Startup Management: Prioritizing and Scaling (Startup Asia Preview)

A billion dollars

Most of the younger generation folks (like myself) may not know Kee Lock Chua who now is the group president and CEO of Vertex Venture Holdings. He has a ton of experience under his belt, a total of 30 years to be exact.

Prior to his stint at Vertex Venture, Kee Lock was an investor at Walden International and Transpac Capital. He was also an entrepreneur at MediaRing.com and BioSensors and an operational executive at NatSteel, Beaver Computer Corp, and Intraco while also serving on the boards of Logitech International, Yongmao, and SHC Capital.

For me to meet him was kind of coincidental. He was at Jakarta for our meetup but unfortunately we had to reschedule it due to the flood. Knowing that some guests flew in just to attend the meetup, we organized a simple dinner get-together for them. One of them who attended was Kee Lock. The dinner set up was great because we all could talk at length. Kee Lock shared his experience and views about the IT industry. I’m not sure how many were listening but I certainly was.

At the dinner, Kee Lock shared several stories about prioritizing and scaling a company. As the company grows, things get busier and the team grows bigger. Kee Lock recommends that we, as founders, should focus on just five things and leave the rest to other team members. Which are the five things? Depending on the nature of your company, it could be sales, product management, etc.

He also lamented about the lack of billion dollar valuation companies in Singapore. Right now, we’re celebrating exits at tens of millions but more can actually be done. Kee Lock pointed out that the media-shy company Reebonz is on track to becoming one good case study for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Of course, Kee Lock could be biased here since Vertex invested in Reebonz. Another company who was a Singaporean billion dollar company is Creative Technologies which Kee Lock also used to work closely with (see Vertex’s past portfolio). Anyhow, the idea of building a billion dollar company is indeed far-fetched. But not impossible knowing that fellow mortals in Southeast Asia have achieved that feat before.

If you want more of Kee Lock’s experience, join his coffee chat interview at Startup Asia Singapore 2013. His coffee chat is scheduled on April 4 at 1.30 to 2.00pm. We will see you there!