What Works

Andy Davis has been a startup founder for about as long as he can remember. From conducting market research for ideas while in university to launching multiple companies in industries including edtech and enterprise software, a passion for entrepreneurial ventures has guided his life. He’s now taking that passion and using it for a singular mission: to support black founders and investors throughout the United Kingdom via his organization 10x10.

Once thought to be a feature and not a business, messaging apps have seen a meteoric rise to popularity over the past decade. There’s WeChat in China, KakaoTalk in South Korea, and now TelloTalk in Pakistan. Founded in 2017, TelloTalk has seen remarkable growth in recent years thanks to focusing on the unique needs of their local market, per CEO Shahbaz Ali Jamote.

For being home to the fifth largest population in the world, Pakistan has a comparatively small startup community. That said, the country is hitting an inflection point, with internet and smartphone usage becoming more and more common. It’s not dissimilar to the technology adoption spikes seen in other countries across Southeast Asia, like Indonesia and Vietnam, that led to a wave of high-flying tech startups. Bykea, a Pakistani startup that offers everything from motorbike hailing to delivery of goods, is set to ride that wave in its home country to become the next local tech giant.

Looking back on the past decade, one of the most notable shifts has been the rapid spread of mobile technology, especially in Southeast Asia. But while consumers and startups were quick to make that shift, older companies found it difficult to quickly pivot to the new standard. Jirnexu was founded to bring those two parties together, specifically in the financial services sector.

They say that with startups, timing is everything. Being early, or late, is the same as being wrong. This year has brought about more change than we can count, but with change comes opportunity for some. And for Johnny Boufarhat and the team at Hopin, the worldwide move to remote conferencing as a result of the pandemic accelerated a trend that they had seen coming for years.

The music industry has gone through massive changes in recent decades. Gone are the days of being able to track each week’s new releases. Now, over 40,000 tracks are uploaded on to music platforms each day. While new technologies have led to a creative explosion by lowering the barriers to record music, this new wave has somewhat overwhelmed companies in the industry, per Musiio co-founder and CEO Hazel Savage.

Fintech as a sector has been exploding for the better part of a decade now. Fueled by mass amounts of new data and powerful algorithms, startups around the world have sprung up to innovate within a once stagnant industry. Within fintech, peer-to-peer lending quickly emerged as one of the biggest opportunities—Lending Club saw marked success in North America, as did ANT Financial in China. Validus is on a mission to bring that same level of innovation to ASEAN.

The rise of e-commerce companies in recent years has made it easy to forget about in-store retail. But, in many parts of the world, physical stores still make up for the lion’s share of money spent. Fave, a startup based in Kuala Lumpur, is looking to connect the two industries by offering offline retailers new-age tools that historically have been only available to online businesses.

When users head to Oway’s website to book travel in and out of Myanmar, they arrive at an easy-to-use portal where planning a trip end-to-end is within a few clicks. Much like U.S.-based Expedia, the 8-year-old startup offers up flight, hotel, car, and activity options for anyone wanting to get away. That said, the road to building and launching such a platform in Myanmar, a country of over 50 million where less than 1% of the population has a credit card, was far from easy, says CTO Tun Tun Linn.

From large metropolises like Singapore to smaller villages in places like Thailand, water is a constant need that flows through any community. And with climate change accelerating, the demand to properly manage this vital utility has never been higher. SpaceAge Labs, and CEO Deepak Pitta, are on a mission to help solve this growing problem by applying that latest in machine learning and IoT sensors, bringing an antiquated industry into the modern age.

It began with a table that Zwende co-founder Innu Nevatia couldn’t find. She had this image of the perfect piece of furniture, but it didn’t exist anywhere outside of her head. No one was making quite what she wanted. In the process of scouring the flea markets and pop-up design shows in and around her home base in Bengaluru, India the idea for her startup was born. “I was meeting all these incredible artists in this quest to find someone to make me a table,” Nevatia says. “And I began to realize there was an opportunity to match the craft of what these artists do with the more modern tastes of today.” So, with her husband, Sujay Suresh, Zwende was launched.

For Kalsoom Lakhani, investing in the future of the Pakistani startup ecosystem was something of a homecoming. Having grown up in Pakistan before moving to the U.S. for university, Lakhani watched as her native country began to assemble the pieces necessary to support would-be startup founders in the fifth largest market in the world. Leaning on the lessons learned in other regions that have recently seen success in building strong startup ecosystems, such as Egypt and Vietnam, Lakhani launched i2i Ventures with her co-founder Misbah Naqvi to invest in and support this new group of budding Pakistani entrepreneurs.

It was not by chance that Kamarul Muhamed combined his financial background and drone obsession into an AI-powered drone services startup. Aerodyne is Muhamed’s fourth startup, so he can spot a great opportunity. But even he didn’t fully appreciate that if developing technology is your only focus as CEO -- you will fail.

Binh Tran, the founder of Klout and a partner at VC firm 500 Startups, looked out over time and geography and saw in Vietnam a place with a steadily growing engineering culture, and a population ready for an economic breakout. The question he needed to answer was this, did Vietnam and Southeast Asia broadly meet his criteria for investments? Could the region deliver those 100X-plus returns that keep venture capitalists in the hunt? At first glance, the answer was “no.” But then Tran saw in startups like Grab a strategy to get to VC scale, and then some.

The power of the open source software movement is how it harnesses the collective power of many developers to solve a shared problem. Raghav Kapoor, CEO and co-founder of startup Smartkarma, is looking to apply that same sense of collaboration to remake the investment research market.

As every startup founder or would-be founder knows, there is an endless supply of ideas for the next great product, or the next great company. It is uncanny (but maybe not surprising in our information-at-warp-speed lives) that what may seem like an original invention is often not only occurring to some number of people in the exact same way, but at the exact same time. The key to leaping ahead, of course, is converting your ideas into something that can be put into the market before all those other people do it. That is why Singlife CTO Ned Lowe has built a team and a product development approach to do just that.

Michael Musandu grew up in Zimbabwe and South Africa before heading to the Netherlands to study computer science as an undergrad and then in graduate school. While shopping for clothes online Musandu had the experience, as many do, of never seeing someone like himself in the smiling fashion scenarios that were presented on his phone and laptop. For Musandu, it was yet another example of the lack of diversity and inclusion in the world he saw around him. His response? He would build the "people" he never had a chance to see.

Rahul Vohra already knew there was a startup CEO + productivity love connection at his first startup, Rapportive. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have built the contact management email extension. What he didn’t know was how much that affinity would create a customer acquisition flywheel for Rapportive, and how, given the right product and target customer, it could be engineered. The good news? You can do it too.

Anna Gong was brought into Perx Technologies in late 2014 as CEO to lead the Singapore-based lifestyle app company through its next stage of growth. But instead of scaling things to greater heights, Gong found herself shutting down the core business and turning what was a consumer-focused business into a full-tilt enterprise SaaS platform. Why her plan worked so well.

Telecom software maker Metaswitch Networks was bootstrapped for the first 25 years of its profitable existence before the team decided to take outside investors including Sandhill Road standout Sequoia Capital. A few years after Sequoia invested in the London-based company, Chris Mairs, who was Metaswitch’s chief scientist, asked a Sequoia partner what the key requirements were for investing in a company. As Mairs recalls the conversation, the Sequoia partner highlighted three things. 1. The people. 2. The business needed to be quite young so there was plenty of opportunity for growth. 3. The Sequoia team needed to be able to bicycle from Sandhill Road to the company’s head offices. Metaswitch had only one of those right. The only one that mattered.

The time and cost it takes to build things has come way down for all kinds of startups. So, unless you are deep in the R&D game, the answer to, “How long have you been working on this?” takes on deeper significance, says Seedcamp’s Reshma Sohoni. The speed to market, and the speed with which competitors also crop up, has vastly increased since Sohoni co-founded the London-based seed investment in 2007. “Particularly in the world of consumer and SaaS it is (now) an execution game, and a go-to-market game rather than it is fundamentally tech infrastructure as a moat,” Sohoni says. “So, a lot of our questioning and push is around the brilliance (a founder demonstrates) around go-to-market."

Southeast Asia is on the verge of an economic breakout, says VC Olivier Raussin. So how can founders building in these tough times be ready to hit the accelerator? Conserve cash, conserve cash, and take some time for yourself.

These are not the times to try and dance around the realities of what it takes (and costs) to run a startup, says Emma Weston, CEO and co-founder of Sydney, Australia-based AgriDigital. AgriDigital straddles the worlds of farming and fintech, offering a platform for buyers and sellers of commodity crops like grain and cotton to do business with more speed and transparency. It’s exactly how Weston and her farming co-founders, are building their startup.

Georg Petschnigg doesn’t think of himself as purely a designer, yet he has spent a career building products like Paper and Paste that helps us all create more beautiful things in the course of our work and fun. “It’s human potential,” says Petschnigg. “It’s always been about augmenting the human and their capabilities.” Where Petschnigg has come at design over the course of his career at Microsoft, at the startup FiftyThree which he co-founded, and now as part of WeTransfer, is from the vantage of point of a trained engineer. “I come from the church of tech,” he says. “I believe in technology from stick to stone, to printing press, to servers in the cloud. Technology is a huge enabler. For me the driving force has always been is technology should enable a richer human experience. “The most important thing it means to be alive is to create. So, supporting people’s creative pursuits, in whatever shape or form they come, is the best application of my engineering training.”

Fred Destin, founder of London-based Stride.VC, has been in the venture business for more than two decades, and what he sees now in the startup investment world is not surprisingly a substantially tightening economic picture. Startup valuations are falling by 30-50%. Volume of deals getting done are down by 30-50%. “Half of our portfolio’s (business) pipeline is doing ok, the other half is getting obliterated, and it’s true for almost every company,” Destin says. “The good news … startups are kind of designed to perform fairly well in environments of chaos."

Matt Clifford, co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, takes a global view when investing in people and their ideas. Not surprisingly, to hear Clifford tell it, there is practically no place on earth where startups and their investors are conducting business as usual. So, what should founders anticipate as they look to raise their next round, and whom should they place their trust in as they navigate the months ahead?

Data practically runs through the veins of Steven Mih, CEO of opensource data orchestration startup Alluxio. He's a serial startup CEO with more than two decades in the distributed data world. At Alluxio, Mih was brought in as CEO to take an opensource project that came out of U.C. Berkeley’s AMP lab, and help scale the software and the startup around the world. The best way Mih has found to work with his team to do just that, involves trust, over-communication, and a little email hack that reminds him to follow-up on just about everything in his busy life.

Serial startup founder, angel investor, and college dropout George Burgess founded exam prep startup Gojimo when he was an undergraduate student at Stanford. Burgess was seemingly living the founder dream, but as his dorm-room startup found an audience Burgess found it was too hard to juggle both school and building his company. So, he left Stanford, and that is where his entrepreneurial education really began.

As an angel investor Richard Fearn has met thousands of entrepreneurs, and there is a streak that runs through the best, he says. “They do have a restlessness and a resourcefulness to continue, even when it gets terribly hard.” And when you pitch Fearn, you better make him believe that you are going to change some of the significant problems the world faces today.

Investors don’t want to hear about your optimistic and unrealistic path to an exit. Save that for your own private, magical thinking. What angels want to see is that you have the right team and a massive market. And critically, if you are a newbie in the startup world, demonstrate that you are open to receiving mentoring.

Sage Franch and her co-founders at Crescendo have all faced their own set of barriers in their work lives, whether that discrimination was based on gender, race, or any number of other cultural biases that can be endemic to many workplaces. They founded their startup to help companies learn about -- and improve — their cultural competency, with software designed to promote diversity and inclusion.

Eamonn Carey from TechStars London walks us through the reasons you might want to apply to an accelerator. Beyond the network, beyond the technical and business help, Carey says, there is the forcing function of just getting an MVP ready for demo day.

Simon Thorpe from U.K.-based Delta2020 uses a basic model when vetting potential investments and it boils down to four things: the right team, the right technology, intellectual property that is defensible, and a very big market.

The 2019 U.K. Angel of the Year, Sunil Shah, joins Richard Howard to discuss the realities of running and growing a business from scratch (it’s not what they teach you in business school), and why not listening during an initial meeting will end your shot at getting his investment.

"They join because they don't have to wear a suit." From playing board games with his children to get out of his "work" head, to solving the problem of finding risk takers willing to join his startup in Asia, Abdullah takes us through how he and his co-founders have built one of the most successful fintech startups in Hong Kong.

Finding a safe haven for people fleeing some of the most chaotic and dangerous parts of the glove is a unique problem for a startup to tackle, and yet ReDI School faces some of the same issues of scale, speed, and purpose as any other startup.

Spoiler alert: The only thing that matters is building something your customers love. But the trick as a startup CEO is staying close enough to customers to know that.

Flip-flops in the office, tracking everything, driving out fear, and giving everyone visibility into everything are just some of ways Bridgement is building a very fast-growing fintech startup in one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

Hire people who can take over your job. Sounds simple, but then you have to really let them do it, and that's hard, especially a CTO used to getting her hands in every bit of code. Plus, how your marketing department can take a cue from agile development routines.

Sehkar Madathanapalli has built systems for some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley, as well as leading venture capital firms. With his own startup Liscio, where he is co-founder and CTO, Palli has baked in some of those big companies lessons alongside the startup tenets of speed and constant improvement. For Palli, it starts with a structure that is flat, but not too flat.