Karmanye vadhikaraste… Learnings from a year as a VC

I joined Saison Capital exactly a year ago today. When we moved back to Singapore in early 2021, I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do next. I’d spent the last 7+ years selling stuff online. I met a bunch of folks — early-stage founders, friends from my past life and during this exploration I came across the team at Saison Capital. I was instantly drawn to the team’s ambition and drive, balanced with their hunger to learn and intention to build a collaborative, collegial culture that explicitly supports personal growth.

So having stumbled upon VC by chance, I was going to sit and reflect on the upsides, downsides and my learnings privately; but as they say — why do something for yourself when you can mine it for content?

Let me get to it:

The Good

• Breadth of learning: When I introduce myself to people I jokingly say: “I spent the last 7+ years trying to sell stuff online — first bedsheets and then detergent.” Being an “operator” for too long in one industry does make you think in a specific way about very specific things. In this past year, I’ve loved the opportunity of being able to apply my mind to a variety of topics and business models.
• Positivity: As an early-stage VC, I meet founders who are pre-traction — with just a deck, a thesis and the absolute conviction that they are going to build the next Facebook/Stripe. Being around this kind of positivity on a daily basis is fantastic. Of course, there are bound to be bumps along the way and there is a lot of brainstorming and course correcting to do over the years, but basking in the sunshine of that early hope is certainly a huge upside of this job (and highly recommended for good health).
• Working with talented founders: It’s a massive privilege of this job to be able to speak to and work with a diverse, young, talented bunch of people looking to change the way various parts of the world work in a meaningful way. Every time I speak to a set of founders — whether we end up investing in them or not — I come away having learnt something new and feeling very inspired. I recently spoke to a Series-A founder, not yet out of college, who bootstrapped his start-up from money he’d made blogging at the age of 14. What a privilege to even know such folks.

The Could-Be-Better

• Anxiety: We’ve built our thesis, loved the team, signed the docs and then it begins — this small ball of worry, omnipresent at the back of your head about how they will do. In the updates you learn: that the pilot product didn’t get much traction, the sales cycles are longer than planned, a competitor raised a larger round, a co-founder isn’t keen on continuing anymore. The list of things that can go wrong (and have gone wrong) is endless. In my time as an operator also there were a 100 things that went wrong, but the lack of control over outcomes in the VC world is something I am still trying to get used to.
• FOMO: FOMO can take so many forms in this industry and like anxiety, is also an omnipresent emotion. Someone we met and passed on raised from a Tier-1 fund. A company which raised a large round came out of stealth in a sector we’re bullish on. A competitor raised a larger follow-on round. Why didn’t I respond to that one email, why didn’t I reach out to that one founder in my network — so many micro-moments of regret and FOMO.
• Ego denting: I have been cut out of 2 “hot deals” in the last 1 year. Both times, we committed quite quickly — one of the first funds to commit, in fact. That certainly hurt. Sometimes our allocation has been squeezed, some founders have refused to take calls with me, others have emailed me assuming I merely schedule calls for other male members of the team. For a variety of reasons, this job just isn’t the best gig for one’s ego.

What I am learning to do:

The only way to sanely navigate this ecosystem is to truly imbibe the most famous teaching from the Bhagavad Gita - “Karmanye vadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadhachana.” This loosely translates to: “Perform your duty but do not have any expectation of the fruits.”

While this principle holds good for most jobs, I can safely say that having been a lawyer, a management consultant, a start-up operator and now a VC, the application of this to my work as a VC is the most relevant because unlike in the past, the level of control over outcomes in early-stage investing is truly the least.

But I can control my inputs: expanding my network, building a thesis for where the world is headed, trying to understand how we can play a part in where the world is headed and helping founders navigate this path. This is where I am hoping to focus my energy in the coming year while trying to worry less about the outcomes. I’m looking forward to reporting back on how successful I was at the same time next year.