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.

Fundraising is a skill and we want to teach founders how to get good at it.

We're in our third year running Iterative, but it feels like we're just getting started. This will be our fifth batch of companies for Summer 2022 - and our biggest one yet.

We’re excited to announce the Visiting Partners for the upcoming Summer 2022 batch. They will be sharing their experience and insights with Iterative’s early-stage companies. They will host individual office hours, group office hours and help companies get ready for demo day.

Iterative is excited to host online office hours for startup founders every Friday. Office hours are 20-minute sessions between you and one of our partners, where they help you with your startup as much as they can.

We’re inviting former founders to work with and advise Iterative companies during Summer 2022. Visiting partners will host their own office hours, work with companies in group office hours and help companies prepare for Demo Day.

We are increasing the size of our investments from US $150,000 for 10% to be between US $150,000 and US $500,000 for roughly 10%.

We’re excited to be accepting applications for Summer 2022. Summer 2022 will be our 5th batch and starts on 4 July

After 3 batches, Iterative companies have raised $130M after our program and are now collectively worth over $720M. Our latest batch (Iterative Winter 2022) has large shoes to fill but we think this might be the strongest batch yet.

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?