Editor’s note: This interview is part of a Q&A series with winners of the ORIGIN Innovation Awards 2020. Amra Naidoo is a winner in the category Movers & Shakers Awards – Outstanding Female VC.
The venture capital or VC industry, as with any industry, will ultimately benefit from having diverse perspectives, according to Accelerating Asia Co-founder and General Partner Amra Naidoo.
She noticed there are more women setting up their VC funds, becoming angel investors, and founding their own companies recently. There are more representation and visibility of women-led businesses and a number of organizations that are providing a platform for female founders too.
“I think that’s a positive sign of things to come as we work towards a more inclusive ecosystem for everyone – not just women but also people from minority backgrounds, underserved communities, and all kinds of career backgrounds entering the VC space,” said Naidoo in a TechNode Global Q&A.
This makes the entire ecosystem much stronger as different people will spot different investment opportunities, she added.
In the interview she shared her story of how she started the early-stage VC firm Accelerating Asia and her journey working in the male-dominated VC industry.
Naidoo also shared the challenges she met working with startups and how Accelerating Asia is positioning itself to tap into opportunities that are overlooked by others.
She also shared her views on gender lens investing and what are initiatives Accelerating Asia is implementing to improve female participation in startups.
Headquartered in Singapore, Accelerating Asia’s early-stage VC fund focuses on pre-Series A startups in Southeast and South Asia with untapped potential that are 6-18 months away from institutional funding. The fund invests a total of up to $250,000 into these startups to help scale their growth.
Can you share a bit about your background and how you founded Accelerating Asia?
I was born in Zimbabwe and lived there until my early teens before moving to Australia. I actually came to Singapore after leaving my marketing job in Australia in 2013, for a 3-month internship at UN Women Singapore. It was a massive risk for me at the time, and I chewed through all my savings for the opportunity, but I was looking for a career change, and it ended up being the catalyst for everything that I’ve done since. Those three months ended up turning into seven years in Singapore – much much more than I could have imagined!
At UN Women Singapore, I led Project Inspire – a global social entrepreneurship program in partnership with Mastercard. After leaving there, I looked after community and operations for Telstra’s muru-D accelerator in Southeast Asia. That’s where I met Craig Bristol Dixon, who at the time was the Entrepreneur in Residence, now my Co-Founder and General Partner at Accelerating Asia.
Craig and I started Accelerating Asia in 2018. Our core focus is on the accelerator and venture capital fund, supporting startups to scale and grow in our 100-day flagship program while also derisking investment for our Limited Partners.
We also run Amplify, a 6-week fast track program designed for early-stage startups preparing to raise investment and looking to gain traction or wanting to take capital raising to the next level. Then outside our core programs, we also work with partners – multinational corporations, governments, and universities who are looking to “10X” their startup engagement and join with an organization with an existing footprint and network in the startup ecosystem.
Outside my work with Accelerating Asia, I also have a podcast called the Doing Good Podcast, which features individuals who are driving social impact through their work and/or in their personal lives. I am also the Asia Pacific (APAC) Lead for Shaper Impact Capital, an initiative of the Global Shapers from the World Economic Forum. In case you can’t tell, social impact is a passion of mine.
Could you share insights about being a female VC in a male-dominated industry? How is the gender diversity gap in the ecosystem?
This is a tough question to answer because everyone has their own experience, and there’s a lot of nuances so I don’t want to oversimplify things. But it’s obviously no secret that women are underrepresented in the VC industry. When I first started out, I was often the only woman in a room at events, even today at investor events. While it’s great to see more women coming in at the junior levels, I am more often than not the only female General Partner.
When I was starting out, I knew that I did not have the same skillsets or experience as many others in the industry who have a strong financial and analytical background, and even with fundraising. I come from a completely different career background, so I bring a different set of experiences. But, none of these skills is gender-related, and so I worked hard to learn so I could be competitive in this space or at least understand what was going on if I’m going to be operating a fund.
I often speak with young female students who are interested in entering the startup ecosystem and they often ask me this question too. Although I have had my share of situations where my gender likely played a role in why someone said or did something that was offensive, this isn’t limited to the VC industry or even to just the work environment. And I don’t want people thinking that because these things have happened, they will continue to happen or because something has happened to someone else, that it will happen to them. I think if we go about our lives thinking that things are going to be hard, always be a challenge or that because you are a woman, things will be worse for you, you inherently start seeing the bad in life, and you are not going to put your best foot forward.
I have been conscious that I am in a male-dominated field, but I have never let my gender influence the way I work. So, I don’t think this should deter anyone, especially women from wanting to enter the industry if they have the right skill sets or are willing to learn.
Do you think being female has given you an advantage as a VC? Why so?
I think the VC space, as with any industry, ultimately benefits from having diverse perspectives. Recently, we have seen more women setting up their VC funds, becoming angel investors, and founding their own companies.
There is also more representation and visibility of women-led businesses and a number of organizations that are providing a platform for female founders.
I think that’s a positive sign of things to come as we work towards a more inclusive ecosystem for everyone – not just women but also people from minority backgrounds, underserved communities, and all kinds of career backgrounds entering the VC space. If anything, this just makes the entire ecosystem much stronger as different people will spot different investment opportunities.
What are the three key challenges that you see in your focus industries?
We are vertical agnostic so there is a whole range of challenges that we see across the 20+ verticals our early-stage startups operate in across Southeast Asia and South Asia.
The key challenges with the startups we work with come down to the stage at which they are at — pre-Series A. Often they have some traction with a little bit of revenue and some users, they probably have raised an angel round and possibly been through an incubator or accelerator in their home country.
Yet there remains a large gap between that stage and when an institutional investor would typically work with them. This is the gap that we work with and there are a whole host of challenges that they’ll face that they can control and adapt to – including fundraising strategies, access to financing, governance structures, and operational growing pains as they continue to scale.
There are also the challenges that founders really cannot control too much — market and economic conditions, changes to regulations. As the past 18 months with Covid-19, there are fluctuations in the market beyond control, but the reality is that there will always be challenges that founders can’t see coming; that’s where a team’s resilience and adaptability are important.
What is the investment focus of Accelerating Asia? Where are the opportunities that you see in addressing the challenges?
Accelerating Asia’s early-stage VC fund focuses on pre-Series A startups in Southeast and South Asia with untapped potential that are 6-18 months away from institutional funding. We invest a total of up to $250,000 into these startups to help scale their growth and achieve success.
As most angel investors, startup programs, and venture funds in the region focus on ideation-minimum viable product stage startups, and solid product-market fit, pre-Series A startups with a robust product at early stages of customer traction are often overlooked.
This is what makes Accelerating Asia a unique and key player in the industry — our accelerator and venture capital model targets this gap in the market and it is specially designed to support and unlock potential in pre-Series A startups.
Through our VC accelerator model, we work alongside our portfolio of startups for an extended period, gather intel and support their growth and fundraising to ensure that they are poised for future growth. From a fund perspective, our model enables us to be better positioned to make follow-on investment decisions into top performers.
In terms of what we will be focusing on in the future, we have seen some trends already – more advanced stage startups are coming into the Accelerating Asia program as we build our reputation for delivering a high-value program and founder-friendly investment terms grow.
Can you share more about your thoughts on gender lens investing and investing in female-led ventures?
There are early studies to suggest that founding teams with women on them tend to do better than those with just men. This is not surprising if you consider it from a diversity perspective — not only a gender lens.
When you have diverse teams, you are better equipped to deal with various issues that come up during the startup journey. When the ultimate business of an investor is to make money, you want to make sure that the companies you invest in have the best chance of succeeding. So diversity then doesn’t just become something that’s a “nice-to-have,” but a “need-to-have” to de-risk an investment.
As an industry, we need to move past thinking about what men versus women bring to technology — it implies that the industry is not big enough to fit everyone and starts from a perspective that the industry should not be for everyone. We need to start from the point of view that there are more than enough opportunities in the industry for all kinds of people and that the challenge is ensuring that everyone has equal opportunity to access the opportunities.
At Accelerating Asia, we have a number of initiatives. Right now we’re working on developing a female founders network after feedback from our own startups. We are also an incredibly diverse team ourselves, with 50 percent of the leadership team women plus our Operations and Marketing heads.
Within our portfolio, 35 percent of our startups are female co-founded, and 65 percent are gender lens investments with 80 percent addressing Sustainable Development Goals. In addition to supporting female-founded enterprises, we have also invested in startups that focus on improving the lives of women — for example, Shuttle, which started as a women-only service in 2018 to solve a pressing issue in Bangladesh, which is the lack of safe transportation for women.
How would you encourage more women to become startup founders or venture capitalists? What advice would you give to female founders and VCs?
My main advice would be to give it a try, take the risk, and just get started in the industry if you are interested in venture capital and startups. If I had to give three tips to people starting their careers in venture capital, it would be:
- Build your network. Getting into the industry and succeeding in it generally comes down to your network. The industry is a close community, and gaining access to deal-flow or raising investment for your fund comes down to whom you know or your ability to get to know the right people.
- Learn the industry language. When I first started, I had no idea what people were talking about. Not because I didn’t understand the concepts — they are logical — but the lingo used can create a barrier to breaking into the industry.
- Your difference is your strength. When we look at our portfolio startups, founding teams that come from diverse backgrounds personally and professionally, are better equipped to look at business challenges and opportunities. It’s the same in the investment space, and a diverse team is more likely to spot unique opportunities or identify gaps.
How can the VC and startup ecosystem encourage more female participation?
Like I mentioned before, it’s an industry that is about your network and how you can acquire access to fellow investors and startups.
From a founder’s perspective, according to Crunchbase in 2020, only 2.3 percent of VC funding in the US went to female founders. That’s actually a decrease from 2.8 percent in 2019. Creating access to enabling networks can help shift some of the weight for women-led ventures. While each startup is different, access to mentors, investors, and deal flow are common needs across the board. So supporting founders and giving them opportunities to showcase their companies is important.
It is also an issue of visibility. If you can’t see it, then you can’t be it. The internet, social media, and media interviews are essential in showcasing that there are women out there who are starting companies and investing. And with that, hopefully, a new generation of female founders and investors will think about this as a viable opportunity for their careers.
I think that’s a really important point too — often we focus on the female founder and their story. When really we should be aiming to profile the products they are developing, the solutions they are implementing in their markets, and at the core of their business because, at the end of the day, there’s a need to profile their companies to potential investors.
We often see this at events — women are often only invited to speak on topics about gender and asked questions about their experience as a “woman in X industry,” instead of talking about their work and their achievements on an equal platform to that of the other speakers. Moving beyond this narrative and showcasing not just the female founder but their business and product can shift the narrative and have a big impact.