Don’t spend too much time writing business plans or creating Excel models. Instead, go to the front and talk to potential customers very early on. Young founders do that far too late.” – Carsten Lebtig, Co-Founder of Workmotion

We have repeatedly spoken to founders who have spent weeks and months behind closed doors trying to build a product they considered a perfect solution for a potential problem.

More often than not, this approach leads to teams spending valuable time developing a solution that looks great on paper but misses a client’s true pain points.

Having invested in more than 70 companies across different stages and industries, we have seen that the most successful entrepreneurs are, above all, pragmatic, somewhat opportunistic, and customer-centric.

Also Read: The 27 Indonesian startups that have taken the ecosystem to next level this year

Based on our discussions with founders who have been through various business model ideations and product validations, we want to emphasise that you as a founder should push yourself out of your comfort zone and into direct interactions with customers, competitors, and industry experts – starting on day one of the venture building journeys.

This is the most efficient and insightful feedback that venture teams can leverage to build a product or service that meets real customer demands and gets early adopters excited about what is to come. Taking advantage of other people’s input in your own product development journey also involves admitting to your own misjudgment; however, making mistakes is part of any venture journey.

What really matters is your ability to derive the respective consequences from these mistakes and to turn them into action. Put your emotions aside. Eventually, this will allow you to save both time and money – two of your most valuable resources as a founder in the early stages of your venture journey.

This is not only true for product development but also applies to defining and shaping the entire business model. In fact, the founders that we spoke to looked at a variety of different business models, before eventually settling on the most promising opportunity.

Personal development is essential to becoming great founders

“Leadership skills are not innate– they are developed over time” – Sebastian Schuon, Co-Founder of Alasco.

When you are running your own business, you have to be willing to invest in your own development. As an entrepreneur, you are, above all else, a leader.

No matter how passionate you are about your product vision or your ability to connect with potential customers, as a founder, you will soon realise that entrepreneurship is about managing, guiding, leading, and mentoring others.

Based on our interactions with individuals and teams that have built various successful and large organisations throughout their careers, we learned that a company’s long-term growth potential is largely limited by one’s own ability to learn and develop as a person and adapt as a leader.

As your company matures, your customer relationships become more complex and your product evolves, and so do the expectations towards you as the founder and the responsibilities you face.

Regardless of whether you are stuck in validating your idea, transforming your business model, or scaling your company– your team, customers, and investors put their trust in you to steer the company through a variety of challenges. Being able to adapt to these different circumstances is crucial.

Establishing and leveraging a network of advisors, angels, and investors

“Network and reputation are priceless. I always try to connect people in my network with one another. I enjoy observing how this creates value for others and more often than not, something comes back in return eventually – even if you don’t expect it.” – Guilherme, Co-Founder of Mercê do Bairro.

As an entrepreneur, you are constantly required to evaluate options and make decisions that will not only impact your own success and fortune but also that of others who are willing to commit to the company’s journey. More often than not, these decisions are unique and the right answers are rarely easy to find.

Building and maintaining a strong personal and venture network is therefore enormously helpful, especially for first-time founders. Building up a peer group of like-minded individuals allows entrepreneurs to exchange ideas.

Also Read: GuavaPass co-founders’ new alternative lending startup Jenfi lands US$6.3M led by Monk’s Hill

Ideally, such a peer group consists of founders who are in a similar phase of the company as well as those who have already successfully overcome certain challenges and are willing to share their experiences.

In addition, partnering and seeking support from relevant and experienced business angels, as well as early-stage investors who want to contribute strategic and operational advice, can significantly accelerate a venture’s success.

Nevertheless, it’s important to keep in mind that successful networking is a long-term game and comes about through give and take. Don’t forget about the people who helped you out at some point in your journey when they ask for a favour.

 Being a founder is neither easy nor predictable. The decision to become a founder has implications on your whole life and can be challenging but also rewarding, both in terms of personal development and professional success. Or, as Sebastian Schuon put it: “The literal meaning of “entrepreneur” is someone who undertakes something. True entrepreneurs are restless and want to create something. If it’s all about the money, you’re better off going into investment banking.”

This article was co-written by Daniel Niklas, Vice President at Picus Capital.

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RaRa Delivery, a startup providing instant delivery service for e-commerce in Indonesia, has secured US$3.25 million in funding co-led by Sequoia India’s Surge and East Ventures.

The startup was founded in Singapore in July 2019 by Karan Bhardwaj, a graduate of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. It is a last-mile logistics company aiming to “revolutionise one to three-hour deliveries” for e-commerce through its data-driven approach and proprietary technology.

While other companies with express logistics infrastructure focus on one-to-one deliveries, RaRa Delivery has developed real-time batching technology to do ‘many-to-many’ deliveries within a few hours.

As a result, it has been able to bring down the eventual delivery cost for customers while enabling drivers to earn more money in fewer hours. According to the firm, it has been able to carry out three-hour deliveries for up to 20 per cent lesser cost due to the efficiencies of batching technology.

Also Read: RaRa Delivery raises over US$800K funding

Besides quick deliveries, RaRa Delivery’s platform offers real-time notifications and status updates. In addition, customers can chat with service agents and drivers, all through a single chat platform.

The firm has also integrated its services into all major online marketplaces in Southeast Asia to allow any seller to offer instant and same-day deliveries to their customers.

In the back-end, RaRa receives orders from businesses and merchants via API integrations, calculates capacity, timeslots, distance and route optimisation to slot these orders into batches and maximise productivity to reduce the cost per order.

RaRa Delivery has ramped up its offering given the rising demand for instant groceries and medical supply delivery services in response to the global pandemic. In addition, it has provided essential one to three-hour delivery windows required for food and medical supplies during the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

The startup counts grocery players such as Sayurbox, Blibli, Kopi Kenangan, Grab Merchant, and Alodokter.

“While the express delivery space has been flourishing in sectors such as groceries and healthcare, we saw an opportunity to scale this offering across all categories, as customer expectations grow alongside the maturity of e-commerce in Indonesia,” said founder and CEO Karan Bhardwaj.

In Indonesia, consumer appetite for fast convenience has risen, and consumers are willing to pay a premium for quick deliveries. As a result, the market size for same-day delivery is expected to grow to 30 per cent, totalling 4.5 million parcels a day by 2023. The premium logistics charges for same-day delivery services are projected to increase to IDR 65 trillion (US$4.5 billion) in 2023, up from IDR 4.4 trillion (US$556 million) in 2018, thereby outpacing the growth in other delivery services1.

A part of Surge’s fifth cohort of 23 companies, RaRa also counts Royston Tay and Yang Bin Kwok among its investors. In April 2020, RaRa Delivery secured US$834,000 in a seed funding round, led by 500 Startups.

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Wisesight, a social media analytics solutions startup in Thailand, has secured more than US$7 million in a Series B financing round co-led by Thai bank Krungsri’s VC arm Krungsri Finnovate and Japanese IT solutions giant TechMatrix.

As per the statement (in Thai) on the company’s website, after this round, TechMatrix will become one of the largest shareholders of Wisesight, along with Krungsri Finnovate and existing investor Nvest Venture. 

The fresh capital will be used to enhance the business potential of Wisesight and fuel its sustainable business growth. 

“We believe that the synergies of strong partners will be a good foundation for Wisesight to grow sustainably as a tech startup,” said Kla Tangsuwan, CEO of Wisesight. “We will continue to innovate to serve our clients better. This year, in addition to maintaining our leadership position in social data analytics, we expanded our analysis to a broader and deeper level.”

Also read: Angel Investors: leading the charge for startup growth in Thailand

Founded in 2010 by Warodom Dansuwandumrong and Pnern Asavavipas, Wisesight provides a set of solutions for brands and agencies to analyse and synthesise social media’s raw data into meaningful insights across various industries. Its services include social media listening and analytics, real-time social monitoring, and research and consulting.

With its ability to process the data via social media for more than 20 million messages a day in Thai, English, Burmese and Malay, Wisesight claims that it has served more than 300 brands and agencies and has a team of 200 developers, researchers, operators and supporters based in Bangkok.

Under this collaboration, Wisesight will capitalise on Krungsri’s strength to expand the business and develop cooperation projects. At the same time, Wisesight will leverage Krungsri’s competitiveness in the domestic and overseas markets by enhancing its customer experience through data analytics.

Meanwhile, Wisesight’s Warroom (a one-stop service to manage customer engagement across social media) and TechMatrix’s FastSeries (a cloud-based CRM system) will be combined to provide a complete solution for all businesses’ needs and enter the ASEAN region.

“This investment will support the expansion of cooperation between each other in the future. It is also an opportunity to help Krungsri’s business customers who are selling products through online channels to have the opportunity to access tools that increase their business efficiency,” said Sam Tansakul, managing director at Krungsri Finnovate. 

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Image Credit: Wisesight

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Recruitment teams around the world are always figuring out ways to meet aggressive hiring goals with short timelines as well as uncertain budgets. 

Never before has this been more true than in the last 18 months – one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the global labour market. Employers around the world were forced to lay off or furlough workers in large numbers in reaction to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic – most of them downsized their recruitment efforts.

Now, jobs have opened up at record levels and we’re seeing a severe shortage in the supply of candidates in the market. These shifts and challenges are unprecedented. 

Traditionally, recruitment teams manually advertised their jobs on sites such as Indeed, LinkedIn, Jobstreet, Beam, Naukri, Monster and many more, to source their candidates. Ongoing decisions on where to post the ads, how much to spend on each source, and how to optimise the performance of the ads were based on intuition.

Such an approach is resource-intensive, time-consuming, inefficient, error-prone, and lacks the data-driven rigour required to consistently attract high-quality candidates quickly and cost-effectively.

In addition, many of the most popular online talent sources in Asia are pay-per-post job sites, which means talent acquisition teams need to pay for their job ads to be displayed for a certain period of time only to hope that they would deliver relevant candidates. In a market as volatile as today’s, committing to invest in “post and pray” ad inventory that may yield little return is not prudent.

The only way they can be effective is by using technology that leverages data and automation to optimise the performance of their campaigns in alignment with the market dynamics. 

Programmatic job advertising technology does just that. 

Also Read: Owning your data is a basic human right, says blockchain-based startup Credify’s Rasmus Kütt

What is programmatic job advertising?

It is a data-driven way of buying and optimising job ads automatically across the most optimal talent sources, the ones most likely to deliver hires.

A programmatic approach enables recruitment teams to attract the most relevant candidates at the right time and cost.

The technology does it all on simply clicking a button. If you’re a recruitment marketer, all you need to do is select your jobs, input your goals (hires or applies), and let the machine drive your talent sourcing.

Using automation and machine learning, the technology drives continuous optimisations in the performance and cost of job ads. These optimisations are enabled by tracking the performance of recruitment advertising campaigns across all online sources, along the candidate journey– right from when job seekers click on an ad to when they get hired.

This data is then utilised to ensure that the ads are automatically placed on job sites or talent sources where they would have the most success within the available budget. 

The best part? As the market forces evolve, the ad campaigns will automatically be optimised in response to the latest dynamics.

Adoption levels vary across the globe– is Asia ready?

The adoption of programmatic job advertising technology has been rising consistently in North America, where the job site ecosystem is relatively fragmented and pay-for-performance models in recruitment advertising are quite prevalent.

This uniquely positions programmatic job advertising solutions to deliver significant value and ROI, as the technology can automate the placement of job ads across the best performing talent sources while saving recruiters valuable time to focus on other essential activities like candidate engagement. 

In contrast, employers in Asia (along with those in other regions like Europe and the Middle East) are still in the nascent stages of adopting this technology. In these markets, recruitment teams are still attuned to working with job sites on a pay-per-post model and the transition to pay-for-performance has been sluggish.

However, this is quickly changing. A number of employers are moving to an outcome-driven, pay-for-performance approach using technology. For example, Indian IT giants like TCS, HCL Technologies, Wipro, and Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS) have adopted programmatic job advertising technology to power their global talent sourcing efforts at scale. 

Employers from other industries that recruit in high volumes, such as BPO and Gig businesses, also have a huge opportunity to leverage this technology to boost the quality and speed of their recruitment efforts.

Ultimately, recruitment teams care about three things: meeting their hiring goals, increasing the speed-to-hire consistently, and achieving a predictable cost-per-hire (or cost per applicant, as the case may be). 

Programmatic job advertising uses data, automation, and machine learning to deliver all of these and more – such as, end-to-end visibility across the candidate journey and predictability of outcomes.

Also Read: Scaling is hard: Here are 7 things Human Resources can do to manage it

The unique demands placed on businesses during the last 18 tumultuous months have accelerated their adoption of technology by several years. This is true for data-driven recruitment technology as well.

So it’s only a matter of time before recruitment teams across Asia go “all in” on programmatic!

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“When I started MetaLab in 2006, the idea of handing anything off seemed insane,” says Andrew Wilkinson, the Founder and CEO of the Canada-based digital product agency on his Medium blog. Today, MetaLab’s clients include Uber, Slack, Amazon, Apple, Google, Mozilla, TripAdvisor, Tumblr, and Walt Disney. But the success did not come easy for them.

In 2009, when it was still a small but profitable agency, Wilkinson recognised that his “biggest problem at the time was managing people. I was up to about 10 employees and I was having trouble keeping track of what everyone was working on.”

They started developing the project management service Flow and launched the beta version nine months later. It was to scratch an itch. “We were frustrated with having to use three different apps to manage our daily workflow, so we decided to build a solution ourselves,” says Wilkinson.

“We broke all the rules. We didn’t raise money, worked short days, and even did client work on the side. And yet just three weeks after launching, Flow was turning a profit. One year later, we’re bringing in over US$500,000 in recurring revenue and growing like crazy,” says Wilkinson.

He borrowed an idea from Basecamp, building software for themselves and then selling monthly access to it.

From day one, it was a huge hit. A lot of people had the same problem and there was nothing else like it. Wilkinson was “in love” with this business model.

When Flow added subscriptions, the service reached US$20,000 in revenue in its first month, growing 10 per cent on a monthly basis. Flow offered a 14-day free trial followed by a subscription for US$10 per month or US$99 per year.

“There was just one problem: I was consistently spending two to three times our monthly revenue and losing money. And not venture capital. Out of my personal bank account,” Wilkinson writes. He constantly reassured the CFO and considered him shortsighted; Wilkinson believed that the service would bring “Millions! Maybe billions!” so more investment was needed in it.

First appearance of Asana on the market

TechCrunch wrote in 2011 about Flow. “If you’re looking for an alternative to GTD lists, Outlook, or Basecamp, it’s certainly worth checking out.” But they also recognised that the service will also be competing with Asana, the site founded by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz who has been Mark Zuckerberg’s college roommate.

Founders of Asana Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein (who left Google in 2007) met while leading Engineering teams at Facebook. They left the company in 2008, to start a company whose product would allow teams to work together more successfully, eliminating much of the “work about work”.

Also Read: Today’s top tech news: Asana plans for direct listing, Fleetx raises US$2.8M in Series A

Wilkinson notes that the name Asana “started popping up quietly at first, then a lot”. However, when the service launched, Wilkinson breathed a sigh of relief: “It was ugly! It was designed by engineers. Complicated and hard to use. Not a threat in the slightest.”

Around the same time, Moskowitz invited Wilkinson for coffee in San Francisco.

“He walked me through who was backing them, how much cash they had, how they had hired top executives from huge companies, and that it was only a matter of time until they beat us on product and outspend us on marketing,” Wilkinson says. “He implied — in the nicest possible terms — that they were going to crush us. I laughed! ‘Nice try!’ and told him ‘let the games begin’,” writes Wilkinson.

A fart in the wind

Wilkinson believed that they had built what he felt was a superior product: the service continued to grow rapidly, users demanded a version for all platforms — iPhone, Android, iPad, Mac.

Asana quickly released clients for all platforms — it had five times as many developers as Flow, Wilkinson writes. “Suddenly it was a key feature when people compared Asana and Flow side-by-side. Mobile was table stakes,” he adds.

The entrepreneur continued to invest until they ran out: the company began to delay missing payroll and rent. Wilkinson writes that one day his business partner Chris Sparling even had to inject cash from his personal account so they wouldn’t miss payroll. By that time, he had already spent “millions of dollars.”

Asana then raised US$28 million in investment and started investing in marketing, while Flow viewed paid marketing as “douchey and aggressive” and focused on organic growth.

In an attempt to regain the market share, Flow started spending on advertising but mostly continued to focus on “making the product better than theirs”. This was the only remaining benefit of the service, but the product also began to suffer: the company did not have the money to hire more developers.

With a team that is a quarter of the size and a fraction of the money, service growth began to slow down as the company received an “endless stream of bug reports.” Meanwhile, Asana continued to hire a “huge team of incredible designers”. Flow’s team felt frustrated and under-resourced and they churned through staff.

Also Read: This project management tool from Cambodia wants to give Trello, Asana a run for their money

“One day I woke up to see that Asana had fully relaunched. Their marketing site looked … great. Better than ours … Their new app, while not perfect, had all the features we wished we had time to make, worked on more platforms, and most importantly, was fast and not buggy.”

“Even our own keywords on Google were crammed with “Asana vs. Flow” paid links. By this point, they were burning over US$150,000 per month,” says Wilkinson. “It was like Fiji waging war on the US with a collection of AK-47s and speed boats vs. artillery and aircraft carriers.”

The writing is on the wall

Then Flow decided that they didn’t need to “own that market”. They could just have a small slice of pie. They focused on base hits. For a while, that looked like an OK strategy. The revenue growth slowed, but still kept on growing.

Until one day it didn’t.

“Churn caught up with us, customer acquisition cost became unprofitable, bugs continued to dominate our time, and Asana and others kept making their product better,” Wilkinson says. “Twelve years and over US$10 million lit on fire, we are done burning money in a losing battle. We give up.
The writing is on the wall. Dustin was right.”

The company downsized and relocated the team to India to break even and support the remaining customers. At the peak of its business, Flow received about US$3 million in annual revenue, and now the average is US$900,000 per year.

Flow “lost” due to inexperience, grocery “myopia” and lack of capital, concludes Wilkinson.

Also Read: wagely bags US$5.6M to give Indonesia’s low-paid workers access to their earned wages

Wilkinson highlighted the key lessons

• If you are in a competitive VC-funded space, it’s foolish to compete without raising money. Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.
• The best product doesn’t always win, and the product is not a long-term competitive advantage.
• If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, it didn’t fall.
• Every developer in the world wakes up thinking “I should build a to-do list app” and people love jumping between productivity apps and workflows. There is no moat in productivity — avoid it if you can.
• Running a SaaS business without deeply understanding churn, LTV, CAC, etc, is like flying a plane without instrumentation — really stupid and dangerous.

• Failure sneaks up on you slowly, then all at once.
• R&D is expensive. Especially when competing with venture.
• If you’re competing on features, it never stops and is an ever-increasing line item.
• Good product with great marketing beats amazing product with no marketing.
• Bootstrapping works best in uncompetitive spaces/niches, or if you have an unfair advantage (a personal brand, unique customer acquisition channel, etc).

Dustin Moskowitz responded to Wilkinson’s thread: in his version of the story, he “did consider @awilkinson and team’s product to be a very high quality player in the space and respected the hell out of them”.

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