When it comes to startup success, founders get the lion’s share of the credit. Investors come a close second. But a venture’s fate is determined by more than just founders and investors.
One crucial, often overlooked group are the various people who bring the two together. These people largely go unacknowledged because their presence goes against the mythology surrounding founders.
This prevailing myth is that of the relentless founder. The founder gets a brilliant idea, and then he stops at nothing to get the capital he needs to scale it up. He cold emails hundreds of investors, chases them at conferences and coffee shops, and even in the face of rejection after rejection, continues to pitch with unbridled enthusiasm.
This relentless founder does not even let decorum get in their way, seizing any opportunity to “elevator pitch” a prospective investor until he gets a signature on the dotted line.
While such myths make for great montage scenes in movies, reality seldom works this way. Rarely does the entrepreneur just independently and directly connect with an investor.
There are many professionals, who I genuinely believe are unsung heroes in tech, that facilitate these interactions in a wide variety of ways. They are, in short, connectors, to borrow some terminology from popular non-fiction author Malcolm Gladwell from his book The Tipping Point.
Highlighting these connectors is important. The tech ecosystem does not only need people who identify business or investment opportunities, we also need people who recognise opportunities at an even higher, more abstract level: They see how the right connection of entrepreneurs and investors can yield exponential results.
A diversity of connectors
These connectors span a wide variety of industries, and each archetype is as deserving of recognition as the next.
The first is event organisers, who create programming in which entrepreneurs and investors can meet. The formats of these events are wide, from a kind of free-for-all networking to a more structured, speed-dating format.
The latter format is how Zopim founder Royston Tay, met legendary investor Tim Draper. While Tay admitted to just crashing the closed-door pitching session, the opportunity was still nonetheless generated by the event organiser gathering top-tier investors into a single point in space and time.
Draper also did not invest at that point, but his early interest was pivotal in goading Tay and his team to build out the prototype for Zopim, which would eventually be bought by Zendesk. (As an aside, this example also underscores another important point: Investors can help entrepreneurs in more ways than just direct investment).
Now that the world is reopening from the pandemic, we need event organisers to resume their role in crafting event concepts that are exciting enough to attract the very best investors, who will summon entrepreneurs in tow. While purely online events may occasionally work, Zoom fatigue is very much real and so on-site or hybrid events may be the best.
Another category of connectors is what I like to call tech diplomats. They generate cross-border investment interest. Such is difficult because it requires intimate knowledge of the business opportunities in one nation and the investment appetite in another.
One such example is Emil Banno, who represented the Philippines at the Japan Cryptocurrency Forum in 2018, and has raised over US$100 million of Japanese investment into the Philippines, across a mixture of primarily traditional and also some tech-enabled sectors.
Banno is now taking on the mantle for the Web3 industry in the Philippines, partnering with BLX to build out any tech-related investments on its blockchain. Such is key in building Japanese confidence in Philippine crypto, fintech, and other nascent Web3 verticals in the country.
Tech diplomats like Banno are crucial. The tech ecosystem in the Asia Pacific can often be isolationist, where each country is viewed or treated as a market unto its own, rather than a part of a larger, interdependent economic region.
Such will require people who have the cultural expertise to bridge the gap between two cultures, and more importantly, understand what will attract investors from one market to back the entrepreneurs of another.
The final category of connector I’d like to cover is community organisers, specifically those at coworking spaces. While coworking spaces have more recently become associated as nothing more than cooly designed workspaces, this new understanding represents mission drift.
Co-working spaces were originally designed where people from diverse backgrounds and industries could, as the name implies, “co-work” with one another, and in so doing, create value. In the halcyon days of coworking, many coworkers reported closing business deals at their spaces or even fundraising for their ventures.
There are some co-working spaces where this spirit still exists. One such example is Cerebro Labs in the Philippines, which in addition to being a coworking space, is also a tech and business incubator. Such formalises the organic investor-entrepreneur connections that could previously occur, and in so doing, gives entrepreneurs a physical hub in which to meet and learn from investors.
Co-working spaces in the Asia Pacific need to get back to these roots, whether through official programmes like Cerebro or more casual introductions between members who are entrepreneurs and members who are investors. Such elevates coworking into co-creation.
Event organisers, tech diplomats, and coworking spaces are still just a small subset of the connectors who facilitate interaction between investors and entrepreneurs in the Asia Pacific.
It’s beneficial to not fill in all the blanks when it comes to discussing this topic, so others in the community can answer the million-dollar question: Who helped you meet your investors?
The response to this question will spur long overdue recognition, and in turn, accelerate even more connections.
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