There are few who would jump headlong into the Southeast Asian investment ecosystem after 18 years in Silicon Valley. Hustle Fund’s Shiyan Koh is one of them.
In fact, her move to Singapore was very much a homecoming. Koh, who is Singaporean, moved to the US in 2000 to pursue her undergraduate studies at Stanford. She then went on to join investment teams at JP Morgan, Institutional Venture Partners and Bridgewater Associates before landing a gig at US personal finance app Nerdwallet, where Koh led business and product development for close to six years.
Upon her return to Singapore, Koh’s former Stanford mates Eric Bahn and Elizabeth Yin invited her to join Hustle Fund. Today, she serves as Hustle’s managing partner, investing on behalf of the pre-seed fund in Southeast Asia.
The real reason for returning, she candidly writes in her blog, was because she wanted her two-year-old daughter to know what char kway teow (stir fried rice noodles with pork lard and cockles) tasted like. It helps that Southeast Asia is poised to experience “a ton of secular growth”.
“I love the beginning of things, I love starting new things. I love it when there’s white space in front of you,” said Koh. “I think, for too long, the venture industry has been kind of like an artisanal cottage industry. There are so many things that we can think about early-stage investing in a different way, and we want to be the fund to be able to do that.”
She acknowledged that while it’s still very early days for Southeast Asia’s ecosystem, that really is part of the fun of being here.
“When you look at all the macro stuff in Southeast Asia – it has a very young population, high mobile penetration, great internet connectivity, relatively stable governments – a lot of things that you can do here are not that hi-tech…”
“There’s a lot of opportunity around how you take technology and apply it to existing businesses and make it better. You don’t even need to be that cutting edge, you just have to be great at execution,” added Koh.
Hustle Fund is a pre-seed investor founded by former 500 Startups partners Bahn and Yin. Its first $11.5-million fund is anchored by China’s online gaming giant Shanda, Japan’s Line and South Korea’s largest search engine Naver. The VC firm is also in the midst of raising a second $50-million fund to invest in pre-seed startups in Southeast Asia and North America.
Koh told DEALSTREETASIA that Hustle has deployed about 60 per cent from its first fund, and intends to invest one-fifth of it in Southeast Asian startups. The fund will target about 100 companies in all, and has so far invested in 8-9 startups in Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines.
Koh added that the larger $50-million second fund will target 150 companies, with scope for follow-on investments. Hustle Fund invests $25,000 in pre-seed startups after which it works with the team for 4-6 weeks before deciding on a larger $250,000 cheque.
Some of Hustle’s Southeast Asian portfolio companies include Blockpunk, a Singapore-based, anime tech startup; Moovaz, a Singapore-based logistics company; and Stendard, a software startup specialising in ISO certification and compliance.
