Strive investor talks opportunities and challenges for Indonesian startups

This article is from an episode of Asia VC Cast, a podcast hosted by Daniel Song. This is heavily revised from the original show transcript. For the full interview, go here.

Samir Chaibi is an early-stage investor at Strive (formerly Gree Ventures), a pan-Asia venture capital fund headquartered in Tokyo.

Chaibi heads the firm’s investments in Indonesia and those across Southeast Asia and serves on the boards of startups such as Healint, Ayopop, Pintek, and Crowde.

Tell us about yourself.

I’ve been around Southeast Asia and India for about two years.

My background was in finance, and my road to venture capital was a little bit bumpy. Before entering the space, I co-founded a startup and joined another one as a very early employee. After that, the intersection of finance and entrepreneurship just led me to venture capital.

At Strive, I mostly cover Indonesia, which is our most important market in the region, and a majority of our successes and our portfolio is actually based there. My job also involves interacting with accelerators and incubators on the ground.

And I think it was these interactions that led to the idea of Skala, a startup accelerator that was jointly created by Strive and Salim Group-backed Innovation Factory.

We started working on the idea in the summer of 2018, and now we are just about to start with our second batch.

Very briefly, Skala is a 20-week program where we offer US$50,000 in exchange for 8% in common equity from a startup.

What’s the motive behind starting an accelerator program?

Of course, we’re still a VC firm first and foremost, but I think Skala – from a strategy perspective – acts as a feeder to our portfolio.

For me personally, I realized that founders in Indonesia – who are first-time entrepreneurs 99% of the time – do not leave accelerators and those kinds of programs with the right business tools and mindset to succeed. This is often because of the limited resources and time that’s allocated to the local accelerators and platforms.

As a premise, we really try to keep what the folks at Y Combinator did in the US in terms of functioning, ideas, and principles. When it comes to functioning, we have subject matter experts that advise startups, we have partners that are always on the core, and we have chief experience officers that come in every week to share their expertise.

But we of course need to cater to the Indonesian context, so we have workshops that range from customer discovery, product development, sales and marketing, hiring, and etc. That’s everything related to the core competencies for founders because, as I said, most of them are first-timers.