The report is brought by Horangi Cyber Security from Singapore, these are the state of cybersecurity in Southeast Asia
As the third largest internet market, Southeast Asia leads in its e-commerce sector, as told by a report issued by Horangi Cyber Security. In its cybersecurity outlook, Horangi stated that 90 per cent of users in Southeast Asia has internet access via mobile, led by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand.
With 90 million users to date and a market worth of US$ 72 billion last year, internet users in the region are estimated to reach 350 million users.
A dominant share is held by online travel business as it totaled 41.7 per cent of the internet economy, as recorded by Google & Temasek e-Conomy SEA 2018. Singapore and Vietnam emerged on top as the countries with GDP-contributing internet economy.
Given the overall statistics, Horangi concluded in its findings that cost of cybercrime is increasing as it is persistent, and Asia is a lucrative target even with the lagging of cybersecurity maturity in the region because of low awareness and historical exposure.
Horangi further noted the breaches in cybersecurity for the past year, ranging from Equifax in late 2017 that affected 1.43 million of its consumers, to Marriot hotel’s data leakages that’s been going on for four years undetected.
Number one type of attacks plaguing the region turned out to be a crypto-related one, with crypto exchange accounts being hacked, accounted for 369 per cent in 2017. This reflects the weak information security the region still has that doesn’t meet the interest in the sector halfway.
Other big attacks were malware for 275 per cent, as there’s an increase in encrypted attacks. In Singapore alone, 42 per cent of the country’s business has reported phishing incidents.
Horangi detailed on why Asia is vulnerable to cyber attack, which is caused by the longer overall time it takes to identify a breach, easier entry, and the lack of cybersecurity experts in the region. Even with the data showing that Asia is, in fact, the fastest growing region for security-related hardware, software, and services since 2015, the total spending on security alone was to hit over US$12 billion last year.
Horangi Cyber Security is led by CEO and founder Paul Hadjy, focussing on creating software that solves cybersecurity problems in Asia. It provides clients with actionable data to make critical cyber decisions.
In 2016, Grab selected Hadjy as their Head of IT to shape the company’s internal technology, information security, and business process architecture.
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Also, Malaysia’s HelloGold steps foot in Africa, Temasek invests in US startup DoorDash
First legal tech startup accelerator to launch in Singapore [KrAsia]
Singapore is said to be getting ready to launch Asia’s first legal technology startup accelerator in April this year, according to the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL). This would be the second attempt of the accelerator, named the Future Law Innovation Program (FLIP), which is a two-year pilot program by SAL that was started with the initial title Accelerator!, but has now been halted.
The program will be three to six months long, with experts in innovation and entrepreneurship joining as mentors that’ll give advice on business strategies and management.
With the legal sector in the country being regarded as lagging behind in tech innovation, this would be a significant upgrade that can provide help for the legal industry.
Malaysia’s fintech HelloGold steps foot in Africa [Press Release]
Malaysia-based fintech savings platform HelloGold has officially expanded to Africa in partnership with Baobab, a digital financial inclusion group. With the partnership, HelloGold will provide gold savings and loans to 800,000 Baobab’s customers, who can access HelloGold’s products through Baobab’s new mobile app.
Using the app that will be launched this year, Baobab’s users will be able to buy, save, and invest in gold on the integrated mobile application instantly and securely.
“The possibility to easily save and invest in gold is an additional key offered to our clients to unleash their potential. This collaboration with HelloGold will allow us to integrate this saving offers in the nine African countries we are working with,” said Arnaud Ventura, CEO, and founder of Baobab Group.
Baobab provides digital and mobile solutions for customers in Africa at its 1140 service points as well as in China to help to manage their finances.
HelloGold uses blockchain technology to enable customers to access affordable financial products and services, starting with gold.
Singapore welcomes People Matters TechHR Conference this month [Press Release]
People Matters TechHR, Asia’s HR tech conference will launch in Singapore on February 28, 2019, at the Marina Bay Sands Expo & Convention Centre. The conference is the two-day program organized by People Matters, the HR community and HR media brand focussing on work, talent & tech.
Key speakers at the conference include Dr. Robert Hogan, Founder & President at Hogan Assessments; Jason Averbook, CEO & Co-Founder at Leapgen; Goh Swee Chen, Chairman Singapore National Employers Federation (SNEF); Nora A Manaf, Group Chief Human Capital Officer at Maybank, and Aileen Tan, Group Chief HR Officer, Singtel.
The conference will highlight topics like tech for productivity and efficiency for employees and the process of deploying technology in the organizations.
The conference also will facilitate about 50 HR tech startups that will showcase their companies at the Startup Zone, meet investors one-on-one, and attend exclusive masterclasses. Investors that will be zooming in as mentors are Singapore Press Holdings, Golden Gate Ventures, SeedPlus, TRIVE, Cento Ventures, Accenture Ventures, TNF Ventures, Monk’s Hill Ventures, ENRG Hong Kong Limited, and Omidyar Network.
The conference also includes a study tour segment which will take place on March 1, 2019, bringing in companies such as Netflix, Singapore University of Technology & Design, 3M, P&G, Google, TCS, Workplace by Facebook, Singapore Management University, and the National University of Singapore that will be hosting delegates as part of this exclusive program.
Register for People Matters TechHR Singapore and take the next leap! Click here to register.
Click here to know more about the conference.
Temasek to invest US$500M in US food delivery startup DoorDash [Deal Street Asia]
Singapore-based investment firm Temasek is said to be in a discussion for a US$500 million funding round for DoorDash, food delivery startup in the US. DoorDash has been backed by SoftBank, CRV, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital.
Should this round comes through, the San Fransisco-based company will be valued at over US$ 6 billion.
DoorDash was founded in 2013 by Stanford University students and does business by hiring contractors to pick up and deliver orders from food and beverage outlets. Currently, it serves in over 1,000 cities across the US and Canada.
Just last year, the company signed a partnership with US retail behemoth Walmart and has been testing autonomous car deliveries via General Motors-owned, Cruise Automation.
Philippines inch away to approve a startup-friendly bill [KrAsia]
Philippines’ Innovative Startup Act, a bill that is designed to support startups in the Philippines is now just waiting for President Rodrigo Duterte’s approval for it to become a law. The country’s Senate has ratified the bill last week.
Senate Bill 1532, or the Innovative Startup Act, was authored by Senator Bam Aquino. In the to-be-enacted as law, startups will be provided with financial subsidies such as tax breaks and grants, especially for tech startups whose platforms address the country’s problems in transportation, healthcare, financing, and other areas.
The Innovative Startup Act will also give founders access to a PHP 10 billion (US$191.6 million) Innovative Startup Venture Fund that they can use to finance their businesses. The fund will be managed by the Department of Science and Technology.
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From a benevolent Facebook group to dating apps, we reveal 8 tech trends we love in 2019
A Facebook group that helps families affected by dementia
Let’s start with a serious moment before we start to get a bit more lighthearted.
Facebook gets a lot of criticism globally and a lot of the times it is well-deserved. But there are some undeniably positive aspects of the social media network.
An important goal of the group is to humanise dementia, and provide a safe place to discuss challenges, advice and success stories to people who are accepting and understanding.
However, it has also developed into another avenue to pursue in emergency situations (obviously, it’s important to call the professionals, but Dementia-Friendly Singapore is an additional avenue to crowdsource help).
A friend of mind has a grandmother with dementia. One day, she left the house and ended up getting lost. This can be a terrifying situation for loved ones because it can be impossible to know exactly where the person went. My friend said Dementia-Friendly Singapore was crucial in his efforts to return her home.
Mental health is becoming and increasingly important part of our global discourse and places like Dementia-Friendly Singapore help make sure we are moving in a positive direction.
On Valentine’s day, yes, the singles are grateful for dating apps
An anecdotal survey of my network suggests that dating apps are a boon for singles out there who don’t feel like wallowing away their night with friends and wine (which, to me, sounds WAY better…but who am I to judge).
That being said, online dating has completely lost the stigma of even a few years ago, and the benefits for Valentine’s Day makes sense. Notably, taking someone out on Valentine’s Day is a big move for a first date. It might be wonderful, but you will be surrounded by long-term relationships and married couples. That’s a lot of pressure.
For single’s it can be scary to walk up to someone and propose a Valentine’s Day dinner to your crush (although it is definitely too late for that at this point). On Tinder, Paktor or Coffee Meets Bagels, the people engaging around this week are already open to testing out a Valentine’s Day meetup. This lowers the barrier-to-entry and can help singles feel the love on this V-day.
To the rest of you, raise a glass to your colleagues, bros or girlfriends.
The addictive nature of TikTok
There is a very important fact about the rise of TikTok that needs to be mentioned: The social network is not considered “cool”. The word used by a lot of young people is “cringeworthy”. But, that doesn’t mean it isn’t popular. Over the 2018-2019 year TikTok announced itself as the successor to SnapChap and Instagram as the next hot social network.
I love TikTok, and was formerly introduced to it by a 20-something office mate who doesn’t even really use it. It was like a non-smoker accidentally getting me hooked on cigarettes.
TikTok may be nerdy, but it also is the best of humanity. The videos are wholesome, dumb-as-hell and highly entertaining. This means the app is super addicting. I can’t tell the number of times I decided to “check out TikTok for five minutes” only to look up half-an-hour later and realise I need to close the app or else I’ll be here for two hours.
TikTok is great.
The diversity of the Southeast Asian startup scene and its willingness to learn
The fragmentation of Southeast Asia has long been a narrative of the region, but we often do not talk about how much we learn from one another.
As my colleague Claudia Florea (who coined this idea) put it,
“From attending different roadshows on the ground in Southeas Asia last year (Bangkok, Singapore, Phnom Penh), I realised how different all the market are and thus, their specific needs.
“The beauty of tech community in Southeast Asia comes from diversity. In Laos and Cambodia, there are not big VC companies but the ideas nourished there can be seen as “gems” for the entire region.
“Bringing an international panel of judges helped with constructive feedback and I think that seeing someone with a track record of experience definitely got the participants onboard for pitching and learning,” she said.
A pop of investment activity in Vietnam
From a macro level, investment into Vietnamese startups has been the story of the young year. In January, the country saw nine deals worth US$113.5 million, according to e27 data. Plus, we counted two additional deals whereby the funding amount was undisclosed.
For years, Vietnam has been considered the Southeast Asian country with the most potential for hyper growth. If the early trends of 2019 continue, this will be the year they fulfil that destiny.
Shameless Plug: We are hosting an amazing event in Vietnam on March 12. Register here!
Esports continues growth, and a couple Southeast Asian companies are well positioned
While Esports is still a small market (global yearly revenues are expected to cross the US$1 billion mark for the first time in 2019), the rise of Esports feels inevitable. The industry is the definition of the word “burgeoning”.
This growth bodes well for two companies with connections to Southeast Asia, SEA Group and Razer. With their core customer base being gamers, its natural that the two companies have made a big investment into Esports.
Sea Group and Razer both made early plays into video games, and in 2019 it seems that bet will pay off handsomly.
We have ourselves a new Big Dawg
Technically, with a valuation of US$950 million, Southeast Asia does not have another unicorn. But we do have another company that can bear the torch for the region’s tech ecosystem.
The company is just over three years old, and just over two years ago it was closing a US$8 million round. Then BOOM! US$226 million later it immediately catapulted itself into one of the most important startups in Southeast Asia.
If people were not aware of Zilingo before this week, they certainly are now.
A half-male half-female bird
I mean, is there anything more Valentine’s Day than a bird that does not need to navigate the social expectations of gender?
The theory behind this Northern Cardinal is that it is actually a fraternal twin…to itself (MIND.BLOWN). Essentially, the two ova are fertilised separately and early in the process they fuse together, creating one organism with two separate genders.
Now don’t worry November babies, scientists don’t think this is possible in humans because we don’t lay eggs. Our fertilisation process is washed in blood which essentially wipes the cells “clean” so they have the same hormones. Even in egg laying animals this is extremely rare.
The most interesting thing to watch over the Cardinal’s life is whether or not it will reproduce.
Free Valentine’s Day tickets to Echelon!
Is your date a tech nerd? Are you a tech nerd and you want to share the world with your loved one? Well Echelon is just around the corner and you can surprise him/her with a couple of tickets!
We have a special Valentine’s Day one-for-one promo that give you access to all three conference stages (Founder, Future, Capital), the TOP100 pitching stage, exhibition areas and partnered zones (TOP100, Marketplace, country pavilions and Talent Zone), the official Echelon App, and the Echelon Official Afterparty.
When looking for a .com name, it can be frustrating to find many that are already taken but appear to be unused.
Is there rampant domain speculation or some other explanation?
Let’s look at the data…
There are currently 137 million .com domain names registered.1Of these, roughly a third of domains are “in use” (businesses, personal websites, email, etc.), and another third appear to be unused, leaving the last third for a variety of speculative purposes.
all DNS records for the top-level domain and the www subdomain,6
HTTP and HTTPS7 responses (status code, headers, and bodies) for the root page of the top-level domain and the www subdomain,
screenshots of the root page as viewed by Mozilla Firefox 64.0 on Linux
The crawl took a little over 48 hours from a single server located in a Singapore data centre.
I ran a follow-up crawl for any domains that failed to connect over HTTP or HTTPS (in case of transient errors). And finally, for the 2,188 domains to be categorized I manually checked any that had failed in case the crawler had timed out or had DOM events blocked by JavaScript.
Then, I wrote a script to help me categorize websites based on their screenshot and body.
The categorization script presents the possible categories as a list of buttons, with Content being the default.
I used the script to categorize domains over the next 2 days.8 In some cases the screenshot and body were not sufficient, so I manually opened the domain in a web browser for inspection.
Summary statistics and insights
Top 10 .com Domain Registrars, from a sample of 100,000 domains
GoDaddy is the registrar for a third of all .com domain names. That’s roughly 45 million domain names. Of those, one in three have parking pages. In other words, more than 10 per cent of all .com domain names host GoDaddy ads pages.
While there are 1,851 registrars in the sample, the majority of those are controlled by a smaller number of operators.9
25 per cent of domains were registered within the last year.
Domain ages according to WHOIS creation dates, from a sample of 100,000 domains
Domain categories
These categories evolved as I worked.
For example, I hadn’t anticipated the high number of gambling domains (aliases).
For most categories, I’ve included a random sample of screenshots from that category excluding redundant ones.
Content (31% or ~43 million)
Content is the category of any domain with a website displaying unique content. It doesn’t matter what the content is, as long as it appears to be unique for the domain and publicly accessible.
When I was unsure, I placed domains in this category by default.
Ads (23% or ~31 million)
Note that half the domains in this category are GoDaddy parking pages, on which GoDaddy places Google ads based on the keywords related to the domain name.
No Web Server (11% or ~16 million)
If I was unable to connect to, or receive a valid response from, port 80 or 443 for either the top-level domain or the www subdomain and the domain had no MX records, I placed the domain in this category.
Some of these domains likely have some non-web use, such as an FTP or video game server, but I expect them to be a small fraction.
Additionally, the crawling server was only configured for IPv4, so any IPv6-only websites would have been grouped here.
Empty (9.2% or ~13 million)
An Empty domain is one for which a web server is answering requests, but returning empty pages, 404s, or unfilled templates (such as default WordPress installs).
The difference between an Empty domain and a Parked domain is that the Empty domain has presumably been configured by the user, but no content has been added yet.
For Sale (7.1% or ~9.8 million)
Many domains are listed For Sale, usually by domain investors, through various brokers and marketplaces.
Nearly half of this category appears to be domains sold by HugeDomains, although their website lists only “over 200,000” domains available for purchase (a fraction of their ~4 million domains if the sample is representative).
I only included domains from recognizable marketplaces or when the contact details were not part of ad placement, as ad networks and domain brokers will often falsely claim that they represent a domain owner (I categorized all such domains as Ads instead).
Error (5.7% or ~7.9 million)
If a domain returned any type of error, whether an HTTP error or an in-page error, it belongs to this category.
Note that I might have miscategorized some Private domains as Errors if they used basic authentication, as I did not distinguish between 403 Forbidden (due to no basic auth credentials) and other errors.
Parked (4.8% or ~6.5 million)
Parked domains are those that display a page from the registrar or host explaining that the domain has not been set up yet.
To qualify as Parked, a domain had to serve a page without any external ads. It could advertise its own services, but it couldn’t place ads from an ad network.
Gambling (3.0% or ~4 million)
All websites in this category are in Chinese and are operating under aliases, often short strings of numbers or consonants (e.g. 17770012 or tdwhtr).
They follow common templates and contain similar images, often with automatically-generated logos. I assume their purpose is to attract people who think the names are lucky.
Mail (2.6% or ~3.5 million)
Any domain not in any other category, but with MX DNS records (for email), I categorized as Mail.
I did not attempt to see if the mail server was working or if delivery was possible. It’s possible that many of these domains are not actually used for email, but I’ve given them the benefit of the doubt.
Redirect (1.1% or ~1.6 million)
Redirects include vanity domains pointing to Facebook pages, alternative names for businesses, etc.
Private (0.64% or ~0.9 million)
Private domains did not appear to have any content accessible without first logging in (or in some cases registering).
Similar to gambling websites, a number of pornographic websites operate under various aliases. The websites were predominantly in Chinese and the domains followed similar naming patterns. As many of the sites display pornographic material directly (not after a warning), I’ve not included the screenshots here.
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^ According to Verisign there are 137,756,106 .com domains in the “active zone” as of 2019-01-27. I had previously verified this number against the DNS zone file downloaded on 2019-01-21.
^ Steven K. Thompson. Sample Size for Estimating Multinomial Proportions. The American Statistician, 4(1):42-46, 2 1987.
^ I downloaded the zone file from Verisign at 2019-01-21 02:00 UTC and crawled the domains from 2019-01-21 11:20:52 UTC to 2019-01-23 14:04:40 UTC.
^ Not all records in the zone file are valid domains. Some do not have a WHOIS record and may act as honeypots to catch people distributing and using zone files without permission. It’s possible that there are also valid domains that act as honeypots, but without any way to identify them, I’ve ignored that possibility for the purpose of this study. Additionally, approximately 1 per cent of the records in the zone file are for name servers, not top-level domains. I excluded them from all analysis (i.e. only 98,854 of the 100,000 crawled records are used).
^ WHOIS records are directly from Verisign’s WHOIS server.
^ I collected DNS records by issuing a DNS ANY query directly to the name servers listed in the domain’s WHOIS record (in order to avoid inaccuracies due to caching and recursive resolution). A small number of DNS providers do not respond correctly or at all to ANY queries.
^ The crawler verified SSL certificates, so any HTTPS-only websites with invalid SSL certificates were classified as Error.
^ I did not manually categorize every website. When I noticed repetitive and obvious cases, such as when the title of the page was, I used an appropriate regular expression to bulk categorize website bodies that matched. I previewed the matches beforehand to ensure that they were not overly broad, but it’s possible that I misclassified some edge cases.
^ DropCatch.com uses numbered LLCs like DropCatch.com 1000 LLC, DropCatch.com 1001 LLC, DropCatch.com 1002, etc. Other drop catching operators have similar collections of names, but not all alternate registrars are named so obviously.
Sometimes you have to go the extra mile, literally
Golden Gate Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm headquartered in Singapore.
The fund invests in consumer-focused internet startups across Southeast Asia. Since 2011 Golden Gate Ventures raised three early-stage venture funds and invested in more than 40 companies.
Michael Lints is a partner at Golden Gate Ventures and focuses on strategic partnerships and fundraising. He has spent the last 5 to 6 years fundraising for Golden Gate Ventures early stage funds and its portfolio companies in Southeast Asia.
This article is a representation of my (Michael’s) personal experience and views.
Experiences from Southeast Asia
There are numerous great articles published about fundraising. I am not here to rehash all the tips about investment decks and fundraising strategies.
This article is meant to give you some insights into my fundraising experience.
Fundraising has something magical.
The ones that are good at fundraising frequently are praised for raking in stellar investors and grabbing Techcrunch headlines.
Luckily fundraising is not magic. It’s a skill you can acquire as a founder. Like everything else, it requires focus, dedication, execution, and grit. Tons of grit. Fundraising can turn into desperation fast.
So how do you master fundraising and where do you start?
Build a pipeline
I’ll start by sharing my personal experience. The very first thing I learned the hard way is that fundraising is the equivalent of doing sales.
Fundraising is a fancier word, but in practice, the activities are incredibly similar.
In one of my first jobs as a counter salesman in a PC hardware store I experienced that numbers count, a lot. I was still a teenager, so I didn’t pay much attention to my boss.
I do vividly remember that he was always worried about making sure the store had enough foot traffic, and that the sales team would convert that foot traffic into actual sales of motherboards, gaming computers, and other hardware.
It was all about converting leads and making sure there was a large enough number of leads to convert.
When I started fundraising, I didn’t take those sales lessons to heart immediately. I assumed I could just hit up a few strong leads (investors in my network) and I would be able to convert them.
Why create a large pipeline when you have strong leads? These investors know me, and with their commitment, I should be home safe.
Wrong! You have to assume that even your best leads will delay or pass on the investment (sometimes even last minute). If you rely on them to come in or be your anchor, you’ll find yourself in a tight spot if they don’t come through.
Building a large enough pipeline of potential investors is crucial. It’s so much better to eventually turn away investors because there is no more room in the round than to be left short of funds.
Your fundraising strategy
Make sure you set up a fundraising strategy before you go out. The first thing we tend to do is make a long list of investors we’re going to send our pitch deck. Take a step back.
The first thing you want to do is discuss the fundraising strategy with your partners/team. Try to answer the following questions:
Why are we fundraising? How will the fundraise impact our business and team? Do we want to explore market-appetite for our fundraise first, or do we start our official fundraise now?
Which investors do we want on board and why? What is our A-list, what does it take to convince them and whom do we add to our long list?
Does our pitch answer the essential questions investors have (Product, Traction, Team, Market Dynamics and Opportunity)?
Do we have enough bandwidth and data to reply to questions from investors quickly? One of the worst things that can happen during fundraising is making investors wait for a reply.
What is our fundraising timeline? When do we need to get nervous or when do we run out of money?
Are we raising internationally and what does that mean time and travel-wise?
Use the answers to these questions to build your fundraising roadmap.
Make that trip
Fundraising means you will need to start building relationships with investors of different backgrounds.
Whether you’re talking to venture capital firms, corporates, high net worth individuals, family offices or institutions, you have to be prepared to be open to a lot of different cultures and make tons of trips.
Since I moved to Southeast Asia, I have learned to make that trip to meet potential investors. Do not try to fundraise from behind your desk.
Why is making that trip necessary? I made strong connections over the years after deciding to make a trip to meet an investor, even though my work schedule couldn’t get any busier.
These serendipitous investor meetings only happen when and if you put yourself out there.
Making the trip also helps you meet other investors in that city/country or region. Actively ask investors who else you should meet.
A meeting is a 100x better than a phone call. Bear in mind that only a small percentage of these trips will lead to actual conversion.
A small tip. Before you go book your flight. Ask the potential investor a few simple questions for pre-qualification:
Have they invested in a strategy or company like yours before?
What are some of the previous investment they have made?
What attracts them in a strategy or company like yours?
A pass is fine. It’s part of the journey
Don’t be scared to get passed on.
Whether it’s sales, dating, fundraising, competing in sports or life in general, you will get disappointed. Please deal with it. Get to a point where you can ask the investor to confirm the commitment.
There are several ways to get an investor to commit (assuming they liked the pitch).
Ask them for their timeline. Which steps do they need to cover before they can commit?
Provide significant business updates during the fundraising.
Prioritize answering questions from investors.
Discuss the terms for the investment.
Ask investors for feedback. Why are they considering the investment and what are their
concerns. If you ask for feedback, use it!
If applicable, provide industry updates that are useful to potential investors (for instance regional macros, regulatory changes, etc.)
After doing all this, you work towards asking them for a yes or a no. If the investor ends up passing, make sure you stay in touch.
Realize that investors will follow your progress. Send updates, add them to your non-confidential newsletters, etc.
For some investors, the timing isn’t right so investors that pass now might become your investor in the next round.
Investors have options, so do you!
At times you’ll feel that you’re pitching away, but not getting anywhere.
I can still recall in the first few years of fundraising that I didn’t even get the chance to pitch our fund. We were pitching Southeast Asia and why investors should be interested in that market. When we got over that hurdle, we finally got a chance to pitch the fund.
Why did we have to pitch Southeast Asia first? Investors were comparing our fund thesis and opportunity to other funds in other regions such as China and India.
We weren’t the only one fundraising and investors look at every investable dollar.
How does it come back, does it bring strategic value, does it give me access to more deals, how does it fit in my asset mix, etc?
When you go out fundraising, you have to realize that you’re not the only one.
Investors have options. Always keep that in the back of your mind when you’re pitching investors. The way you pitch, behave, respond to questions, present yourself and your team, everything will get benchmarked against other opportunities investors have on the table.
A few more things to take into considering while you’re fundraising:
No one will pitch investors saying their business will slow down or will generate negative returns. Realize your competitors will likely pitch a similar story to yours. Find your unique angle and anchor your pitch around it. The way you fundraise tells the investor a lot about how you run your business. Strive for excellence in execution across all aspects of your business.
Under promise and over deliver. If you tell investors you’ll respond within a week, make it four days. You have to remain on point during the entire fundraising process. Don’t slow down.
Provide a clear response when investors want to understand what the effect is of their investment on your business. How much more can you do with their capital, which opportunities are you able to proceed, how different will the company’s trajectory be after the investment?
Sometime in 2013, I started a Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) business.
I put my all in it and watched it grow. I loved my business, and I loved how quickly it was growing.
But then tragedy struck…
Fire engulfed the business one year later in the middle of the night, and by the time I came the following morning, the premises were in ruins.
Thousands of dollars gone, just like that. It was heart-wrenching.
It was at that point that I realised that I hadn’t insured my business…
The story above is my true-life story. But notice how I could have easily started talking about an insurance plan that would have worked for me. Something, that my readers would then easily buy into.
Why?
I employed the ancient art of storytelling to sell. That is what I call the Art of Story Selling.
If you are a marketer, you would have noticed that selling things outrightly would not likely resonate well with your audience.
How do you that? How do you write in such a way that your target audience would be sold without knowing what hit them?
Here are some tips to help you become a better story seller.
1. Talk to your audience like they are your friends
Just like I did in the story above, when you write, tell your stories in a natural form.
If it will work better for you, start your writing with the heading, “Dear X”. In this case, “X” should be your closest friend. Then write your story.
In this article on My Startupceo on managing emails, for instance, the author began his story in a conversational tone.
Reading it was seamless for me because it sounded like he was chatting with a friend. This means you can apply this no matter the topic you are writing on.
Also, after writing, make out time and read out what you wrote to your own hearing. Make all necessary edits until it starts sounding like a story your best friend would love to read.
2. Create suspense
Let’s face it, you may not really be an author.
This means that you are not likely writing for the sake of writing.
You have a goal. And your goal is for your targeted audience to become your customers or clients.
To do that, make sure that your story takes them on a journey.
Don’t tell them everything within the first two lines. Let the story unfold. Make them curious. Use words and sentences that would get your readers to ask themselves, “what happened next?”.
This way, they will keep reading without even knowing that they had gotten sold.
3. Talk about the problem you want to solve
Like the instance I used in my story, the problem was a fire accident.
My job as a story seller was to paint the picture of this problem in a way that my readers would be able to relate to it. At that point, they would be nodding in their minds because this could have been them.
I could also make it worse by backing up my story with statistics.
For instance, I could say that according to US Fire statistics, there were 1,317,500 fire incidents in the United States in 2017. And according to this data in this article on Forbes, 40 per cent of businesses never open after a disaster.
Worse still, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) says that only 29 per cent out of those that do would still be operating after two years.
Facts like these will help make the problem look scary, and get my readers to start asking for the possible solution to this problem. Use this to your advantage no matter the line of business you do.
As a Quora user, immediately I came across that article, the only question on my mind was, “What do I do to protect myself from these hackers in the future?”.
Doing this effectively will make it very easy for you to sell your solution.
4. Sell your solution like a boss.
You know how sales-y marketers sound, right? It can be annoying. Don’t do that. Don’t sound desperate.
And no matter what you do, don’t ever beg them to buy. Bosses don’t beg. If you sound like you are begging, people won’t want to buy from you.
Why? The simple reason is that people want to buy the best products out there. And the logic is that if what you are selling is so good, you wouldn’t have to beg people to buy it.
5. End your story by asking for the sale.
It is not enough to talk about the solution you provide, go ahead and ask for the sale. You can do this indirectly through a creative CTA (call to action).
It could be to sign up to your newsletter or to click on a link that leads to a check out centre. Or it could be that you gave them a phone number to call for your services.
But don’t ever make the mistake of story-selling without actually asking for the sales.
And as a bonus, make sure you add a wonderful and relatable picture to the story you are selling your audience.
Remember that saying about a picture speaking more than a thousand words? It is true.
By the way, you should not be caught dead using Google images for this.
Make the extra effort of going to picture sites like Unsplash, or Pixabay and downloading high-quality images that can be used to show in pictures the story you are trying to tell with words.
Or you could use your own personal pictures. These would work better especially if your platform is a social media site.
RecyGlo hopes to help Myanmar companies recycle by making the process for convenient for businesses
RecyGlo, a Myanmar startup that has built a recycling pick-up service, has been accepted into the Katapult Ocean Accelerator Program from Norway and will receive a US$150,000 investment as part of the programme.
RecyGlo is trying to help Burmese companies improve their recycling habits by helping them schedule and arrange the delivery process. Essentially, if a company organises their recycling, RecyGlo will make sure it gets to the correct location.
Co-founder and CEO Shwe Yamin Oo explains as such,
“The current waste management in Myanmar is frangemented, inefficient and problematic. Our biggest concern is that waste is not properly managed and eventually going to rivers and ocean thus creating massive environmental problem. We make sure waste management and recycling easy, affordable, systematic and minimal impact on the environment.”
RecyGlo also has alternative products like waste awareness training, a corporate social responsibility programme and a waste auditing service.
It boasts clients like the International Finance Corporation, H&M and Panasonic.
The startup is entering Katapult in an effort to secure later stage funding with the goal of expanding into other cities in Myanmar.
As for Katapult, they were attracted to RecyGlo as a company that fights ocean plastic at the source. A significant chunk of ocean waste starts on land before being transported to the ocean via rivers. If plastic in developing nations like Myanmar can be transported to recycling centers, it may help decrease the amount of waste in our oceans.
RecyGlo had previously come out of the Phandeeyar accelerator programme where it received its first injection of financing.
Blockchain is inherently secure, but there are a lot of vulnerabilities in services and products currently in place. Here are some community- and business-backed trends that will ensure better security in transactions and data
One of the hallmark features of blockchain is that it is supposedly much more secure, adding remarkable levels of transparency that can quickly identify and mitigate cyber threats. But, at a time when we’re approaching 2,000 blockchain projects in development worldwide, watching thousands of crypto miners do their thing each day, and seeing billions of investment dollars pouring in each year, are we taking threats seriously? Has the greater community taken aspects of blockchain’s security for granted? The hard truths reveal affirmatives to both questions.
There are multiple ways that users can contribute to their favorite blockchain projects — whether that’s mining, staking or operating nodes (which can include masternodes, full nodes or lightweight nodes). Regardless of what they’re doing, these private deployments require an investment of time, money and effort to set up, so the last thing anyone wants is to fall victim to hackers. Unfortunately, people often don’t invest as much energy in securing their blockchain deployments as they do in getting their different features to work and scale, making the hacker threat very real.
Various attacks have already been seen on mining software, and there have been multiple high-profile thefts that were worth a lot of money. Tokens in staking wallets make very attractive targets. Malicious actors have successfully infected enterprise infrastructures with sneaky mining malware, called cryptojacking; and in 2016, Hong Kong-based exchange platform Bitfinex was hacked, resulting in more than $60 million (at the time) of crypto losses. The fact is that a victim may not even realize they’ve been hacked until it’s too late. Savvy hackers are careful to cover their tracks and siphon only a portion of tokens at a time.
Another emerging security hole in the crypto community is the potential for sensitive metadata to be exposed through common actions like checking balances, initiating transactions or just receiving block updates. This was recently called out by Ethereum Core Developer Peter Szilagyi. While metadata may seem harmless, it can lead to exposing the physical location of a blockchain deployment, which is something most would prefer to avoid. Why is it important to call out some of these threats?
The Difficulty of Securing Blockchain Projects with Traditional Security Applications
Addressing these and other threats today can lead you down the proverbial rabbit hole. Some of the chatter on BitcoinTalk forums reveals sage advice — often learned the hard way — about using virtual private networks (VPNs) and firewalls to secure deployments. However, these discussions are often light on details, especially on adequately configuring protective applications. As you dig deeper, you can get lost in threads upon threads detailing which ports need to be opened for each blockchain and which should be locked down. The point is that solutions like traditional VPNs and firewalls for protecting blockchain networks are possible solutions, but it’s difficult, messy and surprisingly fragile. I’m not saying fragile in the sense of penetrable, but more so in that one misstep or misconfiguration could open the door to vulnerabilities. What you’re left with is a security fig leaf: a false sense of safety actually covering for a gaping hole.
Then there is the centralised nature of network traffic management itself, as it is largely managed by a few centralised internet service providers (ISPs), which are vulnerable to threats like routing attacks. In fact, research previously suggested that just 13 ISPs host 30 percent of the Bitcoin network, while just three ISPs route 60 percent of the transaction traffic.
Making Blockchain Work for Blockchain
So how can we make sure that the networks blockchain developers and crypto miners use are secure? One possible solution is to build on the Marconi Protocol. This way for example, secure channels for data transport via packet-level encryption are enabled by default for any deployment. This is in contrast to using a separate solution such as a VPN, which not only requires specialised knowledge to set up and maintain, but also introduces a central authority and central point of failure into an otherwise decentralised system.
It’s essential that peers establish these secure connections between all nodes in a network so that traffic is safely transported. And with features like network layer virtualisation and traffic proxying built-in, protecting traffic becomes much easier.
Essentially a blockchain protecting the blockchain, this enables management of routing and packet processing with rules stored in blockchain-based smart contracts. This simplifies deployment and maintenance of what often become complex rule sets. Furthermore, with this setup you can allow developers to define their own network traffic rules, such as conditioning on packet-level features to spot a common phishing strategy where a misleading website, similar to a trusted one, is sent to lure in a user. And these framework ideas are just the beginning, especially with an enthusiastic blockchain developer community. Developers can now take the initiative to build their own decentralised security applications for anti-phishing, anti-malware, intrusion detection and distributed VPNs to deploy on the global blockchain.
Trust and Transparency
The bottom line is that it’s not enough to just trust in blockchain security because there is usually more transparency than other technological data security and privacy methods. Developers, miners and even enterprises need to look at the entire digital ecosystem when considering security, as every single point provides savvy hackers with a weak leak to exploit.
As blockchain investment continues to skyrocket and the crypto markets continue to diversify — even with the recent slowdown — we will see more unique and sophisticated examples of cyber criminals penetrating blockchain’s security veneer. That’s the paradoxical ratio of technology: for as many positive innovations that tech brings up, there almost is an equal amount of sinister efforts to match it. The trick is to keep discussing the threats to blockchain while also inspiring and enabling the community to secure it.
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As a child, Ford stayed awake at night on his family’s farm, taking watches apart and putting them back together again. His father didn’t support his ambitions, so young Ford ran away to train as an apprentice at a machine shop when he was 16 years old.
Nearing the age of 40, Ford was often looked upon as a daydreamer by acquaintances; they criticized him for preferring to “tinker with odd machines” than work a steady job.
Lucky for us, some of Ford’s friends did believe in him. The future icon started his company with an initial investment of US$28,000 and never looked back.
Ford studied the continuous-flow manufacturing processes of breweries, flour-mills and meat-packing plants, before borrowing their ideas to increase efficiency in his factories.
One of his earliest moves? Breaking the company’s Model T automobile assembly into 84 distinct steps. Each worker was trained in one step and was only responsible for completing that individual task.
While this enhanced efficiency to a degree, it wasn’t until Ford implemented power-driven machinery that production really skyrocketed.
The man went on to develop the industry’s first moving assembly line, manufacture more than 29 million automobiles and amass a net worth of $200 billion.
Doing more with less vs. doing more with the same
While Ford’s story is inspiring, his accomplishments weren’t entirely unique.
The modern machinery spawned by the Industrial Revolution ushered an era of unprecedented wealth and success for several of his contemporaries.
Interestingly, the “efficiency mindset” embraced by Ford dominated the marketplace all the way into the early 2000s.
Industry leaders like General Electric, Honeywell and HP have all showcased their efficiency programs and associated bottom-line results.
As reported by Harvard Business Review, earnings growth for the S&P 500 ran at nearly three times the rate of inflation during this time period, despite several years of mild growth.
However, the tide began to change in 2015:
“S&P 500 earnings began falling, and earnings growth has remained negative ever since,” said HBR contributor Michael Mankins, “Without top-line growth, continuing to wring out greater profits through efficiency has become the managerial equivalent of attempting to squeeze blood from a stone.”
Mankin argued that today’s business environment requires a different worldview — one focused on productivity over efficiency.
And I mostly agree.
While efficiency is about doing more with less, productivity is about doing more with the same.
As suggested by a recent survey of more than 300 senior executives — conducted by Bain & Company and the Economist Intelligence Unit:
Today’s most successful organizations are the ones who nurture productivity in the workplace.
Over the last 12 years, focusing on productivity (not efficiency) has helped me significantly to grow JotForm to over four million users.
I wanted to share some of the productivity practices we have found success utilizing, as well as some of the ones we hope to embrace in the future:
1. Team productivity > individual efficiency
We could get all our designers to sit in one room and developers in another.
Similar to how Ford did it, we could ask each person to take on one job at a time and move on to the next right after.
This way, we could get them to work 100 per cent of the time and become a super efficient organization.
Each team includes a lead designer, who works side-by-side with UI and CSS developers, full stack developers, plus UX specialists, data scientists, and any other necessary functions.
Instead of getting each person to work on one task at a time, our cross-functional teams work on one project at a time.
Each team operates like a little company.
They are independent and empowered to make their own decisions. They come up with great ideas, execute and test them quickly, and constantly build new ideas on top of others.
The system works beautifully. No one tries to solve a problem in isolation, so each project benefits from a variety of voices, skills, backgrounds and strategies.
In our offices, each cross-functional team has its own room, with whiteboards, big desks, space to stretch out, and doors that close.
It’s amazing how much these rooms have increased their productivity.
Do we utilize our resources more efficiently? No.
But we do utilize them more productively. We boost creativity.
And we would have lost that team dynamic, product ownership and all the ideas generated from the discussion of people from different fields.
2. Get out of the way
During the early days of scaling a business, “bureaucratic red tape” rarely exists.
An amazing amount of progress can be achieved in a short amount of time with the right combination of team members.
It’s the steady creep of complexity — coinciding with business growth — that slowly hampers productivity, progress and revenue.
However, the larger their organizations become the less productive they often feel.
According to research conducted by Bain & Company, the average company loses more than 20 per cent of its productive capacity to something called organizational drag.
The term refers to unnecessary workplace activities, requirements and regulations pushed by upper-management.
As managers or founders, our job is to question how we can get out of the way and reduce organizational drag.
Take meetings. As Mankins told Sarah Green Carmichael of HBR IdeaCast, the biggest opportunity for enhancing organizational productivity is reducing the number of unnecessary meetings and meeting participants.
I explained in “Should you walk out of that bad meeting, even if it’s rude?” that not all meetings are created equal. They’re not necessarily a “scourge” on your company.
But it doesn’t mean we should:
Stop interrupting the workflow of team members with meetings that don’t necessarily require their presence.
And ask ourselves: Do we need a meeting at all? Does this issue warrant taking up someone else’s precious time?
Because the old maxim that “time is money” simply isn’t true.
One can always earn more money, but time itself? That is irreplaceable.
Meetings are part of our lives. Ultimately, every founder needs to set their own boundaries and create a meeting strategy that fits their organization.
3. Maximize your MVPs
Most companies have a handful of what I would call all-star MVPs.
You can find them in sales departments, IT departments, customer service departments and sitting behind admin desks.
They come from all backgrounds, educational credentials and job descriptions. And, for whatever reason, they have a disproportionate impact on company success.
Unfortunately, these talented individuals are often placed in organizational roles that limit their effectiveness.
“Despite the countless millions that have been spent fighting ‘the war for talent,’ our research suggests that relatively little has been devoted to safeguarding the spoils,” said Mankins,
“Fifteen per cent of most companies’ workforce are star players, employees with exceptional performance and the potential to have an outsize effect on strategy execution.”
Translation: The output of one inspired employee is more than double that of a satisfied employee.
4. Lose the “more is better” mentality
We’ve grown to subconsciously measure a person’s worth based off how many hours they work, how much is on their plate and put simply — whether or not they are running around like a chicken with their head cut off.
But, sooner or later, all of us have to ask ourselves what our mission is — is it to be the busiest or is it to make the most impact?
The 40-hour work week became standard in 1940.
The U.S. Congress amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to include the number after a long period of back-and-forth negotiations.
Considering how much the nature of work has since evolved, we must ask ourselves: Why are we enforcing work practices that were developed nearly 78 years ago?
Countries like New Zealand are now experimenting with 4-day work weeks after several studies have suggested zero correlation between productivity gains and hours logged.
As reported by the Guardian, Luxembourg is the most productive country in the world, despite its workers averaging 29 hours a week.
While JotForm has yet to experiment with shorter workweeks, we have experienced significant boosts in productivity due to flexible work hours.
Those who prefer to sleep in are welcome to start their day a little later. And those who prefer a traditional schedule can come in early.
Additionally, we encourage team members to take frequent breaks to recharge their batteries.
Studies indicate that the average person cannot engage in critical thinking for longer than four hours at a time; anything after that is wasted effort.
And it makes sense — the more mentally refreshed employees feel, the more high-quality work they are likely to achieve.
I try to practice what I preach as well. Every year, I take at least a full week off from my company and head back to my hometown to help my parents with the olive harvest.
All thoughts of startup growth or conversion rates slip away when you’re picking olives. It’s meditative and calming.
I know that olive picking won’t land me at the top of TechCrunch, but it’s a personal measure of success. And somehow, some of my best ideas come to me during this period.
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Switching from an efficiency mindset to a productivity mindset hasn’t happened overnight, but it’s been worth it.
Each change has produced significant gains in terms of happier employees, higher performance and increased profits.
Being an effective person is the foundation of building a successful startup.
In addition, beginning with self-improvement is essential in building great leadership qualities that every business requires.
Great leadership is not a matter of experience or age. A person who has been using one traditional solution isn’t a great leader by any means.
A great leader possesses personal traits and success-driven principles and characteristics.
2. Have a clear vision
The first highly successful person who perfectly brings this point across would be Steve Jobs.
He was the only candidate who could get Rob Campbell, CEO of Voalte, a wireless software provider for hospitals and point-of-care facilities, interested enough to buy into his vision.
Although it is important to have business financial goals and realistic desires, that’s not what a vision is all about.
A vision is something that is seemingly unattainable in the next year or so but is possible in the long-run.
Having realistic goals can make us reach greatness, but a scary yet clear vision would leave a legacy.
Dream big for your startup, you’ll be surprised how the gap between present and future can spur you to achieve success and more.
3. Great sales and marketing
In the case of every startup, the best salesperson and marketer has to be you – the owner of the business.
Who else cares more about your business than you? Who can compete with you in terms of understanding your business?
Grow your sales and marketing skills first then outsource it to a marketing team when you already understand what works for your business.
This can save you a sum of money, plus maximize every dollar you spend on outsourcing.
Getting sales is the lifeblood of every business; you can’t survive without sales and you can very well do with more of it.
The third trait of highly successful startups is having great sales and marketing.
4. Valuable offering (product/service)
You can’t polish a turd.
Providing something that helps people avoid something unpleasable or painful is valuable.
Offering something to serves joy and pleasure is valuable. And when served on a silver plate, it could double in value.
“I always think that you should start with the problem that you’re trying to solve in the world and not start with deciding that you want to build a company. And the best companies that get built are things that are trying to drive some kind of social change, even if it’s just local in one place, more than starting out because you want to make a bunch of money or have a lot of people working for you or build some company in some way.”
Solve a problem, enhance a solution – provide a valuable offering.
5. Have short and long term goals
Earlier in trait number two, we touched on having a clear vision and about realistic goals.
Now, before you start throwing shade that I’m contradicting myself, allow me to clarify.
Having realistic goals, both short and long term helps in the practical steps to work towards the vision. Pinning up detailed objective helps to track the progress which is crucial for a highly successful startup too.
The point of a vision is to ensure that you always stay hungry, and never get complacent. Whereas, short term and long term goals are more about the mission, strategies, tactics, and action plan.
Thus, having these goals are important in seeing success for your startup.
6. Open to changes
In the past three decades, the growth of technology supersedes human growth.
It’s exponential – meaning it is extrapolated to only get faster and time goes by.
Can you keep up? Can your business keep up?
In our world where everything is going digital, and socializing has new normality, it is paramount to be ahead and stay competitive.
Nowadays, consumers can instantly sniff out an advertisement and nobody likes to get sold.
Thus, we have to connect to people first and offer something that is risk-free yet ultra-valuable.
Gary Vaynerchuk has preached about the benefits of running a small business or a lean startup that is remembered in 4 simple words: “Macro patience, micro speed”.
He stresses the importance of speed in business. But not in the way that most people would think which what he wrote in the following really explains what I mean perfectly.
“To me, it’s all about speed. I actually don’t care about anything else. Speed, both in people skills and hard work will trump anything.
When you’re not spending any time worrying, you’re spending time on executing. That’s what a great culture is, it’s speed. You’re not spending the 15 minutes a day bickering. You’re not spending the four hours a day wondering if that person’s trying to ruin you…
It’s just hustle. Input and output. It’s very binary. You can’t expect 30 years of results from 30 minutes of work.”
