Inside the mind of entrepreneur and investor Khailee Ng

Photo credit: 500 Startups.

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Khailee Ng is the managing partner of 500 Startups in Southeast Asia and is a rock star entrepreneur, investor, and startup founder with a long history of success. This history started from his very first substantial exit, which was a five-month-old daily deal group buying website he created called GroupsMore. He sold his company to Groupon in 2011.

Two years later, Khailee found his second company, which was a social media and news sharing website called SAYS.com. This one he sold to Malaysian media giant Catch Media. After he did that, he spent some time angel investing (very successfully mind you) and went on investing full-time by joining the 500 Startups group.

I met him several years back when he had first joined the 500 Startups collective as an entrepreneur and resident, and we’ve just remained friends the whole time.

I think you’re going to find this one very interesting.

Can you give us an introduction of yourself and how you became successful?

“[…] I know you’ve accused me of being a successful entrepreneur, [but] I identify myself more with the word ‘creative spirit.’ I’ve been creating things from a very young age—writing little poems all the way to writing songs. You know, little things. Fast forward, you discover the powers of the internet and you’re hooked.

“[…] I grew up in Malaysia [and] spent most of my life doing stuff out in Malaysia. [My] first business, I kind of got lucky. It was an ecommerce business. It was the second largest ecommerce operation in my country and we built it in three months. And then Groupon decided to acquire it when they were expanding internationally.

“[…] At that time, though, being this Malaysian kid who just wanted to do fun stuff, I always looked up to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was like the Mecca of entrepreneurship […].

“I kind of had that in my mind and I said, ‘You know what? All the stuff that I’m doing out here in Malaysia is fun, but if I make it in the big leagues, I get to go to the Valley.’ So, that was the idea I had at the time.

“[I was] 28 or 29. And so I got myself there by chance and I kind of identified who I’d want to meet and who I wanted to jam with […]. But there was one which stood out. It was 500 Startups. […] I said, ‘I have to meet Dave McClure.’ So I tried all the ways—different ways, different intros—but I couldn’t really score a meeting with him. Eventually, through some US embassy connections, somehow I managed to trick his PA at the time that I was somebody important. [Dave and I] jammed for a little bit. He really liked my story and how I got to the Valley.”

What was it like working at Silicon Valley?

“[…] It seems like a blur to me now. So, when I started to spend time there working with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, I was shocked. I was shocked because, number one, it’s almost as though there’s no such thing as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. These people came from all around the world, you know? In the accelerator itself, there were Russian accents, there were Japanese accents—people came from everywhere to Silicon Valley to build companies. It was [rarer] to find someone who had lived and grown up on Mission Street in San Francisco and became an entrepreneur. I didn’t meet as many of those. I met a lot of international people, people who came from out of town.

“The second thing I found out was that a lot of people in Silicon Valley were not any smarter than the people I met in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. They were not any smarter than the people I met in Hong Kong. Everyone was just hustling and so we all had to come in. We’re all in the dark and we’re all trying to figure things out.

“But the third thing I realized is that […] there was a world of difference [in] Silicon Valley. If you built a company there, you would likely have some very useful friends. You would have friends that you could meet at a bar who was a product manager at Facebook who would give you some advice which was actually applicable. Whereas if you grew up in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, whatever, at the time, most of your friends are doing things which were less useful to you.”

When it comes to innovation, what’s the score going to be in 10-15 years?

What do you say to those who critique you saying, ‘These guys at 500 are spreading themselves too thin?’

What makes an OK company vs a fundable one?

What are your goals and what do you want to achieve in the next several years?