#EcosystemGiants (virtual) - the final session of the year with the young VC leader, teaching the young generation how to VC - today, 21 December 2021
New to ‘Ecosystem’? This passion project aims to help tackle the barriers to entry in venture for less networked founders and investors of diverse backgrounds through a newsletter and online initiatives (#EcosystemGiants). Find out more here or become an annual subscriber to support our growth.
*If this post was delivered directly to your inbox (subscribe here!), welcome back! Delighted to (still) have you on the journey we set out to take more than a year ago, together, to increase transparency in the venture capital industry. It’s been a hell of a while since you’ve last heard from me. There is no elaborate excuse - as much as I would love to spend more time on here, and with you, I’ve been struggling to find the headspace for this over the last couple of weeks. A good proportion of you are doing your own fundraise and know just how time-consuming it is. In fact, if you are in active fundraising mode, I won’t be surprised if you struggle to find time for much else. But that’s a story for another time. For now and with very little notice, sharing the details for the final #EcosystemGiants session of this year - which will be recorded and highlights of it released for everyone to watch.
**And if that’s the very If you are new, welcome. The drive behind ‘Ecosystem’ has been and continues to be two-fold - to support pre-seed (women) founders get ahead when raising venture funding and to make the industry more open and accessible to those, unfamiliar with how it works. A big goal of ‘EcosystemGiants’ is to enable new entrants with a desire to be capital allocators join and excel an industry which has been notoriously difficult for outsiders to break into.
And breaking into VC is actually a topic that never gets old. How to land a role, how to build a career that lasts and a name that speaks for itself? Across continents and across sectors. Even more, how to inspire people to follow you and to help you drive a purposeful cause? The last #EcosystemGiants guest has done just that - from his early operator days in venture builder Rocket Internet (Asia) and as employee #5 at global startup launcher Antler to playing a key role in the operations at Saison Capital, a FinTech-focused venture capital fund, with direct investments including Grab, Southeast Asia's largest startup and super-app, as well as ShopBack, Southeast Asia's largest shopping and cashback rewards platform. He is also the (1st!) person behind the community-driven impact-focused platform, Shaper Impact Capital, an association of 60+ techies and VCs (based worldwide), striving to help purpose driven early stage businesses further their impact by putting them in front of interested investor parties. connecting them with interested investors that helps early stage startups with an impact connect with resources they need for the next stage of growth.
Chia Jeng Yang is joining for a chat today at 6pm CET - and if you would like to tune in, email me directly. In each #EcosystemGiants session (which have featured guests like VC icons like Oliver Holle of Speedinvest, Cem Sertoglu of Earlybird and Soraya Darabi of TMV), a founder pitches for feedback at the very end. If you are building a purpose-driven company and would like Chia to review your proposition and guide you on its future direction, send me your deck (if selected, you’ll get to speak with him in a separate call).
In a way, by joining #EcosystemGiants (and by reading the newsletter), I hope you get plugged into an ecosystem of its (our) own – web of network and connections that takes years to build. So that together, we can be the change and see capital allocated to ‘less obvious’ entrepreneurs and fund managers. Ones who reflect the diversity of the world we live in. Who beat all the odds against them. So that innovations serving the diverse society we live in at large are brought to life.
If you would like to find out more, drop me a line by hitting ‘reply’.