4 valuable tips for fostering successful collaboration between business founders and investors
While raising a fund is one of the milestones business founders are seeking to accomplish, making sure the company becomes successful is another side of the story to tell. So, how do Venture Capital (VC) firms and business founders work together in building a successful company?
In a webinar held by Startup Grind Singapore, Peng T. Ong (Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Monk’s Hill Ventures) and Oswald Yeo (Co-Founder & CEO of Glints) shared the essential things every business founder might find helpful in fostering a successful collaboration with investors.
Here is how Glints’ co-founders work together with Monk’s Hill Ventures in building a winning team with these four main takeaways from the talk.
The fact that Glints has a very young founding team influenced the type of investors the team preferred to work with. “I wanted someone that we could learn from, who has been through that entrepreneurial life cycle,” said Oswald Yeo.
It is important to note that there are different types of investors. Some investors may focus more on hypergrowth or the next funding rounds, while others may focus more on business fundamentals.
According to Oswald, Glints belongs to the third camp. He said, “We wanted investors who will also work with us to focus on the business fundamentals instead of just focusing on the next round all the time.”
When it comes to building a winning team, founders need to find people with the right culture and skills fit. This ensures that you are working alongside like-minded people in your company who share your values and vision.
For Oswald and the Glints team, they were looking for investors with the right mix of experience and networks that they could partner with. Oswald said, “We thought that Peng would be a great partner to learn from because he’s built multiple companies to IPO, so now he can help us to hopefully do the same in this company.”
Oswald added that the Glints’ founding team thinks of investors as partners, who would work together with them and bring the company to the next level.
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There are some instances where entrepreneurs are too focused on granular stuff that they struggle to explain why they are doing what they do or have to make up stories around that.
Defining and articulating your company purpose, mission and values during each board meeting would provide a constant reference point to keep your strategy plan on track. It also drives alignment between founders and investors.
“I recommend you, if you’re an entrepreneur or CEO, when you start the meeting, go through at least one slide—if not two or three slides—that clearly states what you’re about and keep reminding people that,” Peng said.
A healthy working relationship between investors and business founders requires mutual understanding and agreement on their roles and responsibilities.
According to Peng, a healthy board working relationship requires a very clear line. He said, “I’m very clear and I tell this to the CEO multiple times when I invest in a company, ‘You’re the boss’. I can be pretty tough in telling you what I think, but ultimately you should be very clear that you’re the boss.”
He shared about how a good VC firm is supposed to help founders build the company, think about the strategy, and double-check the reasoning behind it.
He continued, “We have intellectual debates but in the end, we’re very clear on who owns the decision.”
Furthermore, Oswald added that he is glad that even though there might not be a unanimous consensus, there is mutual trust between both Peng and the team which led to a successful outcome.
Get deeper insights on the topic by watching the full webinar at this link.
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