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Hi there,
Over the last weekend, I wondered for the nth time if US actor Anita Barone – who was originally cast as Carol in Friends – yearns for the career she could have had, seeing how the sitcom went onto become one of the most popular shows of all time. Barone reportedly left the show because she wanted a full-time role and Carol’s wasn’t written as one – the character does have a number of appearances, though.
While hindsight is always 20/20, I think almost everyone thinks about how our lives boil down to that one leap we did or did not take. And some of us even take a second leap.
By conservative estimates, at least 111 startup have taken that second leap and gone onto wear the VC hat, as in the cases of Monk’s Hill Ventures’ Lim Kuo-Yi and Golden Gate Ventures’ Vinnie Lauria.
And while this pattern of founders becoming investors isn’t new, as my colleague, Tian Wen, notes in the Big Story, slightly over 75% of founders in Southeast Asia have transitioned to a career as a VC in just the last half a decade.
Besides having numerous advantages that can work in favor of VCs and startups, being a founder-turned-VC is also a reversible switch. VCs can go back to being founders.
An “irreversible” shift is the one toward online learning, Geniebook co-founder Neo Neo Zhizhong tells my colleague, Samreen, who in the other Big Story, peers into the finances of the Singapore-based edtech startup, which has seen 100% revenue growth in 2021.
Meanwhile, there’s a quiet storm brewing in Indonesian edtech, with Nadiem Makarim, the country’s education minister – also Gojek’s founder – announcing that he intends to make changes to Indonesia’s university entrance exam. It’s a move that could make edtech firms sweat a bit. More on this from my colleague, Aditya, in Making Waves.
— Nikita
THE BIG STORIES
1️⃣ The rapid rise of SEA’s founder-VC mafia
Image credit: Timmy Loen
Three out of four founder-turned-VCs emerged in just the last five years, and a significant number have established their own firms.
2️⃣ Geniebook tops the class with 100% revenue growth in 2021
The Singapore-based edtech firm grew its user base 5x between 2020 and 2022.
MAKING WAVES
NEWS YOU SHOULD KNOW
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