What I learned from interning at a VC firm in Southeast Asia

This summer, I interned as a summer analyst at Patamar Capital, a global VC firm focusing on impact investing in Southeast Asia. Here’s a little write-up reflecting on my experience. Hope it will provide some useful insights!

I spent 2 months in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, for my internship. Within these two months, I’ve learned invaluable lessons and the whole experience have exceeded my expectations. Since I don’t really hear many people (in my circle, at least) talking about what it’s like to intern at a VC, I have decided that I’ll share my experience here for you to see if you might also be interested in a VC internship.

What did my days look like?

For an intern, I truly felt like I was offered a diverse range of tasks and projects to learn from. My day-to-day responsibilities include some of the following:

1. Contributing in deal sourcing and pipeline building.

We were encouraged to go to events in the startup ecosystem and talk with people there to keep up to date with the community. As an intern, I was also given the chance to conduct preliminary assessments of some of the startups in the pipeline, and draft the pre-investment summary to the global team.

Lessons: I got to practice evaluating startups in a wide range of industries by briefly looking at its market size, its product-market fit, its competitive advantages, and its core team. The discussions that follow give a lot of insights on the different components required to make a successful startup and train me to quickly identify strengths and weaknesses of an idea and an organization.

2. Doing a lot of market research, both primary and secondary.

I got the chance to help the firm with their due diligence for a potential deal. The research I did involved desktop research on the industry landscape, competitors, and recent developments in the space. While all of that was very useful in giving context, what I found most interesting was our field research. The other interns and I spent a few days on the field talking to the startups’ merchants, customers, and other stakeholders to see what things were really like in the market. We also interviewed employees to really understand its company culture, its day-to-day challenges, and what motivates the employees to join the startup.

On top of the due diligence research, we also performed research on various industries in Indonesia to further the firm’s understanding on the market. I chose to take a deep dive on the Financial Services industry. I mostly did secondary research — I spent days reading reports, articles, and the news to compile information. Then, the intern team and I further analyzed the data dump and transformed it into a more digestible format in the form of a report. We ended up presenting our key findings to the global team at the end of the internship.

Lessons: Through this process, I learned how to perform research more effectively. It’s always overwhelming to start on a research project given the sheer amount of information out there. My mentor taught me that it’s always best to start with a set of questions, and then find answers to those questions through the research. More often than not, follow-up questions will emerge, and you’ll have to prioritize and decide whether or not those questions are important to pursue — or else you’ll be researching forever.

In addition, I gained so many insights on the high-level trends in Indonesia. To name a few, I learned a lot about the emerging fintech players in the region and the challenges in the financial services industry. I also realized the specific challenges faced by Indonesia as an archipelago and the importance of an infrastructure, or a method, that can reach the untapped markets. This does not only apply to financial services but a whole range of industries as well. Having said that, the many problems in the region are actually opportunities for investors. There is still a lot to figure out, a lot to solve, and a lot to innovate within Indonesia and beyond!

3. Meeting with founders and a lot of interesting people.

I was able to sit in the meetings with founders from different startups that came in our way. I saw pitching styles of different founders and different approaches that they took in communicating with investors. Through the events that we attended, I met people ranging from early-stage founders, serial entrepreneurs, to even the CEOs and key figures of some of the most notable startups in Indonesia.

Lessons: I realized that leadership does not come from only one type of personality. There were founders who were very confident and dominated the conversation in the room, but there were also founders who were more reserved, but you could see that they equally possessed passion for their ideas. I also learned that being able to read the characters of others is a good skill to have in business. Moreover, I was able to sharpen my networking and communication skills. Due to the nature of the job, I was forced to put myself out of my comfort zone and engaged in conversations which sometimes led to very interesting findings or genuine connections!

4. Supporting portfolio companies to achieve growth.

One of my favorite parts of the internship was when we were given a project with one of Patamar’s portfolio companies. I spent a week in the portfolio company’s headquarters to help them brainstorm ideas and come up with a strategy to enter a new market segment.

The intern team and I held meetings with the startup’s team, mapped out the challenges that they faced in their current attempt, and conducted extensive primary research (we interviewed current customers, the customers in the new market segment, and assessed current operations) to figure out a feasible strategy. At the end of the internship, we were able to share our final recommendation to the founders and key employees through a presentation.

Lessons: The most important takeaway from this project was understanding the challenges faced by a rapidly growing startup. I came to realize that the problems of a startup differ greatly from that of an established firm. For example, a startup is still greatly concerned with testing out their core business models and piloting different projects. They are faced with scaling challenges and pressures from investors to “grow at all costs”. In regions like Indonesia, startups must deal with a scarce talent pool which leads to hiring challenges. In a big organization, the problems can revolve around profitability issues, solving inefficiencies within many divisions in the organization, and many others that a startup wouldn’t even begin to think of yet. In addition, this was my first time conducting a consulting project at the company site, and learning how to handle this interaction was very valuable.

5. Providing an extra hand for the events hosted by the firm.

VC firms sometimes launch initiatives to foster the entrepreneurial ecosystem in their regions. In my first week of my internship, Patamar was actually wrapping up their accelerator program that was co-hosted with another VC firm, Kinara. The program was called the Impact Accelerator Program, which took 10 startups in the fashion industry and mentored them in growing their businesses.

The majority of my time was used to review their 2-minute pitch presentation decks and help the startups finalize the decks for the final event, where they will pitch their businesses in front of investors and potential strategic partners. I helped a couple of startups redefine their business plans in a simpler way so that it was understandable to me, as an outsider. Additionally, I was also able to listen to the “class lessons” and engage in the discussions during the break-out sessions.

Lessons: Having to go through and revamp so many pitch decks essentially made this program become a crash course on pitching for me. After the event ended, I gained so much insight on how to pitch your company in an engaging way to an audience, as well as how to build an effective pitch deck for that purpose. I learned that a lot of the times, the main challenge for a founder is to find a way to simplify their business model into an understandable concept for the audience. Oftentimes the founder is so engrossed by the complexities of the day-to-day operations of their companies, that it translates into their pitch which then makes it very difficult to comprehend.

Overall: A change in my perspective

Prior to this internship, I knew exciting things were about to happen in Southeast Asia. The demographic changes, such as the rise of the middle class in Indonesia, made sure of that. However, I never knew the extent of how vibrant the startup community is in Indonesia (especially Jakarta), and the number of brilliant people who are on the ground trying to solve the most pressing problems faced by the region. There are people out there trying to solve unequal distribution issues, financial inclusion, last-mile logistic issues, and many other problems embedded in our markets.

Though many will face challenges and possibly fail, I believe that some of the previously “impossible” problems, be it economic or social, will be tackled by these agile, endlessly innovative, and ambitious startups led by founders hungry to make a difference. It’s already happening, and I have no doubts that amazing breakthroughs are to come in the next coming years. Just take a look at Go-Jek, one of Indonesia’s unicorns, and how it has practically re-shaped how the entire city of Jakarta operates by aggregating a highly fragmented service (motorbike rides) into one platform.

Thank you so much to Patamar Capital for giving me this opportunity and for teaching me so much! I hope this post is useful to everyone who is considering interning at a VC, or considering on returning to Southeast Asia from their studies abroad. If you have any questions or just want to chat, feel free to contact me!