Recent content on The Culdesac
I got invited to a lunch a little while ago on “redefining Southeast Asia’s value proposition.” Fourteen people around a table, Chatham House rules — so I’m not going to tell you who was there or what was said. But they sent four questions ahead of time to chew on. And the questions were good enough that I ended up writing out my own answers. So here they are. The four…
This past Saturday I got to sit on a panel with Jeff Paine (Golden Gate Ventures), Michael Blakey (Cocoon Capital), and Roy from Crane. It was one of those conversations where a bunch of threads come up that feel separate in the moment. But the more I sat with them afterward, the more I realized they were all circling the same thing. The question we kept coming back to is the one every pre-seed…
Last night at our Founder Friends event, a guy walked up to me with the kind of opener you don’t forget. “This might be a little weird — but I’m interviewing for an internship right now, and the hiring manager told me to come find you and ask what I should say to get the job.” I laughed. Then I asked him the obvious question: “Okay — what’s your current plan to…
Urgency is a social phenomenon, not an internal one We talk about drive like it’s a character trait. I believe it’s mostly a downstream effect of your environment. You don’t decide to feel urgency. You catch it — from the person shipping something on a Saturday, from the friend who just raised, from overhearing a conversation at the next table that assumes a bigger game than the…
I have keloids. If you don’t know what those are, consider yourself lucky. They’re raised, rubbery scars that grow way beyond the original wound. They itch. They’re painful. They come back after treatment. And if you’re unlucky enough to be prone to them (hi), every cut, piercing, or surgical incision is a roll of the dice. The standard playbook is steroid injections,…
There’s a poster by Tim Urban that shows your entire life in weeks. 4,000 little boxes. It’s sobering. But for parents, there’s a more specific version of this exercise: How much time do you actually have left with your kids? Conventionally the math people scare you with assumes they leave at 18 and are never under your roof again. Reasonable assumption - but neglects the…
A founder I back asked me last week if I knew anyone who could help them rethink their engineering org from scratch. Not a layoff consultant. Not a recruiter. Someone who could help them answer a harder question: If I were building this team today, knowing what AI can do now, what would it look like? I’ve been hearing versions of this question from almost every CEO in our portfolio. And I…
There’s a negativity problem in Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem right now. And look — there are reasons for it. Markdowns, down rounds, slower exits, tighter liquidity. I’m not going to pretend the data doesn’t say what it says. But here’s the thing: negativity is self-fulfilling in innovation ecosystems. Innovation requires the suspension of disbelief. Someone has…
Starbucks asks for your name because someone in a boardroom decided it would “foster connection.” The barista says your name, you feel seen, you come back tomorrow. Beautiful theory. In practice, they butcher it. Unless your name is Mike. Mike collects his flat white with the quiet confidence of a man whose name has never been misspelled. The system was built for Mike. My name is…
Last year, I sat through a forty-five minute pitch where the CEO answered every single question — including deeply technical ones — while the CTO sat silently and nodded. Not one substantive contribution from the person who was supposed to be building the product. The deck was fine. The market was real. But that meeting told me everything I needed to know about how that company was being run. The…
Every parent I know is asking some version of the same question: what should we actually be teaching our kids now that AI can do… most things? It’s not a theoretical question for me. I have three kids. The oldest is nine. By the time she enters the workforce, the landscape will be unrecognizable. So what do I optimize for? Not coding. AI writes code better than most humans already.…
Everyone keeps saying writing code is dead. They’re not wrong — but not quite right either. What’s dead is the value of typing code. AI writes functions faster than I can describe what I want. It has more patterns in memory than any engineer could accumulate in a career. What’s alive — more than ever — is knowing what to build and why. The Meta Engineer There’s a new…
You know a group chat has gone off the rails when someone asks for credentials. “Well, what’s your background in this?” Or worse — “that came across as pretty condescending.” The moment that happens, something’s already broken. A good group chat runs on collegiality — people sharing what they’ve learned, building on each other’s thinking, assuming…
The best books about building startups aren’t really about startups. They’re about people — how they work together, why they fall apart, and what it takes to lead through the mess. Here are three that I keep coming back to and recommending to founders. They’re all short reads. They’ll all change how you think about your job. 1. Leadership Without Easy Answers — Ronald…
Most startup advice is about strategy, metrics, hiring. Very little about how people feel — and yet feelings are usually what determines whether a team ships or stalls. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, partly because I keep seeing the same pattern play out across startups I’ve worked with. And partly because of something I learned years ago in Ronald Heifetz’s class at…
My computer science grad cousin and his data scientist wife are peering at my laptop screen, looking at a little app I built — the bane of every Singaporean parent’s existence: a Chinese dictation practice tool for my nine-year-old. I’m walking them through the prompts I used to build it in Claude Code. “How long did this take?” they ask. Less than 30 minutes. To prove the…
There is a certain irony in finding one of the most vibrant communities I’ve encountered in what was designed to be a ghost city. I recently visited Network School , Balaji Srinivasan’s experiment in intentional community and co-living, now housed in the shells of Forest City. Forest City sits just across the Causeway from Singapore, a massive development built by Country Garden, one…
A chef’s knife can do almost anything in the kitchen — chop, slice, dice, even peel if you’re determined enough. A kiwi peeler? It does exactly one thing, and only if you happen to have a ripe kiwi handy. Lately, I’ve been thinking about this knife vs. peeler analogy as a way to make sense of the explosion of AI applications, startup ideas, and even how we teach kids math.…
If you’re a parent, or involved with small children through blood or friendship, chances are you’ve been forced/privileged to observe a performance or two. Perhaps it was a song, something approximating a sporting event, or the performance of a musical instrument. Unless your child is a prodigy, most of these early performances are adorable but not particularly outstanding. Recently,…
A new year is always a great opportunity to reflect and set some goals - inspired by Der Shing’s blog , thought it useful to jot down priorities and give myself a chance to check back in a year to see how well I did against my stated intentions. Priorities Health Improve sleep quality Improve VO2max Relationships - Quality time focus Kids K Parents Work Time blocking more aggressively —…
Late last year, Jeremy Au invited me to do a weekly podcast with him, riffing on the latest news in the Southeast Asia Tech scene. Now I love listening to podcasts (Acquired, Odd Lots, Stratechery), but I had some trepidation about being so out there with my thoughts in public. I figured it would be a good way to challenge myself. (good tweet from Kevin Lee on getting over this fear)
One of my favourite childhood memories was picking fruit from my best friend’s yard, loading up her red radio flyer wagon, and wandering around her neighbourhood selling oranges to her neighbours. We had no guidance on pricing, and no real goals other than wanting to be able to buy snacks at the pool snack bar we often frequented. Other revenue generating activities in my youth included…
I’ve always loved first days - of school, work, trips - it is a moment bursting with possibility and anticipation. (and of course the school canteen, the best part of Singaporean schools) Today was my daughter’s first day of primary school - first grade for my American readers. It was utterly adorable with all of the children lined up for assembly in the school hall with the parents…
This article was published as part of the book “America: A Singapore Perspective” edited by Tommy Koh and Daljit Singh. The full book can be purchased here . Koh Shiyan and Karen Tay Chances are, you can access this article from a smartphone right now: a device that was unimaginable for most just twenty years ago. In milliseconds, it serves up real-time directions, messages, music,…
I’ve been building communities all my life. In the beginning, it was accidental - I noticed that most groups were willing to do things if someone (anyone!), provided a small amount of direction, “Hey guys, let’s go to the beach and do X, Y, Z,” vs let’s all stand around discussing things we could do for 30 minutes, with everyone politely deferring to everyone else and…
The idea of metrics for a pre-seed startups can feel rather oxymoronic; what does it even mean to have metrics when the business is so early? To add to the confusion, investors say conflicting things about the types of metrics they are looking for. Forget the investors for a second - as a founder, what do YOU want to know about your business? You are smart and talented and could be doing a million…
I’d taken up baking like everyone else during the COVID-19 pandemic, precipitated by a friend’s kind gift of a 3 year old sourdough starter. My first attempt was pretty sad. It didn’t rise, was weirdly dense without the holes you want inside, and the outside was pretty uneven. It’s also the first skill I’ve taught myself this year since we’ve mostly been in…
If you’re watching the news, and face it, who isn’t, it’s disheartening to watch what’s happening in the US right now. Yesterday, we sent a note out to our portfolio founders: Sitting here in Southeast Asia, which has it’s own troubled history with race, colonialization and conflict, it’s been so hard to watch what’s been happening in the US. Not only are…
Every week I write a note to our portfolio, and in each one, I share one thought that I think is relevant for our founders to noodle on. This week’s note got some good feedback, so thought I’d share it here. I was listening to my favorite podcast, “ Invest Like the Best ” where Hamilton Helmer was being interviewed about his book and subsequently spent my Saturday reading…
I’ve given various versions of this talk, and thought it might be worth sharing out the slides here for folks. Will add a transcript of the comments on each slide when I free up a little. Playing around with Loom so this is my maiden attempt =)! Watch the Loom video
I recently met with an incoming MBA student, who is leaving his cushy PE job for business school so that he can start something of his own. He asked if I had any recommendations on a) how to optimize his business school experience to best prepare himself for entrepreneurship, and b) if I had any books to recommend. It’s something that’s been on my mind as I’ve just finished…
One of my portfolio CEOs recently asked me for some examples of a great investor update newsletter and I thought that was a good opportunity to articulate the key components of a great investor update. Why even bother writing a monthly newsletter? I mean we’re busy operating our business getting s*** done, selling to customers, building product; do I really need to spend time communicating…
Picture: From L to R, Shiyan Koh (Hustle Fund), Radhika Dutt (Radical Product), Anna Gong (Perx), Reshmi Roy (Skyscanner) Last night, I had the privilege of moderating a panel hosted by Women in Product , where we explored what product management was to our panelists, as well as perspectives on growth, metrics, localisation and careers. It was a broad-ranging conversation, appropriate given the…
After almost 6 years at NerdWallet, and having had the chance of a lifetime to build a business from scratch with my friends, I was looking for something that would engage me in a similar way. In Drive , Daniel Pink writes about Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose as the key elements of intrinsic motivation, and I realised the NerdWallet experience was special because it hit all these intrinsic…
After nearly 6 years building NerdWallet, I left at the end of March to move back to my home country, Singapore. It’s been nearly 18 years since I first arrived in the US to start university at Stanford. I never imagined I would be here so long, and now it’s time to begin navigating my return. My motivation: I have an almost-two year old daughter - I want her to experience growing up…
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could all be neighbors with our best friends? We could come home from work, trade stories over a glass of wine while watching our kids play together?” This is the vision I tried to sell my college friends after we graduated, because once we scattered to the far-flung corners of the world, or let’s face it, once some people moved to the East Bay,…
Shiyan Koh Singapore-based early stage VC @ Hustle Fund . On the board of Stanford Club of Singapore, Stanford Rugby, and Q Chamber. Previously @NerdWallet, @BridgewaterAssociates, @IVP, @JPMorgan. Mother, Wife, Enthusiastic reader and thrower of dinner parties. Twitter @shiyankoh · Threads @shiyankoh