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Crowdport CEO Yuichiro Fujita (left) and co-founder Yo Shibata. Photo credit: Crowdport.

Yo Shibata has sold three businesses in Japan and is a prominent angel investor, but even he was nervous to jump into social lending. The average 8.1 percent interest yielded just seems fishy in a country where a savings account gives less than 0.02 percent (PDF).

Yo’s hesitations subsided when he met Yuichiro Fujita. Yuichiro sold his previous company and then worked at Crowd Bank to get more lenders on the platform. Yo was fortunate to meet an insider, but not everyone has the chance to meet an officer at a crowdfunding company directly.

“The more you talk about financial services with friends, the more people view you with suspicion,” laughs Yuichiro. The two agreed more transparency was needed in the space and founded Crowdport to compare peer-to-peer lending services.

Buildings, not people

Consumer lending is very different in Japan. Loans to individuals only make up six percent of social lending, according to Crowdport’s research. It is easy to find a one to three percent loan from a bank so the prospect of crowdfunding is less appealing.

Crowdport CEO Yuichiro Fujita.

“It’s hard to get a loan from a bank where the return period is very short or the amount of money is small,” says Yuichiro. For borrowers, for example a business hoping to cover costs under US$100,000 while waiting on invoices to be paid, or a property flipper looking to pay back investors in under one year, crowdlending is proving popular. In the last year, 37 percent of the social loans went to businesses and 32 percent went to real estate funds.

From 2015 to 2016, the total amount raised through social lending funds grew 71 percent from around US$300 million to well over US$500 million, according to completed fund data gathered by Crowdport from each lending platform.

There have been no defaults for the past three years, according to Yuichiro, and the average 8.1 percent interest paid by loans beats the Nikkei index’s annualized 1.26 percent return for the past 10 years.

Serial entrepreneur Yo Shibata was hesitant to join crowdfunding at first before meeting Yuichiro Fujita.

While investment timings are important, Yo and Yuichiro really believe crowdfunding can save Japan’s financial future. At the moment, 52 percent of the country’s over US$15 trillion in personal assets are held in cash. With the Bank of Japan now targeting at least two percent inflation, holding money in a low interest account would be like throwing it away.

“If it’s a Goldman trader or your mom, both people will get eight percent,” smiles Yo.

Strike up the crowd

Crowdport launched last week and currently is the only service in Japan which compares all 18 Japanese social lending services. Users can sort by company, investment genre, and availability of collateral, as well as filter funds by interest rate and payback period.

The company also provides interviews and news about the crowdfunding market. It is looking to get a kickback when someone opens an investment account with another service.

“We haven’t seen a great increase in traffic yet,” states CEO of Lucky Bank Shohei Tanaka, whose company is listed on Crowdport.

“But if Crowdport started an affiliate model, we would gladly pay.” Although Crowdport would not talk about future plans, if it enters the lending space or becomes a broker similar to AlphaFlow in the US, Shohei believes it could be hard to stand out due to the lower margins for loan businesses in Japan. For funds with an overseas focus like real estate aimed Gaia Funding, acting as a broker to fund other funds may work.

“The cost of money in Japan is relatively low compared to other major countries,” says Gaia Funding CEO Kelvin Chiu. “That also gives a lot of room for different kinds of ‘market facilitators’ to exist and thrive along with all the major crowdfunding companies.”

As more people borrow money from social lending though, the chance of some bad defaulting apples rises; something Japan’s traditionally risk adverse market might not be ready for.

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“It becomes challenging at times to make people — vendors, prospective employees, ex-employees — believe that yes, the decision I take is in fact the final decision”

                                                   Richa Singh, Co-founder and CEO of BigStylist

Richa Singh is one of the few women entrepreneurs to find an envious position in the Indian startup scene. In a country where discrimination against women is still a pressing issue, and which is growing at an alarming proportion, Singh fought her way out to become a ‘person to reckon with’ in a highly male-dominated industry.

Singh feels that all the hurdles she faced while establishing BigStylist, an on-demand beauty and salon services startup backed by InfoEdge, she would have faced them irrespective of her gender. They are mainly related to hiring a good-quality team, rolling out of operations, getting customers, and raising funds. She is however of a view that the society is yet to accept a woman entrepreneur.

e27 listened to Singh’s startup story, and the big hurdles she faced when building from BigStylist from scratch.

Edited excerpts:

There are quite a few on-demand beauty and salon services in India, with less or no USPs at all. Why should the country need another such venture?

Existing on-demand beauty services were not quite up to the mark in terms of brands and products they used. In fact, most act as lead generators and aggregators that simply pass on customer’s orders to freelancers. In this process, the only loser is the customer as she gets different experiences every single time.

Also Read: A paying customer’s feedback is worth 100K new customers: TooYoo’s Shipra Sharma

That’s when we though of coming up with an internet salon which stands for complete ownership of customer experience and standardisation. There are several other pain points to be solved. Why cannot there be early morning services for working women? BigStylist does that! Why must a physical salon invest INR 70 lakh (US$10,000) in a place before starting operations? The salon-at-home aspect can do away with that investment

When did the entrepreneurship bug bite you?

When I moved to IIT Kharagpur for higher studies, I was disappointed by the quality of service provided by local beauty parlours or salons. The service was so bad that many a times IIT girls travelled more than 110kms to Kolkata for their basic grooming needs, which was a major hassle during hectic academic sessions.

I continued to face this problem as I moved to different cities for my MBA (at IIM Ahmedabad), and later when I started travelling around countries during my consulting stint with Oliver Wyman.

After realising the magnitude of the pain-point, I along with Chinmaya Sharma and Anurag Srivastava did some research at ground level, and then conceptualised BigStylist in May 2015. The idea was to get the salon to travel to the customer’s place and ensure that the experience is standardised across visits.

Can you walk me through your product, traction etc.?

BigStylist.com is an on-demand salon-at-home offering spa and salon services at home. It offers services from handpicked and trained beauticians to the consumer in the comfort of her own home, on her preferred schedule. All the experts on BigStylist work exclusively with BigStylist with they take complete ownership of every aspect of customer experience- training, uniforms, products, feedback, pre and post-service advisory. This ensures a much better and holistic customer experience, hence creating platforms that act as marketplaces or intermediaries.

When it comes to traction, Bigstylist is at an annual revenue run-rate of INR 5-6 crore (around US$400,000), while being operationally profitable upwards of 20 per cent in both the cities we play in. They have served nearly 50,000 orders in the last year and half of their existence. The internet salon grew north of 30 per cent m-o-m in January 2017.

Richa Singh with the other two co-founders

We currently offers services across Mumbai, Navi Mumbai and Pune. We are looking to expand to Hyderabad and Delhi NCR in the coming months.

Where is the on-demand beauty industry heading for? Is it growing strong on the back of the rising middle-class population?

In its organised, technology-led avatar, it is a pretty new industry. I would say that the biggest trend simply is the speed at which the industry is growing (most players are growing over100 per cent y-o-y). This implies customers are earning up to the idea at a great pace. Most salon-at-home players are not acquiring customers from each other but from existing physical salons.

I think the other key trend is how this industry is moulding itself to customers’ needs by opening up early morning and late evening slots.

There are very few female entrepreneurs in India. Do you think it is tough to be an entrepreneur for women?

I feel that all the hurdles I faced while establishing BigStylist, I would have faced them irrespective of my gender. Hiring a good-quality team, rolling-out operations, getting customers to repose faith in them and raising funds are all challenges that any entrepreneur should expect to face, notwithstanding gender and idea.

Also Read: Female entrepreneurs in Asia: Here are 8 things you need to know now

However, the larger society in India is still not as geared to see and accept a young woman lead a company as I would ideally want. Hence, it becomes challenging at times to make people (vendors, prospective employees, ex-employees) believe that yes, the decision I take is in fact the final decision. Some have even gone to the extent of actually declaring, “No, no, you cannot be the owner.”

Women hesitate to take up entrepreneurship due to various social factors. How do you manage the professional and personal life? Is it hard?

At a slightly philosophical level, for most entrepreneurs their startup is a labour of love. The hours are not easier than most other professions but you will not hear entrepreneurs complain. The journey is enjoyable too whether or not you have one eye permanently transfixed on the outcome.

At a practical level, the best thing about working at BigStylist is that people were either already friends or have become friends after joining BigStylist. Our major source of hiring is referrals and we make sure to hire guys who can lend uniformity to the culture we want to build but diversity to capabilities and ideas we are looking for.

There are days when we work for crazy hours and then there are times when we are just chilling, so we usually create our personal space and time as per our convenience. Of course, there are conflicts and difference of opinions, but they are usually resolved through discussions and since we all have a common goal, it’s easy to be in tandem.

Why are there very few women entrepreneurs in India? What is holding them back from diving into entrepreneurship?

That used to be a fact, but now the scenario is fast undergoing a change and there are a lot of women entrepreneurs who have ventured into the market with interesting business ideas. Of course, over decades girls have been the second preferred gender in India when it comes to allocation of a family’s budget towards education, nutrition, career-preparedness etc. This will continue to show in the ratio of male entrepreneurs vs. female entrepreneurs for a few more years to come.

However, do not go looking for quantity. In terms of quality, there are enough success stories of women entrepreneurs waiting to emerge from both rural as well as urban India.”

What learnings you have had that you would like to impart to the aspiring minds in the country?

“Learn as much as you can about the industry you operate in. Become an expert in that industry. Obviously, there are plenty of resources to learn from, but also try to find a mentor who directly answers your questions.

A common mistake I see many startup founders making is that, they aren’t solving a real problem. You should try to solve a real problem that people have — replace their need with your product. Also, make sure you feed your mind with the things that you’re fond of so that your personal life stays as enriched as your professional life. Do not let the latter consume your personal life.

One last piece of advice, especially for women entrepreneurs, is to assert oneself more. One’s opinions do not become less or more valuable given one’s gender.

Image Credit (salon service): milanmarkovic / 123RF Stock Photo

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Armed with a team of 130 employees, Kumparan believes that the future of journalism lies in the hand of user-generated contents

Kumparan CEO Hugo Diba

When Kumparan was launched in the end of January 2017, the Indonesian social media landscape was rife with conversation about the platform.

Many netizens were quick to compare it with Medium; but when e27 sits down with CEO Hugo Diba and CMO Andrias Ekoyuono, they are the taking the comparison lightly.

“It is really up to them how they want to see this platform,” Diba says.

“We have no exact preference of global platforms or startups [that we drew inspiration from]. What we were thinking when we set up this business was the problems faced by the consumers, advertisers, media, even to issues such as information accuracy. What will be the best form to answer these problems?” Ekoyuono explained.

Kumparan itself is what the founders called a “hybrid” media platform. Available as desktop and mobile site and app, apart from generating content from the startup’s own editorial team, users can only write and share their own content through the platform. Just like in any social media platform, users are able to follow different profiles and topics, and will only see contents relevant to their personal interests on their personal feed.

Diba explains that right now 50 per cent of the content that Kumparan is publishing is generated by their own editorial team, while the rest is by their own users.

Also Read: IDN Media raises Series A to become the forefornt news portal for Millennials and generation Z

They have also included public figures such as Minister of Communications and Informatics Rudiantara, singer Aimee Saras, actress Karina Salim, senior Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) politician Hidayat Nur Wahid, former Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Sudirman Said, as well as volunteer teacher community Indonesia Mengajar as guest authors.

“Back then, by reading one or two media, we would know enough of what we need to know for the day. But today there are just too many things [to know]; what you, Andrias, and I need would be different. For us, the future of media will be how it is able to serve as a platform to bridge collaboration between information from the editorial team and the readers,” Diba explains.

He then adds that the challenge lies in capturing “big” stories through user-generated content that do not undermine the ethics of journalism, the reason why Kumparan will also edit the contents that are being submitted to the platform.

Ekoyuono also stresses that Kumparan aims to be a media platform with an impact towards social change.

He pointed the example of a recent article on Kumparan about a 93-year-old man who sells bread for a living. The man has a dream of going on pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, but was not able to afford it. After publishing the article, Kumparan then teamed up with Indonesian crowdfunding platform for social causes KitaBisa to help the old man makes his dream comes true.

Within just two days, they were able to raise up to IDR40 million (US$3,000).

Also Read: Indonesia’s Kincir launches news portal for the young at heart

“These are the kind of things that we need to continue on exploring … as ‘solving problems’ continue to become he DNA of startups,” Ekoyuono said.

The Kumparan site

An all-star team and an ample bag of gold

The Kumparan team does not seem to joke around with their mission to create an impact.

When e27 paid a visit to their office in South Jakarta, despite currently being in the beta stage, the startup is already armed by up to 130 employees. Most of them are in the editorial and IT team, and the startup claims to receive 12,000 applicants when it first opened job vacancies.

The startup itself was co-founded by a team of senior-level professionals in the field of journalism and tech, mainly from Indonesian leading news portal Detik, such as Budiono Darsono (former Detik CEO), Abdul Rahman (Detik co-founder), Calvin Lukmantara (Detik co-founder), Hugo Diba (former Detik and CNN Indonesia Business Director), Arifin Asydhad (Detik editor-in-chief), Ine Yordenaya (former Detik Vice Editor-in-Chief, Head of Lifestyle Content), Heru Tjatur (former Detik CTO), and Yusuf Arifin (CNN Indonesia Editor-in-Chief, Manchester City FC Media Executive).

Ekoyuono himself was previously the VP of Business Development of local venture capital firm Ideosource.

“Along the way, we saw how the online media industry has developed into a point where there is an idea and opportunity, be it from business or media perspective, to create something new. If we don’t do that, this industry will never develop,” Diba says of how the company began.

Also Read: Working together with local content platform, Kaskus initiates Kaskus Network

Kumparan is also armed with an undisclosed seed funding from an angel investor, whom the team has declined to name.

Its ain monetisation channel is through advertisement on its platform, which Diba dubbed as the “bread-and-butter” of online media company.

“Like many other startups, we have several alternative funding options. But the one we are focussing on is IPO, one day. But the road is still long,” Ekoyuono adds.

Save it for the rainy day

As in many parts of the world, today is a challenging time for journalism in Indonesia as the government is planning to oblige online media to include a special barcode on their platform. The proposal is part of an effort to curb the rise of “fake news” during current election season —but many sees this as a threat to Indonesia’s press freedom.

“We are facing the same issue everyday. We see how hoaxes, hate speeches distributed freely, everybody is panicking … This is why I told you that a media platform has the responsibility to set things straight,” Diba says.

For the year 2017, Kumparan will focus on market adoption.

Also Read: This startup wans to give voice to Indonesian futsal league –here’s how they do it

“We were just being launched and we hope that we will be able to be accepted by the society. We are also targetting healthy growth, getting feedbacks. But like any other startup, we will continue on improvement and adding new things,” Ekoyuono closes.

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Replicating the success of the addictive side-scroller may not be likely, but that does not diminish Ninja Spinki’s qualities

It was a time of wrecked nerves, thumb aches, and sweaty palms. It was a time of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Such were the symptoms of the many entrapped within the lure of Flappy Bird.

Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that the infamous mobile game – a simple auto-running side-scroller created by Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen – took the world by storm and, in its brief existence, proved to be one of the most addictive and tough-as-nails smartphone games ever.

The concept was devilishly simple: Players had to guide a bird through an infinite series of obstacles in the form of green pipes. To control the height of the bird’s flight, players had to continuously tap on their phone’s screen. The bird dies once it hits a pipe. The longer players kept the bird in flight, the more points they scored.

Never mind that the concept was far from original – Helicopter Game, a flash game released way back in 2004, had identical control mechanics (except in place of touchscreen controls, players clicked a mouse button to control flight).

Never mind that a french game Piou Piou vs. Cactus copied and ported that concept onto the mobile platform in 2010 – three years before Nguyen did; and the similarities didn’t just stop there, the characters and designs of Piou Piou vs. Cactus’s were eerily similar to that of Flappy Bird‘s (perhaps both developers dreamt the same dreams).

Nevertheless, whether it was serendipity, careful search algorithm tweaking, organic viral marketing, or perhaps more nefarious boosting means, Flappy Bird proved to be a global hit. And before Nguyen took it down from the app stores on 10 February 2014 (after being overwhelmed by the game’s popularity), it had logged over 50 million downloads and earned over US$50,000 per day in ad revenue.

In the months and years that have since passed, Nguyen made two other mobile games Swing Copters and Swing Copters II in the same vain as Flappy Bird. The only changes were that they were vertical scrollers, and that their difficulty level was even more punishing. Despite using the same concoctions, Swing Copters never quite caught on like Flappy Bird. The reception of its sequel was also fairly muted.

Now, Nguyen has begun the year of the rooster with a brand new game, featuring control mechanics that seek to strike a delicate balance between sophistication and simplicity; while retaining its trademark onerous gameplay.

But will Ninja Spinki be Nguyen’s new golden goose?

Still hard as nails, but the simplicity is gone

Ninja Spinki has moved a long way since Flappy Bird. Instead one game mode, players have a choice of six game modes.

Gone are the auto-running feature of Flappy Bird and Swing Copters. And the finger gymnastics are more complex now.

The player controls a ninja who has to manoeuvre around a stationary platform and avoid the attacking enemies. In alternate modes, the enemies do not attack the player; instead, players have to fire shurikens (more colloquially known as ‘ninja stars’) to kill them before the timer run outs.

But while the gameplay mechanics have become more complex, it retains its one-handed control scheme. Each of the six game modes come with instructions so players do not mix up them up.

The completion of the first phase of one game mode allows the player to advance to a more difficult stage. For example, instead of one enemy rushing the player, there would be two enemies. There is also an “endless” option where there is no timer, and players collect as many stars as they can to earn points, while avoiding or slaughtering enemies.

So how does Ninja Spinki make money? The same way as Flappy Bird – advertisements. Except these are video adverts, and once it begins, there is no way for the player hit pause until it is over.

While this may seem like a huge inconvenience, it is actually cleverly weaved into the gameplay; two options are presented to the player when his ninja character is killed: one, they can choose to restart the game completely, or two, continue off from the point of its death, meaning that players would not lose their progress or points.

And that is where the advertisements come in. The second option requires players to sit through a video advertisement in order to unlock that feature. So unless they are a casual gamer who couldn’t give two hoots about their points, gamers won’t be disinclined to spend a few extra seconds to get a good score.

But perhaps the most burning question is: is Ninja Spinki‘s allure as potent as Flappy Bird‘s?

In the short, the answer is a no.

It’s very simple: the appeal of Flappy Bird was that it was easy to pick up from the get-go – one game mode and one instruction. It was a no-brainer game you could play while standing in an elevator, sitting at a cafe, or when you needed a breather in between coding or writing essays.

So although Nyugen has stayed true to his style of simple but brutal one-handed gameplay, the variety of game modes may put off the more casual gamers. And unfortunately, some of the modes do not have the best designs; more often than not, players would die needlessly because their thumbs would be blocking the view of enemies at the bottom of the screen.

Don’t get me wrong, on the whole, Ninja Spinki is still a quality mobile game, but its design choices will not leave casual players reaching for the replay button – as much as Flappy Bird would have, anyway.

Ninja Spinki is available on both the iOS and Android platforms. Try it out and let us know what you think in the comments below.

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Image Credit: Ninja Spinki

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This week’s roundup is not lacking for excitement. One company received funding from both 500 Startups and 500 Startups Japan funds. Another waltzed away with a rare-for-Japan US$16 million series A. But both were overshadowed by an acquisition featuring an industry giant and a startup which only just finished blowing out the candles on its second birthday.

3Minute

A still from the 3Minute website. Photo credit: 3Minute.

These are good times if you run a digital content production studio in Japan. As consumer eyeballs show a preference for online video, corporates and startups alike are looking to take the lead – and profits – in content production. One of the earlier movers in this space – 3Minutes – has gone from idea to US$38.2 million acquisition in just over two years.

Though 3Minute first scored an undisclosed sum from Line, it exited to gaming giant Gree last week. A Japanese unicorn since before it was fashionable, Gree has high hopes for the integration, anticipating anticipates that Japan’s video ad market will balloon from last year’s US$475 million to US$1.8 billion by 2020. With a monthly reach of 75 million users and 100 million page views, 3Minute will now be a key part of Gree’s plans to capitalize on the industry’s growth.

Folio

World, Tokyo here. Fintech has landed. Photo credit: Miyabi Inoue

Folio is the latest robo-advisor to join Japan’s growing family of fintech startups. By unveiling a series A of US$16 million, the startup is sending notice that it’s ready to hit its spring release with plenty of firepower. DCM Ventures and Draper Nexus funded Folio’s US$2.6 million seed round last March and returned for the series A. Joining them are powerhouse investors including Rakuten Fintech Fund, Jafco, Monex Ventures, and Sumitomo Shanghai Capital.

The past couple years have seen an uptick in robo-advisors – algorithm-based services that act as automated money managers for lower fees and initial capital than traditional services. Folio will be facing stiff competition from the likes of Money Design, which added an undisclosed sum in funding last November to push its total funding to over US$23 million.

Xtreme Design

Photo credit: tec_estromberg.

Xtreme Design, a finalist at TIA Japan 2016’s Arena Pitch Battle, announced a pre-Series A of US$620,000. Freebit Investment along with prominent angels like Kotaro Chiba (founder, Colopl) provided the funds. The startup democratizes the processing power of supercomputers by letting business owners rent their machines by the hour (or minute) or through a regular subscription.

Unibo

Unibo is a home support robot joining the battle for your living room. Its playful frame distinguishes it from the bodiless or monolithic Siri, Alexa, and Cortana, but it will not officially launch until March. Investors are expecting a strong consumer response and just provided US$2.9 million in funding. Fujitsu Corporate Venture Capital, Nikon-SBI Innovation Fund, and Sumitomo Corporation headlined the round.

The robot is expected to integrate with a home’s IoT devices and also help with family matters like calling one another and buying groceries.

Lendy

Photo credit: wutwhan / 123RF.

Lendy is looking to be a friendly face for small business owners in need of a little extra capital. After raising a seed round of US$532,000 last September, it topped up with a further US$444,000. The company says the round was effectively split in two, meaning it raised approximately US$1 million for its seed stage. Previous investors Draper Nexus Ventures and Voyage Group are joined by Freebit Investment, 500 Startups, and 500 Startups Japan.

We spotted Lendy last December at the Infinity Ventures Summit. As noted then, Lendy uses a proprietary scoring model to structure the right loan. Loans often go for US$20,000, at 8-15 percent interest with an expected payback period of 6 months.

Lendy claims its approach can reduce loan defaults by 30 percent, making its service more appealing for investors than traditional lenders.

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From Russia with hustle: Nikita Semenov. Photo credit: Zenrooms.

A senior role at a Rocket Internet startup is a highly coveted job.

The German venture builder has a stated preference for hiring people with prior experience in management consulting or banking, along with degrees from top-tier universities.

It manages to entice candidates away from places like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank by offering them even higher salaries, fancy job titles, and sweeping powers to hire, execute, and grow companies quickly.

Such hires will learn a lot as they’re pitched into cutthroat environments where meeting ambitious targets is an absolute priority.

It’s certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but Rocket’s immense reach and formidable brand equity are without doubt.

That’s what Nikita Semenov banked on when he applied for a position at Lamudi, Rocket Internet’s property portal.

He graduated with an MBA from the prestigious HEC Paris in 2014, starting work at an investment bank in Luxembourg shortly after. But he was having second thoughts only six months into his banker life.

“I realized I wasn’t learning anything substantial about building businesses – I was just wasting my time in an office working on spreadsheets,” Nik says about his time at Nordea Investment Funds in Luxembourg. “I wanted to acquire real skills.”

I had never been to Asia before.

Nik then did what he feels many others wouldn’t dare do – leave one of the hubs of global finance for the relative backwaters of Asia.

“HEC graduates are obsessed about finding highly-paid jobs in London or other parts of Europe,” he explains. “You waste the entire year just applying places and not developing your business acumen – it’s completely a CV game.”

The Russian native wanted none of that. He had his first interview with HR just a day after submitting his application to Lamudi. His second interview was with the global co-founder, where Nik outlined his career plans in detail and expressed a desire to get out of his comfort zone and get his hands dirty.

The next day he was offered a sales internship based out of Jakarta, which he accepted without a second thought. Nik flew into the Indonesian capital two days later.

“I had never been to Asia before and I wasn’t sure if Bali and Indonesia were the same things,” he laughs.

Diving in

Nik was entrusted with building a Lamudi sales team from scratch. The problem was that he had zero experience in anything remotely related to sales – his specialty was crunching numbers in Excel and structuring complex financial projections.

To exacerbate the problem, Nik didn’t speak a word of Bahasa Indonesia.

“You’re a new guy and everyone knows that. It’s a huge trust barrier you face in the beginning. Why should real estate developers do business with a white person who can’t even speak their own tongue?” he reminisces.

Yup, this is in Indonesia: Pura Ulun Danu temple, Bali. Photo credit: kamchatka / 123RF.

They key to overcoming these hurdles was hustle. Refusing to take no for an answer, he stuck to two strategies to win people over: follow up with leads constantly and explain the benefits of Lamudi’s online listings in painstaking detail.

Slowly but surely, attitudes started to change. In a couple of months Nik had built sales processes where none existed and started developing Lamudi’s playbook. He was also given the authority to hire more people – a team which eventually grew to five.

Weekly language lessons also helped him understand local culture and traditions, as well as the preferred way of doing business in Indonesia.

Absorbing pressure

“My time in Lamudi was full of challenges,” admits Nik.

In true startup fashion, he didn’t have a well-defined, linear role. Alongside sales, Nik was also asked to look at the marketing side of things – learning things like customer acquisition costs, cost-per-click, and other strategies used to understand how well the business was performing.

“Now I am quite proficient in it,” he says.

See: Rocket Internet closes new $420m fund

As his internship started drawing to a close, Nik began to sniff around for other opportunities within the Rocket Internet empire.

A fateful meeting with Rocket’s Kiren Tanna and Nathan Boublil locked in his next move. The duo had been tasked by Oliver Samwer to launch a so-called Uber for budget hotels startup akin to India’s Oyorooms. They were introduced to Nik in Lamudi’s Jakarta office.

He urges graduates not to settle for cushy career jobs in London or New York.

The foundations of the company were still a mystery – Kiren and Nathan would serve as the global heads, but they had yet to make any key hires.

After a few discussions, it was agreed that Nik would join Zenrooms with the title of co-founder and managing director for Indonesia. At the time, Zenrooms was simply just an idea that had tickled the fancy of the powers-that-be in Rocket. They hadn’t decided upon a name, there was no website, and not even a single hotel had been signed up.

“If you master the sales process, you can apply it in any industry,” states Nik. “I used the same strategies to convince hotels as I had done earlier with real estate developers in Lamudi.”

This time the pace of execution was even more relentless than before. Zenrooms formally launched in November 2015 after just a month in private beta. Within a month it had grown to 300 hotels in Indonesia alone, with a team of six salespeople in different cities.

“We were working 24/7 from a small office in GEPI Incubator in Jakarta. I remember people complaining of us being noisy while doing sales calls. But we had to grow at Rocket speed. Discipline in work and freedom in opinion were and still are a crucial part of our culture,” affirms Nik.

A Zenrooms pad in Singapore. Photo credit: Zenrooms.

After the quick rollout in Indonesia, Nik was asked to expand the business in Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

It was a familiar story for him – he didn’t have many local contacts on the ground and had to adapt to different ways of doing business in new places.

But his experience held him in good stead. Zenrooms is now present in Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Hong Kong. The model was so infectious that Rocket even launched it in Brazil.

No micromanaging

Nik’s spent barely two years at the German startup leviathan, but that already makes him a veteran by Rocket Internet standards. He dismisses the criticism frequently directed at Rocket’s culture, as well as the high rate of employee attrition.

“It’s a complete myth,” he says in reference to reports of staff stress and poor management practices. “Maybe it was a bit like this in the past, but in Lamudi and Zenrooms all key employees have been there since inception and no one moved out.”

We have to be bullish and aggressive, otherwise we’ll miss the opportunity.

“However, each startup is unique and each team is unique. I take pride in the fact that my employees have stayed with me for a long time, with only two or three resignations. We work for the idea, the experience, and the thrill.”

Nik – who has 70 people reporting to him – says absolute transparency and regular feedback is key for fast-growing startups. It ensures the team’s on the same page and any signs of burnout or stress are dealt with immediately.

What helps is that Rocket Internet has a truly global footprint – and portfolio startups are encouraged to share local knowledge and trends with each other. When Zenrooms expanded to the Philippines, for example, Nik was able to solicit advice from Lamudi’s local team. That assisted him with hiring as well as coordinating a media strategy.

“Yes, everyone on the team has challenging KPIs,” he admits. “But if you meet them, then no one’s going to bother you or do any micromanaging. And we have to be bullish and aggressive, otherwise we’ll miss the opportunity.”

Smart hires are another priority – with 25 percent of Nik’s time now spent screening resumes, interviewing people, and making job offers. The Rocket Internet brand helps attract top-tier talent, but attitude and self-motivation are important elements that can’t necessarily be taught.

See: Rocket Internet lost $682m so far this year

“It’s also very important to show leadership by building trust within your team. The only way to build trust is to show by example. I was never afraid to do all ‘dirty work’ by myself. You also learn a lot from it,” he adds. “ Bad bosses will drive you nowhere and will never give credit”.

The eventual goal for the aspiring Russian entrepreneur is to start his own company from scratch, but he says he’s completely committed to the Zenrooms project for now. “I will not leave until it’s super successful,” says Nik.

He urges graduates not to settle for cushy career jobs in London or New York.

“Working at Rocket will teach you way more than a business school ever could. Yes, it’s tough and we work super hard. But hardly any company will give you the flexibility and independence to build something on your own and develop as a leader in your own right,” says Nik.

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Does your leadership or organisational style fit your startup?

For the most part of my life as an entrepreneur, I’ve often believed that it is really important to drive the vision of the company into every single employee and that it was my job to ensure that everyone is aligned with the vision.

However, there were a lot of times that beliefs were wrong simply because there was no product-market fit and our vision was unnecessarily rigid.

This, combined with our ego, often left us to bleed money until the harsh reality dawned upon us that, perhaps, we could have been wrong and that other folks from within the company or outside including the second level of leadership had a view point that was right.

And more than once, false positives and small sample sets of customers skewed our view points. Combine that with an authoritarian leadership and that represents a recipe for disaster. This brings to question about leaderships styles in startups and how it impacts startups.

Leadership styles

While there are several types of leadership styles recognised today, the most major/early study of leadership styles was performed in 1939 by Kurt Lewin who led a group of researchers to identify different styles of leadership (Lewin, Lippit, White, 1939).

• Authoritarian or autocratic : Tthe leader tells his or her employees what to do and how to do it, without getting their advice.
• Democratic or participative: The leader includes one or more employees in the decision making process, but the leader normally maintains the final decision making authority.
• Delegative or laissez-faire (free-rein):  The leader allows the employees to the decisions; however, the leader is still responsible for the decisions that are made.

Authoritarian leadership and startups

The most cited example of an authoritarian leader is Steve Jobs. However it is important to understand that Steve Jobs found it extremely important to convince his fellow team members to be a part of his reality distortion field and that happens to be the single most important thing in building an organisation that lasts forever.

Effectively, I think that Steve Jobs transitioned from an overbearing but democratic leadership during the early stages of his entrepreneurship to an authoritarian when the company’s size became too big to yield the desired results that he wanted to realize.

Authoritarian and autocratic styles work for leaders who are indeed visionary and they have proven capability to be able to drive phenomenal success through their products.

If you don’t have an extremely proven background, don’t try to thrust your vision onto someone else without convincing them first.

More often than not , if people remain unconvinced, shoving down your vision may not work even if you’re right.

Participative style and startups

Participative style of leadership can be a good driver of growth in fast growing startups. It helps for leaders to ask for opinions and also delegate after trusting the next level of leadership. Participative leadership is when the leader lets decision0-making become democratic and while the final decision is still owed by the leader, the subordinates often are allowed to discuss/debate and propose solutions and the the risks that are associated along with the decisions.

This type of decision-making depends upon trust. The more you trust your team, the more likely they are to rally around you when you need it the most. This style of leadership has known to build long-lasting organisations and a work culture that is more of a cult than anything else.

Delegative or laissez-fair decisioning lets employees partake in all critical decisions where the leader is generally hands off. Laissez-fair decisioning considered to be useful in more creative situations or in early stage companies central decisioning is not needed and may not necessarily add value to the organisation.

With respect to startups, I’d think that delegative decisioning works best in early-stage startups where either there’s no concern for cash burn or until the point when the startup ceases to be an idea and becomes a business. It could also be useful in creative/media startups wherein creative freedom is more important.

I believe that this kind of leaderships also works very well with later stage startups where a fair amount of product market fit is well established and leaders don’t necessarily want to be in charge of details.

With respect to startups, I would say that this form of leadership might be well suited for startups wherein there’s tremendous growth and focus on more things that the entrepreneurs or the CXOs can handle. However to mitigate risk, it is best to then treat the employees’s decisions as a series of minor pivots, as much as risky as it sounds — an experiment can be conducted and a decision can be taken to move or not move in that direction, with employees heavily participating in the decision. Quick decisioning, data-driven feedback and logical reason would be enough ways to checkpoint faulty decisions.

In conclusion

Both from my own experience and observations, I’d like to summarise a few points:

Until a product-market fit is established and or your startup is experiencing tremendous growth or profitability, your decisions as a leader are always questionable. Your vision maybe in a state of flux and there’s a good chance that you are wrong about a lot of things.

To that effect, startup leadership leadership has to be less autocratic and more democratic or even laissez-faire in the initial phases until a clear growth trajectory is established.

It is important to get your team’s perspective, and enable the right kind of leadership style for yourself and your startup, that will deliver the best kind of success in each phase of growth.
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This is a work in progress blog. I will continue making minor edits based on feedback received.

The views expressed here are of the author’s, and e27 may not necessarily subscribe to them. e27 invites members from Asia’s tech industry and startup community to share their honest opinions and expert knowledge with our readers. If you are interested in sharing your point of view, submit your post here.

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Stellaris’s key investment areas include local language online services, technology-led
financial inclusion, supply chain networks, vertical machine learning applications and SaaS

Ritesh Banglani, Alok Goyal and, Rahul Chowdhri — seasoned venture capital professionals and former partners at Helion Venture Partners — has launched an early-stage technology focussed VC fund with a corpus of US$100 million.

Christened Stellaris Venture Partners, the VC fund has also announced the first close of the maiden fund. It has secured capital commitments from financial institutions, corporates, entrepreneurs and family offices in the US, Europe and Asia.

The Series A-oriented fund will invest in technology businesses solving India-specific problems, as well as global
software products from India. Stellaris’s key investment areas include local language online services, technology-led
financial inclusion, supply chain networks, vertical machine-learning applications and global SaaS businesses.

The firm has already made two investments so far, and is on track for a final close in 2017, according to an official statement.

Also Read: Alibaba investing up to US$250M in Indian m-commerce firm Paytm: Report

Banglani, Partner at Stellaris, said: “We have assembled a strong syndicate of Limited Partners for our first fund. Indian tech companies are set to create US$500 billion of value over the next decade, and our fund gives its investors the opportunity to participate in this value creation.”

Stellaris has also created a network of more than 50 successful entrepreneurs and business professionals in India and abroad, who work closely with the partnership to help identify promising investments, advise the portfolio and
selectively co-invest with the fund. The names include TaxiForSure (acquired by Ola in 2015) Co-founders Aprameya R and Raghunandan G, Indify founder Alok Mittal, Capillary Technologies Founder Aneesh Reddy; as well as investors and business leaders like Kanwaljit Singh, Founder of Helion and Fireside Ventures, and Neeraj Agarwal, India Head of the Boston Consulting Group.

Stellaris has offices in Bangalore and Delhi NCR.

Goyal has more than 20 years of experience, including as COO of SAP India, where he was responsible for all the go-to-market functions of SAP India. Chowdhri has more than 19 years of experience working in venture investing, strategy consulting, business planning, software product management, and project execution in India and the US.

Banglani has more than 18 years experience in venture capital and operating roles in technology companies. Previously, Banglani was a Vice President at IDG ventures and held various operating roles at Adobe Systems, July
Systems and Synopsys.

In the past, the trio have invested in market leaders such as Taxiforsure, BigBasket, ShopClues, Axtria, Lifecell and Simplilearn.

Early this year, seasoned VC investor and Co-founder of LetsVenture, Manish Singhal, launched a US$30 million VC fund, pi Ventures, which looks to invest in the hardware, IoT, and machine learnings sectors.

Image Credit: flynt / 123RF Stock Photo

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Photo credit: jeshoots.com.

Singapore-based online fashion group iFashion announced today it has snapped up clothing, accessories, and lifestyle item online store Megafash for US$2.2 million in cash and shares.

iFashion managing director Jeneen Goh previously told Tech in Asia that iFashion would pursue an IPO in the Australian Securities Exchange this year.

Megafash specializes in showcasing smaller, independent brands through a combination of online retail and physical stores. The startup has been operating in Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand. It reports US$5.7 million in annual revenue for 2016.

Tech in Asia has reached out to iFashion for comments, specifically on how it arrived at the valuation of Megafash.

See: 14 popular ecommerce sites in Singapore

iFashion’s services include mentorship, marketing, logistics, warehousing, sales, fulfillment, and financial services for online entrepreneurs who want to reach a wider audience and grow their business.

The company styles itself after digital media and marketing network Yello Mobile. Similar to YM, iFashion has also been very active in the acquisition game, going after retail space booking platform Invade, fashion e-store Dressabelle, and Malaysian fashion brand Nose.

In March 2016 it raised seed funding worth US$736,000 from venture capital fund Rimu Group. It’s also backed by Singaporean startup investment company Fatfish Group.

Converted from Singapore dollars. US$1 = S$1.41

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This will be its fourth acquisition to date

Singapore-based lifestyle venture platform, iFashion Group, announced today it has acquired Singaporean independent designer brands marketplace Megafash for S$3.15 million (US$2.23 million), in a cash and shares deal.

iFashion group also appointed Jeremy Khoo, the CEO and founder of Dressabelle – an O2O fashion marketplace that it acquired last year for S$7.5 million (US$5.5 million) – as its new CEO.

This new development will strengthen iFashion Group’s position as a major lifestyle portal in Southeast Asia. Megafash has both a strong online and offline presence, with its 7 stores occupying over 15,000 sq ft; its annualised revenue for 2016 is reported to be S$ 8 million (US$5.7 million).

The acquisition of Megafash will also accelerate iFashion Group’s plans to go public. A press release said that the company is mulling an IPO at the end of April or May.

Last year. besides Dressabelle, iFashion Group made two other acquisitions: online retail real estate booking platform INVADE, and Malaysian fashion brand NOSE.

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Image Credit: Megafash

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