Happy Chinese New Year, readers! As you might know from our newsletter, I arrived in Singapore in November of last year. Sorry Chris, your corner office is no longer exclusive real estate!

first impressions

It’s been fantastic getting to know the tech and VC ecosystem here. As Chris summed up in his first blog from Singapore, the volume and scale of the tech and VC scene in Singapore is much larger than in NZ. There’s a lot of money looking for a home, and no shortage of entrepreneurial-minded people looking to start ventures. I’ve particularly enjoyed meeting founders from all over the world who have chosen Singapore as a startup-friendly place to do business. For me, this reaffirms Chris’ impression of Singapore as a real global tech hub.

I’ve also noticed that the median age of the founders and VC fund contacts we come across here tends to skew pretty low. As the younger Singapore team member, this makes my work a lot of fun. Going to networking events and talking to clients is way more exciting when you have things in common to talk about!

what’s been happening

In my first months here, Chris and Lee have introduced me to various players in the VC scene. I’ve met some of our existing tech and VC clients and gotten the lowdown on the co-working spaces (e.g. Lattice 80, Impact Hub), universities (e.g. SMU, NTU) and accelerator programs (e.g. Entrepreneur First) that we’re involved with. There is no shortage of networking opportunities, with industry events happening every week. A couple of my favourites so far were the launch of the ASEAN Fintech Network, where I got to meet some of our Singapore fintech clients I’d worked with from NZ, and a talk at Startup Grind by the founder of a local fashion brand that I love.

looking forward

We’ve been working hard on v2.0 of some of our existing Southeast Asia capital raising templates, plus some shiny new ones which we think are going to be really useful. We’re hoping to drop these sometime in quarter 1 so look out for them!

It has been a great experience getting to meet people in the little red dot, not to mention surviving my first Chinese New Year here since my childhood visits! (A tip for young players: don’t leave it to the day of reunion dinner to find mandarin gift bags. Singaporeans will know what I mean.)

I really look forward to diving deeper into the scene here. Tune into my next blog to see how it’s all going!