ANGIN team members attended the ‘Fundraising Strategies for Early Stage Startups’ seminar on the 21st of February, hosted by BLOCK71 Jakarta, to gain some insight in the criteria venture capital investors are looking for when investing in startups.
The Kopi Chat was between Peng T. Ong, Managing Partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures and moderated by Roshni Mahtani, CEO/Founder at Tickled Media – theAsianparent.com. It was quite a great experience listening to the expertise of Peng T. Ong who was the founder and CEO of Interwoven and Encentuate and the co-founder of Match.com – all three of these companies had successful IPOs on NASDAQ. He put a focus on being driven by actions and living in Indonesia he believes his current purpose is to foster growth is SEA globally through supporting technological prospects.
The event was well attended by many entrepreneurs – locals and foreigners from around the globe – looking for investment knowledge related to the Indonesian market.
Ong highlighted his venture capital investment philosophy in SEA into three points:
- The Entrepreneur team and founder must be coachable to grow and learn. The entrepreneur must be mature enough to make changes in themselves and to the company in order to adapt and be successful
- It needs to have a big business outlook – this is how it should work in SEA. Reaching a global market is vital and there must be opportunity for potentially 1 billion people and generate at least USD 100 mil usd in revenue within 4-8 years.
- The business must be able to differentiate itself from competitors as is grows and they must have sustainable proprietary information. Accumulation of proprietary information is key to growth and success.
As a entrepreneur Ong also explained that when starting a company it is also essential to keep clarity, integrity and resilience and to never compromise in the face of weakness as this will just lead to more compromise.
Overall it was an insightful evening which allowed junior ANGIN team members to game an insight into the large scale criteria and requirements of companies in which a VC invests in as opposed to an angel investor.
