Jeffrey Chua
Golden Gate Ventures (GGV), one of Singapore’s active VC firms, has promoted Jeffrey Chua as Principal.
Chua has been at the heart of numerous investment-related activities and has helped founders grow ever since he joined the company as an intern five years ago.
In an interview with e27, Chua said that he will continue to focus on processing venture deals. Moving forward, he will also become more active on the portfolio management side.
Being the only junior investment professional at GVV since a long time, Chua brings the experience of being involved in almost all of its major deals. Among them are BukuWarung, Funding Societies, KooBits, and Carro.
In this interview, Chua discusses his personal investment strategy, what he looks for in founders, the GGV’s investment thesis and how deals might change post-COVID-19.
GGV is among one of the most well-renowned early-stage VC firms, globally. How did your journey in this space begin?
Chua: I ended up in the VC space by accident. It wasn’t something that I had planned.
After studying in the US, I decided to move back to Singapore and was basically helping out my mother with a couple of side investments and everything.
A friend of mine, whom I had known during my time in New York, convinced me to join GGV as an intern, and I decided to give it a shot after staying home for the longest time.
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Could you also share a little bit more about the GGV investment thesis and the kind of investments that you largely focus on?
Chua: We are a consumer-focused VC that focuses on software-based tech companies in Southeast Asia, therefore we tend not to play in hardware. The general thesis is the consumer journey within Southeast Asia and the focus is consumer upliftment and improvement. So it could be like payments and logistics companies that make the daily lives of the general population smoother and more efficient.
What are some of the key qualities that you look for in founders?
Chua: For me, I must walk away from the conversation learning something new. If I walk into a meeting and happen to know more about the business model or industry than the founder himself/herself, it’s a red sign. So I like to look for someone who can teach me something new.
Another thing that I look for are people who can change my mind. I might come into a meeting with a certain view or thesis on something. But I’m open to having my mind change if they’re able to change my mind in a very convincing way. That’s usually a very positive sign.
So, the founder has to have some qualities of a good salesman?
Chua: The founder should be able to back up his ideas with sales.
Adding to that, how often do you look at numbers for your early-stage deals? Are you more founder-focused or number-focused?
Chua: It really depends on the stage of the startup that we’re looking at, and what the context of the conversation is. I think, in the VC space, at least in the early stage, I’m probably one of the more numerically-inclined people, where I like going through Excel models and financial plans.
So, if you have data on your current business model, what I’m looking for are things that show me that what you are telling me has been proven or are based on numbers.
At the end of the day, I’m not an accountant. I won’t say ‘hey, your balance sheet doesn’t balance’.
What are some deals that you passed on that eventually went on to become successful startups?
Chua: We try not to look back at this because we understand that we’re not going to hit every single unicorn. For us, we like to play in the space where we would like to make the best quality decisions based off of the data available. The outcome, there could be various different factors that play into it.
Speaking more broadly, what signal is the market currently sending post-COVID-19 in terms of investments? Should we expect more deals?
Chua: Overall I think investments will get easier and things will move faster and smoother. Due to the pandemic, a lot of deals that were in the US$10-million range and above were slowed down or stalled since people were not allowed to travel and visit these companies in person. But going forward, when people are able to travel, they’re able to get back to their regular due diligence process.
For GGV, in terms of the number of deals that we’ve seen, things haven’t really changed much since pre-COVID-19. So our pipelines were still pretty full of companies.
We also heard that you beat a couple of investors at the reverse startup competition organised by Slush? What was the winning idea?
Chua: The reverse pitching competition is where investors have to pitch to startups, and I had signed up for it and gone up there and pitched a company called ‘Uber for trains’.
My pitch was that I was raising US$1 trillion to cover Singaporean railroads so that people would be able to hail trains from anywhere. And then I ended up winning because I made everyone laugh the most.
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Image Credit: Golden Gate Ventures
The post ‘Founders should be able to back up their ideas with sales’: Golden Gate’s newly-appointed Principal Jeffrey Chua appeared first on e27.