"How real are you about the state of the business? You don’t need to be falsely upbeat about your business. It’s dangerous when people are not comfortable telling their own investors when things aren’t going well. When your investor has known all along that things are going badly, they feel there's been transparency and communication and it puts them in a better position to help you, versus if they’ve only been hearing great reports and suddenly find out the great problems, that’s much harder. There is a baseline expectation and there's no way you can know all the answers, that's why you need to leverage your investors and your advisors, and get help. It isn't the expectation that you know everything, but it's when things arise that need to be solved, you can figure out how to marshal resources to solve it." - Shiyan Koh
"It's important to live in reality. We can't hide from what reality is, whether it's ourselves or our investors, and I know sometimes that's hard because you also want to put on a show that you’re not freaking out in front of employees, but they can sense when you're not living in reality. They also talk to customers and they see the product. There's a balance between being positive and relaying the vision, but also being realistic in where the business is. We knoe it’s going to be hard so you need toidentify the things that need to get clarity on the next three to six months." - Shiyan Koh
"If you're moving to a new country, it's always hard to do a country shift, industry shift, and a role shift at the same time. If you do a triple jump, you're effectively an entry-level candidate for the employer. It’s important whether you’re here for the short-term or long-term game. A lot of people want to be in Singapore or Vietnam for a while to see if they want to do more of in the future, but there is some level of a switch where they could potentially say they want to go back to X country. If there's some possibility that you may not stay in that country for more than two or three years, then being an operator makes more sense because you can build skills that are in yourself and are less network-dependent. You can also do well and port that skill around different markets, versus as a VC, it's very much about network community building, and so that payoff and ramp takes a longer period of time." - Jeremy Au
In this episode, Jeremy Au speaks on the listener Q&A: founder-investor trust, buy-now pay-later credit models, and USA SEC regulatory impact on SE Asia VC.
Keywords: Listener Q&A, Founder-Investor Trust, Buy-Now Pay-Later Credit Models, USA SEC Regulatory Impact, Southeast Asia VC, USA, Southeast Asia, Q&A
