Going into 2022, Victor Lim and the team realised they needed to do something different to stay ahead of the curve in the cloud kitchen industry. The Philippines economy was re-opening, and dine-in was hitting pre-pandemic numbers, so the timing was perfect for experimenting with new features.
“We were originally working on an interactive VR experience in a virtual food hall concept. However, we couldn’t achieve that ‘wow’ experience we looked for. So we shifted gears, and in the end, we found a much better way by launching the Kra-Verse Food Hall (KFH),” Lim, Co-Founder and CEO Kraver’s Group (operator of the cloud kitchen startup Kraver’s Canteen), tells e27.
Kra-Verse Food Hall is a concept developed by Kraver’s Group to provide an interactive metaverse experience for F&B brands. Customers can walk into the ‘buildings’ of its brand partners, explore the virtual food hall, and run to other customers walking around in the space with live video capabilities. The KFH staff walk around as ‘waiters’, taking live orders and answering customers’ questions.
“The objective here is to recreate the experience of an offline food brand, wherein customers can walk in, browse menus, and order their favourite dishes. Being online-only brands, cloud kitchen startups don’t get the same branding and offline recognition benefits as other brands, which is a disadvantage. By utilising these new technologies, we just found a way to turn our digital nativity into an advantage,” Lim explains.
Kra-Verse Food Hall is a collection of six in-house online brands, including CharSilog, Jok Time Lugaw, I Love U, Stew, Everything Gravy’d, and krave. The firm has also partnered with US-based D. Wade Burger, a brand owned by NBA legend Dwyane Wade. Kraver’s Canteen will operate the brand exclusively in the Philippines and set up meet-n-greets and various activities for Wade to connect deeper with the archipelago.
As part of the KFH project, Kraver’s Canteen has also introduced a new self-heating technology. It utilises activated carbon and measured distilled water to create a ‘self-heating’ chemical reaction, which keeps the food hot for up to 15 minutes.
The team also explores new use cases for this technology, from boiling stews to sizzling platters, melted nacho cheese to dessert fondues.
The Philippines is a fast-growing market for Web3 and metaverse. There are different versions of and applications for metaverse technology, and many of them are doing well in the Philippines. The Philippines is a key market for the popular play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, which is a rage among the youth. It shows the incredible cycle of growth in technology and innovation in the country in general, particularly these last few years. Kraver’s aims to leverage this growth to introduce new products.
“Kra-Verse Food Hall is just one of the most immediate and fun things we were able to set up for the customers that apply this technology, but we are also investing in other applications,” Lim notes. “We will pilot its first dine-in location in Makati in partnership with Kaya Founders to enable diners to enjoy a plated meal from Kraver’s while browsing and purchasing NFTs from local artists and creators. This space is intended for founders and funders to get together with an augmented meta-experience.”
Lim says he is excited about the metaverse space and its future potential for artists, creators, and brands. “It’s super interesting because there are so many different forms of metaverses and applications that may be relevant for various brands. We found a fun way to use this technology for the F&B space. Still, the space would be equally as exciting for instant commerce brands or any other plays that leverage the digital economy, online-first,” he concludes.
Launched in 2020 by Lim, Eric Dee, and Victor Mapua, Kraver’s is backed by Quest Ventures and Foxmont Capital. The startup recently raised a US$3 million Series A round led by Quest Ventures Asia Fund II. This came almost a year after securing a US$1.5 million seed round led by Foxmont Capital.
The cloud kitchen’s list of investors also includes Brian Cu, Christopher Po, George Pua, Lance Gokongwei, Paulo Campos III, the Foodee Group, Oak Drive Ventures, Martin Cu, Francis Wee, Anthony Oundjian and Rohit Gulati.
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A few months back, I needed help hiring a few great freelancers. So I naturally posted on LinkedIn asking for recommendations.
Within 24 hours, my inbox got flooded with messages from all sorts of agencies. I had such a hard time going through all messages that I needed to pull in one of my colleagues to help.
At first glance, that sounds like a great success. I needed help and got plenty of options. But when I started looking deeper, 95 per cent of all messages came from mediocre agencies. Their websites were terrible. I could not find any social proof, and the people reaching out to me were way too pushy. Rather than trying to understand my needs, they tried to force their way in.
So I copied the same message and shared it in a few paid communities where I am a member. Organisations such as OnDeck, Reforge, and DemandCurve. A few days later, I met a great copywriter who is currently working with us. The volume of requests was lower, but the quality was substantially higher.
That was not the first time when I tried to source great talent or insights via platforms such as LinkedIn, Quora, and Facebook –and got disappointed. Please note that I am pretty active on LinkedIn with about 5,500 followers, many of them highly curated connections.
Despite that, over time, I have decreased my outreaches via LinkedIn and doubled down on paid communities. Communities where the members are fewer but better curated. That has helped me spend less time on unqualified prospects and more time-solving hard problems.
The more I reflect on that experience, the more I start seeing value in two upcoming verticals:
Paid communities
NFTs
Paid communities and a brief history of the internet
Web1
In Web1, we discovered the internet through dial-up modems, which helped us access static web pages. By today’s standards, web1 was a laughable experience. I still remember how an average movie took three days to download during my childhood. The internet was slow, expensive, and had a terrible user experience.
Yet, the fact that we could share information so easily with the entire world had an incredible impact on our progress. Before the internet, we relied on printed books. We could spread information only at the speed of physical distribution. Access to information was slow, gated, and not even possible in some parts of the world.
Platforms such as Craiglist got a lot of traction because they served as digital yellow pages. Yes, indeed, the experience of browsing such venues was not extraordinary. But users could easily access organised directories of relevant information like never before in human history.
Web2
Throughout the past 10 to 20 years, we have seen the rise of the second wave of the internet, the so-called Web2. Three core innovations enabled Web2:
Mobile
Social
Cloud
All those innovations unleashed many attempts to unbundle well-established, horizontal marketplaces. The classic example here is the unbundling of Craiglist:
It is important to note that the image above points out only the success cases. Many startups attempted similar approaches but failed. Some disruptors lacked the necessary frequency of usage. Other, adequate business models to build sustainable businesses.
Yet, the startups that survived have often turned out to be more powerful than the entire horizontal platform as a whole. In other words, niche products can have a substantially better user experience. That allows them to capture a massive market share from both digital and analogue players.
“The moral of the story is this: In all but a few circumstances, the broad horizontal verticals eventually break. They become a victim of their own success. As the platforms grow, their submarkets grow too; their product gets pulled in a million different directions. Users get annoyed with an experience and business that caters to the lowest common denominator.
“And suddenly, what was previously too small a market to care about is a very interesting place for a standalone newco. Like clockwork, a new wave of innovation begins to swell, picking off the compelling verticals the new horizontal players cannot satisfy,” says Jeff Jordan and D’Arcy Coolican.
Let’s go back to LinkedIn and how its value has been slowly depleting. As the platform grows and attempts to monetise more verticals, the experience for the average user degrades.
“The unbundling of Linkedin will create 20+ companies worth US$5 billion+. Heavily segmented, heavily verticalised, with highly specific functionality for each vertical. Let the unbundling of Linkedin begin,” says Harry Stebbings on Twitter.
LinkedIn is an excellent platform for some use cases. For example, think of recruiters and salespeople. But for more specialised verticals like blue-collar workers, engineers, or healthcare professionals, the platform fails to create the minimum necessary value.
To prove this point, consider the growing number of highly specialised startups: engineering (Hired), blue-collar (Wonolo), healthcare professionals (Docquity), hospitality (Pared), oil and gas (Workrise), bookkeeping (Paro), etc.
Each of those platforms builds digital experiences that are considerably better. Specialisation results in more personalisation and contextualisation for both candidates and employers than the generic LinkedIn model.
The future of consumer social
I do not mean to pick on LinkedIn alone, though. I think the same statement is true for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other similar platforms. The market is big enough for everyone. I expect those platforms to continue to exist and deliver value to shareholders. After all, the winners of the Web2 era helped us to:
Discover and connect with people and companies around the world
Build digital profiles and a sense of credibility on the web
Databases of opportunities around the globe
Valuable content and permissionless ability to create
But it does feel like those winners have started to stagnate. At such a scale, it’s simply too difficult to cater to everyone’s needs. Therefore, there are opportunities to unbundle further and thus create niche communities. Platforms that would be smaller by design but will have 10x better experiences.
The intersection of communities and education: OnDeck
Now let’s take the opposite stance and study niche communities. In particular, I would like to review OnDeck.
Everyone who knows me well has heard of OnDeck. I am pretty impressed with what the company has achieved in such a short period. In turn, I have been actively promoting the company to my entire network.
At its core, you can think of OnDeck as an educational platform.
“On Deck is building a modern, digitally native education platform at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional higher and continuing education.” – What’s On Deck for On Deck? by Packy McCormick
The image below illustrates some of the current educational programmes and thus communities that OnDeck runs. When I first heard of OnDeck, there were only two to three fellowships. Today, I counted 28 programmes ranging from no-code to chief of staff and all the way to longevity biotech.
One of the challenges with building communities is that they are tough to scale. If you are not careful, the community will become a generic network like LinkedIn. A platform that attempts to cater to everyone will inevitably degrade the average user experience.
In business, that’s called “evaporative cooling”. Evaporative cooling occurs when high-value community members leave a community because they are not getting sufficient value. In turn, that leads to a decrease in the quality of the overall community.
OnDeck is one of the few platforms that has managed to scale its efforts while retaining a fantastic community gradually.
Initially, the company started with a Founders Fellowship. A typical approach for them would have been to continue growing that programme. Instead, they decided to build a variety of small, intimate communities that are complementary to one another. Each new programme is small enough to retain great talent but complimentary enough to reinforce other fellowships. The resulting flywheel is illustrated by the tweet below.
Today, OnDeck has built a platform where like-minded people go to learn, connect, find jobs, and create. In the process, they have re-imagined a variety of LinkedIn features:
At first glance, NFTs look de-attached from the narrative that I am driving. But if you study success cases of NFT-driven community forming, you will quickly realise how that’s not the case.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique. You can think of them as web3 media assets. The most popular use case of NFTs today are pieces of art, but it can be a lot more. Music, code, tweets, gifs, access passes, digital identities, domains, game character skins, and even this very essay that I am writing can be converted into an NFT through a platform like Mirror.
Organisations like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club (now the same company) have shown us how communities can be formed around characters. Hate it or love it, most people think of NFTs as a trading asset.
But let’s leave the revenue generation opportunities aside. Instead, let’s focus on better cultural representation and streamlined collaboration. People who own a crypto punk or a bored ape feel a sense of belonging. They are part of the same community of somehow similar people. Most probably, each person who owns such an NFT shares similar characteristics:
Middle upper class or higher as otherwise, you won’t be able to purchase such an expensive NFT.
Interest in the forefront of technology, i.e., web3.
Similar taste in aesthetics, you won’t purchase a particular NFT if you find the design unattractive.
Tech-savviness. Otherwise, you won’t be able to deal with the complexity of purchasing and storing an NFT securely.
The list goes on and on. Theoretically, you can create characters representing distinct cultures and ethnic or religious minorities. The more depth an NFT collection has, the higher the probability of bringing together a group of similar people.
Today, all NFT-formed communities take place on a Discord server, but that won’t be the case tomorrow. So while everyone is racing to create the metaverse, we see the first attempts to bring NFT-centred community members together to the offline world.
Contrary to what most people believe, good web3 communities have a strong sense of cooperation, support, and recognition. It’s not entirely focused on trading and get-rich-quick schemes.
For example, as a birthday present, I received an NFT which gave me access to a well-managed discord community, Zen Academy. Members are helpful to each other, and my NFT serves as an accreditation of credibility. Unless you have that NFT, you cannot access the community.
But once you do, members seem to be quite like-minded and supportive of each other. The founding members put a lot of effort into ensuring everyone shares similar values.
Let the great unbundling begin
Those thoughts have been going through my mind for quite a while. On the one hand, established tech platforms are more powerful than ever. But on the other, the user experience and perceived value have been eroding. Trying to satisfy users from all walks of life is challenging.
As a result, the product gets pulled in a million different directions. In turn, that dynamic attracts new startups like vultures. Entrepreneurs are especially good at sensing opportunities.
Over time we start seeing a lot of disruption. So founders pick niche verticals and build gated communities, vertical marketplaces, and NFT collections. Driving 10x better experience for a niche community of similar people in the process.
Having said that, I think that the network effects of big tech companies like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube make the products highly defensible, thus, difficult to disrupt.
So it will be challenging to reach a similar scale. But you do not have to. The market is large enough to accommodate smaller yet highly successful communities.
As the infamous saying goes: “There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle.”
You either aggregate or specialise.
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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
Website hacking is becoming increasingly common, no matter the size, scope or kind of organisation. In 2020, more than one million WordPress sites were hacked. On average, 30,000 websites are hacked each day, most owned by legitimate small businesses.
Despite these worrying facts about hacking websites, many companies still believe that hackers have no reason to attack websites because they are not hacked. Attackers are constantly crawling and snooping on websites to identify vulnerabilities to break into them and bid.
Cybercriminals target startups to reach 50 per cent, because security measures may not be fully implemented. In SMEs, customer trust is critical in a time of widespread cybercrime and data privacy attacks. Startup owners now face the challenge of building consumer trust as they build their businesses.
Financial motivations trigger many websites hacks about hackers using sophisticated tools to break into cybersecurity, data files, and corporate servers. Negligent employees, contractors, and third parties cause the majority of data breaches. And startup owners should beware of this.
Through this article, we want to help you understand all startup cyber safety best practices.
What happens if startups get attacked?
The consequences of hacking are complex, time-consuming, and expensive, and can eventually shut down businesses. Hackers can steal a business’ confidential information, from its financial report, business plans, intellectual property, employees’ and customers’ information, and many more.
In other words, hackers can take anything they want that may destroy your business’ reputation.
Team training is not just about improving their cybersecurity knowledge. But to build a culture of safety protocols in your team. In terms of security practices, everyone should be on one page to avoid all vulnerabilities.
Some data breaches recorded over the years started with an employee accidentally opening a phishing email, or someone on the team accidentally leaking sensitive information. These should all be avoided.
Make a written security policy
Startups need a written security policy that is easily accessible to all employees and covers all possible hacking scenarios and how to respond to them. So that in the event of a hack, employees can use the security policy as a checklist to ensure compliance with standards.
Update your software
Threat actors are constantly looking for ways to exploit software vulnerabilities. Threats use ransomware and software to start installing hacking systems.
But you don’t have to worry, because software companies usually provide regular updates to deal with these types of problems when they are found and to make other fixes. So as a startup owner, you have to pay attention if your cybersecurity software makes the latest updates.
Restrict data access with a strong password
Startups, whose core team has no cybersecurity experience, will be vulnerable to data clutter.
To avoid this, it’s a good idea for each team member to protect their data with a unique, complex, and hard-to-decrypt password.
Also, ensure that your employees do not have access to download or install their own software programs. Restricting network access further increases the security of your network.
Do the same for customers, if they subscribe to or log into your site, ask them to use a complex password and two-step verification for their own protection.
Backup and encrypt your data
Always backup and encrypt all your data and keep it in a safe place. This technique helps stop the ransomware before it causes significant damage. If hackers save data for ransom, you have the option to wipe the device and start over with a new device. You can recover data from there.
Encrypting data can also prevent hackers from decrypting stolen data.
Stay up to date with hacker news
Today, there are many variants of ransomware and malware. And this variant will probably continue to grow even more dangerous than the previous one. You can wait until your startup is hacked, to learn about the risks involved. But you have to be able to prevent it.
Try to follow blogs or news about cybersecurity for all new and existing threats.
Prepare for failure
When it comes to cybercrime and malware, there is absolutely no certainty. Even the safest companies can be hacked, but they can get out of hacking without damaging their reputation or customers because they have a plan of action.
Startups need to be prepared for all eventualities, look for good security systems, keep up with hacking trends, and constantly test and investigate security policies and best practices to keep them as secure as possible.
Engage with cybersecurity experts
The success of a tech startup depends heavily on speed and agility and investing time and resources in cybersecurity. Startup owners should work with a good security service provider, so they can focus on growing their business.
There are many SOC service providers to assist business owners in overseeing cybersecurity in their companies. But with today’s technological developments, ArmourZero is here to help startup owners provide subscription-based cybersecurity.
Startup owners don’t have to buy software licences and pay people to supervise, because ArmourZero does it all.
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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
Fintech company SYNQA today announced that it has rebranded to Opn altogether with the announcement of their US$120 million Series C+ funding round.
The funding round included the participation of JIC Venture Growth Investments, MUFG Bank, and Mars Growth Capital. It brings the total capital raised to over US$222 million to date.
In a press statement, the company said that it will utilise the funding to continue scaling its business and expanding into new geographies.
The rebranding itself was introduced to support the company’s expanded strategic vision and global aspirations. It aims to “better reflect the company’s strategic vision and bold purpose of enabling access to the digital economy for everyone.”
The company also stated that the new name underscores its commitment to making payment seamless and borderless for both people and businesses.
“We are extremely excited and proud to bring on board this high-quality investment, allowing us to accelerate the development of our core payment solutions, while also expanding into new territories within our core markets of Southeast Asia and Japan and beyond,” said Jun Hasegawa, CEO and Founder of Opn.
“As we approach 10 years since we started as a payment gateway company, and now customised fintech solutions to help businesses grow, we have continued to obsess over how to make payment ever more seamless for both businesses and the people they serve. Through our fintech solutions, we are realising our vision of enabling access to the digital economy for everyone.”
Founded in 2013, Opn specialises in online payment, blockchain technology for fintech applications and digital transformation solutions for Southeast Asia and Japan markets.
The Opn platform is powered by its payment infrastructure sister company Omise Payment Holdings which provides one-stop online payment solutions.
Opn’s parent company SYNQA is one of the first companies to receive certification for its business plan from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) through a ministerial program that started in August 2021, guarantees private-sector loans for deep-tech venture companies.
Under this programme, companies that have had their business plans approved by METI are able to receive loans from private financial institutions approved by the METI. The loans are backed by the ministry’s Organization for Small & Medium Enterprises and Regional Innovation of Japan (SMRJ).
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Indonesia-focused VC firm East Ventures announced today it has raised a total of US$550 million in the final close of its latest fund.
The firm will allocate US$150 million for early-stage deals and US$400 million for growth-stage deals, according to Willson Cuaca, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of East Ventures.
“We have been transforming ourselves from a seed-stage investor into a multi-stage investor and becoming an efficient and robust platform to support entrepreneurship,” he added.
“Digitalisation in Indonesia has become more robust, with a 73.7 per cent internet penetration rate in 2021 and equal digital competitiveness across the regions shown by the increased EV-DCI score from 2020 to 2022. We also saw the IPOs of some of Indonesia’s largest tech companies in recent times, a significant milestone in paving the way for other startups in the country to follow suit. We believe the strong initiatives made by the relevant stakeholders, such as the government, in promoting digitalisation through G20 Presidency, will further elevate the tech ecosystem and create even greater investment opportunities in Indonesia. At East Ventures, we will continue to double down our investments in Indonesia,” said East Ventures Managing Partner Roderick Purwana.
Founded in 2009, Singapore-headquartered East Ventures is a multi-stage investor that has backed over 200 seed- and growth-stage companies in Southeast Asia. It is the first investor of unicorns Tokopedia and Traveloka. Other notable companies in the portfolio include Ruangguru, SIRCLO, Kudo (acquired by Grab), Loket (acquired by Gojek), Tech in Asia, Xendit, IDN Media, MokaPOS (acquired by Gojek), ShopBack, KoinWorks, Waresix, and Sociolla.
East Ventures claims that it has experienced significant growth, with more than 200 portfolio companies graduating from seed to growth stages. The firm, which manages over U$1billion in AUM, has attracted US$6.7 billion in follow-on funding for its portfolio companies.
The VC firm also said it recorded more than US$86 billion of annualised GMV in aggregate by its portfolio. The firm will also incorporate sustainability aspects in every practice and usage of the funds.
East Ventures has launched many strategic initiatives in supporting the overall progress and development of Indonesia. They include supporting the digital transformation through its annual East Ventures and ensuring the sustainable investment and practices by signing the Principle of Responsible Investment (PRI), a UN-supported network of investors.
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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.
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”.
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.
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’.
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.
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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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).
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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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