Khailee Ng built and exited two startups at breakneck speed. Here’s how

Khailee Ng is a managing partner at 500 Startups. According to Ng, the 500 Durians fund has invested in some 50 startups across Southeast Asia to date, including Malaysia’s Grabtaxi, Singapore’s Carousell, and Indonesia’s Kudo.

On stage today at Tech in Asia Singapore 2015, Ng looks back on his own past experience as founder of two startups, both of which he successfully exited.

Ng’s startup journey began in 2010 when his friend and then co-founder Joel Neoh asked Ng for help. Neoh was in the events business and had a huge database of contacts. “He asked me, how can I monetize this?” says Ng.

The idea for Says.com started to form, and it evolved into a model that paid people to share branded content. This model worked well, Ng says, but in the beginning growth was slow. “We were bringing good conversions to our advertisers, but we also started thinking about something we can we launch that works for ourselves.”

The meteoric rise of Groupsmore

So, shortly after founding Says.com, Ng and Neoh launched a second venture, Groupsmore. Ng openly admits it was “a straight up Groupon clone.”

“We’d get into arguments over how to copy Groupon. We would see different things, until we realized this happened because they were split-testing everything,” Ng recalls.

“When we built Groupsmore we didn’t expect it to get acquired so quickly. But then Groupon bought Citydeal in Germany, Rocket Internet’s version of Groupon. They put Oliver Samwer in charge to run Groupon international, that was part of the deal. Groupon was really smart here to work with Rocket,” Ng says.

Roughly three months after building and launching Groupsmore, Ng got a call from Groupon. The negotiations lasted only two weeks, then they had a deal.

“They are not easy to negotiate with. Basically they told us that either they would buy us today or they would kill us. The decision-making process for us had three arguments: Do we want to fight with those guys? No. Do we want to get cash off the table now? That doesn’t sound too bad. Is Groupsmore the best thing we can do in our lives? No. We knew it was the right decision to sell,” recalls Ng. “In retrospect, the sale itself wasn’t worth as much as the experience I gained from it, and all the things the acquisition made possible.”

After all these years, Ng still can’t disclose the terms of the deal publicly. “Let’s just say it was way overvalued,” he laughs.

A month of low at Says.com

After Groupsmore’s acquisition, Ng went back to focus on Says.com. Although the business grew steadily, there were some low points. Ng remembers a key staff member leaving the company, which was tough for him to handle at that early stage as an entrepreneur.