Early-stage founders don’t need to focus on their decks, says this angel investor

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with Asia VC Cast hosted by Daniel Song where we publish the revised transcripts from the podcast’s interviews with inspiring entrepreneurs and experienced VCs. This is heavily revised from the show’s original transcript. For the full interview, go here.

Eric Dadoun is a founding partner at Impiro. He started his first company at 17 years old and has spent 15 years in the startup, tech, and business world. Now, he plays an integral role at his own investment firm.

In this interview, Dadoun talks about Impiro’s approach, tips for founders, and some interesting views in the angel investment space.

Tell us about your background and how you got into angel investing.

I’m based in Singapore but I’m originally from Canada. I’ve been traveling in and out of Southeast Asia for almost 10 years now.

I would say that starting an angel investment firm was not by accident. My business partners and I started working together in 2006 at a telco company in The Netherlands. Long story short, our company expanded into Asia in 2009 and we started doing some investments in the telco space.

We met a lot of different people who were involved in various networks and industries. So privately, we started doing some investments in other things that we thought were interesting.

Then, six years ago, we looked at that mixed bag of investments, the original company we started together, our private investments, etc. and came to the conclusion that we had become angel investors. It was going well and we were having fun, so we decided to formalize it. That’s what we’ve been up to for the past six years.

What is your investment rationale and which sectors are you focusing on?

Typically, we are just looking for who we think are great founders—guys we are comfortable to work with—as they are critical to us. We are not necessarily looking at things like traction and projections because we are early-stage investors. We’re just looking for quality ideas or ideas that we think are scalable.

We’ve seen some really great ideas that weren’t executed because of the people behind them and vice versa. We’ve also seen not-so-great ideas get executed and even scaled because they were operated by absolute rock stars.

With respect to industries, we’re kind of industry-agnostic. If you look at our portfolio, we seem to be a little bit all over the place: telco, renewable energy, logistics, health and fitness, brick-and-mortar F&B shops, etc. Geographically speaking, we really like Southeast Asia.

What’s your approach to investor-founder relationships?

We don’t invest in anyone whom we feel we need to micromanage or be overly involved with. I don’t think we would be comfortable putting capital into their business. So, we’re here when and if the founder needs us—as advisors, as sounding boards, to give some opinion on a project that they’re working on, to open some doors within our network, etc. We’re here to help and support but, ultimately, the founders don’t work for us, so we don’t want to micromanage them.

What does the comeback of larger funds to seed investing mean for angel investors?

It’s great. Like I said, we’re early-stage investors and we’re involved in angel and pre-seed rounds. So, it’s fantastic that the market for later-stage funding is becoming more liquid. That means companies have more opportunities to scale and grow through that funding funnel. We don’t view it as a bad thing just because it’s not impacting the kind of companies in the rounds that we’re looking at.

But I hope the valuations don’t become absurd. I hope the funds and VCs don’t experience the fear of missing out. If I go back a few years to when we just started, we saw some valuations skyrocket for no reason. And I think that was driven by the fear of missing out. I hope it won’t happen in later stages now.

What are your tips for founders when approaching angel investors?