Imagine you’re a founder at a hot-shot early-stage startup that’s just raised a ton of money. You hire your first high profile Vice President of Engineering (VPE) after months of searching, someone who you carefully vetted and came highly recommended by credible people. And, your VPE quits after less than 24 hours on the job.

Sounds crazy? Well, it happened with a fintech startup called Clinkle, in 2013. Founded by a then-22-year old Lucas Duplan, Clinkle raised US$25 million in June, in what was then the largest seed round ever announced in Silicon Valley history. They closed on a seasoned ex-Yahoo engineering leader, Chi-Chao Chang as their first VPE in December.

Clinkle was a secretive company, and wouldn’t divulge the true state of its product and strategic road map to an outsider. The founder was only willing to let someone go under the hood after signing.

Chang on his first day found out the company was planning a round of layoffs while hiring in a bunch of new senior folks, and the product and marketing strategy were in much poorer shape than he imagined. He wasn’t scared by hard work or a product that needed serious reworking. But fundamental disagreements over where the company was headed were not something that could be fixed.

The Clinkle story serves as a cautionary tale and doesn’t apply to the vast majority of searches I’ve worked on in the USA and Asia, though I’ve seen many situations where a hire gets dragged out.

A VPE is one of the most critical (and expensive) hires that an early-stage startup can make, and getting it right can save founders a lot of heartaches and stress down the road. The talent pool for technical leaders is also smaller and more untested in Southeast Asia, which makes it more challenging.

So let’s highlight some key Dos and Don’ts when hiring your first VPE.

Let’s hear the do’s

Do be very clear on what you need from this hire:

As a founder, ask yourself, what pain points should this hire solve? What projects are stuck on the back-burner until you fill this role? Those two questions will take you a long way toward writing an effective job description.

Being clear on the specific deliverables will allow you to figure out what are hard requirements, vs nice-to-haves. I like to use the following table:

Breaking down requirements into discrete categories forces you to drill down on the critical areas. This will help in writing a more thoughtful job description to circulate to your network and recruiters.

At the same time, be realistic as to what a VPE can do. A VPE’s main job should be to focus on the people and processes to build a scalable, productive and happy engineering organisation.

Depending on the stage, this person could be given a Head or Director of Engineering title. This is different from a CTO. who’s usually someone in the founding team with a strong technical background that’s able to get the initial architecture and product off the ground and set that roadmap.

Do have your pitch down for a technical leader:

For candidates who are in high demand, you have one shot to make a first impression. For series A/B companies, the founder/CEO should always take the first meeting. This lets you put your best foot forward in articulating the company mission and how important this role is. It also allows you to learn and calibrate the best fit for your company.

For technical leaders, be prepared to talk about why what you’re building is technically challenging and interesting. One of the key duties of a VPE is to help you hire and retain engineers. They need to feel confident they can go out there and sell that.

Also Read: 5 productivity tools for busy startup founders to stay focused in 2022

It’s all well and good to highlight what a collaborative culture you have and how you provide free lunches, but what most talented engineers really want is to work on something complex they can dig into.

Do go hard after the folks you want:

For high-quality candidates, i.e. folks that people you trust refer to you (whether it’s a recruiter, VC or someone in your network),  go after them! This is not the time to sit back and think “Oh if they’re interested, they will come back to me”. Reach out directly, and quickly.

When we were hiring Uber’s first CTO, founder Travis Kalanick took it upon himself to relentlessly seek out strong candidates. The candidate lives in Seattle and couldn’t find time to come to San Francisco in the next few weeks? No problem, Travis would get on a plane the next day and fly to meet them in person. You may not be able to convince or close the candidate  but you would have left a strong impression, built a relationship, and that person may refer someone else to you.

Once you feel you’ve found the right person, go all out to close them, being flexible on compensation as needed, getting their family’s buy-in, etc.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help and call in favours, ask your VC, recruiters or board members to talk to the people you are targeting. Busy candidates can often be more responsive to an email from a known VC versus an unknown founder.

Founders in our portfolio often ask me how to interview people more senior to them; I can then connect them to seasoned VPEs to help them prepare for such interviews. People can be remarkably generous and often flattered to be asked for help.

Now, onto the don’ts

Don’t hide (all) the bad stuff, be transparent and honest:

Tying this back to the Clinkle debacle, don’t try to hoodwink candidates and tell them you’re further along than you are, have more funding than you have secured, or that you don’t have any technical debt. The truth will come out  and you want a candidate to be aware of what they’re getting into before signing on the dotted line.

Sometimes founders feel like they need to only show the good stuff and hide the stuff they are really worried about, for fear of scaring away candidates. Trust me, any experienced leader will have seen their fair share of crazy, chaotic, screwed up situations. And you can build trust early if you can embrace these and make them part of solving the problems.

Don’t rule out people who aren’t from your tribe:

Cultural fit and chemistry are extremely important. Ultimately this is someone you will be working with closely and there needs to be a ton of mutual trust and respect. But sometimes “not a cultural fit” becomes code for “this person doesn’t look, act or feel like me, therefore they must not be qualified”.

Also Read: How companies can nurture the next generation of tech talent today

Wanting people from your tribe, eg: same school, same background, same sex   is natural but can be dangerous when hiring your first external senior hires and getting to a diverse team. I am encouraged that I see this issue less in Southeast Asia, by virtue of there being so much richness in diversity and the rise of remote teams.

I once worked with an early stage fintech firm with a pretty cookie-cutter, the non-diverse engineering team of 20, looking to hire their first VPE. They were callous and in my view, disrespectful when meeting with some (qualified) candidates.

The CEO would show up late for meetings and sometimes cut the meeting short after 15 minutes when he felt the “chemistry wasn’t there”. When pressed what exactly that meant, it seemed to come down to whether the candidate was someone he would want to grab a beer with, and didn’t speak English with an accent.

It’s not wrong to rely on instinct. Our gut often tells us things that can’t be rationalised. But also be aware (especially if you are a young founder) that the things you look for and are comfortable with may lead you to exclude people who could actually be great for the job but just aren’t the “type” you are used to.

And whether you are discriminating against and ruling out people due to your unconscious biases. Take a beat to think about why some candidates resonated with you and not.

Don’t hold out for the Unicorn aka Purple Squirrel:

Back in the 2010s in Silicon Valley, we would refer to a candidate who ticked EVERY SINGLE BOX that a founder wanted as a unicorn,  elusive and mythical. Nowadays the term unicorn is used more to describe companies with billion-dollar valuations, so I’ll revert to another lesser-known term, the Purple Squirrel: this is used to describe sought-after candidates with the perfect, but often impossible, a combination of skills for a given job.

I once worked on a search for a very attractive Series D company where it took us over two years to find the right VPE candidate. During that time I went on maternity leave twice!

Did they end up with a great candidate? Yes, but the process was so long because we had a very long list of target “reach” candidates (every single VP at Google and Facebook) and there were too many people involved in the decision making, which made it easy to find something wrong with every candidate.

For founders in Southeast Asia, where the market is less developed and there aren’t as many folks who have successfully scaled multiple startups, don’t get overly focused on specific brand names, paper qualifications and pedigrees.

Google, Apple, etc were once startups but now are massive public companies. Hiring an ex-Googler does not guarantee quality and might not deliver the skillset your startup needs. Hiring someone who is very good at managing a team of 100+ engineers may not be the right person to manage a team of 25 engineers.

Also Read: Singapore faces talent crunch for engineering and product manager roles: Report

So, let go of the idea of the perfect candidate and focus more on applicable skills for the role — this will be in terms of actual hands-on qualifications and also in personality and approach.

Do you need a scrappy problem-solver, an agile team player, or a deadline-driven technician? Think about how “knows how to mentor and make people feel heard” may be more of a draw for a VPE role in your organisation than “is the best coder the world has ever seen.”

Final thoughts

In summation, a great VPE that is right for your organisation can make the difference between success and failure at the early stage. So, look beyond just technical skills and reflect on the quality of their character, and always do your reference checks and backchannels!

I welcome comments/feedback/questions which I’ll digest over time, reach me here at LinkedIn.

Disclaimer: Any content provided on this post are views of my own and does not represent the views or opinions of Monk’s Hill Ventures and its affiliates.

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The onset of the pandemic blindsided many businesses in Singapore and inadvertently placed social media at the heart of a company’s outreach strategy. It no longer became an option to have a social media presence. It was the place to see and be seen, helping brands to remain relevant and continue to engage better with their audiences.

In Singapore, there were 4.7 million social media users in 2020 (out of a total population of almost six million people), and close to 90 per cent of the population used the internet. This number is expected to grow more than 93 per cent by 2025, according to Statista, showing no signs of the digital network slowing down in the Lion City.  

Most brands jumped onto the social media bandwagon to ensure survivability, making the space crowded and noisy and easy for a company’s reach to be hampered. What’s more is today’s audience is constantly distracted and interrupted, with customer attention spans drastically dropping. 

Despite these setbacks, businesses can still organically reach and engage with communities to navigate business growth through the web, successfully. What does it take to do that?

What is organic reach?

Organic reach is a social media marketing metric measuring the number of unique accounts that have seen a post on a social media platform.  In short, it measures how many people have seen the post once.

Most importantly, organic reach excludes any reach resulting from paid promotion, and it specifically measures the natural or ‘organic’ reach of the post.

Sometimes paid promotions and ad boosts are not accessible to all, leaving businesses wondering what they can do to increase their organic reach and make sure they are interacting with the right audience. 

Here are six ways businesses can increase organic reach:

Eyeing the prize

The golden rule for businesses to engage better is to concentrate their efforts on a few platforms core to their business, as opposed to sharing content across multiple social media channels in the name of ‘spreading the word’.  

Also Read: 5 video marketing trends that marketers can leverage in 2022

There are many factors to take into account when picking and choosing the right social media platform. Where is the audience spending most of their time? What is working for the brand’s competitors? These are questions businesses should be thinking about. 

Also considering those different demographics spend different amounts of time across different platforms, while YouTube and WhatsApp are the most popular social media channels in Singapore, Facebook is currently losing interest in the eyes of the younger generation who are flocking to Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. 

Optimising social media platforms

Social media algorithms, much like search engines, are designed to find pages matching a user’s criteria and deliver them in the feed. This implies that brands should optimise social media content in the same way as a website.

Brands want to be remembered, easy to find and give their customers a smooth experience to follow through on their journey with their business. Usernames have to be readable, short and easy to remember, and photos/logos need to be recognisable to the brand.

A professional-looking social media account is more likely to ensure customers engage with the brand online. The company’s ‘about’ section and website are also key to making customers follow through with the brand from the social media platform; they need to be keyword-rich and trackable.

Trendjacking as a way to boost marketing efforts

I’ve talked about the noise already existing and cluttering the social media space. Trendjacking content provides useful information to a brand’s social media audience in a timely and relevant fashion, allowing the material to ‘work smarter’ and increase interaction rates, while retaining good sentiment. Ultimately, this benefits the brand by improving awareness.

Showcasing the brand’s social listening skills helps them build better recall and will best serve the online community, placing trust in the brand’s ability to share with their audience only what is relevant to them.  

Noting down what trends to ride, along with choosing the right content format and platform, gives businesses the ability to move quickly on the opportunities that come their way. 

Post evergreen content to social media channels

Although audience attention spans are limited, it doesn’t mean brands should give up on evergreen content. Evergreen content will be relevant and discoverable to the brand’s audience indefinitely.  Popular hashtags are a good way to make sure material can be found again. 

Also Read: Former Airbnb marketing head on building a global community through international expansion

Quality over quantity

To break through the social chatter online, brands should focus on getting their posts tailored and relevant. At times, less is more. Posting quality and relevant content than worrying about frequency and volume of content will help improve engagement. 

Target hours and social media spend

A myth that still exists is that posting during peak online periods is the greatest play, but it means brands are also publishing content when everyone else is. When waiting till non-peak hours to post, businesses will have a better chance of being heard among the noise of other postings online. 

Using an AI-powered marketing platform allows suggestions based on audience engagement so look into using tech that helps brands pinpoint the right time to post. It can also provide insights that allow brands to learn from the online interactions an audience is having with their content.

If a particular piece of content performs well organically, it will benefit from extra momentum created through ad spending and paid boosts, making the content work harder.

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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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Atma, a community-powered social job platform in Indonesia, has announced US$5 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round of funding led by AC Ventures with participation from Global Founders Capital.

The founders and executives of GoTo Group, Advance Intelligence Group, Ula, Lummo, Kopi Kenangan, Sampoerna Strategic, MMS Group and Xiaomi also joined.

The startup plans to use the money to enhance its product, execute a go-to-market strategy, and expand the team.

Atma was founded in 2022 by Edy Tan (ex-Chief of Driver at Gojek), Chris Gunawan (Co-Founder of RestoDepot and Product Executive at Vara), Susan Suhargo (ex-Strategic Initiatives at Tencent and Regional Marketing at Gojek), Tim Young (ex-investor at Atlas Asset Management and Fixed Income Trader at HSBC; and Monica Oudang (Chairperson of YABB – GoTo Foundation).

Also Read: Why cross-skilling is critical for jobs of the future (Part 2)

The venture focuses on solving pain points within the lower and middle-income job segment and intends to build an end-to-end ecosystem that includes a job marketplace, an upskilling institute and a community-based support system.

According to Atma, the current job marketplace in Indonesia has pervasive inefficiency. Companies experience several weeks of lead time from the moment they post an open position until it receives any qualified candidates. Poor recruitment processes from generating leads, screening CVs, and conducting interviews result in candidates having extremely negative experiences or no responses.

The same job search and candidate search experiences have not benefited from effective innovation. Atma sees a massive opportunity for product solutions at scale to redefine the existing job search and candidate search experiences.

“Job seekers in the lower and middle-income segment describe their job search experience as emotionally traumatising, while companies often describe their candidate search experience as a random walk. In Atma, we are building a product to redefine these experiences by overhauling existing dated systems with a first-principle approach. Simplicity, interactivity, sociability, personalisation, and gamification will be the core elements of our product,” said Atma CEO Edy Tan.

“Over 100 million active workers in the lower to intermediate level income bracket face significant inefficiencies in searching for the right job that matches their skillsets and preferences. Atma is going to help workers find the right jobs more easily and provide them with career advancement opportunities by taking additional certifications or training. They also help employers screen for applicants with more relevant qualifications. Atma will redefine the job-seeking experience and help candidates increase their potential,” said Michael Soerijadji, Founder and Managing Partner of AC Ventures.

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You’ve decided to live and work in Taiwan and begin mapping out your path to launching a business in Taiwan. But before you go any further, here are some things to think about.

Knowing if your business is a good match for Taiwan

As a hardware manufacturing hub, Taiwan is an obvious choice for multinationals like Apple, Google, and HP looking for partners and suppliers.

But zero-to-one companies may have a harder time identifying the best ways to leverage Taiwan’s capabilities. Since Taiwan’s strengths lie mostly in tech manufacturing, an SME that produces physical products, say, electric bicycles or 3D printers would have the greatest chance of success.

On the other hand, enterprises that are consumer-facing or predicated on a scale, e.g. selling a new elixir (kombucha or handcrafted beer) to Taiwan may need to rethink their plans or businesses that hope to use Taiwan as a stepping-stone to China may encounter more challenges.

Acquiring a government grant in Taiwan

Taiwan has done a great job advertising government support for start-ups. We have encountered many entrepreneurs upon their face visit to Taiwan inquiring about government grants for their startups.

It is important to understand that government grants are awarded not to individuals but to companies registered in Taiwan, so if you’re a foreign entrepreneur with a foreign company, then you need to establish a Taiwanese entity to qualify for a government grant.

Branch offices and representative offices are not eligible for grants. And while foreign workers with Taiwanese residency (ARC) are allowed to receive such subsidies, remote workers located outside Taiwan aren’t eligible. We cover this in greater detail on the process of applying for a government grant in Taiwan here.

Understanding accounting practices in Taiwan

It’s easy to assume that accounting practices are the same at home and abroad, but some aspects of Taiwan’s accounting procedures may come as a surprise.

Also Read: How remote work has changed the salary scale in Taiwan

Take business expenses as an example. In the US, business accounting operates within an “innocent-until-proven-guilty” framework, which means you can write off a business expense on your tax return with a receipt, even if it is written on a paper napkin.

But Taiwan’s business accounting framework is the opposite: you’re guilty until proven innocent. So to claim a business expense, you need to receive a Fa-Piao (發票) or a Uniform Invoice, but in order for it to be an expense deduction, you need to give the vendor your tax ID number, which needs to be typed or written on the official receipt you obtain from them.

Elsewhere, particularly in the context of start-ups, this accounting framework means that a payment you’ve made to a company registered outside Taiwan for a SaaS subscription or to a freelancer in Chiang Mai won’t be recognised by the Taiwanese government as a valid business expense. These are only two examples of how accounting practices in Taiwan can be completely different from other places.

Navigating the regulatory environment in Taiwan

Startups today are built for a digital, cross-border world, but managing cross-country jurisdictions can be a real huge headache from an administrative standpoint. Taiwan may be a liberal and open country, but when it comes to business practices it’s still relatively conservative.

Also Read: 5G tech? All eyes on Taiwan

The government in Taiwan oversees much of daily business. Taiwanese labour law, for example, takes precedence over any agreement that may be signed between a company and its employees, so employers and employees can’t enter into any private agreements as they would be able to, say, in the US.

And since the Taiwanese government plays a big role in business, foreign business owners will likely find themselves having to talk to multiple agencies to get answers to their business questions. This is where a service like 11th Fleet can help simplify the process.

11th Fleet’s outsourced CFO/COO solution can help avoid many missteps for entrepreneurs and companies that are new to Taiwan. Most importantly, 11th Fleet can help stave off trouble by helping its clients anticipate any problems that may arise along the way, saving its clients valuable time and money by avoiding detours.

Overcoming the language barrier in Taiwan

Taiwan is closer to Japan and South Korea in terms of English fluency than it is to Singapore or Hong Kong, where English is spoken as an official language.

Although the Taiwanese government is committed to making the country bilingual by 2030, business in Taiwan is still largely conducted in Mandarin, and business contracts and documents are written in Chinese.

This means foreign investors who aren’t fluent in the local language must take the extra step to have their official documents and contracts translated when registering their businesses in Taiwan.

Moreover, when you are ready for business, you should have someone on your team who can help you navigate the language and cultural barriers.

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A recent study by Accenture and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) showed that consumers want more courses of action that enable a circular economy by ensuring longer shelf life and reuse of products in a bid to tackle the impact of climate change. This includes better packaging design and recycling of waste. In fact, over 30 per cent of consumers ranked sustainable ingredients and packaging as top factors in choosing sustainable disposal options in everyday shopping.

This demand is understandable considering the fact that the environmental impact of food packaging is enormous. While modern food packaging provides a way to make food safe, reliable, shelf-stable and clean, unfortunately, most of them are designed to be single-use. This means they are typically thrown away rather than reused or recycled, especially in places with substandard waste management.

This is why barePack and &Repeat are calling for more collective efforts to sustain the planet.

To put an end to single-use packaging in the restaurant business, these two players have come together to offer a more complete and unique circular economy solution for the food industry in Europe and Asia. &Repeat is an app that financially rewards people when they recycle their food packaging while barePack is a reuse network in Southeast Asia and France.

In Singapore, barePack and &Repeat function as a reuse ecosystem where people can order their food as usual. However, instead of receiving it in single-use containers, they will receive their meal in beautiful reusable boxes. After their meal, the user can drop off the containers anywhere in the network, at any partner restaurant.

Also Read: Why GoImpact believes that education is the key to promoting ESG investment

Recently &Repeat has completed the acquisition of barePack as part of their effort to rapidly scale towards greener choices.

In an exclusive interview with e27, &Repeat CEO and Co-Founder Tor Espen shares about the acquisition of the company. “With the acquisition comes the ambition for an even bigger impact. We want to move the industry and society toward more sustainable practices and behaviours, whether it is recycling or reuse. To support this transformation we are aligning the two brands and barePack will probably become &Repeat in the long run when we merge the two user journeys (recycling and reuse).”

He further says, “More than 9,000 single-use packagings are thrown away every second. We all know it causes water pollution in Asia and everywhere in the world. We need to reduce drastically the number of single-use items and we decided to launch &Repeat in order to create an ecosystem where restaurants and users go together to battle these challenges.”

As part of their mission, the two companies have been allocating resources to train and educate the clients of their partner restaurants on the matters of waste reduction, recycling and reuse.

&Repeat and barePack are now operating in Singapore, Sweden and France with more than 70,000 users on board, aiming to make a change and apply zero waste concepts to their everyday life. Besides they are also preparing the launch the service in at least one other European country by the end of 2022.

Espen further elaborates, “We are already the leader in circular packaging solutions for food in Europe and Asia, but we picture &Repeat to be a much broader movement with a significant impact on waste reduction. We need to onboard the people who already are making a change in their daily life and those who are not there yet.”

Also Read: How consumers are prioritising sustainability beyond the single lens of eco-friendly products

Looking back at their important milestones and future plans, Espen says, “The acquisition of barePack, reaching 50,000 users and launching to new countries is pretty amazing milestones and it’s only the beginning!”

&Repeat itself raised EUR3 million in 2021 and is preparing new fundraising for 2022 to support its goals promote the circular economy in the market it is operating.

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Image Credit: barePack

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