Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 43 – Nikhil Kapur – Partner at STRIVE – The Belief in the Capabilities of the Founder

Nikhil Kapur and I had a fantastic and insightful conversation that ran a gamut of topics around the venture capital and investment space in Southeast Asia, Japan and India.  Nikhil is Head of Investments for Southeast Asia and India at STRIVE.  He is an accomplished computer engineer and a successful startup founder.  He built a profitable B2B media-tech venture in India called TommyJams.

Recently, STRIVE (the former GREE Ventures) has been in the news as it has completely re-branded and has also announced the first close of its third fund and expect to announce a final close by year-end 2019.  Among other things, we discussed both the rebranding and the new fund.  We also spoke about the firm’s commitment to sit in the same boat as the founders into which it invests.  This exemplifies STRIVE’s passion towards building big businesses along with the founders.

Nikhil noted that each successive fund of STRIVE’s moves more and more into the B2B sector, believing that enterprises in Asia still maintain a technology stack (or lack thereof) that has yet to be fully disrupted. We moved into a discussion of SuperApps, Grab, Alibaba and TenCent and why chat was really important to their growth.