Chloe Tan

Some exciting callls tomorrow 1. W/ a Singapore based community builder re the various events, and such 2. Might be recording a podcast with Dilip Kumar: The Other Side Podcast, Rainmatter 3. Learning more about what someone is building One of my goals this year: Trying to talk with more people about what I am building, sharing my half baked ideas, learning more about the startups and VC ecosystem Surrounding myself with more builders, hustlers, founders, and people doing cool things Will be sharing more like this in my weekly updates on X And hopefully in my personal newsletter- once I get it up and running

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VCs feel more threatened by other VCs than founders worry about other founders. It operates like a zero-sum game, it doesn't have to be. This makes life tough for emerging managers trying to get in, unless you apprentice at a big brand for a decade. Yet even then, you still don't learn all parts of the craft. As in any field, emerging managers learn only by diving in, and learn through trials and tribulations. But with a peer group, you can learn faster and make fewer mistakes. I joined Coolwater to connect with fellow emerging managers and tap into a brand LPs recognize. Learned more in 3 months at Coolwater than in 20 years of reading Fred Wilson. Wrote about my experience here: https://lnkd.in/gB5FFq3T Why Coolwater is great: * Helped 200+ new VC funds that are raising $3B+ * You tap into a 3,000+ top investors network * 8-week program with 300+ experts * Lots of different voices (25% women, 42% from diverse backgrounds) * People love it (83/100 NPS) Coolwater's not just a program; it's like a compass for funds that want to be institutional LP ready. They help you avoid rookie mistakes and build a strong brand with LPs. Considering becoming an emerging manager? Coolwater might be your next step. You can apply now for the next cohort. Have questions? Feel free to DM me. #VentureCapital #EmergingManagers #CoolwaterCapital Winter Mead Sean Chung Alexander K. Kiani, CPA David Teten

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Early in my journey with Quuu.co, we had a bold vision of changing the way people share content on social media. But like all great ventures, we hit a wall. We needed to figure out our product-market fit, and it wasn't pretty. In the beginning, we thought we knew our audience. We thought we understood their needs. But the data told a different story. Customers weren’t engaging as we had hoped. Instead of throwing our hands up in frustration, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. We started talking to our users, conducting interviews to dig deeper into their pain points and needs. It wasn’t easy to hear that our assumptions were off, but we embraced the feedback. We refined our offerings based on what we learned and, just like that, the engagement began to soar. What did that teach us? Product-market fit isn't just a number or a metric; it's about truly understanding and connecting with your customers. It requires relentless conversations and a willingness to adapt. The truth is, you can’t please everyone, and trying to is a surefire way to fail. So here’s my advice: don’t shy away from hearing the tough stuff. Embrace the feedback, iterate, and pivot if necessary. Stay clear on your vision, but be flexible on how you get there. It could be the difference between fading into obscurity and creating something monumental.

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Founders raising for the first time? This is an awesome guide. 👀⤵️ All credits to Brian Ortiz 👏🏽 #firstdegree #founders #investors
#alwaysbelearning #sharingiscaring #changethewaywework

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How's the busy summer season in the startup world like? Screening 400+ early stage deals with NUVC.ai, doing 10+ VC funds' DD for Asian Investor Club. All thanks to AI and all my friends, and finally after 3 months of hardworking, meeting investors and founders, I would love to share one new addition to of the 2024 vintage of my alternative investment portfolio: 🪽 Exciting news – I’ve just invested in Pretty Privilege and joined their Advisory Board! Empowering younger generations through community building is one of my core investment thesis: #Impactinvesting Pretty Privilege is revolutionizing the concept of “Pretty Privilege” by bringing exclusive influencer perks to an entire generation of young women. With over 21,000+ Gen Z and millennial members, the fastest-growing lifestyle club in Australia is partnering with 70+ top brands in beauty, fashion, wellness, and lifestyle to offer exclusive giveaways, events, and premium discounts. The business is already seeing explosive growth, with 10,000,000+ organic social media views in the past 90 days and a strong, engaged community. With an A+ team and a proven model, Pretty Privilege is poised to become Australia’s next unicorn. And don‘t forget the recent ESIC early stage innovative company accreditation by the ATO providing tax benefits to investors. Thanks so much to the founders and can't wait for this next phase of growth. Watch this space! 🚀 Message me if you want to know more. www.prettyprivilege.club https://lnkd.in/g7ardbNV #angelinvesting #angels #earlystage #startup #melbourne #femaleinvestor #girlpower

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"How do you switch VC firms?" I get this question a lot 👆 from VC's looking to make a move. In our Moves in VC newsletter tomorrow, we'll be sharing an interview with Sri Ayangar, who has some great advice on the topic. He's had solid stints at 2 firms already, and has just announced this week that he's moving to Lakestar. Watch the clip below to see how he recommends a #vc approach this delicate topic 👇🏻

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Want to take your angel investing game to the next level? Here’s how to start your own syndicate: 1. Gather your network that may be interested in angel investing 2. Create and set up your legal entity and SPV infrastructure via a platform like AngelList 3. Prepare for your first deal - discussions with the founder, collection of deal materials, confirmation of your allocation 4.. Write your deal memo, circulate the deal, collect commitments 5. Close the deal, wire the funds, and celebrate your first syndicate deal Importantly, after wiring the funds, ask the founder if you can pass along future investor updates to LPs so they can stay up to date with how the company progresses over time.

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Founders: Can I interest you in lunch on us? Yes, we’re back with another ecosystem initiative from Tin Men Capital Namely: TINFLUN (There is no free lunch until now) It’ll be held in a unique format: 🔸5-6 VC funds across investment stages will be in attendance. 🔸Fundraising founders get to seat with a GP/VC investing in their stage/sector. 🔸Only 6-8 founders per table. 🔸Conversations will be had, deals could be made. The best of all? Lunch is free for founders! All thanks to our amazing sponsors. For those fundraising from Seed to Growth (Series A/B) stage, It’s a nice opportunity to meet VCs in a casual setting. Especially in the current fundraising climate where interest is tougher to find. As with any of our events typically (and even more so for this), This event on the 30th of August will likely be oversubscribed very quickly. 🥲 Bring an empty stomach and your fundraising-hat. Murli Ravi , myself and our other participating VCs Hsu Ken Ooi , Arshad Chowdhury , Tanuja Rajah , Karan Mohla look very much forward to see you there. P.S. Will leave the link in the comments - more info there. Credits to John T. for the funky name.

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What do you do when you find founders who have deep experience in a traditional domain like construction tech and have spent years honing their insights in the domain. Combine that with Co-founders experience being founding engineers of giants like Rippling and spent time on building banking and fintech infrastructure at companies like Niyo. We at Neon love working with such domain experts who come together to startup. Construction tech is a domain that deserves founders like Merlin to disrupt it. As I say it can’t get better that this founding team. Read more about Neon’s portfolio Merlin and our founders Sneha, Siddhartha and Ayantika here: https://lnkd.in/g4m9su-e

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Building a startup now is like the old saying - "selling ice cream during winter". You are doing it at an unfavorable time. But it also shows that you are not here for the hype, you truly believe in something. Here's Antler & Winnie Khoo connecting with founders who are ideating or building during the 'startup funding winter' - The time when most resilient founders shine.

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I continued learning about RAI decentralized stablecoin today at Circle's Edge City event following up with Vitalik on a question from Wednesday, "Why might EigenLayer not be a good source of collateral to add to RAI?" - EigenLayer (Eigen Foundation) is permissionless so a bad actor could mint 1mm Eigen ETH, distribute 500k to RAI as collateral and 500k to their sketchy app - When the sketchy app gets slashed it would cause all 1mm minted from the bad actor to get slashed including the RAI collateral Potential use cases of EignLayer from Vitalik - Preventing network spam (Anti sybil attack) - There was another use case about single collateral scenarios that I need to understand better There were also great talks on stablecoin use in Africa, the potential of more local stablecoins in Africa, and zkPassport for bridging government IDs with privacy. More stablecoin use in Africa could improve the transparency and security of products like lending (Onchain version of Goldfinch), arbitraging currencies to rebalance the local stablecoin values, etc. The Circle team also outlined more real world uses and implementation of their confidential ERC-20 research. It'll be important to have compatibility with essential crypto apps like Safe and CoinTracker. https://lnkd.in/ek-hG5Q9

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Rob's goals 21st October 2024 ARR: 10.9 Goal: 13m Hours: 31 hours Goals last week: continue interviewing shortlisting candidates for athena (ongoing) continue studying a16z, sequoia, founders fund investments (ongoing) continue studying deep tech: biotech, nuclear and engineering (ongoing) what did I do: monday - team meeting, review contactout data priorities tuesday - review twitter, youtube, meta ads and redo them wednesday - 8x founder interviews, residency checking and AMA thursday - review athena candidates, compile marketing efficacy stats, finances friday - study andrej kapathy neural net course. study poverty research: finished poor economics, started on end of poverty and bottom billion books sunday - continue studying neural net / poverty research Learnings: Ads: youtube ads targeting unrelated keywords (fixed) twitter and facebook ads are not producing very many form fills, we need to add pixel tracking to successful form submission on tally (not fixed) (priority) ads are running on meta ad network including 3rd party platforms ads pointing to book a meeting form when candidate quality is bad, should point to website instead (fixed) text based ads on meta, don't look good, focus on ugc and images instead Lots of good learnings from poor economics: share-dot-evernote-dot-com/note/ed40c769-8a2c-dbef-d30f-37b8f5cc16b5 Most successful candidates for athena coming from friend referral and Linkedin outreach: Linkedin and Friend converts at ~5% Facebook / Insta converts at ~0.5%. Insta is better than FB but might be too small sample size Twitter, Youtube hasn't produced a single good lead yet despite lots of spend influencer marketing for athena is kicking off seems promising tiktok-dot-com/@khangsaumui/video/7428063017151122689 next week: continue interviewing shortlisting candidates for athena continue studying a16z, sequoia, founders fund investments continue studying poverty and deep tech

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🔥Raise Millions For Your Startup🔥 This is arguably the most valuable startup fundraising resource I've had the privilege of stumbling upon. It's from Tam Pham from hustlefund.vc and it's good... The reason why it's particularly useful is because the intel provided is ACTIONABLE: ● Should I raise from angel investors or venture capitalists? ● What do all the fundraising stages mean? ● What do equity, SAFEs, and dilution mean? ● How do I determine my startup’s valuation? ● Why are cap tables, shares, and vesting so important? ● Where should I incorporate my company? ● When is the best time to start fundraising? ● What exactly should I include in my pitch deck? ● How should I structure my first meeting with an investor? ● What questions will early-stage VCs ask me? ● How do I build authentic relationships with investors? ● What happens if an investor says no or ghosts me? ● What should I expect after an investor verbally commits? You guys can save this doc to your local computer by enlarging the PDF below and then by clicking the "download" icon in the top right corner of your browser. -------------------------------------------------------------------- 💡Join 30,000+ Amplified Investors: https://lnkd.in/eAYGMHRN ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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How to take advice is important. Prioritize taking advice from founders (over people who may be knowledgeable but are giving you advice from a completely different PoV). Ideally, try to find founders that have actually done the thing you are trying to do. When it comes to Korean startups going global, there's unfortunately not many that you can take advice from. Cue Ryan Lee (Jigo.ai) on Learning and Adapting in Business: "Be careful who you reach out to, and take advice from people who are closer to what you want to achieve... No one in our generation has cracked [the global market] yet, so keep that in mind when you get advice." #startupswithseoul https://lnkd.in/g52anyBc

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Building Startups that Last: Lessons from the Trenches Recently, I’ve been consulting for a startup led by a brilliant founder with deep expertise and a PhD in machine learning. The product they’ve built is impressive, and their efforts to secure funding are commendable. But during one of our conversations, I had to pause and deliver some hard truths: Your product is amazing, but where’s the revenue plan? Startups often focus so much on perfecting the product and raising capital that they overlook one crucial piece of the puzzle: a clear path to sustainable revenue. I sat the founder down and emphasized: “It’s great that you’re building a fantastic product and securing funding, but you need to figure out revenue from day one. Even if it doesn’t kick in immediately, there has to be a roadmap.” My role? Helping them create a business structure and model that isn’t just about building, but also about sustaining, ensuring they have a clear path to monetization while scaling. For anyone building something new, remember: Funding might get you started, but revenue is what keeps you in the game. Have you faced similar challenges in balancing product development and business sustainability? Tell me about it in the comments! #StartupLessons #RevenueFirst #SustainableGrowth #Entrepreneurship #Tech #Africa

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the biggest difference between San Francisco & Singapore for me is this. whether it's the population of experienced, ambitious series A-B founders that's low (they leave to SF/London for better network effects once they reach this level) or if they exist but the chance of meeting them is low because they're too busy to spend time with people outside of their team/customers/family (or they rather meet up other founders at their level or higher in private dinners) is worth being looked into. but regardless, this takes a massive toll on knowledge/wisdom transfer in an ecosystem. that's bad because startups are peak knowledge economy and insights and short cuts make all the difference in both life and death of startups, as well as in the rate at which they can grow and generate and capture value. singapore is way ahead of most countries. most countries don't even have that critical mass of early stage startups, or a critical mass of exited tech builders/investors. but this curve will create negative network affects, if not dealt with. not just singapore, any country that wants a healthy ecosystem for startups or any other important thing (scientific research etc.) needs a healthy knowledge/wisdom transfer pipeline. can't miss a few layers in between and expect the system to produce great output. Btw I think San Francisco is absolutely lucky to have the knowledge transfer pipeline that it has. It's not necessarily designed or intentionally set up. and I don't think it's sustainable either (smart people leaving their countries to go 1 place can be exciting for a few decades but then causes their home countries to get worse and worse, which makes the world worse and worse. no city can become/stay great if the world around it is burning). but this problem wont get solved by itself because humans have a natural tendency to hang out with people at their level of competence/consciousness or higher. elitism reinforces elitism. LearningLoop.com's global mission since day 1 has been, not to disrupt elitism, but to capture the wisdom of the elite, present it at different levels of abstraction to people who seek it but can't get it; because of their location, wealth, level competence, etc. make 1 billion elites we've started with 1 knowledge space that is startups. so at this scale, we define success as making sure San Francisco's startup network and knowledge/wisdom pipeline and discourse not just available but accessible globally. availability = being able to see/read/hear about it vs accessibility = being able to participate in it and get value from it. P.S: we're hosting an event in singapore this wednesday, if you're a founder you should drop by. the RSVP list looks amazing and you'll love the people and conversation. link in comments

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#TISeed #ImpactBillionsRevenueTrillions #SanjayBhargavaMentoredFund Sanjay Bhargava is on the scaled up disruption path again. I have known him for more than 13 years of more than 20 years, since he and his better half Anita came back post the PayPal buyout in 2002 by eBay. For me the couple has the flavour of Don Quixote, wanting the Muskian Mars-shots on Earth ! They have involved themselves in IAC ( India Against Corruption), Anita has been involved in Clean Up Delhi campaigns, been shadow Municipal Councillor to see how Indian Bureaucracy stymies much progressive movement but then both worked on setting up International Innovation Corps (now headquartered in University of Chicago), to help top bureaucracy get talent from top US & Indian universities to envision & implement big transformations. They were involved in setting up Bharosa Club along with their son and his partner, to encourage direct selling and transparent data analysis of mutual funds. Now Sanjay is going solo. He wants young teams anywhere to attempt impact disruptions of planetary scale, and willing to put 100,000 USD of his own, help raise the other 400,000 USD and mentor through governments and his networks, these pilots. And he desires to see teams from anywhere in the world, working on all sides of the Economic & Social Pyramid, across geographies to build a Balanced Sustainable, Healthy and Prosperous planet, inspired by the Gita, he doesn't care if he succeeds but he is going to do his bit. And the prosperity index for him includes good health of both it's peoples and nature. He believes the world can live better lives with lesser consumption. These are the top professionals, who have seen the West & East and want the enterprise pathways out of the ideological & geopolitical impasses. And what are the ideas that will get this support? There are many trillion dollar impact ideas possible from any domain. These examples are just pointers. Poverty Eradication Not Just Alleviation: Reimagining responsible credit, welfare, and UBI Target: 1B+ users, $10+ ARPU Global Youth Platform: Serving the 18-45 demographic Focus: Community and global prosperity Target: 1B+ users, $10+ ARPU Sustainable Employment: Bridging global labor market inefficiencies Solving worker surplus/shortage mismatches Focus on scalable, ethical solutions Smart Villages: Innovative rural development Climate change mitigation Replicable, customizable solutions Investment Focus Focus on trillion-dollar impact potential Deep involvement until Series A AI-powered solutions for global scale Sanjay's Track Record : PayPal pioneer (Employee #7 at X.com) Former Country Head, Starlink India Led Citibank's growth from 1% to 36% market share in Thailand Scaled Citibank India to process 5% of national GDP with just 6 branches Endorsed by industry titans: Elon Musk Founder & CEO, Tesla, SpaceX Reid Hoffman Co-founder, LinkedIn David Sacks First COO, PayPal

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Exciting times ahead at TOKEN2049 in Singapore! 🌍 I’m happy to announce that Mercuryo is co-hosting a special side event, bringing together some of the brightest minds in the crypto space. This event is designed to foster insightful discussions, build valuable connections, and explore the future of the digital economy. Whether you're a long-time partner or new to the community, this is the perfect place to dive deeper into the world of fintech and blockchain innovation. If you're attending TOKEN2049 and want to connect or learn more about the event, feel free to shoot me a DM. I’d love to chat and see how we can collaborate. On top of that, I’m so happy to be back in Singapore, reconnecting with our amazing clients and partners! Big shoutout to organizers and co-sponsors for making this possible 🙌🏼. PancakeSwap Lista DAO Binance Labs BNB Chain Innovation Binomial Orbs Trust Wallet CoinMarketCap StakeStone 1inch Labs dappOS Check out more details and RSVP here: https://lu.ma/nljx3l98 Let’s make it an unforgettable week! 💥 #TOKEN2049 #Mercuryo #Crypto #Fintech #Blockchain #Networking

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