After more than two decades of investing...
I believe we’ve found the next big hidden opportunity:


Most LPs exploring venture capital funds as an investment vehicle are concerned with media sentiment.

"Capital at risk"
"Growth at all costs"
"Long-term"

The numbers don't lie. If well managed, venture investing reaps very attractive ROI versus most other alternatives.

And, you won't even need to find the next unicorn to do that.

Today, sustainable, sticky growth is the holy grail for any investment office looking for longevity with attractive returns.

Some years ago my partner, Murli, and I started Tin Men Capital in pursuit of that.

Our fund's unique focus:
- B2B and Enterprise Tech Startups
- With a strong focus in Southeast Asia
- Who are in Series A stage and beyond

Our thesis:
SouthEast Asia's legacy industries are still largely undigitised.
B2B tech in large TAM > High-gross margins > Sticky recurring revenue > Quicker pathway to profitability

We've already proven that these ideas our sound with measured results from our inaugural fund.

Family offices and institutions that work with us appreciate our ethos in running the fund:

⚙️ DISCIPLINED DEAL-SOURCING : 
Carefully scrutinising every deal for the right valuations, founder mix, and expertise. No exceptions.

⚙️ HIGH-CONVICTION: 
We only invest in a handful of teams that apply. Sounds counterintuitive, but It's seeing above-market returns with below-average failure rates.

⚙️ EXPERIENCED B2B OPERATORS AT THE HELM: 
Murli and I bring collectively more than 40 years of experience in investing and management, having sat on boards and brokered large M&As. Our thoughts have also been featured on TechInAsia, Peak Magazine, and more.

Some of our portfolio companies:

🔵 Hubble (Series B)
Resource management platform for parties in the construction value chain to track and optimise processes

🔵  Zipline (Series A)
Australia's #1 workplace management platform for the aged care and health sectors

🔵  GlobalTix (Series A)
Software and marketplace software for tourism attraction operators and travel product distributors 

We’re always on the lookout for new partners and startups to join us.

If keen to chat, shoot me a DM/email or head over to our website to drop us a line.

Jeremy Tan

I hesitate each time someone asks me for career advice.

Just last week, we had a team lunch to thank our intern who’s finishing up her time at Tin Men Capital.

She asked me,
“What do you think I should do?”
“What would you do if you were me?”

This is NOT the first time I get these questions.
But it still gives me pause.

Because what I hear is someone looking for the answer.
A formula.
A truth to copy and treat as gospel.

That scares me.
Reality is life doesn’t work like that.

Each person's life and path is unique.

↳ Different opportunities and social backgrounds 
↳ Personal loves, dislikes, and motivations 
↳ Life events that happen at different times

Context, timing, and opportunities all differ.
What’s right for one may be completely wrong for another.

Over time, I’ve only found a few things that hold true. 

What I told her:
🔹 Life will throw you curveballs. Play the cards you’re dealt and adapt. 
🔹 Gratitude is the gateway to happiness. 
🔹 Priorities and desires change with time. 
🔹 Pay attention to global shifts. Macro forces often shape personal outcomes. 
🔹 When you take advice, listen for the context behind it.

In the end, being able to choose your own path is a privilege in itself.
The rest is just figuring out how to make it work for you.

I still don’t have perfect advice.
But maybe that’s the point.
No one should.

The best any of us can do is stay curious.
Stay adaptable.

Keep building a life that makes sense to us.

To me, that’s how we end up in fulfilling careers and more importantly a happy life.

Agree?

Talks about #startup, #investing, #fundraising, #familyoffice, and #venturecapital

Tin Men Capital

Backing brilliant B2B founders 🦓 in Southeast Asia | Co-founder at Tin Men Capital | Linkedin Top Voice

Tuan Le

I just got into KL.

The last time we were here together was five years ago,
Right after we led Hubble’s Series A at Tin Men Capital

We flew in to meet a co-investor and closed the round on that trip.

When we headed back to Singapore in Feb 2020,
We didn’t know it would be our last time travelling for a while.

Today, I got to travel with SJ Lin again.
We chose to drive in this time.

It’s cathartic to spend some quality, uninterrupted catching up and dreaming up the future of Hubble.Build.
Five years felt like a lifetime.

A pandemic.
A funding winter.
More ups and downs than we expected.

And I’m thankful for the friendship and partnership we’ve built through all of it.

I’ve learnt a lot from founders like SJ.
I admire the way they stay steady under pressure, even when the environment is tough.

This time, we’re meeting investors and customers.
Wish us luck.

Hello KL, looking forward to building with you!

Singapore was built to avoid failure.
But our progress - our very survival depends on it.

Yet, we still treat failure like a scar.
Here, it’s partly culturally ingrained.

We were raised on the idea that we’re a small island,
With no resources and can’t afford to fail.

That mindset made sense when survival was top priority.

But over time, it manifested into something else.
A quiet fear of getting things wrong.

Across the region, failure is viewed very different.

In Malaysia, for instance.
Many built their businesses without the safety nets we have.

No government backing.
No currency stability.
No guaranteed support.

For them, the only path was forward.
Failure wasn’t shameful.

It was part of the process.

I’ve seen the same pattern with founders too.
The resilient ones study their missteps.
Every failed pilot, missed forecast, or wrong hire becomes data for the next decision.

That rhythm of trial and error builds staying power over time.

We should see it that way.
Failure can be a stepping stone to greater things.

It's proof of learning.
It's a showcase of progress in motion.

Don't shy from failure. Accept it as a part of the journey.

---
🎧 From Unfair Advantage with myco-founder Murli Ravi
(a Tin Men Capital Podcast)

We bring voices from across the ecosystem to understand what drives the region’s B2B growth.

Now streaming on all major podcast platforms: 
🟢 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gEig_89f 
⚪️ Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/gECJhtSS
🔴 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/g8bfShYA

I’ll be in KL, Malaysia this week - looking to connect with founders/ investors.

Tin Men Capital will host a casual networking drinks session on Wednesday evening. (19th November)

I’ll be sharing some thoughts about the evolving Southeast Asia startup ecosystem with a focus on the big part Malaysia plays in it.

It’ll be a great opportunity to trade insights and stories with other folks in the space to learn and unwind. 

You’ll get to hear from both founders on the ground and investors to get a pulse of where things are heading.

Possibly get inspired on new directions before the year’s out to set 2026 strong.

I expect some really great conversations and a fun evening.

Will be joined by a friend: First Move’s GP - Audra Pakalnyte.

There are limited slots - so I’d recommend applying early.
(Will attach the link in the comments.)

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Founders, don’t trade “nice” for “formidable.”

You can be both.

Mean founders might win once.
Nice founders win every round after.

I’ve been around this ecosystem long enough to see both.

Some founders think you need to squeeze every deal, underpay talent, or push for harsh terms to get ahead.
Some are unnecessarily antagonistic.

And yes, they might capture a little value in the moment.

But over time, it backfires.

In startups, the game is compounding.
🔸Company value ≈ Initial value × (1 + growth rate)^t

Shave a little off your growth rate every time you mistreat a hire, frustrate a partner, or shortchange a customer.
And those “wins” quickly turn into losses.

On the flip side, I’ve seen founders who:
✅ Pay fairly and on time
✅ Fix customer problems without excuses
✅ Treat partners like long-term allies

They build reputations that compound.

Hiring gets easier.
Deals close faster.
Investors lean in.

And in Southeast Asia, backchannels travel faster than revenue.
Your reputation is often the first due diligence that gets done.

The point isn’t to be “soft.”
Or to just to protect your growth rate.
It’s more basic than that.

Really, just don’t be a jerk.

Being decent should be the default.
Being formidable makes it  even more powerful.

That combination wins almost every time.
That’s how you compound.

What goes around comes around. 
Costs nothing to be nice.

Ingrained in Tin Men Capital's mission is to play a key role in building a thriving eco-system.

For SEA and for many generations to come.

It is that north star that fuel's Murli and my conviction and provides light at the darkest moment.

Earlier this week, I had the great pleasure of being invited to a small VC roundtable led by MOS Dinesh Vasu Dash,
together with other Singapore-based VCs.

We were invited to share views on the recommendations being shaped for the Economic Strategy Review.

I hope the candid views of all the VCs attending is useful for the policymakers in attendance.

Stoked that we can play a part in shaping vital policies.

What I appreciated most was how seriously the government is taking this role.
And I hope we’ll see more of these discussions happening even after the recommendations are announced and rolled out.

If we want founders to feel confident building here,
The right policies and financial infrastructure need to be in place, with frequent calibrations.

Whilst we are going through a reset now, we are starting at a higher base and that should be celebrated.

And I’m optimistic.

I believe we’ll get there at a much faster pace, with Singapore well-positioned to lead.

Big thanks to MOS Dinesh, Cindy Khoo, Heng-Tong CHOO, Emily Liew, Alvin Cai for the kind invitation.

And great catching up with friendly faces too:
Jixun Foo, Edgar Hardless, Arrif Ziaudeen, Jeremy Loh PhD Shailendra J Singh, B. Paul Santos and Dickson Loo.

Onwards!

They say Cash is the lifeblood of any startup. There's a good reason why.

As the ecosystem matures, founders have become much more financially aware.

They’re reading their numbers better.
Tracking recurring revenue, churn, ACV, margins.
That progress matters.

But I still meet teams who aren't as aware of cashflow management.

Take this example:

🔸A company doing $10M ARR, growing 100% YoY, with 80% gross margins.
Everything looked solid.

🔸Then the finance lead pulled up their collections report.
Only $2M had been collected at the gross profit level.

🔸Most customers paid every six months, with 90-day terms.
Several invoices were still overdue.

✅The books said healthy growth.
❌The bank account told another story.

This is probably an extreme example, but the point still stands.

Cashflow management may seem as a afterthought as we prioritise booking revenue,
Yet it often decides survival.

-Trading off contract size for faster payments
-Appointing someone accountable for collections
-Negotiating better terms with suppliers

Each move compounds over time.

More predictability.
More breathing room.
More control.

Good cash discipline rarely makes headlines. 
That is… until you run out of money.

But it keeps companies alive long enough to earn them.

Cash is king.
Founders should treat it that way.

For years, we’ve glorified one outcome for startups of any size.

Going public. Listing on a major stock exchange.

I get why this was the case.
It’s what most of us grew up reading about.

The glorious bell-ringing and confetti.
Those splashy headlines.
It felt like the mark of success.

But Southeast Asia doesn’t quite work that way.

Public liquidity lives offshore.
Markets are much more fragmented.
It takes longer to build scale needed for IPO.

Trouble is, when everything revolves around IPOs as the only option,
Other good outcomes get overlooked.

Founders keep building for windows that don’t open.
Funds hold on for longer than they should.
And solid M&A paths get ignored, even when they make perfect sense.

The truth is, M&A has driven a significant part of returns .

Done right, it rewards founders, recycles talent and capital,
And keeps momentum in the ecosystem.

We don’t talk about it enough, because it’s less flashy.
But we’re seeing it start to take off.

What would help now are doable fixes.

Building bridges with acquirers' corp dev team.
Cleaner cap tables.
Shift in local corporate mindset of "I will build it myself"

None of that’s out of reach.

We don’t need to chase Silicon Valley’s version of success.
We can design our own.

With the founders and investors already here,
Building outcomes that actually fit this region.

How do you define a good outcome in SEA today?

Docquity

Chief Product Officer

Docquity is Southeast Asia’s largest professional community of healthcare professionals. Our vision is to connect healthcare professionals to build healthier lives around the world at scale.

As a Chief of Staff, I serve as an extension of the founding team, supporting them with all kinds of projects across product development, user engagement & retention, special projects, new products, talent management and internal alignment through OKRs.

Chief of Staff

Bigbang Angels, Inc.

Bigbang Angels is an early-stage institutional investor based in Korea and Singapore, focusing on cross-border startups. It supports R&D by linking various government funds in Korea along with investments to companies and supports verification of the marketability of companies with various public/conglomerate partners. It also supports companies in expanding their business into global markets through Singapore and Canada.

Entrepreneur In Residence

Learning Loop

Learning Loop is a private peer-to-peer learning and growth accelerator. I learn in public on Learning Loop with other impactful founders around the world, and we compound each other.

Fellow

On Deck

Everything Marketplaces

Everything Marketplaces is a community & world-class network of 1,400+ marketplace founders, teams, & leaders. Members range from aspiring and first-time founders, to founders of breakout marketplaces like Nana, Neighbor, Cameo, and Whatnot. We even have founders & leaders from some of the largest marketplaces like Thumbtack, Turo, OpenSea, and more part of the community.

Member

Greenhouse.Co

We’re building Asia's first marketplace for professional services, starting in Southeast Asia and expanding across APAC. Our network now includes 200+ providers in 31 markets, with an impressive NPS of 78 (industry average is 25).

Our "managed marketplace" model helps foreign companies enter fast-growing markets by establishing trust, identifying top providers, ensuring price transparency, and automating the demand-supply match.

While the first phase of the internet focused on goods, we’re reinventing the service economy, tackling the traditionally resistant professional services sector.

Chief Operating Officer

Head of Indonesia 

General Manager at Greenhouse at the Penthouse

shl.vc

Scouting for great startups at shl.vc.

Shl.vc was started by Sahil, founder of Gumroad and previous investor in ~ 30 startups including Clubhouse, Lambda School, Figma, Notion, Vercel HelloSign, and Movable Ink.

LPs include Naval Ravikant, Arlan Hamilton, Matt Mullenweg, Elad Gil, Tim Ferriss, John Lilly, Minal Hasan, Josh Kopelman, Marc Andreessen, and Nick Kokonas.

Drop me a message if you an early-stage startup with high growth potential looking for great investors.

VC Scout

Revenue Collective

Revenue Collective is a private membership organization with 5000+ members from around the world. The community consists of commercial growth operators like COOs, Heads of Business Development, and Heads of Operations and it's designed so that members can openly discuss business-critical issues with the comfort of privacy and confidentiality.

Tinggal.com (OneStandard Group Pte Ltd)

Tinggal is a platform connecting budget hotels and lodges with travelers. As Head of Marketing, my focus was on increasing brand awareness and business growth through content creation, product marketing, social media, ads, email marketing, PR, SEO, SEM, and event management.

Head of Marketing at Tinggal.com

Snaplio

Snaplio was a lifestyle startup that enabled us to travel across Southeast Asia's most beautiful destinations. The core of the business was a marketplace connecting photographers and travelers.

Co-Founder

Chief of Staff at Docquity

A few things I believe:

- Velocity is everything. The faster you execute, the more you learn. Speed increases your interactions with reality.

- Small teams win. Fewer people mean faster decisions, fewer meetings, and no need for political fragmentation. No room for mediocrity.

- The only real limits are the laws of physics. “I have learned to use the word impossible with the greatest of caution.” — Werner von Braun

There are two ways to reduce economic inequality:
- Lift the floor.
- Lower the ceiling.
I’d rather work on lifting the floor.

- Most problems come from not having found your life’s work yet. Once you do, most questions disappear.

- Fight entropy. A product that isn’t improving is degrading. It's always Day 1.

- Relentlessly add value to great people in my network.

- Take full ownership. No excuses, no passing the buck. End-to-end responsibility in everything I do.

- Default to trust. Approach problems with intellectual maturity. Give credit in public, criticize in private.

- Optimize for impact over status.

---

If you're interested in startups, I share insights from the frontlines every once in a while: https://viktor.substack.com.

---

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are my own and do not reflect those of my employer.

Viktor Kyosev

CPO at Docquity | Building at the intersection of AI and healthcare

📢 These CPOs aren’t just building roadmaps — they’re reshaping Asia’s tech economy.

From fintech to healthcare, cloud to SaaS — these product leaders are doing what few others can: scaling complexity with clarity. They turn insight into innovation, and platforms into ecosystems.

Meet the 10 Chief Product Officers defining 2025:

🔹 Karthik Narain leads global product, GTM & revenue at Google Cloud — after building Accenture’s Cloud First & AI businesses across 104 countries.

🔹 Yoel Sumitro scaled UX across 70+ countries at Uber, adidas & Delivery Hero — now redesigning tiket.com’s experience end-to-end.

🔹 Bikash Joshi built enterprise platforms at Jio (JioCX, JioCRM) — now shaping AI-native SaaS at dMACQ.

🔹 Vineet Das launched GoPay, scaled UPI, and led a 30% fintech revenue uplift at GoTo — now CPO at LeadSquared.

🔹 Viktor Kyosev created AI-powered clinical tool Dx at Docquity — empowering better, faster medical decisions in real time.

🔹 Khilan Haria co-authored Razorpay’s pricing algorithm patents and scaled the product into a full-stack fintech powerhouse.

🔹 Ibrahim Farag is leading Enjaz Payment Services — Saudi’s largest fintech — into an AI-powered, growth-focused future.

🔹Monica Millares scaled BigPay across Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, and leading the first embedded finance integration with AirAsia.

🔹Shreya Agarwal builds people-first SaaS at Think Future Technologies, founded SelfBest, with digital health roots at YHealth.

🔹Jene Lim has driven credit product innovation across Citi & Experian for 20+ years — from APIs to global rollouts.

These are the CPOs turning product into performance.

📖 Read the full list: https://buff.ly/0B41ylU 
🎧 Listen to the podcast: https://buff.ly/tYKSt5g 

👇 Who would you shadow for a month if you could?

#TopVoices2025 #CPOtoFollow #ProductLeadership #TechAsia #SaaSInnovation #NewInAsia

Ever since listening to David Senra's episode on Founders Podcast about James Dyson’s first autobiography, I’ve been meaning to read it. It wasn’t easy to find, but a friend surprised me with a copy, and it quickly became one of my favorite autobiographies!

A few stats that blew my mind:
- Dyson built 5,127 prototypes before getting it right.
- He worked for 14 years before achieving success.  He was 31 when he had the idea, and 45 when it finally worked.
- For over 1,000 days, he built one new prototype every single day.

For all the talk in startups about working hard and agency, I haven’t met a single founder who’s come close to that level of grit!

Some of my favorite lines from the book:

“I would crawl into the house every night covered in dust, exhausted and depressed.”

“There were times when I thought it would never work.”

“I would keep making cyclones until I died.”

Now, I understand a little better what it takes to build a great product!

"I like to avoid dealing with people where I feel like I need a contract."

- Shane Parrish

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