Where does the vision of driving 1% of Southeast Asian GDP growth come from?
At one point, I found myself asking, “Why do we do what we do every day?” I just didn’t want to be born and die without doing anything meaningful. So there I was, pondering what I should do after I sold my startup, and I arrived at two different options: I could do something that impacts this region or I could find a different opportunity in a different region. Southeast Asia is my home so I felt like I had a solid grasp of the areas where we could really achieve progress. That’s the reason that I went with the former. We can certainly help entrepreneurs scale in Southeast Asia.
That said, I actually never thought I’d run a VC fund! It’s more of a means to an end, and it definitely wasn’t the starting point. To help the region’s GDP grow, we must help the businesses here grow. That’s why we tapped the largest companies here to be our LPs: we view them as entrepreneurs who are just looking for ways to improve their businesses. If we can help them do that, we will have achieved our goal.
You started as a doctor and eventually became a VC – what was that journey like?
I’m curious and love to learn about new things. It’s hard to overstate and is quite a passion of mine. I really, really enjoy conducting deep dives into new technologies and VC enables me to learn about new things all the time. Web3 is probably the best example of this: full-scale decentralization of entire sectors of the Internet after an era of steep consolidation is a true paradigm shift. I just couldn’t get enough of it and, for awhile, was taking meetings with pretty much anyone building blockchain projects. So far, the result has been good for the fund since we were able to invest in the early rounds of two unicorns, Band Protocol and Solana.
But let’s return to the topic of learning new things. No one can learn everything about every subject, so we narrowed our focus to deep-tech. That emphasis helps to maximize the impact we can have.
And lastly, although I’m not a practicing doctor, I’d also say that it’s not like I sacrificed six years in medical school because I still use the knowledge that I acquired there regularly. Healthcare and biotech are sectors we’re really excited about.
