These numbers will remind you that doing a startup is brutal

So you want to change the world? Create a cutting-edge, highly-scalable product that will get hundreds of millions of users and hurtle towards a billion dollar exit? Nevermind a billion, as cool as that is. How about a more realistic ten million?

Dreaming is easy, and admittedly, the tech media does cover successful startups and funding news too obsessively. But here’s what you don’t hear: the tons of pitches we don’t write about, coming from me-too entrepreneurs who aren’t solving real problems. In fact, many of the startups we wrote about two years ago aren’t around today.

It’s true everywhere: in Silicon Valley, China, and especially Southeast Asia. I dug up some numbers from a few seed investors in Singapore and the region, and here’s what I ended up with:

The table warrants an explanation: most of these firms (save for East Ventures, which I must disclose has invested in Tech in Asia) belong to iJAM, a government program which picks incubators who then decide the startups to pump taxpayer’s money into alongside private sector capital. East Ventures is one of the most prolific investors in Southeast Asia, although their portfolio includes Japanese startups.

Given their relative youth, let’s discount FocusTech, Fatfish, and Angel’s Gate (which is more of an advisory that pools together cash from angels), and focus on the top three firms in the table.

Let’s assume these three belong to the cream of the crop of the region’s seed investors. It’s a reasonable deduction: firms that are doing well are more likely to share their numbers, and those that have closed shop are less reachable anyway. So far, none of the other iJAM incubators, responsible for the remaining two-thirds of the 330 deals backed by the program, have responded to Tech in Asia.

It’s not all doom and gloom