Category: Thought Articles

Grants & Subsidies List for Singapore Startups

At Saison Capital, we are always looking to add value to our portfolio companies. The Singapore government (ministries & statutory boards) has provided a range of grants, subsidies, and assistance to startups and SMEs. However, the sheer number of programs may be hard to navigate. Discoverability of programs may also be an issue, with multiple government entities such as Enterprise Singapore, Workforce Singapore, and Skillsfuture Singapore hosting program information on different websites.

LP Strategies: Ownership, Fund Size, and Emerging GPs

As we at Saison Capital looked back at our LP winners, and improve on LP strategies moving forward, we were particularly excited by the rise of first time GPs, and micro-VCs [defined as <150m].

We built SEAcosystem.com and discovered the problem of talent ‘freshness’

Talent freshness is the issue of candidate relevance to the job market — i.e. not just that a candidate had been looking for a role, but how ‘fresh’ is their desire to find a new role. This is about our experiences building the SEAcosystem.com talent database platform, and what we learnt about talent-freshness in the HR/recruitment process.

For SEA diaspora, advancing to a New SEA Non-Technical Startup Role

You are probably aware that Southeast Asia is one of the world’s fastest-growing tech opportunities in the world. The internet economies in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines are growing by 20–30% annually; Indonesia and Vietnam are growing in excess of 40% a year. With the third-largest labor force, behind China and India, SEA has outpaced the rest of the world on growth in GDP per capita since the late 1970s. Since 2017, the dramatic rise in successful regional startup early-stage fundraising rounds has led to ever-increasing interest from SEA diaspora and foreign talent in joining the SEA tech scene.

Distribution Supply Chain Financing in India — Saison Capital

Chris, Chia and myself took a dive into Supply Chain Financing this month, exploring the fast growing distribution financing sector in India deeply. We discovered two models that we were excited by, distributor-led and marketplace-led financing, uncovering the characteristics we think underlie why each of these models succeed and why we, at Saison Capital, are super excited to work with founders in this space.

Net IRR calculator

At Saison Capital, we are always looking to build tools to automate our backend tasks to allow us to focus on the things that make us better VCs — thinking and helping founders. As we are currently expanding our LP investment portfolio, especially in the US, one common calculation we do is figure out the net returns from Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) that GPs might have done or to calculate returns for first time angels-turning-VC fund managers, who typically have a number of SPVs as part of their historic returns profile.

IRR

What you need as a VC: Benchmarking skills across Venture Capital jobs & titles

As Saison Capital is growing our team, recruiting for Associates and interns, there was a single question that we kept returning to: What is the standard we should expect from each other, and how could we measure our growth over time?

The “What do I need to believe” Sales & Fundraising Trick

Sales and fundraising cycles for commonly understood business models can be fairly straightforward (though still not easy). However, what if you are selling something that is relatively unproven and requires a bigger leap of faith?

Interviewing for VC Associates at Saison Capital

As Saison Capital started looking for Associates to join the team, we started writing some notes internally about the type of prospective candidates we were looking to hire, as well as the types of conversations we were looking to have, and decided to open up the process to let people get a glimpse into the black box of the VC interviewing process.

How I learned to love the D2C (Direct to Consumer)

Chatting with Nadim from DSG Consumer Partners and reading Ryan Caldbeck’s thoughts from A16Z’s podcast makes me more bullish about Direct-to-Consumer brands and the general ecosystem.