Faith-based business models: Christianity and redemptive startups
Chris Yeo double hats as the co-founder of Digital Mission Ventures and the CEO of Doku. Find out how he integrates his Christian identity with work.
Digital Mission Ventures, also known as DM Ventures or DMV, is a Singapore-based venture capital firm that aims to build the redemptive startup ecosystem in Southeast Asia.
If you’re not a Christian, you’d probably be a little lost. What’s a redemptive ecosystem, and what does that have to do with startups?
So. A basic primer on Christian theology is needed here. Skip if you already know all this.
Christian doctrine holds that all humans are born with a tainted nature and with a natural propensity towards sinful conduct. This is also described as being in a state of separation from God, which embodies perfection.
Redemption is thus necessary for people to obtain salvation from the sinful nature that they were born with, plus the sins that they will commit throughout their lives. At the most basic level, redemption refers to doing good deeds, but can also mean transforming one conduct to be less sinful.
The end state of redemption is eternal life in heaven, or living a good life in harmony with Christian moral values.
By the way, redemption is a concept common across the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
A startup with a redemptive business model can probably be described as a business built upon Christian values, rather than one that is purely driven by profits.
To understand how a redemptive business model works, I spoke to the former head of GrabPay, Chris Yeo, who co-founded DM Ventures. He’s also serving as the CEO of Doku, a Jakarta-based fintech payments solutions company.
This post showcases the highlights from our conversation, the transcript has been edited for flow and clarity. Do listen to the full recording on Regen Supply.
This is the second post in a series about faith-based business models. For views from the Muslim world, read about Umar Munshi and his work at Hasan VC here.
Han: How do you integrate your faith with your work at Doku? Or is there a very strict wall in between the two jobs that you do?
Yeo: At my first town hall as the CEO, one of the things I really struggled with was whether I should say that I’m Christian. Bearing in mind that this is an Indonesian company where most of the employees are Muslim.
I think the answer was yes because it goes back to your heart posture (read this and this), and your identity. If nobody knows that you are a Christian or your faith is X, then what’s the point? How are you able to serve your religion, your faith, your God at work if nobody else or only 1 per cent knows about your faith?
So at the town hall, I said that, you know what, guys, one of the things that’s really important to me is my faith. I’m Christian. And as a Christian, I have very specific values. That’s why I will make decisions in a certain way. Or why I will try to push all of us to make decisions in a certain way.
That is important because one, it frees you, it gives you peace. The second aspect is that it gives you accountability. I’d better show that I’m a good Christian, especially as a CEO.
Han: Could we talk a bit about your spiritual background as a Christian, and then maybe your journey towards DM Ventures?
Yeo: I became a Christian more than 20 years ago, and it was actually my wife who brought me to the faith. I remember when I first became a Christian, I was wondering what it meant to be a Christian. How does it apply to every aspect of your life, including your work?
I didn’t quite have the answers to that. And so the early part of my career, I thought what it meant in terms of faith and work is really to try to work hard, and retire early so that I could spend 100% of my time and resources to serve God in whatever capacity he calls me to.
It was only later that I realised that’s probably not the best way to serve God. And that’s why I started DM Ventures.
I just wish that I could have learned much earlier in my career in terms of how we think about faith and work integration.
Han With DM Ventures, would you describe it as bringing faith into the venture business or would it be bringing your expertise in venture and technology into your work as a Christian?
Yeo: I think it’s both. For DMV, what we anchor on is this concept of redemptive entrepreneurship. For founders, redemptive entrepreneurship refers to building sustainable and scalable businesses, involving some element of sacrifice so that specific broken parts of culture are redeemed as your business grows.
For the Christian faith, we follow the example of Jesus. Jesus gave his life on the cross so that we are all redeemed and restored in our relationship. It’s the ultimate act of sacrifice.
That’s from John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave, his one only Son”. So we follow the example, and we also obey God, because he is a just God, and he cares for all of us as perfect image bearers.
We know that the world that we live in or the culture which we operate in is broken in many parts and it’s not meant to be this way. So we obey him by trying to redeem specific broken parts of culture. And in doing so, as part of operating the business, then hopefully what we wanna do is glorify God.
DM Ventures is like an academy in some sense. We teach founders about redemptive entrepreneurship and there is a playbook about how you think about it in your personal ambition or vision setting, your strategy, your operations, how you run the business, and your partners and all that.
But there’s also a capital side to that. For startups, having the right investors in the cap table, ideally faith-aligned, makes the execution easier, especially on a longer term basis.
Han: Would you describe redemptive businesses as a specific type of social enterprise with maybe stricter guidelines?
Yeo: I don’t think so. So I see that more as a subset of any startup. And the reason for that is that we believe that redemptive impact can come from any type of startup. We are sector agnostic: we have climate tech, marketing tech, ecommerce, and fintech.
It doesn’t matter because we believe that redemptive impact can come from any type of startup. And also because we do expect these startups to scale to the best that they can. It’s through scale, funded by your own sustainable business operations that more broken parts of culture can be restored or redeemed.
So we’re looking for companies that will grow big, and as they grow, the redemption will be organic to their business model.
Han: Okay, so maybe a better way to describe it would be a very specific type of impact business? Because redemption seems to be a type of impact, but with roots in Christianity.
Yeo: It goes back to what are you trying to redeem. That’s a very personal question for each of us and our founders and fellows. The way we try to tease that out is that we believe that every Christian has a different calling from God. And that is true of everyone’s faith journey.
Maybe you’re gifted through some resources through birth or maybe acquire some specific skills over your life and you’re exposed to different experiences. We believe there’s a purpose for that.
So that may lead some folks ultimately to the path of ecommerce or marketing tech. When we talk about brokenness, it basically means that we know inherently in our hearts that something is wrong in that part of culture or the industry.
A very good example is corruption. Corruption is endemic at a country level, but it’s also endemic in many different industries in most parts of the world, and in parts of the value chain for specific industries.
Our startups are trying to redeem those specific parts of their industry. Even in ESG, you’re starting to have some of those issues. The moment capital starts being funnelled a lot in some of these industries or countries, then you have a lot of these issues starting to happen because certain stakeholders, certain actors, want to maximise their profits and the capital that flows to them, at the expense of others. Then bad behaviour happens and sometimes it becomes endemic in industry.
We believe that tech founders that can scale and are capable, can try to influence and redeem that part of culture so the entire industry, over time, can move in the right direction.
Han: Could you tell me a bit more about the sacrifice part? We’ve talked about how the business needs to be sustainable and scalable, and the redemptive opportunity. What do you mean when you say sacrifice?
Yeo: The theological basis for that is the redemptive framework. I would describe it in three concentric circles. The first circle is what we call the exploitative framework. I win and you lose. And that’s how the world works. I’m signing a commercial deal with you. I obviously want to get 51%, you get 49%.
That’s where most of the world operates and the culture today sort of rewards that behaviour.
Beyond that, the second circle is called the ethical framework. You can think about it as win-win. It feels good and is the right thing to do for all of us. I think a lot of us strive to operate in that sphere as much as possible.
For us, we believe the redemptive framework is the third sphere. Instead of win-win, we believe in “I lose and we win”. That’s where the sacrifice comes in. I may lose in some parts of this partnership, or in some parts of being a business owner and employer. But in the long run, we win together as a company, as an industry, as a community.
It starts with the founder’s heart posture. He first has to recognise that in everything he does, he’s just stewarding his resources for God. So God is the real CEO of his startup right now, and if God says tomorrow it’s time to steward resources is to do something else, he’s at peace.
It’s first that personal heart posture of surrendering to God for complete obedience, rather than your personal ambition, which drives us so hard in this world.
The ambition to be number one, to be the biggest unicorn, those are the success metrics from the exploitative world.
For the redemptive world, I don’t always have to be number one. That’s not the most important thing to me. I don’t always have to be on the Forbes cover or Bloomberg.
Han: How do you keep the balance between the redemptive impact and profit motive?
Yeo: I think it’s just like what I said about heart posture. It’s actually harder, more counter-cultural, to think about redemptive first than redemptive all the time. So that’s our focus, actually. I think once you get that right, the business aspects come very naturally.
Han: Could you explain a bit more what you mean by redemptive first versus redemptive all the time?
Yeo: For example, when I meet with my startup founders, conversations naturally turn very rapidly to typical topics: What’s your cash flow like? How’s sales going? Are you raising a new round? What’s the investors are you getting?
Those are important topics to address because those need to be done well and right to run the business. But talking about how you’re progressing in terms of redemptive and thinking hard and with the founder about maybe doing things or thinking things through a bit differently, it takes effort.
That’s why when I say redemptive first, it means always putting every single conversation through a redemptive lens.
So for example, on the topic of layoffs which has been very common in the past 18 months, how do you put a redemptive lens through that? How do you put a lens of loving your employee through that?
I’ve experienced and executed layoffs. The easiest and most efficient way, which some clients do, is a Zoom callwith everyone impacted. It’s like a town hall, 20 minutes, any Q&A, five minutes. That’s it. It’s very efficient. That’s best practice.
Or you could spend three months looking at the comms. How do you sequence activities? Are there managers involved? Are there managers of managers involved? What are you going to do T + 1 after the exercise. What are you going to do for them on LinkedIn? And things like that.
That’s really hard. That takes time and sacrifice. So that’s what it means by trying to make sure you’re being redemptive first, and also being redemptive all the time.
Han: What would be a successful outcome for you?
Yeo: I think a successful outcome would be that we are able to work with the founder to clarify what his redemptive opportunity is, and then also develop a redemptive playbook. So how the redemptive opportunity is executed in a startup will be different for every founder.
We have learned that for some founders it is relatively clear what their opportunity is. For others, it takes a bit more time. And that’s where we come in and we hope to be on the journey with them.
It could be one year, two years, or three years. But that’s sort of the relationship that we hope to build with each of our founders even if we exit any of them.
The community aspect is equally important for us. Being a startup founder is a lonely journey but being a faith-driven founder and finding like-minded founders with that mindset is even harder. It’s a topic that doesn’t naturally come up, especially in a startup space.
So we hope to build that community so that there can be mutual encouragement and fellowship and prayer and they can walk together over the years.
Han: This has been a very lovely conversation and quite illuminating for me. I’ve learnt that being a Christian actually comes down to a set of values, which in all honesty seems to be pretty universal. Be nice, respect other people’s right to express themselves, and this part about tackling redemptive problems, fixing what’s broken, I think it’s a great service to society.
So I think maybe if we take out the baggage that comes with institutionalised religion and just get down to what it actually means to have a faith and to integrate that faith in your daily life and your work. I think that’s quite a beautiful thing.
Yeo: Yeah, no, thanks for that. And I think it’s beautiful and it’s so important and it’s necessary. Faith has always played such a critical role in society. In work but also in communities and cities.
I think once faith is sort of artificially walled off or taken out from any of these, then bad things, bad actors happen.
And I fully agree with you that, at least from the Christianity point of view, God created man and God’s a God of love. And that’s how we inherently know if things are right or wrong.
Is it by random chance? I don’t think so. So it has to be sort of designed into it, like we are all created intuitively.
Han: Any last words?
Thanks for this podcast. I’m always looking to chat and talk with and meet with any Christian tech founders or Christian entrepreneurs. So feel free to reach out to me anytime on LinkedIn or through Han. I would love to have a chat with any of you.
