Allow Me to Introduce Myself

The Early Years

I’ve always been an entrepreneur.  Not always good at it, but the desire’s always been there.

That started when I made a stall to sell my toys. I was 7. My Mother said, “Alexander what are you doing? Why are you selling your toys?”. I told her I want to make money. I’m sure I didn’t know what the money was for, it just seemed like something I should do.

The best business deal I will ever make was when I was 8. I sold a packet of Maltesers I got in Singapore to the son of the head of Mars Asia.

I got 20 Mars bars and 20 Sneakers. Supply and demand. Jakarta was ghetto in the 80s so you could only get cool stuff on trips to Singapore. My friends knew I kept them in my freezer and would sneak into my house and rob me regularly.

Through high school and university, I always had a hustle. From bootlegging CDs to running parties (great way to be the centre of attention and make solid cash!). Despite all this, from the age of 10, I decided I wanted to be an investment banker like my uncle.

The Hard Years

Fast forward a decade or so and I quit M&A during the financial crisis to ‘do startup’. There was a slight problem though- I had no idea what I was doing.

In the mid-2000s, there was not nearly the same amount of information on doing startups as there is today.

I knew how to sell billion-dollar insurance companies, what did I know about online marketing? I was so naïve I thought it was something that just happened. I jest not.

I found this site called 500Hats run by this guy called Dave. He swore as much as I did and was a bit bonkers. I loved his site, but there was still so much I didn’t know that I didn’t know.

In 2007, I bought a site called OpenSourceStartup.com. I figured out that 70% of startups had to be largely the same.

Understanding that so many startups failed, I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t a site where failed startups would upload all their docs, processes etc so that other founders could reuse their work.

Why make HR docs if someone has them already? Great idea, but I was the blind leading the blind and had zero network at all. I was not the right person to make this a reality.

I went back to hustling to fund myself. I taught myself to day trade and did pretty well. I almost sold a $200m building. I sold prom dresses (and my partner screwed me over). I got into HIV testing in India, a property marketplace, a research online buy offline platform, etc.

The key issue was I just was not learning fast enough. It was only when I joined a VC-backed startup that I started learning rapidly.

My difficulties of wanting to learn, but not being able to get the information I wanted never sat well with me. It left a bad taste in my mouth with a desire to revisit “OpenSourceStartup” again when I was in a position to help others.

The Year I Started Blogging

Let’s skip a few unicorn startups and get to when I started to work in VC in Asia.

It’s also worth knowing that there are a lot of people blogging now, so there is a ton of information available.

There’s no course to be a VC. You learn by doing. And if VCs are pretending like they know it all, I assure you that they do not!

I always planned on being a VC but only when I’d turn 50, and it would be what I did till they wouldn’t let me come to the office anymore.

I knew that I’d need to know a lot to be any good so I started reading every single day, so that in 20-something years I’d be in a great place.

I knew what people said they didn’t like about VCs and I didn’t want to ‘be that dude’.

I love talking to founders so it was easy for me to start getting my own deal flow immediately. But haha! It doesn’t take long to understand why some VCs are the way that they are with how they respond to founders!

Your job as a VC is to say no. I learned that quickly, but how you say no matters. I would respond to emails with helpful advice, but helping founders over email is like feeding a stray dog.

You feed it once, and it keeps coming back! I really rapidly learned I couldn’t scale giving a lot of feedback to every single founder who reached out to me. I hate emails so I had to figure out how to be the person I wanted to be and ‘not that dude’.

The question was how.

I figured out every founder’s pitch deck had the same sort of issues. So I wrote two Word docs and I would attach them to my rejections and say “Here’s some advice“, and founders liked I tried to help.

Just finding the stupid attachments became annoying. What else could I do to be even faster to keep up with all these fricking emails and still not go Sith lord and ‘be that dude’.

So there is this thing called the Internet! Why not put those two blogs on a WordPress site, and then I just need to give the founders a link? Even faster! Founders didn’t complain so Kool and the Gang.

Getting to Today

As a founder, you need to be a bit naïve. I got the idea in my head that I could easily raise my own big ass fund and innovate in how VC is done.

Nope. I quickly realised I again didn’t know what I did not know.

But I knew a lot more so this time I was able to figure these things out myself.

Trust me, there is a reason the big US funds do things the way that they do. Also, haha, raising funds is way harder than raising for a startup!

Through the process of learning what I didn’t know about VC and then how startups fundraise and scale, I said why don’t I just write everything I am learning? So, I started blogging a lot more.

Pretty much every blog on my site is a fraud. I had absolutely zero clue what I was talking about when I wrote them (is it that obvious!?).

I would pick something I didn’t really understand, research then build on first principles. SAFE notes? Yeah, I just read the docs and built the free calculator. Same for convertible notes, viral modelling, cap tables and the list goes on to everything else you read.

So, if you read something and call BS on me, do it, you’re right! I had no idea when I wrote them.

But here’s the thing. If I don’t understand something in detail, there’s going to be at least one other person that doesn’t either. So, most of my blogs go into a lot of detail because I was teaching myself something and just sharing what I had figured out.

Now my site tools sell well. And it came because of one reason. I couldn’t find something so I made it.

Financial models, yeah, there were no detailed ones and now there are. When I was in Bali I had an idea, if I made something cool, would someone buy it? So I made the ecommerce model, and someone bought it. LOL. Free money.

Everything I do now comes because the founders ask for it. I only do consulting because someone said “Could I pay you to have more access to you?” So I said yup.

Going Forward

I’m at around 3k blogs now. Holy crap, I have no idea how I even got here.

My plan is to keep putting out content to cover everything fundraising-related and a few other important to founders of startups. I also plan to do more for emerging VCs.

I have a number of courses to create as well as a lot of other great resources. I am also going to write a few books.

I would love to get you to start helping me create high-quality content too, so we can cover all the bases founders need more comprehensively.

I just don’t scale like I would like to.

I’m itching to do investing again and be hands-on with startups, and I have a few SaaS startups I want to build (one is in relationship building). But for now, making this content is a full-time job.

I appreciate your support in the meantime.