Danny Goh – Look for Vision, Execution, Flexibility

May 29, 2019

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Danny Goh is a serial entrepreneur and an early-stage investor. He is the founder and CEO of Nexus FrontierTech, an AI research firm that easily integrates AI into organizations’ processes by using natural language processing to transform idle information into structured data, enabling the organization to run better, leaner, and faster. He also is a general partner at the G&H Ventures fund, which invests in early-stage start-ups primarily in Southeast Asia. The fund has invested in more than 20 portfolios in deep tech and is building its third fund to help start-ups into the growth stage.

Danny currently serves as an entrepreneurship expert at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and is also an appointed research fellow at the Center for Policy and Competitiveness at the École des Ponts Business School in France. He is an advisor and judge to several technology start-ups and accelerators, including Microsoft’s accelerator program, Startupbootcamp IoT, and LBS Launchpad.

Danny serves as a visiting lecturer at various universities in Europe and is a speaker at various conferences, including TEDx and fintech events.

“As early-stage investors, we are not investing just in the products or the growth, we are actually investing in people, the founders themselves”

Danny Goh

Worst investment ever

Danny’s focus is as an early-stage investor. He made his first such investment around 10 years ago in an education tech start-up in Israel. After that early success, he was so confident after that he believed and acted on the belief that he could just as easily invest in start-ups in Europe to help them to grow. After he spent around six years trying to build ventures and help founders in Europe “it was a complete disaster”. He puts it down to his perspective that perhaps doesn’t suit everyone that “as early-stage investors, we are not investing just in the products or the growth, we are actually investing in people, the founders themselves”. He says that is the very reason why founders come to meet investors for just US$50,000 or $100,000 to start creating a business. So he arrived at his technique of looking into the founders, hearing what the founders say about their “beautiful” vision, and realized that it is more than just about the vision itself. He discovered that to be a successful founder requires three things for the investors to actually buy (see “Some lessons” below)

Some lessons

Danny has arrived at three key items investors should look for in a start-up founder: Their vision has got to be big. Strong execution skills.Flexibility. He defines this as the ability to keep going and the ability to pivot. He went on to explain that in his experience this applies particularly in Europe and perhaps other developed countries. In those areas, if things go wrong with the start-up, it appears easier for founders to give up and find another job or company to work for. The start-up life is tough. It is definitely not as glamorous as people read in the media, there are great pressures involved, as shown in start-up statistics. He pointed out that the typical lifespan for early-stage start-ups in Europe is around six months.

“More than 75% of start-ups fail in the early stage before moving out of the first year.”

Danny Goh

Southeast Asian founders are different in their flexibility. They have a big vision, good execution skills, but the price they pay for a start-up to survive is much lower. Also, the reward for the price of success is comparatively far greater than for them to continue to work in a daily job. This means he has seen many more serial entrepreneurs in the region who have had five or six start-ups fail, but they keep ongoing. So investors still believe in them, talk to them, and like to discuss their problems and how to solve them.

Founders should listen and learn from investors. This has been a principal idea that an investor should be very knowledgeable, should be very experienced, and should be very rich. The founder should listen to everything the investors say.

BUT: Danny says his biggest lesson of investing in and working in start-ups was

Investors should listen and learn from founders. Investors themselves must play a bigger role in understanding the start-ups and equipping themselves with better knowledge so that they are not really putting themselves in the wrong shoes of the founders and making the wrong decisions when they are advising them. Investors should know what they need to do, know what they are supposed to be telling founders, instead of simply blaming the founders when the investors have to take part of the blame when things go wrong. Investors must have the ability to identify with and what with founders of all kinds from all regions.

“(Founders should look to) Get the type of money that fits your needs.”

Andrew Stotz

Actionable advice

Avoid overconfidence. Many different factors result in success so don’t think you are successful just because of your skill and acumen. Danny says his overconfidence resulted in a lot of brash actions and bullish dealings with other people.

No. 1 goal for next the 12 months

Looking for deep-tech AI companies to join the third fund at Nexus FrontierTech

Danny and his team are trying to find more companies to add to their portfolio of start-ups they would like to assist in the region. If there are any deep-tech companies in the region or in greater Asia who would like some help, he would like to hear from you.

The focus of his funding is on deep tech, especially in artificial intelligence. By that, he means any start-ups in any industries that utilize this technology to do better than their competitors that don’t use such technology.

Nexus FrontierTech is looking to support you in making the most of your competitive advantage.

Parting words

Enjoy the next 12 months and enjoy life every day.

You can also check out Andrew’s books

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Connect with Andrew Stotz