Investor: friend or foe

[2014-11-14 Fri 12:05] speaker: John Tan event: Hackers and Painters @ Blk71 ** prior a management consultant ** currently private investor and shareholder at 8capita ** personal portfolio chronology

• travel and transport focus
• from B2C, to B2B, now B2Developers (eg Temasys)
• started from Chope 3 years ago
• Drive is first major investment
• Ninja Van
• Saturday kids
• teach programming to kids
• Controlled commodity
• fashion e-commerce ** bootstrap as far as possible shows commitment able to determine valuation with more certainty ** pick your investors carefully ** meeting investors
• ask for a personal intro
• go to events ** valuation vs structure you choose the value, I choose the terms is not good for the founder future investors will consider terms given to earlier ones ** some business needs a lot of money eg redmart ** valuation vs stress high initial valuation makes it harder to justify even higher future rounds ** what do investors look for?
• is the idea viable?
• traction (revenue, users)
• strong founding team
• 5-7x ROI
• size of the marketplace, ability to scale ** on low valuation in SEA
• smaller companies looking to acquire
• not many moonshot projects, most are building marketplaces