Fresh off US$12M funding round, Loship aims for US IPO
The Vietnamese delivery startup hopes to debut on the NYSE by 2024 after reaching profitability in 18-24 months; It has attracted 2M customers so far; In Vietnam, the company faces more than a dozen rivals from Gojek and Grab.

ALAMI raises US$17.5M Series A+ led by EV Growth, Quona Capital
In January, the Shariah-compliant P2P lender raised ~US20M in debt and equity; Some strategic angels from the Middle East, which were previously involved in SoftBank’s Vision Fund, also joined the round; The move was said to be paving the way for Alami’s expansion into that region.

VNG mulling public listing via SPAC merger at US$3B valuation: report
The first tech unicorn in Vietnam, VNG counts companies including GIC, Temasek and Goldman Sachs among its high-profile investors; GIC, Temasek and Goldman Sachs are among high-profile investors; The firm has been considering a potential listing for several years.

SubPlace raises US$2.4M for its smart lock product in 4 days of launching ECF campaign
The startup plans to set up 250 brand stores across Malaysia within the next 5 years, with an expected uptake of over 100K new users; SubPlace plans to launch in October this year at the price of ~US$566.

AC Ventures, Kenangan Fund join Durianpay’s US$2M round led by Surge
Durianpay provides small e-commerce merchants with a one-stop solution for “frictionless checkout and easy-to-integrate modern APIs and dashboards”; The firm offers businesses and developers access to a broader range of payment options and a no-code interface.

BRI Ventures, SBM ITB team up to launch Indonesia’s first VC courses
The curriculum is designed to help students learn about basic venture investment principles, gain exposure to various startup ecosystems; SBM ITB will open the VC courses under both undergraduate and graduate programmes at its Jakarta and Bandung campuses.

SG fintech startup M-DAQ bags Series D from Affinity Equity Partners
M-DAQ provides specialised tech-enabled financial services to enterprise customers and other downstream fintech companies; Its proprietary FX solutions process over US$7.4B in cross-border transactions annually.

Thai online media platform Ookbee bags funding from Tencent, Sumitomo
It will use the funding to acquire new users across its existing platforms, expand its business across the region, and develop new products; Ookbee operates e-book stores as well as user-generated content platforms across SEA.

Singapore edutech accelerator EduSpaze selects 8 firms for its third cohort
They are Akadasia, myFirst, Schoters, Kalpha, and ZenGengo, among others; Participants can get up to US$370K in funding from EduSpaze and will also receive mentor support and have the chance to implement pilot projects during the programme.

How to successfully build and run a business with minimum capital
One of the first steps in starting a business is to conduct research to identify a gap in the market; Another important aspect of running and owning a business venture is to work on providing a great consumer experience through efficient customer service.

3 factors affecting e-commerce trends in Vietnam
The e-commerce landscape is dominated by three large companies: Shopee, Lazada and Tiki; With a higher monthly traffic count, Shopee seems to be the clear winner at the moment; The e-commerce platform is a cash burner and that’s the reason why you see several rounds happening for Tiki as Lazada is owned by Alibaba now and Shopee belongs to the SEA group.

5 hottest healthtech startups in Malaysia
The current state of healthtech in Malaysia is proof that the country is following through with its objectives; It is teeming with successful digital health startups, including wearables, applications, and platforms that make healthcare more accessible than ever before.

Embedded finance won’t make every firm into a fintech company
Embedded finance helps companies and brands outside of the core financial sector distribute financial services; This requires varying levels of effort from the company and looks like anything from Starbucks offering an integrated wallet and payments within its app to Lyft offering a debit card to their drivers; But that doesn’t make Starbucks or Lyft fintech companies.

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Image Credit: Loship

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Adobe’s people-centric culture has been a hallmark of our success since the company’s founding in 1982, and we are very pleased to have recently been named a 2021 Great Place To Work-Certified company in Singapore.

Last year, when it became clear that work was never going back to the way things were, we saw an opportunity and the need to reimagine the employee experience and develop a future of work approach that leverages the best of in-person and virtual interactions to foster creativity, innovation, and culture.

Digital experiences are transforming how people connect, work, learn, and play. The acceleration of digital in the last 18 months has massively changed the nature of work– and that in turn, has changed the way employees are expecting to work today and post-pandemic.

Adobe put together a team composed of members from different functions to learn from the best of the last year and a half and set the vision for how we would work next.

We conducted interviews and focus groups with hundreds of employees, managers and leaders across various locations, organisations, and tenure, and we regularly surveyed our global employee population to draw a vast array of insights to both inform our plans and test our hypotheses to create a future model that would work best for Adobe.

Here’s what we found.

The future of work at Adobe will be hybrid

• Being digital-first will be critical: As the digital experiences company, we will double down on digital tools and workflows across the employee experience – from onboarding and career development to collaboration and community, to enable our people to be productive working wherever they are.
• Flexibility will be the default: Adobe employees will have the option to work from home approximately 50 per cent of the time and in the office the remainder of the time. We’re empowering individuals and teams to figure out the working cadences that are best for them.
• We’ll gather for the moments that matter: We will have an intentional mix of physical and virtual presences, with in-person gatherings driven by purpose and designed for collaboration.
• Remote work will expand: We believe in the value of in-person interactions however we know that in some cases, a remote work arrangement makes sense for Adobe and the individual. So, we’ve established criteria and guidelines on remote work which we’ll be rolling out in phases globally, and then continue to learn and iterate to make this model successful.

Also Read: A new approach to hybrid working: Let the employees decide when, how and where to work

The employee experience evolution

Adobe’s sweet spot is at the intersection of technology and creativity, so it’s only natural that we lean into our strengths to design the workplace of the future. Our aim is to provide an exceptional employee experience, regardless of location, and intentionally leverage the best of different workplace settings.

We recognise the work-from-home era isn’t necessarily reflective of the future, but there’s the behavioural insight we can draw to inform how we work in this next chapter.

For example, we’ve increasingly traded email for real-time messaging; the desire for community building and informal interactions has heightened, and we’re seeing greater adoption of asynchronous collaboration methods in place of meetings.

At the centre of this transformation is our new smart digital campus app– Adobe Life –an award-winning digital experience, designed with Adobe products, as a solution to power our new hybrid workforce.

As with everything we do, Adobe Life was created with our people in mind, drawing insights from employees’ workstyles, workflows, and workspaces. The app is ripe with functionality to help employees stay productive, connected, informed, and well.

It meets employees where they are. Each office has its own digital campus in the app, serving as a hub of curated news and information catered to their location, including re-entry updates, wayfinding, and conference room bookings.

Employees can stay connected to each other with personalised community engagement and custom notifications powered by artificial intelligence.

And this is just the beginning. We recognise that we have a lot to learn and that evolving how we work will be a long-term transformation. The hybrid future of work is here to stay, and we know that one size doesn’t fit all.

Organisations, large and small, will need to determine how that ‘hybrid’ will look like for them and start putting in place the digital solutions they will need to build that future.

One challenge that many organisations face when transforming for the future of work is legacy workflows. In today’s fast-changing environment, addressing the issue of legacy systems means moving to more flexible technologies that digitise more or all of the workflow steps, and using cloud-based services to deliver this quickly and at a more optimal cost.

Also Read: How to be an effective product team manager as your team grows

To help with that, Adobe has recently announced the availability of Adobe Sign and Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service hosted locally in the Microsoft Azure Southeast Asia region data centre located in Singapore, bringing expanded digital experience management and e-signing capabilities onshore to support local organisations in their future of work vision.

We’ve also introduced the new Live Sign in Microsoft Teams – available later this year – that will offer e-signing that feels like an in-person experience. For example, remote teams can go through the details of a project document on a Teams video call while capturing their e-signatures for approvals – all without leaving Teams.

As remote and hybrid work becomes a mainstay of the future of work, we can expect to see more digital innovations incorporated into employee experience and workflows.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast or infographic

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Image credit: Sigmund

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People matter. Seventy-four per cent of CEOs are concerned about finding talent with the right skills. The third biggest killer of startups is ‘the wrong team’. Even in the era of algorithms, game-changing businesses are built by game-changing people.

With all these challenges identified, how can we identify and attract the right venture talent for corporate ventures?  What do founders even want?

Three simple factors

Over the past decade, we’ve built and invested in ventures with more than 100 of the world’s biggest and best corporations.  Talent, and particularly a difficulty attracting the right sort of entrepreneurial talent, has been a constant theme.

With the intensity of competition for venture talent heating up here in Singapore, we’ve looked to the data to understand how corporates can get ahead.

We’ve spent the past month engaging with 30 founders from across the entrepreneurial spectrum to understand more about why they would or wouldn’t be open to joining a corporate venture.

We’ve found three extraordinarily simple factors that corporations need to get right to attract the right sort of venture talent: Equity, freedom and metrics.

Fire and seasoning

Firstly, how should corporations define the ‘right’ talent? Like cooking a steak – it’s a matter of seasoning and fire. Specifically, we look for seasoned founders forged by the fire of Venture Capital.

Let’s look at the data.

Studies show that ventures with teams who founded three prior startups were nearly 50 per cent more likely to survive, regardless of whether the previous startups were successes or failures.  These teams also logged 11 per cent more sales than teams with no startup experience.

The more experienced the founder, the higher the chances of venture success.

The quantitative data here is more limited.  However, from our experience building 60 ventures and making 1,000 investments into startups, we see time and again that Founders who have previously raised Venture Capital funding consistently outperform others in a corporate venture environment.

Having been accountable for every dollar they spend they know what it takes to deliver on someone else’s investment. Importantly, they also know when to push ahead independently and when to selectively involve investors – a difficult balance to strike.

Also Read: The “shmart” entrepreneur: Skills entrepreneurs need to become future-ready

Build it and they will come?

So we’re looking for seasoned founders who have been forged by the fire of VC.  Most of the corporations we work with assume these people are pretty unlikely to join a corporate environment.

On the surface this seems a fair assumption – why would they join?  But the data tells a different story.

So we’re in the game, what are the rules?

First, we have the talent magnets, the reasons why founders are so open to corporate ventures.  Overwhelmingly, these are:

• Easier access to capital
• Ability to accelerate scale through corporate assets
• The chance to make a bigger impact on the world

The first rule of the game – understand why founders are open to the conversation and are careful to keep these things in mind.

Handling the hurdles

Then we have the hurdles, the reasons why founders might hesitate.  Get these right and the talent pool is wide open.

Equity

Our founders overwhelmingly prioritise equity over salary. In fact, the more experienced (number of previous startups) and the more successful (number of exits) the founder, the more important equity becomes to them.

Equity is not something corporations are used to giving up and it can be tricky to structure, particularly in more heavily regulated industries.  Is it really worth the trouble?

Our data and our experience say ‘absolutely’. Can you attract a founder on a salary?  Sure. Can you attract a seasoned founder forged by the fire of VC?  Probably not.

Also Read: Lucy, a Singaporean neobank focused on women entrepreneurs, bags seed funding

Freedom

Corporations often assume politics and bureaucracy to be the key “founder repellents”. We were surprised to find this wasn’t the case for many founders. Instead, the killer “repellent” for many founders was a concern around autonomy.

Seasoned founders forged by the fire of VC are comfortable with the high-accountability-high-autonomy relationship between founder and investor.  They live and die by their own decisions, and investors back them to do that.

Founders worry they will not get the same backing in a corporate context, and that their ability to truly lead the venture would inevitably be limited by the hierarchical and risk-averse nature of corporate decision-making processes.

Metrics

Finally, misaligned metrics and measurement is a key concern for founders.

Founders need to be confident that the success metrics set for the venture are appropriate and will remain so in the long term.  For most founders, this means measuring the ventures by their market performance rather than internal KPIs.

In particular, many of the founders worried that corporates had unrealistic time expectations when it comes to short-term revenue generation.  Founders expect to play a long-term game building equity value and are wary of being trapped into a short-term revenue generation game.

This also belies a suspicion from some founders around corporate motivations.  They expect to dedicate four to eight years of their life to building a new venture.  Before they invest that time, they need to be confident that the goalposts won’t move.

Also Read: How app entrepreneurs are growing multifold in Southeast Asia

Hearing from the venture talent themselves

To illustrate the data, let’s hear from two very different founders on their views of the corporate venture world.

Sophie Soowon Eom, CEO & Co-Founder of Adriel and Serial Entrepreneur, pinpoints some uniquely entrepreneurial traits and shares her honest thoughts on heading back to the corporate space. For a contrasting view from the inside of the corporate venture world Jeremy Youker, Senior Venture Architect and Founder at Longship Partners, discusses the complementary nature of the Founder-Corporate partnership.

What are the defining entrepreneurial traits that make you, and others like you, a great Founder?

Besides the obvious traits like mission-oriented, relentless, and flexible, a lot of the great founders I’ve met look and sound like they’re from the future! They’re truly convinced about what they believe is not going to happen in the market, what’s going to be the next big trend, where the opportunities are, and what potential risks they have to navigate.

Because they’re so convinced about what the next big thing that will change the world will be there they’re sometimes even willing to be misunderstood. Like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos once said, they can see solutions, threats, and eventual problems that most people don’t see. Their predictions are combinations of intuition and very well-calculated scenarios, which often turn out to be right.

What have you gained from your time as a serial entrepreneur that you couldn’t get during your time in the corporate world? 

Before I became an entrepreneur, I felt like I had to please literally everyone, even in situations where unanimous decisions were not optimal for the company’s long-term growth. After founding two startups, I learned how to be tough when necessary – a skill that’s crucial in being able to make a great impact. With that lesson learned, I exited my first startup, which provided me with funds a typical corporate employee would never be able to dream of.

What would it take to convince you to take up an offer to get back into the corporate world? 

A big plus would be that you get to know and work with many different people for different purposes. But even on these terms, I personally, would never want to go back because the startup communities are becoming so sophisticated and make for an extremely valuable network as well. I love being an entrepreneur in the startup scene. It’s tough, but you gain a lot, learn many lessons, and grow every year.

What must corporates do, be or have in order to attract and retain top Founders?

Ultimately, entrepreneurs bring the mindset, the behaviour, and the expertise on how to scale – essentially from zero to growth. They have very driving personalities which means they’re looking to make decisions as quickly as possible, with just enough information to validate their idea before getting things done. Corporates, in order to attract and keep top entrepreneurial talent within the corporate itself, need to make room for this type of behaviour.

Also Read: Entrepreneurship is at an all time high, but are you doing it right?

Entrepreneurs going into a new corporate venture, or founders, are looking for industry expertise, industry connections, and the ability to leverage some of the corporate assets. What they would be expecting from the corporate is really clear access to those assets that can give them an unfair advantage. This could be access to data, industry expertise, go-to-market distribution channels, Intellectual Property, technology leveraging brand credibility.

What are the biggest challenges or barriers facing corporates in attracting top entrepreneurial talent to lead their corporate ventures? 

Generally, large corporates are not seen as the most innovative, or agile space where an entrepreneur can operate. Entrepreneurs are looking for an environment where they can move quickly, make decisions on their own without a lot of oversight and have freedom in their own operations. But, entrepreneurs don’t recognize the value that a corporate can bring, like access to corporate assets which boosts their ability to really accelerate a new venture.

Part of what we do at Rainmaking is to look for those assets and how we really can give an “unfair advantage” to a new venture. Corporations looking to do corporate venturing would be well-served by taking a close look at themselves, what corporate assets they could offer to new ventures, then working internally, to smooth the way for access to those assets as new ventures are developed.

It is no surprise that Corporate Venture Building is a universe fraught with the cultural inconsistencies of traditional corporations and innovative ventures. This makes the right talent challenging for corporations to attract, although one that is absolutely vital to overcome in order to succeed.

We have learned that the challenge clearly lies in alleviating the skepticism founders have about the motivations and intentions of corporations and we believe that the most efficient way to achieve that will be for corporations to work on the 3 key factors of Equity, Freedom & Metrics, to a degree worth boasting about.

This article is written as part of the Corporate Venture Launchpad programme. The S$10 million pilot programme by EDB New Ventures aims to enable large, established companies new to corporate venturing to launch a new venture in Singapore within six months, supported by venture studios experienced in corporate venture building.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast or infographic

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This article runs in collaboration with Makan For Hope, a non-profit initiative by Asia Startup Network. The Makan For Hope Festival brings notable mentors and aspiring entrepreneurs in 30 meaningful virtual conversations over food from social enterprises to raise S$125,000 for Fei-Yue to support the children and seniors from low income families.

People, team, culture, and leadership are topics brought up frequently by current and aspiring entrepreneurs at the Makan for Hope Festival roundtables. On July 27, Samuel Rhee, co-founder of Endowus and former CEO and CIO of Morgan Stanley Investment Management in Asia, hosted a roundtable discussion on how to build a team and maintain it.

In this 90-minute session, ten participants had the opportunity to tap into Rhee’s decades-long leadership experience across small and large organisations and had many questions answered on the fundamentals of building a successful company – including building powerful teams.

Culture sets the tone for how people are brought together

Corporation originates from the Latin word corporare, which means to “combine in one body”. Organisation is from organisacioun, meaning “act or process of organising, the arranging of parts in an organic whole”.

The etymology guides us on how these entities operate by way of uniting their parts. We do so on the basis of companionship, which is at the essence of the word company that combines com (together) and pani (bread) to mean “share bread together”.

Leading a corporation, organisation, or company therefore necessitates bringing people together. Culture and common values define the way. “What a company espouses may not necessarily just be about winning, like a professional sports team, which is a popular analogy these days”, shared Rhee.

He advised to think of a professional team with a sense of companionship and closeness, like members of a family. Leaders can then try to answer the question of what kind of culture the team would like to create to this end.

Though Rhee admits to “still learning along the way”, he and his co-founder Gregory Van have managed to build what was, until recently, a completely bootstrapped and 100 per cent employee-owned company with virtually no turnover in its product/engineering teams. These teams take up more than half of the company and are carefully recruited.

Also Read: How to build a strong remote workforce for startups

For Endowus, developing a strong mission-driven culture has been central to its team-building endeavours. The leaders strived to ground themselves in the mission, vision, and purpose of the company and articulate them across teams at every step of the way – focusing on solving real problems for investors in Singapore and Asia makes a meaningful difference in people’s lives and in securing their financial future.

They are also focused on raising the quality of financial education and level of financial literacy through Endowus Insights and webinars, for which the company is well known.

As a company grows, bringing the many people together and rallying the common values across the organisation can become more challenging. Charles Debonneuil, President of Intrepid Group and former CMO of Lazada, shared his experience of facing such challenges and remarked on the importance of aligning leaders across different locations. Likewise, by working well with the evangelists within the company who champion its core values and “spread the good word”, the core leadership team can “trickle-down” the key messages more effectively across offices.

The vibrant discussion covered a wide range of issues that spanned how to go about looking for a co-founder, how leaders should spend time with teams, how to instinctively determine a good hire, and how to create a coherent culture across offices, to name a few. Below is a recap of key insights shared.

Key takeaways on how to attract and build a team

The most important thing in attracting and selecting a founding team is to ensure that the members are aligned with the mission of the company. If people do not truly believe in the mission, eventually, it may not work no matter how impressive their capabilities are. Once aligned, the members should be able to balance out each others’ weaknesses with their diverse strengths and skillsets.

Leaders should focus on:

• Meaning and purpose – Endowus team built a mission and purpose-driven organisation, which provides meaning to their employees. With this, there is little need for management to micromanage them. As long as the right types who are aligned with the values of the company are hired, they will perform to a high level with independence and integrity.
• Safety and security – Leaders should be able to provide a sense of security and a safety net for people to do their best work. Ensuring psychological safety for people to take risks with their ideas and know that there are no dumb questions is very important. Basic questions asked and answered in early stages set up teams for better execution and reduce mistakes down the road. It is advisable for leaders to facilitate the conversations so that both extroverts and introverts can speak up. They should also spend enough time with new recruits in the beginning so that the role, goals, expectations, and tools to aid the work process are well defined.
• Connected community within the company – People need to feel connected and need one another to succeed. It is therefore crucial for leaders to constantly work on facilitating relationships. Having superstars is great but they will not solve all of the problems.
• Empathy and responsiveness – Building a good sense of togetherness require empathy and responsiveness towards employees. These are also critical in working together effectively. Effectiveness is more important than efficiency in achieving good outcomes over the long term. Building a lasting business requires investment in relationships both internally and externally.
• In hiring a team, Endowus tries to understand people’s motivations and aspirations to determine the fit, in addition to mutually learning about each other through case studies. The fit may be more intangible than tangible so there is no one-size-fits-all. In the same context, Endowus has a flexible approach to compensation structure as everybody’s needs are different. Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) are handed out to provide the opportunity for employees to own the company and conform to one of its core values – alignment. This entails aligning to the best interest of the clients they serve and internally to their team.
• In building and maintaining a team, focus on the people and not the work. Leaders should care about the things that people care about, whether it be money, environment, learning opportunities. It is down to the leader to assess individuals’ needs and capabilities and create an environment for success.
• As a company grows larger in size, there will be more management challenges especially with regards to how time is spent with different teams. It is important to break it down to levels, such as team level, business unit level, and individual level, to ultimately create a flow of management whereby senior leaders delegate down to make the business run organically. By doing this people are given the opportunity to grow, take on more independent initiatives, and flourish in their roles. A flexible mindset on people’s work versus pigeon-holing people is important in this respect. This is more of an art rather than science.

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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast or infographic

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community or like the e27 Facebook page

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Jenfi, a Singapore-based alternative revenue-based financing company for digital-native businesses and startups in Southeast Asia, has raised US$6.3 million in a Series A funding round led by Monk’s Hill Ventures.

Korea Investment Partners, Golden Equator Capital, 8VC, ICU Ventures, and Taurus Venture joined the round.

As per a press statement, the startup will use the fresh capital for product development, customer acquisition, and market expansion in Southeast Asia.

Previously, the Y Combinator graduate bagged US$25 million in a debt round led by San Francisco-based early-stage credit fund Arc Labs, with the participation of Gluwa, the co-creators of CreditCoin. It also counts Atlas Ventures, Next Billion Ventures, Stormbreaker Ventures, VentureSouq Capital, and Iterative among its existing investors.

Jenfi was started by Jeffrey Liu and Justin Louie, co-founders of fitness subscription company GuavaPass which was acquired by ClassPass in 2019. The startup provides flexible funding options for companies looking to scale their businesses through increased marketing, inventory, and growth campaigns.

Also Read: How revenue-based financing will help unbanked and underbanked businesses flourish

Unlike traditional lenders that focus on a company’s financial statements, Jenfi monitors and underwrites businesses through a qualification process with alternative data sources. These sources include the likes of accounting software (e.g. Xero, Quickbooks), payment gateways (e.g. Stripe, Braintree), merchant platforms (e.g. Shopify, Shopee, Lazada), and digital advertising (Facebook and Google Ads).

Indicators such as the creditworthiness of a business, the efficiency of growth spending, the health of the companies, real-time data on revenue growth, and marketing ROI are all considered.

Business owners and entrepreneurs can avail up to US$500,000 of non-dilutive growth capital in return for a small percentage of future revenue instead of a fixed repayment schedule.

The company claims that it has backed over 100 businesses, including B2B and SaaS businesses such as Tier One Entertainment, Pay With Split, and Homebase.

The company boasts that its average customer achieves a significant amount of compounded sales growth, ranging from above 26.5 per cent over three months to more than 156 per cent over 12 months.

By July 2022, Jenfi plans to deploy US$15 million in non-dilutive capital.

“Online merchants and digital-enabled businesses are burgeoning, and these same businesses are taking advantage of the exponential growth of e-commerce and digital marketing. It’s time for lenders to evolve,” said CEO Liu. “We built Jenfi with the vision to help these businesses grow and to partner with owners for the long-term without them giving up any equity.”

Susli Lie, venture partner at Monk’s Hill Ventures, said in a statement that Jenfi is blazing a path for how digital-first companies do the financing.

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Image Credit: Jenfi

The post GuavaPass co-founders’ new alternative lending startup Jenfi lands US$6.3M led by Monk’s Hill appeared first on e27.

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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