"Everyone is afraid of using AI in their tools because they see it as a black box and do not understand the generated responses. We invested in a company called OpenTopic that focused on generating content for media agencies. That opportunity mirrors why Bitcoin emerged in the first place, which was the failure of the traditional financial system where infrastructure was not robust enough and bank runs occurred. New players entered and asked why there should not be a decentralized system where, in Bitcoin’s case, no one even knows who started it and the system is fair to everyone." - Beatrice Lion, General Partner and CEO of True Global Ventures


"I wanted to be the technophile, the one who says, have you heard about this exciting thing that is happening. That was a pivotal moment for me to decide I wanted to be in this industry because it is where innovation is. I like being the person who introduces new technology to my friends. I do not want to be the technology lagger or the last to adopt something new. I want to be the one who asks, how are you not using this yet. That is what drew me in, and it is the same reason I wanted to enter at that moment and why I feel the same way about AI today." - Beatrice Lion, General Partner and CEO of True Global Ventures


"That moment coincided with the launch of ChatGPT, when AI became understood by the mainstream as a truly transformative technology. More people started using it and became less afraid of it, which made it the right time to deploy into these companies because clients were now asking what AI could help them do. That also made it a bad time to leave, because I did not want to miss being part of this fund at that moment. The pattern kept repeating, and I never felt like I was stagnating or done learning. That is why I never wanted to do anything else, not just for the economic incentive, but because it is always exciting to be part of real innovation." - Beatrice Lion, General Partner and CEO of True Global Ventures

Beatrice Lion, General Partner and CEO of True Global Ventures, joins Jeremy Au to unpack how early conviction, long cycles, and hands-on learning shaped her path from finance student to venture capital leader. They explore why blockchain and AI only look obvious in hindsight, how decentralization solves real risks created by centralized platforms, and why hype often masks weak demand rather than weak technology. The conversation covers building a venture fund from self-funded roots to institutional scale, navigating fundraising and regulation, and what it takes to grow as an investor across multiple market cycles. Beatrice also shares how staying in one firm for years can still mean many different careers, and why resilience and judgment matter more than timing.

02:52 A no-pay internship reshaped career direction: Shadowing a GP showed how small actions, like one introduction, could determine a startup’s survival.

04:11 Venture capital felt more meaningful than banking: Direct impact on founders and companies mattered more than prestige or salary.

13:20 Decentralization drove blockchain conviction: Seeing Animoca lose its business overnight to a centralized platform clarified the risk of single gatekeepers.

16:33 Technology does not create demand: Tokenization only works when real markets already exist, not when assets lack buyers.

22:22 Market crashes build resilient founders: Repeated crypto downturns filtered out weak actors and strengthened surviving teams.

29:00 Eight years in one fund meant many roles: Beatrice moved across portfolio support, fundraising, regulation, and investment decisions without stagnation.

41:20 Leadership required personal courage under scrutiny: As a young CEO, Beatrice led a long MAS licensing process while managing deep self-doubt.

Jeremy Au: Hey Beatrice! So good to see you.

Beatrice Lion: Hi, Jeremy. Yeah, very excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Jeremy Au: I think we first met at a conference and I was so intrigued by your last name, Lion, because I was like, how do you get Lion as a last name?

Beatrice Lion: It's a name that you don't want to do anything wrong with because you appear in the papers; you're in a very narrow pool, it's not like a Tan or Lee. The quick backstory is just that in World War II when my grandfather changed his passport. He actually went to the customs officer in New Britain and my grandfather only spoke Mandarin, so he told them my Mandarin last name, which is Liang, and they directly translated it to Lion.

So all the kids he had before he lost his passport are Nio, because Nio is Liang. For us, like with my father and his younger brother, they took on the new last name, which is Lion. We decided not to change it after the war when there was a period of time to correct it. So that kind of stood for another few generations, I hope, of this last name.

Jeremy Au: Good. Now, we've recorded this so that in a thousand years where there's a whole clan of Lions they're gonna be like, "How did this happen?" and then they go back to you and this origin story. Could you introduce yourself?

Beatrice Lion: Yes, I'm Beatrice Lion, the General Partner and CEO of True Global Ventures. We are a global VC fund, as the name suggests, investing in early-stage across artificial intelligence and blockchain technology. That's where we focus on in our core. Our active funds right now are Funds 4, 5, and 6 in the early stage.

Fund 4 is a $113 million fund, fully deployed. We're in the harvesting stage now. We're very proud of our performance. We are actually checking on Carta insights and PitchBook; so far, our DPI and TVPI puts us at the top one percentile of funds globally. We have our Fund 5, which is still deploying $166 million in the growth stage.

It's an opportunity fund, but we are also investing into new deals and then actively deploying also in the sixth fund, which is back in the early-stage, late seed, and Series A, again throughout 4, 5, and 6 in AI applications and blockchain. And on top of that, in terms of geographies, we focus a lot on the Bay Area and New York in the US. That's where we have a strong bias towards investing into for AI application companies, but elsewhere in the world, we also have London, Stockholm, Paris, Dubai in the Middle East, Singapore, and Hong Kong in Asia. Those are the geographies where we have a deep network, where our LPs are coming from, but also where we have better proprietary deal flow coming from.

So that's a bit about ourselves.

Jeremy Au: Incredible. And let's go back to the beginning, right? Because here you are, General Partner in venture capital investing, but take us back to the beginning when you're a university student. What major do you choose and why?

Beatrice Lion: So I was one of those who said, "Okay, let's just try to open our options," and I did a double degree in Business and Economics. Okay, that was the flavor of the month when I was a university student. And basically, I decided to major in Finance. And so all my peers joined large banks and consulting companies; those were the top places where you wanted to be and where you're proud to go into.

And for me, I actually did an internship in 2017 and I met this very interesting mentor called Dušan Stojanović. So he's the initiator of True Global Ventures from the very beginning. A Swedish national, he moved to Singapore in 2014 and decided to set up and build on this ecosystem—a very exciting place for AI and blockchain because already then the MAS (Monetary Authority of Singapore) already pushed a lot for looking at such frontier technologies. So he thought this was a great place to start developing from an Asia point of view.

And so when I met him I was like, "This is a very interesting area that he's doing." And it's a no-pay internship. We called it Gazelle at that point in time. And basically, you would shadow him as a General Partner and go through supporting portfolio companies, looking at deal flow, flying everywhere, but you don't get paid. This was in comparison with my friends who were at J.P. Morgan and got paid like 10,000 a month just as an intern. But for me, I felt that this was a brilliant opportunity. You can travel to the US for leisure, but traveling to the US during the period I was interning—in New York and SF—to be very close to a financial services hub like New York and also a tech hub like SF, I felt like this was the opportunity that I wanted to jump into. So that's how I got to know Dušan through this internship. He only had one intern at that point in time, so I had to push my way through and say why I really deserved this learning opportunity. It was a growing period and it was basically four or five months with Dušan, really shadowing everything he's doing. And what I really learned during that period is that sometimes the line between success and failure is very thin. Like just because you did one additional introduction, that portfolio company of yours could be funded in the next round. Or because you did one additional introduction, that portfolio company had a cornerstone client and that made it for the portfolio company. So sometimes just because of one additional thing that you didn't think too much of and you push yourself to do that, then the line between success and failure is super small.

And what I recollected after the entire internship was, do I really want to join a bank where, you know, whether the share price of the bank goes up by 1 cent or 2 cents, I don't know whether I contributed to that? Whereas in this space, every decision that as a VC you make, you could bring a new technology to the world or you could actually stop and kill that entire company if you don't have the conviction in it anymore. It could be as simple as funding a bridge note or finding it comfortable just to buy a couple more months before they have a proper round.

That kind of decision and the impact actually is much more material; I feel that there's a sense of fulfillment as well. And most often than not, it's interesting to even look at the companies that had a turnaround as opposed to just only the companies that do well because those are the ones that you really remember—going through the tough times with the entrepreneurs and the management teams as well. So that entire experience caused me to change a little bit my direction.

I really remember one of the conversations I had with Ron Suber, who was basically the founder of Prosper at that point in time in the Bay Area. He's a very notable entrepreneur. And he asked me what I wanted to do when I graduate. And I said that, "Oh, I would love to work in J.P. Morgan in the innovation side or in private wealth at a big bank." And then he looked over to Dušan and he was like, "Wow, Dušan, what happened? I'm so disappointed in you. How can someone be shadowing you and have that kind of ambition to work for a bank?" Because it's very different worlds and different mentalities of what it entails.

And then when I graduated, I was looking at different opportunities and I did still apply for the banks, but when I was going through the interview, I realized that it was a very different mismatch. I clearly remember interviewing for Goldman; they had eight rounds of interviews and basically, at the third round, we both felt this was not the company that I would want to work in. And I thought about it and Dušan came to me and said, "I want to set up bigger funds, we're going to start raising external capital." We started as a solo GP fund, so we only had our own money that we deployed. And then we decided, "Okay, do you want to join me?" Dušan asked me to actually go bigger and have external capital.

And I felt this was like the time that the ship docked at the harbor—do I want to go with the ship or do I just stay in the harbor? And since I'm young and there's nothing to lose, I felt, let's just try it for a while and see how it goes. That "while" became now my eighth year with True Global Ventures and we've grown quite a lot as a venture capital fund as well. I never looked back because I felt that this was exactly what I wanted to do.

Thanks to the internship, I really saw the value that I was able to provide and learned a lot as well—to be like a sponge to absorb. And I really liked that kind of fast-paced movement. Although at that point in time, it doesn't mean it's just about the salary or the hours; you're no longer counting the hours. You're just counting the impact you can do on the portfolio companies. So that was a pivotal moment for me to decide I want to be in this industry because it's the place where innovation is. And then I really like to be the one to introduce a new technology to my friends. I don't want to be the technology laggard. I want to be like the technophile and the one that says, "Have you heard about this exciting thing that's happening? How are you not using this yet?" That's basically where I was interested in.

Jeremy Au: Going to a family dinner and as a technophile, while your grandparents are techno laggards.

Beatrice Lion: Exactly. Introducing new devices, new stories,

Jeremy Au: New solutions. Yeah. A lot of innovation. Amazing. And so, what's interesting is that you chose to do this actually at an interesting time, right? Because about eight years ago, technology in Southeast Asia was going up but not super hot. So I find you being a VC analyst in 2018 quite interesting. Because at that time, it wasn't super hot—it was super hot in 2021. I joined venture capital in 2020 when everybody thought that venture capital was dead because of COVID.

Beatrice Lion: COVID. Yes.

Jeremy Au: And so I joined at a contrarian time and then it went off like crazy. But 2021 to 2025 being a VC analyst is super hot. What about the job made sense to you beyond technology back in 2018?

Beatrice Lion: I think we were very frontier in that we wanted to invest into AI and blockchain. So within the portfolio, we already had companies then, and 2017 to 2018 was the whole period of the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) boom and bust. Basically, everyone felt like blockchain was very speculative. You would just go in there and just extract as much value and then pull out. And then there were a lot of entrepreneurs that were raising out of white papers for enormous valuations and take the money—honestly, a lot of fraudulent cases as well. And then that entire thing shut down everyone into the beach basically because they lost their treasury from whatever they raised; they went from 10 million to 10% of that. And they couldn't pay for employees. A lot of them raised the money with the intention to start building, so they had barely started.

So there's a whole period of time where people are very cautious. At the same time, I feel like if you really want to be the earliest in technology you have to pick the bets when it's not the only time when it's popular, but it's actually a time where you really have that conviction in that technology. And we were looking at it from an infrastructure point of view and saying that there's a lot of potential here especially in decentralization. Those were actually early bets we made in 2019 right after the bust, before COVID. And basically, people were saying, "Oh, what is this thing that you're investing into?"

We were not early in Bitcoin. We were very early in NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) at that point in time. So we already invested in NFTs in 2019 or companies that were building that. And we didn't even dare to use the word "NFTs" because "Non-Fungible Token"—you try to explain that to an investor at that point in time, they would be like, "No, I'm not investing in this, I don't understand it." So we were saying, "Imagine virtual land having a value link to it" or "a digital footprint having a value link to that." So we were trying to help them relate a little bit.

That whole period of 2019 where we made the early bets came out very successful for us in the following years, especially because COVID accelerated a lot of the gaming space and digital entertainment. So that was a high period for all of our portfolio companies since we entered so early. And we definitely accelerated our funds in terms of building the next fund during that period of time. So taking that decision to enter in at this timing, I just wanted to be part of this.

And it's the same right now with AI. People say this is so inflated, but this is a transformative technology. AI is a much more transformative technology than blockchain ever was. When we invested into AI with our earlier portfolio companies, those were more machine learning. The technology was not there. The knowledge of the clients was not there. Everyone was very afraid of using AI in their tools because they think it's a black box and they don't know the generated responses. We even invested in this company, for example, called Open Topic, and they were basically doing a lot more generating content for media agencies. For example, Dove—how are you going to sell Dove to clients? And they actually came up, the machine came up with this idea, "Why don't you push for sportswomen using Dove as a relation?" But of course, it was very nascent, right?

We were using IBM Watson at that point in time. So right now in terms of the technology advantage and the growth and how it's transformed, I really want to be in the space. So the thesis was always that in the VC space, you try to spot early, you have that conviction that the technology is going to be transformative eventually.

Jeremy Au: So really interesting because I think two very strong technology bets you've made are on the blockchain side as well as the AI side. Let's talk about the blockchain side a bit. For me as an economist, I was very much trained in currency and real value. What I missed out on was that it was really more about the financialization of different assets—the ability to cut fractionally, move it around, and the ecosystem around that. But back in 2018, it was a "winter" to make that bet. What gave you the conviction in 2018 for venture capital?

Beatrice Lion: I think one of the pieces goes back to the whole idea of blockchain being decentralized; that's a super important piece. One of the companies we actually backed early on was Animoca Brands. A little backstory: they were previously doing education games on the Apple App Store. One day, the Apple App Store decided to shut them down. And then you see the revenues just went to nothing because it's a centralized control. You are obliged to follow whatever rules on the Apple App Store and that's your entire consumer base.

What really turned the entire story for Animoca to go from an education company into blockchain was that Yat (Siu) saw this and it was a huge turnaround: "I'm never going to trust a centralized party because that took my entire business down." And that opportunity is the same reason Bitcoin came about—there was a failure of the traditional financial ecosystem. The infrastructure was not robust enough to absorb a bank run and all of that. Players came into the scene saying, "Why don't we have a decentralized way where nobody even really knows who started it and it's a fair play for everyone?"

So that was the idea of decentralization. And with that kind of conviction, even though there's the dot-com boom and bust and a lot of fraud, there will be good companies that come out of that. So that was a conviction because we really believe in the decentralized alternative to centralized systems in different verticals.

Jeremy Au: We've seen crypto go through several booms and busts since then. Definitely, I felt like the digital end is a bit of a low point with NFTs. And the joke is, "If you right-click and save as a JPEG, the NFT is mine." And then people argue about the blockchain. It feels like it goes through these massive hype cycles and there's a lot of bad actors that team the work of all the good people building the right infrastructure. What are your thoughts about that?

Beatrice Lion: Technology can always be used for good or bad. And that's the sad part about it. There'll always be bad actors that will be using technology for bad things. For example, even if you look at AI, there are so many fraudulent people that use AI for their own benefit in social engineering. And then now you need to actually have cybersecurity to counter such generative AI attacks. So again, any technology can have good users or bad users. We have to weed out all of the rubbish and look at the gems underneath because they grow up to be very good companies to back.

The whole idea of the NFT part was fractionalization of assets as well. Looking at it from the form of an expensive art piece and breaking it down—the idea was that then everybody gets a part of it as opposed to never having the entry ticket. Democratizing access to the larger masses was the whole idea. Tokenization of the asset class can be used for very good causes. You see how Robinhood has put shares where you can buy a smaller portion or partial shares. That's the same case with tokenized assets—you can break it up and cut it into smaller pieces so there can be more access for users. You can do that with financial instruments, real assets, or property.

But there are a lot of expectations that technology will solve demand and supply. There was this whole slew of companies that decided to do real-world asset tokenization without thinking that it is a function of a marketplace. You need to have demand and supply in place before you can actually have transactions. We were very early backers in this company called SharesPost, which merged with Forge and is now on the New York Stock Exchange. In that case, the major matched transactions were because there was a lot of demand for Facebook shares at that point in time. This was way back in 2010 when there were not that many private companies out there. So with the supply of the Facebook shares they had, they could match it with the demand because demand was overpowering.

That is a form of a marketplace that you can actually tokenize. However, if there is no demand and supply and you try to put tokenization in place, then unfortunately the technology is not going to solve it because demand and supply is the first phase. Looking at a lot of companies that tried to do it in the real estate space—why it did not take flight is because the projects were maybe not the most exciting piece. Maybe it was an aggregation of property investors didn't really want to invest into; it's like a basket of junk bonds parallel. And that's why the demand was not there—people didn't see the returns upside and there was not enough liquidity.

So this mismatch between the supply and demand is not to blame on tokenization as an innovation, but rather that marketplace was never robust enough. At the end of the day, technology is an enablement. There has to be some form of a marketplace in place. Back to the JPEGs with the NFTs—one of them that really worked out well was Bored Ape (Yacht Club). They created exclusive communities—almost like joining a membership club. We really liked that digital twinning or applications in the real world because it makes it easier for the masses to actually adopt it. If you buy an NFT, you're actually buying a membership to our exclusive club.

To the point of people starting to come up with ugly monkeys and selling that with no intention of a utility—you can't really blame the technology because there were bad actors that tried to monetize it too quickly and there was no real use case behind it.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. I think that's a really good insight; you can't take an asset that doesn't have a market and put it on the blockchain and expect a market to materialize.

Beatrice Lion: Exactly. That's one of the biggest misunderstandings—because you just blame the technology whereas if you dive deeper into it, there's just no demand or no need for it.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, and I think there's an interesting component as well. If there is demand and supply, then that makes the transaction better and makes it less friction. And a price can be found, right? But the price could be totally wrong because you can always pay too high for JPEGs or whatever it is.

Beatrice Lion: Willing buyer, willing seller. Arguable, yes.

Jeremy Au: I have bought fractionalized assets of real-world assets from a company called Otis. So I have some professional shares in some art. Again, I was just experimenting just to learn about that space.

Beatrice Lion: And that's where a lot of actors came in and wanted to be part of this. So it's a huge influx of money and people seeing top-line numbers like an art piece sold for 66 or 69 million. And that got a lot of FOMO activity. Running a blockchain company, these cycles are just more like fire drills for them because they had SVB (Silicon Valley Bank), they had FTX, they have Terra Luna. So for them, it's just, "Okay, here we go again, another fire drill."

What comes out of it is that we built very resilient entrepreneurs. Those that actually made it have been through the cycles and are still surviving. They're maybe pivoting, maybe they have found a new angle around the same technology. And the role is also to identify resiliency in entrepreneurs who can bootstrap when the markets are down.

Jeremy Au: Blockchain allows these actions which are not being regulated by the police or regulators or the media. So then you're basically creating a market in every pocket of the economy and each of those pockets could become a mini bubble because it's not effectively regulated.

Beatrice Lion: Yes. We are very pro-regulation. Just to be clear, obviously, it's always better to have regulation than not. When we first invested into SharesPost, they were doing what today is like an alternate trading system, but back in the days, there was no real legal or regulation around it. So there was actually a fine from the SEC to them—and it was significant because they just couldn't park them under any current regulatory basket. So there's always a regulatory risk and of course, in some cases, technology takes a discount or the valuation of the company takes a discount because of that risk.

But coming to the blockchain space, we are definitely very pro-regulation. If there is a jurisdiction that is fronting that, we’ll say, "Go set it up there," because that's where you have clarity. It's all about reducing the uncertainty. At the same time, under the previous administration in the US, it got super restricted for no reason and good technology entrepreneurs were going to jail for things that were ridiculous. It was not even that they were being a bad actor; it's just that there was no regulation around it and they continued building. Imagine tech entrepreneurs that had very illustrious careers having the threat of going to jail just because the SEC is not equipped enough with current rules.

I think regulatory risk has always been there and it's always been a catch-up game. That's why people are excited about the space now because, in the Genius Act, there's more clarity for stablecoins as well. That is definitely going to help innovation because they're less scared. I think Singapore was one of the earlier jurisdictions to actually establish what is a utility token, a security token, and a payment token. But unfortunately, everybody still looks at the US as the "Big Brother." And with the current administration opening the floodgates a little bit more, that has opened up a lot of opportunities.

Jeremy Au: It was viable to have a blockchain thesis as a fund in Singapore because in 2018 the US regulatory position was very uncertain. Plus, China banned blockchain. So a lot of Chinese blockchain founders either moved to America or they moved to Singapore. I think Singapore actually got that early look and was pro-blockchain from 2018 to about 2023.

Beatrice Lion: I would think so. And obviously, not everyone's all about the AI craze—so arguably, is blockchain bubbly or AI more bubbly? I don't know. But just to be fair on the AI front, a lot of that bubble is coming from large language models, but we don't focus on those because we don't have the deep pockets nor the horizon to invest into them. We focus more on the application layer. We are always very valuation-sensitive because a large portion of our funds are our own capital—our GP commit. You better put your money where your mouth is because you're going to lose your own money as well.

Jeremy Au: It makes a lot of sense. And you've also been at this venture capital fund for eight years. You cited you are a GP now, but it is uncommon for people to be at a company for eight years and then become a GP—and this is your first job.

Beatrice Lion: It really may be my last job. I joined True Global Ventures when we were in the harvesting stage from our earliest solo GP funds 1, 2, and 3—now rebranded to Innovation Founders Capital 1, 2, and 3 because they were only private capital. So I was in a good position where I could see the harvesting part or turnarounds from existing funds and also the fundraising part, which arguably is one of the hardest parts of setting up VC funds.

For me, the part that I only really developed recently was the deal sourcing part because, in early-stage investing, it's more of an art than a science. It was only this year that I actually managed to find a deal from scratch and get to the deployment part. Having that conviction as a GP to say, "This is the deal that I want to do"—that only came up for me this year.

I reinvested all the carry I had from early successes into Funds 4, 5, and 6. I also deployed my own capital into these funds. Fundraising for Fund 4 was a trying period starting in 2018. I got the Venture Capital Fund Manager (VCFM) license for the company so we could actually raise external capital. We were more like an education company then because we were telling LPs about the excitement while deploying our own capital. When LPs finally came in early 2021, they saw our portfolio was already doing well. We basically raised 113 million on Zoom post-COVID.

At that point, I felt there's never a good time to leave. I was so excited about the exit stages of our companies and then about the opportunity to deploy and be part of the Investment Committee. I started as an IC member and learned from partners who were typically double my age; I was like a sponge. True Global Ventures is very flat; we are partners-heavy. We don't have the typical analyst-associate-principal-partner step-up, which means you do everything. I became the "glue" amongst my partners and saw every single deal, which gave me the most exposure in my opinion.

And then we raised our next fund, Fund 5, very quickly—in about six months. We offered our LPs the chance to participate in our Fund 5, which is an opportunity fund, and they doubled down. Then ChatGPT was launched and people became more generic in the masses where they understood AI is a transformative future.

I never felt like I was stopping or stagnating in learning. I've been in so many different jobs because every point in time was a different role—I was the glue, I was in operations, fundraising, and now deploying as part of the IC.

Jeremy Au: Any advice for emerging fund managers?

Beatrice Lion: You always need to be different. How are you going to differentiate yourself as an organization when pitching the LP? LPs are going to see 30 other fund managers in a month. In TGV, we differentiate through value-add. We pay ourselves very minimal base salaries and take most of our management fees and give it back to the portfolio companies by running events for them. We have 16,000 contacts in our database and we have done 72 proprietary events now—it's our 10-year anniversary. We create an organic connection between companies and what they’re looking for—new clients, next-round investors, or M&A opportunities.

We actually reverse-pitch entrepreneurs that we want to deploy into to show them that we are not just a financial investor, but partners. And then, our GP commit is 25% to 35% of the fund. Typically, GP commit is 1% or 2%—maybe 5%. With 25% to 35%, they see that you're going to lose money as well if you lose money on theirs.

We also took the bet to be global from day one. Dušan had that vision. We narrowed down into eight cities where we have been for almost a decade and grown our network. Fundraising is very tough now because there have not been many exits, so there has been very little liquidity returned to the LPs. Even if you did well in Fund 1, LPs are using distributions to offset losses in other funds. You really need to stand true to your conviction. One of our LPs and my personal mentor is Howard Morgan, Chairman of B Capital. He is approaching 80 and still leading on deals and is very sharp. That for me is an inspiration.

Jeremy Au: Could you share a personal story about a time that you've been brave?

Beatrice Lion: Recently, when I was 28, we decided to pursue a larger license—the Licensed Fund Management Company (LFMC) license in Singapore under the CMS (Capital Markets Services). Our previous license limited us to 20% secondaries. The LFMC license has no restrictions on asset classes and allows us to do unlimited secondaries.

I was newly the CEO and it took a lot of courage because I knew age matters to MAS in terms of experience. I was not an ex-banker; I had six years of VC experience. The process took 20 months. In the initial parts, MAS had a lot of questions about whether I was qualified, and I felt like an imposter. "I really don't deserve to do this. I'm discrediting the experience of my partners because I'm fronting this as a CEO."

But we took compliance in-house, improved our processes, and MAS eventually said they were happy with all our answers. It was a huge achievement. Honestly, the first year of that 20-month application was very trying because I always had to prove myself. But MAS didn't cut us out immediately; they wanted to give us a chance to explain why we deserved it.

Jeremy Au: Amazing. Incredible journey. Summarizing the three big takeaways: your journey from a finance student to discovery of VC, the multiple roles you've played in the VC trajectory, and your thesis on blockchain.

Beatrice Lion: I think the tokenization of asset classes is going to help a lot in adoption. And I’m definitely happy to catch up more on the AI application side—specifically a deal I’m looking at for automating tax reporting for SMEs.

Jeremy Au: Awesome. We'll do that for another episode then. Thank you so much for sharing.