In venture, the biggest risk is people.
My path into venture was anything but linear. Before Stella Capital, I spent years at the intersection of investment banking and corporate ventures at PwC, where I served as Co-Head of PwC Ventures and built our emerging technology investment banking practice across Asia. Prior to that, I was employee number one at Spenmo, a B2B fintech that scaled to a $500 million-plus valuation backed by Tiger Global and Insight Partners.
What those experiences taught me is that pattern recognition only gets you so far. The most important skill in venture is the ability to suspend your existing mental models long enough to genuinely understand what a founder is building. Some of the best investments I have seen were in markets that looked small, crowded, or unglamorous from the outside. The real edge comes from understanding the people, the timing, and the structural tailwinds behind a business, not just the business itself.
Operating across Asia and North America has also fundamentally changed how I evaluate opportunity. Markets behave differently. What works as a growth model in Southeast Asia often looks nothing like the playbook in the United States, and vice versa. That cross-border lens has become one of our core advantages at Stella.
The Rise of Secondary and a New Liquidity Landscape
The most significant structural shift we are living through right now is the compression of engineering costs. AI-native development tools have effectively brought the cost of building software close to zero for a certain class of products. That changes the calculus of venture fundamentally. It used to be that a seed cheque was largely paying for engineers. Now, capital efficiency looks very different, and investors need to adjust what they are actually underwriting.
The second major trend is the maturation of the secondaries market. As the IPO window has remained unpredictable and hold periods have extended, secondary transactions have become a legitimate and increasingly sophisticated asset class. At Stella, we have built out meaningful activity in this space alongside our primary venture investments.
The third is geopolitical. The bifurcation of technology supply chains, particularly across Asia and the West, is creating entirely new categories of opportunity for investors who can operate across both sides. Infrastructure, enterprise software, and fintech are the areas where we see the most durable tailwinds regardless of how macro conditions evolve.
Investing for the Long Term in a ShortTerm Market
The honest answer is that you cannot separate those three things. Risk, value creation, and founder vision are deeply interconnected. What I have learned is that the biggest risk in early-stage investing is not market risk or technology risk. It is a people risk. A great founder in a mediocre market will almost always outperform a mediocre founder in a great market.
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Pattern recognition only gets you so far. The real edge comes from understanding the people, the timing, and the structural tailwinds behind a business.
At Stella, we invest our own capital. That alignment is not just a marketing point. It changes how we make decisions. We are not optimizing for a fund mark or a quarterly update. We are thinking about what this business looks like in seven to ten years, and whether the founder next to us has the resilience and the judgment to get there.
On founder vision specifically, I try to distinguish between founders who are chasing a trend and founders who are building toward inevitability. The latter are the ones worth backing. The best founders we have worked with have been almost unreasonably convinced about the problem they are solving, long before the rest of the market caught up.
Why Trust Is Built in Difficult Moments
The most important thing I have learned is that the best investors are not advisors. They are genuine partners. There is a meaningful difference. An advisor shows up with frameworks and recommendations. A partner shows up with skin in the game, a network they will actually activate, and the willingness to be honest even when it is uncomfortable.
I also think trust is built in the hard moments, not the easy ones. Any investor can add value when a company is growing fast. The real test of a partnership is what happens when things go sideways, when a key hire leaves, when a competitor raises at twice your valuation, or when a market assumption turns out to be wrong. How you show up in those moments defines the relationship.
My time on the Bretton Woods Committee has also shaped how I think about partnership more broadly. Operating at the intersection of government, sovereign capital, and private enterprise requires a different kind of listening. You learn to find common ground across very different incentive structures. That skill translates directly to working with founders who are running fast and need an investor who can keep up without slowing them down.
The Power of Having and Defending a Point of View
Go operate first. The most useful thing I ever did for my investment career was not joining a fund. It was joining a startup early, before product-market fit, and living through what it actually takes to build something from scratch. That experience changed how I read a deck, how I evaluate a founder's confidence under pressure, and how I think about what early-stage capital should actually do for a company.
The second piece of advice is to build your network before you need it. Venture is a relationship business, and the relationships that matter most are the ones built when you had nothing to sell. I host the Geeks of the Valley podcast and newsletter, which started as a way to stay intellectually engaged with the ecosystem and has become one of our most valuable channels for building genuine relationships across the industry.
Finally, develop a point of view and be willing to defend it. The investors who stand out are not the ones who are right about everything. They are the ones who think carefully, take positions, and update their thinking when the evidence changes. Intellectual honesty is a competitive advantage in this industry, and it is rarer than it should be.
