In this cover story, The Edge Singapore speaks to founders, venture capitalists and private equity partners to identify the challenges in building Southeast Asian unicorns, Singapore’s role as an entrepreneurial hub and the outlook for dealmakers as macro obstacles remain.
STAGE 2: GROWTH
Shortly into his double degree in law at Yale-NUS and NUS, Hansel Tantohari realised the esteem of the legal industry could not outshine the allure of entrepreneurship to which he had always been attracted to. While this discernment caused some initial chagrin from a loss of professional direction, today, the venture architect at Rainmaking APAC believes that process precipitated the path his career would take.
“I really tried my best and I did fairly well in law school but within the first law internship I attended, I knew it wasn’t for me,” recalls Tantohari. “I was more interested in how the managing director of the firm was running the business than the actual contract review process.”
Explaining his “irrational draw” towards entrepreneurship, he says: “At first, the motivations were about wanting to be my own boss — to work on my own time and to have those outsized potential returns — and, of course, the pride of saying that something is my own.”
But over time, Tantohari says he realised that there was more to entrepreneurship than just the ownership of a business. “What now draws me to entrepreneurship is centred around the like-minded people that you find in this space,” he says.
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Tantohari gained some of this understanding as a co-founder of the start-up Galigo, which attempted to build a digital platform to bridge businesses, green innovators and industry authorities. Galigo raised $250,000 in a pre-seed Simple agreement for future equity (Safe) round at a valuation of $3 million and was able to grow from two founders to a team of seven.
While still pursuing his undergraduate degrees, Tantohari was able to lead the start-up from its conceptual stage to an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $90,000 with Singaporean clients in construction.
However, the team failed to “systematically validate” its biggest assumptions — a critical step in the business process of which Tantohari says he has always been a proponent — and the product they had built for some $100,000 failed to meet the needs of customers. Galigo was dissolved in August 2021 after just a year and four months in operation.
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Having experienced starting and failing at the helm of a start-up with a multimillion-dollar valuation, Tantohari’s entrepreneurship journey was put on hold as he began a career in consultancy at Simon-Kucher & Partners, where he found himself working with several Asian unicorn companies. While he thoroughly enjoyed the experience of learning how these tech companies were able to grow and scale “sustainably and profitably”, Tantohari knew where his calling lay when he discovered the world of corporate venture building — a line of work that marries management consulting and entrepreneurship.
“I realised that corporate venture building would provide so many things for me. It allowed me to hone my entrepreneurial skills on the job while exposing me to the equity upside of the businesses that I would be building,” he says.
After receiving offers from several venture building studios, Tantohari eventually joined Rainmaking APAC — a pioneer of the “equity-share model” in corporate venture building that allows the company to take equity alongside its corporate partners, each acting as founding shareholders in the new businesses that are created.
Tantohari says his job as a venture architect is now to oversee the iterative process that he always knew was critical but did not have the chance to implement fully with his first business — to systematically identify and validate critical assumptions.
This prospect of honing the skills he was still developing as a young entrepreneur in his first business was ultimately what drew him to venture building. “The myth of the 20-year-old founder is just that — a myth. That’s just a sellable story that the media likes to pick up,” says Tantohari. “The truth is that entrepreneurship is really tough. There are a lot of hard and soft skills that a 20-year-old will not have, let alone the intuitive judgement to make snap decisions daily.”
He adds that founders who are as inexperienced as he was when Galigo was created often have little conception of the business-to-business (B2B) world. And contrary to popular belief, he notes that the “vast majority” of successful start-ups have been founded by entrepreneurs between the ages of 30 and 45, after gaining the requisite skill set.
As a venture architect at Rainmaking APAC, Tantohari takes on the role of an “interim founding team member” who builds new businesses from the ground up for a typical initial period of three to five months. “Early on, a group of one to four people will explore an opportunity — sharpening and shaping the idea to the point where it becomes pitchable. When the concept makes sense, it is coherent and enough questions have been answered, we could then receive an investment from a corporate partner or an external investor,” he explains.
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After receiving an investment ticket, what typically follows is that the interim founding team continues to “transitionally support” the permanent founder who is selected to lead the business moving forward. Tantohari points out that there have been instances where venture architects have become so passionate and attached to these projects that they carry on to join the project permanently.
But these instances are rare, and he emphasises that people like him who are drawn to corporate venture building often have “slightly different motivations”. The way Tantohari sees it, venture building allows him to sharpen the core entrepreneurial toolkit which he believes he will be able to “bring to bear” in the future companies he intends to start, whenever those opportunities arise.
“It’s impossible to say that I’ll have enough knowledge after 15 years of venture building, for example, and at that point, I’ll be ready,” says Tantohari. “What I tell myself is that the next time I start my own company when something speaks to me, I want to bring in so much more than I did before.”
Read more:
STAGE 1: FOUNDING
Has the region lost its start-up zeal?
STAGE 2: GROWTH
Venture capital seeks growth beyond Singapore’s shores
STAGE 3: EXIT
Positive outlook for late-stage deals in Southeast Asia in 2024 and beyond
