"Founders need to have a grander vision earlier on and be able to convey that and not just focus on we're going to be the best in Malaysia, but we're going to be the best in Southeast Asia. That mentality switch shows the strength of ambition that is necessary in order to get an investor. There are a number of options that are out there and available. Many of them are big time wastes where you may be able to get a little bit of capital out of it, but you'll spend months and months trying to get 50k. There's a little bit of caution to be played as far as where your time is being spent. And then, not all advice is created equal. Do not take anybody's advice as I need to do this exactly as this person said. Take people's advice, work it into your own framework." - Kevin Brockand
"The bigger point is that Malaysia has not yet gone through the strength of generational cycles that you see in some other markets where you have instances of a second time, third-time founders. You don't have many of those and you don't have many stories of employee number three now spinning off to start their own startup where they experienced hyper-growth. You have that in Singapore. You now have that in Indonesia as well. We're lacking some of that component in the maturity of the ecosystem in that respect. We need to do better in normalizing the pathway of entrepreneurship. I've worked in Latin America and in many parts of the world and there's a stigma around entrepreneurship where you need to go get that steady paycheck. It's stable. It's consistent. It's reliable. The expectation is that you're going to go the family pathway. So you need all of that stability. We need to normalize entrepreneurship and that it's okay to take those risks. The combination of that would go a long way towards improving the ecosystem." - Kevin Brockland
"First, we can't be so obsessive around the jurisdictional domicile of the location because if we're going to pool capital, it needs to be where those other capital providers are willing to put their money, which generally, there were 5 destinations: US, Delaware, Singapore, then came in BVI. It used to be Hong Kong, but politics have changed. So I don't know what constitutes the 5th anymore. We have Labuan, but it's just not here. Second, we recently had a program that did just that. There were 4 or 5 investment funds that came out of that matching program. The problem that I have with that is that they all went late-stage and so it wasn't really addressing any of the areas where I believe that there's a true funding gap. It's not at the A, it's not at the B, it's not at the growth stage. We really need to try and do those matching programs at the earlier stage of going after seed funds, maybe companies, maybe ones that still do, but definitely not beyond, because again, the larger the check, the more international the capital, and it's just not the pain point." - Kevin Brockland
In this episode, Jeremy Au speaks on founding Indelible Ventures, elevating Malaysia's startup ecosystem, and navigating fatherhood.
Keywords: Kevin Brockland, Founding Indelible Ventures, Elevating Malaysia Startup Ecosystem, Fatherhood, Malaysia, VC, Founder Story
