Startup Founders can Change the WOrld
Over the past five years I’ve interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs in my roles that include co-founder of Asia Sustainability Angels in Singapore and investment team member at my university’s Angels and Entrepreneurs Group. I’ve seen dozens more as a member of several other investor groups.
The founders are highly creative, and the best ones are really impressive. They’ve identified a problem to solve and found a solution. They have deep expertise in areas ranging from improving farmers’ crop yields or creating bioplastics to building a fusion nuclear reactor or developing a drug to combat a rare disease. The best ones are able to explain technical or scientific concepts in a way that even a non-scientist like me can understand. Some of them may even have a solution that can change the world.
Success Factors
Despite these capabilities, data shows that more than half of startups may fail. The question then is what separates the winners from the losers. While traits that investors look for vary, several skills stand out.
Solving a real problem: Successful founders identify a problem that matters and use expertise to develop a solution. One founder created a better way to keep ice cream cold. While it’s important, it’s hardly earth-shattering. Another had a solution to help stroke victims like his aunt recover more quickly, and another who had seen a friend die due to a lack of electricity in a rural area is building a solar energy solution. The latter two, and others like them, have better chances of success.
A great team: While a company may start with a solo founder, that entrepreneur will be more likely to succeed if they assemble a fantastic team. Even though Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are brilliant, for example, they would not have succeeded without a co-founder to turn their dream into reality. Subsequent new hires brought more skills that they needed. The team can make or break a startup.
Sales skills: While a great product or service is essential, the entrepreneur needs to sell it. Along with having sales skills or a sales team and using channels such as social media effectively, the sales person or team needs to be able to tell stories that convince skeptical customers to try an unproven solution. Storytelling is so important that one venture capital firm requires all investees to learn that skill.
Operations to grow big: Running a small pilot of the product or service is a start. Once the product works, the startup needs to deliver thousands or millions of items. An experienced team that can ramp up production quickly and cost-effectively can be the difference between success, mediocrity and failure.
A number of startups, still in the early stages of growth, show how founders in Singapore have leveraged passion, expertise and storytelling to put them on a positive path.
Billion Bricks
When he started Billion Bricks as a non-profit, Prasoon Kumar provided disaster relief housing across Asia. In 2020, he pivoted and started a company that builds affordable solar-powered homes in the Philippines. While the problem he is solving is still shelter, he now focuses on building high quality, affordable homes that cost homeowners less due to the energy they generate.
“Our home are 20% more affordable for homeowners, 20% more profitable for developers, 100% carbon neutral,” he said.
The Billion Bricks team is in the midst of building homes, expanding its team and telling stories on social media that can drive sales.
Mycosortia makes Chocolate with AI and without Cocoa Beans
Anli Geng wanted to solve the problems of a shortage of cocoa worldwide and lots of soy waste (called okara) from tofu production. She decided to use her skills to create an alternative chocolate.
Making “chocolate” from okara is essentially the same process as converting cocoa beans to chocolate, she said. “The fermentation process will produce the precursors of flavors. It goes through roasting. Then, the precursor becomes flavoring. We use a mixed culture of microbes so we can create a broad range of precursors to emulate the cocoa flavor. There are many parameters for formulating the flavor - the foundation, condition, temperature, time, pH. We needed to run hundreds of experiments. We gave the data to AI. AI will tell us which ingredients at what condition and what dosage.”
While it’s still in the early stages, Mycosortia is producing chocolate, scaling up and reaching out to more customers with stories – and samples of delicious chocolate.
Nika
Johan Wah and his cofounder started Nika, which uses complex algorithms and AI tools to build an AI-native geospatial platform for teams that collect, analyze, and visualize location data, most often from satellites.
“We decided to build a credible and strong carbon project”, Johan Wah said, so that companies that buy carbon credits so the firms could predict carbon credits accurately and credibly. Over time its clientele has expanded to include other firms that need geospatial analytics, including logistics firms such as FedEx and banks such as UBS. The software, which is easy to use, enables customers to enhance their business through analytics for sectors such as checking on trees that produce carbon credits, looking for ships at sea or analyzing sales by tracking cars in retailers’ parking lots.
Follow Nika on social media and you will usually see several stories a week explaining how they are solving real problems that affect customers’ business every day.
Solving Real Problems
The problems these and other founders seek to solve vary tremendously, as do their skills and chances of success. The sectors investors look at and the factors they focus on in their analysis also vary, though they often focus on common themes. While not every startup I’ve interacted with or invested in has succeeded, the passion of the founders and insights from fellow investors never cease to impress me. I believe some of them do, indeed, have the potential to change the world.
This article first appeared in Living in Singapore, page 40-41, at https://issuu.com/singaporeame...
