Helping you run a successful startup

Having started 2 companies and personally invested in a few dozen more, I thought I was reasonably familiar with how startup investments were structured and what deal terms were common. That changed when I moved back to Southeast Asia. I started seeing deal terms I had never seen before or had mostly disappeared in San Francisco (SF).

Read this before applying to Iterative, where we break down some of our questions in the application form.

Accelerators are often thought of as only being helpful with early stage companies but founders of seed stage companies have found our program helpful. Here's how.

It's a persistent question founders ask themselves - and the most difficult to answer.

How are founders in Southeast Asia defining product market fit?

Your top questions on validation, answered in videos.

How to validate your startup idea? We've compared the five common methods: what they are, how they compare to one another, and how you can use them.

Product market fit has no set definition - how are investors in Southeast Asia defining it?

We think it's instructive to share our rejection reasons - and hopefully it'll help founders better communicate why they are great founders with good ideas.

Our first AMA, where Hsu Ken answered the questions founders had on how to grow your startup.

Partner at AC Ventures, oversees the SE Asia Mobility Fund. Was the co-founder of Rukita, where he scaled the company to its first $3M revenue. He's also the Visiting Parter for Iterative's W23 batch.

Chinmay Chauhan is the co-founder of BukuWarung (YC S20). He raised $80M in funding and grew the organisation to 400 people. He's also a Visiting Partner for Iterative's W23 batch.

Tessa Wijaya is the Co-Founder and COO of Xendit, a leading payment gateway in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Southeast Asia. Xendit became a unicorn in 2021, making Tessa the only female unicorn founder in Indonesia.

How do you get to 100 *paying* customers? We asked three of our Iterative founders, and here were their answers.

Sia is the co-founder of Tranglo in 2008, a payment processing company that powers the last-mile cross-border payout for various banks and fintechs globally. In 2021, Ripple purchased a 40% stake in Tranglo for an undisclosed amount.

Before Iterative, Sylvia was the co-founder of Omnilytics, a retail insights platform. At Omnilytics, Sylvia led Customer Success, growing NRR to >100% and serving global clients like Uniqlo, Lenzing, and Lidl.

We've asked some of our portfolio founders on their experiences doing office hours during their time in the batch - and what they've learned.

Kum Hong is a business leader, GM and angel investor. He spent 10 years at Airbnb, starting as the APAC General Counsel before transitioning to run business and operations as the APAC Regional Director in 2017. Three years later, he was appointed as COO for Airbnb China.

As Bitcoin enters its tweens as a 12-year old technology, the industry has seen exciting development—from Bitcoin being adopted as legal tender in a country, to DAOs making a dent in investment and art spaces. While it is early days yet, here are some ideas we have for the technology that we would like to see more of

$10M from Village Global, Cendana, Andrew Chen and more, to invest exclusively in early-stage startups in Southeast Asia.

We are excited to kick off our first virtual Country Tour. We'll be hosting talks with Iterative founders and partners who've built successful companies in their country.

After one full-year of running the accelerator and completing two successful batches, we're excited to announce Iterative's 3rd batch of companies for Summer 2021.

There are a number of ideas or trends we’re particularly interested in. We thought it'd be helpful to be public about them in the hopes that it would (1) encourage founders working on these ideas to apply and (2) help people get started on ideas we think are interesting.

We pick 10 startups, share them with over 200+ investors and connect you with the investors that are interested.

In the past 3 months, we've met with over 220 companies from all over Southeast Asia and are excited to announce our Winter 2021 batch.

We started a podcast! Most of the time, we will be interviewing people who start, operate, and invest in startups, on how they got started and what their experience is like. Once in a while, like in the first episode, we'll be giving practical advice around a specific topic.

For a startup to be successful, it needs to be solving an important problem.

What do we look for when deciding to invest in startups?

The most important thing for a startup, and by extension the engineers at the startup, is iteration speed.

Here are the 3 questions I ask myself when trying to answer this question and what to do about it.

Fundraising is slow right now. My hunch is fundraising both will pick up in the second half of this year. Here's why.

Interestingly enough, 'product market fit' is a term often used by founders starting out but almost never by more experienced founders. Why?

A year ago, I wrote our first Request for Startups - and I'm revisiting the themes again to see what I got right or wrong.

A common question we get is: “Which is more important in fundraising: a strong story or strong traction?” But what is a strong story and strong traction — and why are they important?