(Almost) Three years at Sequoia Capital in Singapore
It’s been a year and eight months since I wrote about my first anniversary as part of the investment team in Sequoia Capital in Southeast Asia. Hundreds of founder meetings, dozens of investment memos and one pandemic later, I’m taking the leap to the other side of the table and launching my own venture.
When I first joined, the office was about a dozen strong. Today, the Singapore headcount has more than tripled in size, and we’ve been privileged to have folks like Rajan Anandan (earlier leading India and SEA for Google), Amit Jain (former head of Uber APAC), and Ajey Gore (previous CTO of Go-Jek) since join. Surge, our early stage program, is now on its fourth batch, with companies like Zenyum and Telio graduating with double digit million Series A rounds. The Guild, a community for later stage founders, has launched. I grew from analyst to associate, helped launch Spark, our platform for female founders, and got the chance to spend six months with our portfolio company CRED working directly with storied serial founder Kunal Shah.
Most of all, I had the honour of working with some of the smartest people I have ever met, across my colleagues and our founders. To everyone in the Sequoia Capital family I’ve had the pleasure of meeting — thank you!
Some may say it is a strange time to start up, but the “why now” has never been stronger. E-wallet users seems to have hit an inflection point in the Philippines; Everest Education in Vietnam moved 98.5% of its students to online live classes; insurance sales surged 44% in Singapore; Shopee more than doubled year-on-year even at its scale; and mobile games kept growing. The demand and need for a tech-enabled world has never been more salient.
And there is still so much more to build. In the last few years, I spent a lot of time in fintech, where so many gaps still exist today: only about a third of Vietnamese and Filipinos have a bank account; credit card penetration in most markets is below 10%; and household debt as a % of GDP in Indonesia is just 17%, vs 54% in China or 76% in the US (2018). When I spoke to a freelancer in the Philippines just months ago, he shared that access to banking and credit services was such a challenge that he and his friends resorted to “sharing” a single bank account.
In BCG, I saw the challenges large corporations faced in going digital and where the opportunities lay. In Sequoia, I watched and learned from the hundreds of founders and companies we interacted with. In CRED, I studied how consumer insight could be used to build a trusted community and brand. I hope all of that gives me some ammunition to make a difference.
I’m super excited about what’s next. If you’re interested in joining me on this journey to build fintech for Southeast Asia, please drop me a note at tammie.siew@gmail.com — I’d love to share with and learn from you!
