【Lesson #3 - Talk to your investors】
Many founders spend countless hours of blood, sweat, and tears fundraising. Endless Zoom calls, perpetual follow-ups, coffee chats, check-ins, dinners, networking events, are all examples of this "always be fundraising" mentality commonly held among bootstrapping entrepreneurs. It's a lot of effort, that oftentimes does not carry over post-fundraising. Once they get money in, the communications falter—a grave mistake and wasted resource, according to Hai Ho, the founder/CEO of Triip (AW#18), a blockchain powered travel platform based in VN.
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What I’ve come to learn is that the strength of your company is very closely tied to the strength of your relationship with your investors and how frequently you interact with them. Oftentimes in the early days of your startup, you tend to shrug off any need for external help. You managed to build up promising initial traction, raise a round or two of financing, hire top notch talent—things are good, why trouble yourself with managing investor relations. “I’ll reach out when there’s a problem” you might think to yourself.
Before, I would probably hold a board meeting once, maybe twice a year depending on everyone’s schedule, strictly for the purposes of corporate governance. I’ve since changed how I communicate with my investors. No matter how busy it gets, I make it an effort to send email updates once a month and have meetings with them twice a quarter.
Looking back on my 13 years of entrepreneurship, I wish I could’ve done this a lot sooner. Your investors collectively boast a wealth of experience, wisdom, and connections. Make sure you take advantage of that. Talk to them, in good times and bad. You’re on a long-term journey together, so the least you can do is put some trust in each other. They can help illuminate your blind spots, while leveling the playing field against competition, but only if you let them.
We often forget that founder-investor relations are still a type of human relationship at the end of the day, which can only be developed through consistent face-to-face interactions (virtual or physical), not just from a couple of WhatsApp messages here and there. Doing so has created a stronger bond and mutual understanding between my board and I, and ultimately allowed for more information flow, both ways. Most of my problems now have become much easier to solve than before.
Right when COVID first hit in early 2020, I was still somewhat optimistic about the fundraising climate and overall travel landscape, in my naivete. But one of our very early investors that I had recently rekindled with through my renewed IR efforts thankfully stepped in with a precautionary outlook, shepherding us through some scenario planning and advising us to cut costs to zero and assume we wouldn’t be able to get new funds in until 2024. His guidance was instrumental in helping us weather this storm so far. It’s been an incredibly tough time for travel companies this year, to say the least. But building this communication flow with my investors and advisors has made it 10x easier, for both tactical and moral support.
Applications for AW#22 are now open to founders targeting SEA, AI/IoT, or Blockchain/Defi -> https://bit.ly/2VQaEg9
board of advisors 在 Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman Facebook 的最佳貼文
I had a great conversation with Billy Mambrasar, the Special Staffer to President Jokowi.
He is 1 of the 7 youth advisors appointed by President Jokowi.
The future lies in the hands of the Youths. It’s high time that we demand a place at the decision making table, not just as fencesitters & bystanders.
Recently, Telkomsel Indonesia appointed fajrin, the cofounder of Bukalapak, 33 years old as one of their chairman of its subsidiaries.
Malaysia has had its fair share of success.
We appointed 3 Youths to Malaysia’s top economic decision making body, NEAC.
We started Youthifying the board members of GLCs & Gov agencies. Give them a chance and they’ll shine.
Diversity in leadership is not just about race, religion & gender. Let’s not forget that having a young person at the decision making table makes a big difference.
20 years ago, Corporate Malaysia opened its doors to great leaders like Shahril Ridza & Tengku Zafrul. They were in leadership roles in their early 30s & proved to the oldies that age is just a number.
If we can do it before, why can’t we do it today?
board of advisors 在 AppWorks Facebook 的最佳解答
【To scale your startup, first scale yourself】
As a startup founder, are you constantly experiencing any of the following?
-Bottlenecking
-Reluctance to delegate
-High staff turnover
-Low morale
-Lack of focus
These things are natural consequences of fast-growing startups. But if these issues continue to persist, they may signal a deeper problem at play--and more often than not it has to do with you and how you're allocating your time.
Startups are synonymous with raising a child. They start off as helpless little seedlings that cannot survive without your constant attention and nourishment. The moment you neglect your startup, it will die.
Just like a parent, co-founders are tasked with doing anything and everything in the early stages, from building a prototype to customer service to setting up a legal entity to sales & marketing to even cleaning the toilets--all in an effort to discover whether or not you're truly solving a problem in the market, or so called achieving product-market fit.
Overtime--and granted you've created something that people want and need--your startup will mature to a point where it can stand on its own two feet. Whether or not it grows into a thriving and impactful member of society is solely dependent on your ability to scale yourself.
At some point, parents need to loosen their roles, adjust their expectations and education of their children as they grow into responsible adults. Founders also need to eventually transition from building a startup to building a company, and evolve from founder to CEO.
Here are a few tips to help you embark on that transition:
-Figure out what you are uniquely positioned to do and delegate, automate, or as Reid Hoffman puts its "amplify" everything else.
-Get experienced advisors on board (could be internally), who can point out your blindspots and illuminate more efficient pathways.
-Rule of 6: Roughly speaking, people can only effectively manage 6 people at any given time; use this concept to structure your org chart.
-Self-reflect! Probably the most important one. Carve out a small chunk of time every week to take a step back and do a post-game analysis on yourself--what went wrong, what went right, how can you improve.
At the simplest level, scaling yourself entails moving into increasingly higher and higher level work to the point where the majority of your time will likely be spent on decision making, and less so execution.
You WILL make mistakes, lots of them. But be sure to extract wisdom from each and every one. Just remember, as a founder, you are your startup's sole arbiter of success; not macroeconomics, not technology, not competition--just you.
-Jun Wakabayashi
Analyst, AppWorks
AppWorks Accelerator now boasts over 1,100 founders in its alumni base, all across Greater Southeast Asia--all of whom have gone through their own journeys of growth and self-development. If you're doing a startup and interested into joining the region's strongest founder community, applications for AW#21 are now live on our website: https://bit.ly/3cyNwt9