My name is Hsu Ken Ooi. I'm Co-Founder and Managing Partner at , a startup accelerator focused exclusively on Southeast Asia. Before Iterative, I started 2 companies Weave (YCS14, acquired by LunchClub) and Decide (acquired by eBay). I studied mathematics in school, played video games for money and I'm originally from Penang, Malaysia.I typically write about startups but will occasionally write about other things. You should subscribe.
A signification portion of a founder’s time and energy is spent convince people of things. They could be investors, potential users or prospective hires. I’ve talked a fair bit about the first two so I thought I’d spend some time talking about the last one.
The challenge
A startup exists to solve a problem. In fact, the problem the startup is trying to solve is the most important thing about the startup. It dictates the market size, the product, the type of people the startup needs, etc. Therefore, for a startup to be successful, it needs to
Given something that needs to be built..
A bad startup engineer will immediately start to build it. There’s very little consideration for how it should be built, ways it could be built and what the trade-offs are. You say make a button that when pressed does X. They make
Iterative Winter 2024 is having it's Demo Day on Wednesday, 8 May. To prepare, we run several pitch practices to help companies prepare. Every few days companies pitch, to Brian and I, in front of the other founders. They get immediate feedback, spend a few days iterating and
It's the end of the year and everyone's doing it so I thought I'd share my top 10 posts of 2023 and my top 5 book recommendations.
Top 10 Posts
I wrote roughly 15 posts in 2023. Mostly on Linkedin and a few made
Maybe the most common question I get is what do we look for when deciding to invest in startups? The answer is surprisingly simple at high level but exceedingly nuanced in practice. At a high level, we (and I suspect every investors) wants to invest (1) in a startup working
A persistent question founders ask themselves and probably the most difficult to answer. Here are the 3 questions I ask myself when trying to answer this question and what to do about it.
Is it growing fast?
Growing fast is the best indicator you might be onto something. How fast
Fundraising is one of the most difficult things a founder has to do. And I suspect, given the current market conditions, it’s even more difficult now than in the previous seven to 10 years.
A common question we get is: “Which is more important: strong traction or a strong
Things that compound are significantly more valuable than things that don't.
For startups, when you learn something about your users, that learning helps you every time you design a new feature, run a new marketing campaign, etc. for the lifetime of the company.
For startups, $ does not compound.
For a startup to win, it needs a sufficient number of successes along the way. The obvious question then becomes: how does a startup generate the maximum number of successes?
Let's define a success as anything that when accomplished, moves your startup closer to winning. It could be