Curious about what happens at Iterative? You're in the right place! This guide will walk you through what it means to be an Iterative founder, covering our funding process, program structure, and the incredible benefits you can expect. Get ready to dive into the details of our office hours, fundraising bootcamp, demo day, and much more. Let's get started!
Iterative offers a standard deal to all companies accepted into the accelerator. We invest between USD $150,000 and USD $500,000 using a "post-money" SAFE in return for approximately 10% of your company.
Unlike traditional investments, we spend considerable time and effort helping your company. As Paul Graham from YC suggests, the best way to evaluate our deal is to consider whether our involvement will increase your company's average outcome by more than 11%. If the answer is yes, you should take the deal.Let's do the math. Since our deal is for 10%, you need an outcome better than 1/(1-.10) = 1.11 or 11% for it to be worth it. Suppose we improve your outcome by 12%. You come out ahead because the remaining 90% you hold is worth .9 x 1.12 = 1.008. If we improve your outcome by 50%, you come out way ahead at .9 x 1.5 = 1.35.
We believe it's almost certain we will increase your average outcome by more than 11% by helping with three key aspects:
Often, a company's growth is hindered not by money but by its founders. Without proper guidance, founders can struggle to prioritize tasks and avoid mistakes, leading to stagnation. At Iterative, we focus on helping founders improve because their growth directly impacts the company’s growth. Our program helps you set priorities, avoid mistakes, and prepare for future challenges, ensuring your startup grows steadily and quickly.
Many founders feel isolated and struggle to find support when facing tough issues and obstacles. This can hinder their startup's growth. We designed Iterative to be the best founder community in Southeast Asia. This means a community of founders in various industries, sectors, countries, and company stages who support each other. As challenges and questions arise, someone in the community can likely help.
Some founders struggle with raising money, while others excel at it. The surprising thing is that fundraising is a skill you can significantly improve with the right guidance. We will likely increase your average outcome by more than 11% simply by teaching you how to fundraise effectively.
If you have existing investors, the best way to help them understand our value add is to explain why you think our involvement will help you get a higher valuation. Oftentimes, we see existing investors focus too much on percentage ownership. That's understandable since they haven't met us. Because we invest quite early, most cap tables consist of small angel checks. Keep in mind that raising on a $5M cap from angels doesn't mean you're valued at $5M. It's simply a cap that gets priced at a future round. Your investors should think of our involvement as a pricing signal, just like how Series A investors after us don't think about our investment as pricing your next round.
If you have existing investors who might be unhappy with our deal, we recommend talking to them. Explain why our involvement will increase your valuation more than our 10% ownership stake.
To learn more about the specific deal mechanics and exceptions to the standard structure, you can read more here.
Iterative hosts two 12-week programs each year:
Running a startup is a highly nuanced journey, and every startup has unique challenges, strengths, and weaknesses. That's why our program has no set curriculum. A generic approach doesn’t benefit anyone, so we tailor our support to meet each company’s specific needs. We work closely with founders to meet them where they are and give them the support they need.
We are confident that participating in our program will significantly contribute to your company's long-term success, far beyond the impact of our investment alone.
Prefer watching a video? Click here to see Hsu Ken explain what happens at Iterative.
The goal of our program is to significantly increase the value of startups. The best way to do this is by creating something that a lot of people want and demonstrating rapid growth. That’s why we've structured our program to support founders in achieving a 5-7% growth rate every week.
At the start of the program, we collaborate closely with you to pinpoint your startup’s biggest challenges and set ambitious yet achievable growth targets.
If you are hitting your targets, the conversation with your lead partner will focus on understanding what's working and how to do more of it. If you are not hitting your targets, the discussion will center on identifying what’s not working, what can be learned, and what steps to take next.
Companies that started with just an idea weeks before our investment, as well as those with millions in revenue, have benefited from our program.
We've created a separate page on orientation that goes deeper into the programming - check it out here.
Each batch kicks off with a 3-day in-person orientation, bringing our founders together. This orientation is crucial for founders to connect, meet their lead partners, and engage with the Iterative team. We also introduce the Iterative Growth Methodology, which forms the backbone of our 12-week program.
Tactically, these are the 4 things you can expect at our orientation.
During orientation, you'll participate in your first Office Hours and Group Office Hours. These sessions set the stage for your journey with Iterative, helping you identify important metrics for your startup, share current challenges, and align on metric targets for the program's duration.
Brian Ma and Hsu Ken Ooi will host three masterclasses to give founders a structure for the upcoming three months:
Many startup stories are like highlight reels—glamorous and heavily edited, making the journey seem easy. This can create unrealistic expectations and leave founders unprepared for real challenges. To address this, we host speakers like Tessa Wijaya (co-founder of Xendit) and Oswald Yeo (co-founder of Glints) for ‘closed-door’ sessions with our founders.
These no-recording-allowed sessions encourage transparency and vulnerability, with speakers sharing their true struggles, feelings of inadequacy, and burnout. This honest storytelling helps founders understand that the startup journey is tough, but they’re not alone in facing these challenges.
Being a founder can often feel isolating. The in-person orientation provides the perfect opportunity for founders to build relationships and connect with their batchmates. These social interactions help combat the loneliness of the founder journey, providing a supportive network and fostering a sense of community.
Want to know what it's really like? Learn from those who’ve been there - 40+ Iterative founders share their biggest learnings from orientation.
During Iterative’s in-person orientation, every company is assigned a dedicated lead partner. At Iterative, we ensure that all our lead partners are experienced founders—no exceptions. Here’s why having a lead partner is crucial:
Imagine having a coach who has founded and built successful companies. This coach works with you on your startup's biggest problems, pushes you to set more ambitious targets, and keeps you accountable every week to hit your goals. Think about the progress you'd make. If you grow 5-7% every week, you achieve an annual growth rate of 12.6x to 33x.
At Iterative, this coaching experience is a core part of our program, and we call it office hours.
The term "office hours" comes from universities, where professors set aside dedicated time for students to get help on assignments. At Iterative, office hours are weekly, hour-long 1:1 sessions between you, the founder, and your Lead Partners. During these sessions, you'll update on your progress against your growth goals, discuss challenges, prioritize tasks, and determine next steps. You can think of office hours as one-week sprints for your company's growth.
You are welcome to ask partners for help with anything, but they typically follow this structure:
Office hours are highly-tailored to each company by design. Every startup is unique, and therefore, has a specific set of problems and needs that require nuanced help. We work with each startup on whatever their most pressing problem is. While the structure of office hours is as shown above, no two founders will have the same office hours. To better understand the true value of office hours, see 5 reasons why office hours are so effective.
1. Office Hours = High Productivity
Founders have told us office hours kept them focused and were some of the most productive times at their startups. With a consistent structure every week—reporting on metrics, execution, learnings, and plans for the next week—this process, repeated weekly for three months, helps founders stay focused on the metrics that matter and iterate faster.
2. Office Hours Keep Founders Accountable
The weekly cadence of office hours keeps founders accountable. A significant portion of the value of office hours is accountability. Having to get on a call, show, and explain your results to someone who's been a founder every week forces you to focus and face reality. It's like seeing a personal trainer regularly—your trainer will quickly know if you're making progress or not.
3. Founders Set More Ambitious Goals After Office Hours
This is where the coach analogy comes into play—a coach pushes you to be more ambitious. Charles Lee, the founder of CoderSchool (Iterative W21), shared with us: “I told Hsu Ken I wanted to double my initial goal target, and Hsu Ken shook his head and said that's still too low.” Charles and Hsu Ken eventually agreed on a more ambitious goal, but Charles didn't think it was possible at all. He was nervous. But by the end of the program, he hit the goal. Founders tend to be conservative when setting targets, but having someone outside of your startup tell you otherwise helps you unlock the limiting beliefs so many founders set on themselves.
4. Office Hours Keep Founders on the Right Path
Having done hundreds of office hours, we notice that what founders tell us are their biggest problems are often not their biggest problems. It's similar to an injury—where you feel pain is almost always not the root cause. All General or Visiting Partners have gone through what you're going through, so they're able to point you in the right direction, setting you on the right path.
5. Rate of Learning Is Crucial
Founders with a high rate of learning significantly outperform those with a slow rate of learning. The high-rate learning founders will do what they said they were going to do the previous week, be prepared to talk about what they learned, and have a shortlist of tasks for the next week. Other founders may show up without knowing why they're not hitting their goals, or worse, come up with excuses.
6. Contradicting Advice Is Expected
Office hours are an opportunity for successful founders to work closely with you on your startup. When you join the program, you're welcome to book office hours with more than one General or Visiting Partner. If you do, it's almost always true that you'll get contradicting advice. And that's completely normal. There's no one way to win the race, and no other founder has the same experience. In fact, we encourage founders to book with multiple partners to get different opinions.
7. Founders Don't Have to Listen to Us
We make it clear to founders at the start of the batch: You're not obligated to listen to our advice. And no, there is no catch, and we won't take back the money. The advice from the General or Visiting Partners at office hours is exactly that—advice for you to consider. At the end of the day, it's your company, and you have the agency to make the final call.
Inside Office Hours - Get the real scoop from our founders who share their experiences of office hours with Iterative partners here.
Group office hours are hour-long sessions that happen every other week during the 12-week program, where companies meet in groups of four with two or more partners. We do this for a few reasons:
We believe the most helpful part of our program is office hours—so much so that we made a video about it.
Ever wondered what really goes on behind the scenes of a successful startup? The real struggles, the unexpected breakthroughs, the late-night pivots—these are the stories that truly inspire and educate, but they’re rarely shared openly. Once every other week, we invite a notable person from the startup world to speak. They tell the inside story of what happened in the early days of their startups. Talks are strictly off the record to encourage candor because the inside story of most startups is more colorful than the one presented to the public.
Past Speakers
Fundraising is hard. Founders often don’t know what investors are looking for or how to make a good pitch, which can make the process stressful and frustrating. The last four weeks of the program are focused on helping companies prepare for Demo Day, where they pitch their startup to hundreds of investors. Here are four key things we teach:
When you fundraise, it's important to know the roles within an investment firm and how the hierarchy works. Your goal is to convince a partner who becomes your internal champion.
Start with the highest level you can reach; if that is the associate, work up the ladder. (Remember, associates have no decision-making power. Their work mostly revolves around research and bringing deals to the partners.)
Once you have an internal champion, you'll need to help them convince the other partners.
Think of your pitch like the hooks of a song. You don’t need to explain every detail, but you need to explain enough to intrigue the investor. The job of the pitch is not to get money; the job of the pitch is to get to a conversation. To learn how to pitch your startup effectively, check out this video.
During the program, there are two things we do to help founders create a more effective pitch:
Almost all successful pitches go through many iterations. Our pitch practices are designed to help founders create their pitch, get feedback, iterate, and refine it. The key is to iterate and figure out what works (or doesn't).
Hsu Ken compares this to comedians practicing their craft. For comedians, it's not just about writing good jokes; it's about delivery, timing, and energy. Comedians like Chris Rock don't start at big arenas—they begin in small comedy clubs, telling jokes to family and friends. They practice repeatedly, noting which jokes make people laugh and which fall flat. They try different deliveries to gauge audience reactions. Once they have enough data, they perform in big arenas with a refined list of jokes that work.
How It Works
We host four pitch practices each week. Founders are separated into smaller groups, and each company takes turns pitching for three minutes. They receive immediate feedback from other founders, Visiting Partners, and General Partners.
Founders are grouped because they learn a lot from 1) How other founders pitched 2) The feedback other founders received.
Even if the feedback isn't directed at them, it's helpful to hear pointers that can refine their own pitches and avoid common mistakes.
After gathering feedback, founders work on their pitch until the next pitch practice session. We notice that pitches almost always improve over time. Fundraising is a skill, and like any skill, anyone can get better with practice.
Friendly investor pitches give founders the experience of pitching to real investors. This also helps them improve their pitch by hearing different perspectives and opinions from investors.
How It Works
Each founder pitches to three friendly investors for 20 minutes. They have three minutes to pitch and receive feedback for the remaining 17 minutes.
We match investors with founders by industry (e.g., AI, Fintech). Sometimes, investors let us know which companies suit their expertise.
For the Winter 2024 batch, Piruze Sabuncu (Square Peg), Dhiraj Mukherjee (Co-founder of Shazam), and Nicolas El Baze (Partech) provided our founders with valuable feedback on their pitches.
To read about the most common startup pitch mistakes we’ve seen, read this post.Think of your pitch like the hooks of a song. You don’t need to explain every detail, but you need to explain enough to intrigue the investor. The job of the pitch is not to get money; the job of the pitch is to get to a conversation. To learn how to pitch your startup effectively, check out
Fundraising hinges on supply and demand. The best way to optimize your fundraising efforts is to have multiple investors interested in you simultaneously. We recommend a parallel fundraising approach—engage with as many investors as possible at the same time. The key is to maximize investor activity within the shortest period.
This strategy creates urgency because (1) it limits information flow among investors and (2) it pressures them to expedite their decision-making. Investors often communicate with each other, which can work against founders. By creating urgency, you narrow the window for these conversations.
On the other hand, serial fundraising—talking to one investor at a time—gives investors control over the timeline, reducing urgency. Remember, your goal is to create pressure for investors to make a decision. Serial fundraising is ineffective in achieving this.
Being unprepared is one of the most common mistakes in fundraising. You often only have one shot at impressing an investor. When you don’t do the necessary preparation, you risk coming underprepared and losing out on your one chance.Think of it like building a good sales process, where you’ll need to:
Want to become more efficient at fundraising? Watch this video of Hsu Ken Ooi speaking with Kuo-Yi Lim of Monk’s Hill Ventures about the Top Mistakes Founders Make During Fundraising.
Founders often see significant progress and momentum during the program, growing 5-7% per week. Demo Day provides an opportunity for founders to pitch their startups to investors and accelerate their fundraising journey. At Iterative, we host one of the most highly attended demo days in Southeast Asia. For the W24 batch, over 400 investors signed up for Demo Day. Iterative companies in our program have collectively raised $168M.
Demo Day consists of three main components:
While the actual event is the Demo Day Virtual Event, we consider the Alumni Demo Day Virtual Event and Demo Day Website to be part of it as the former is the dress rehearsal, and the latter is what generates the most connections.
The Alumni Demo Day Virtual Event is held two days before the main Demo Day. This rehearsal event is crucial for several reasons:
The Demo Day Virtual Event is the highlight where founders pitch to a large group of investors, ensuring maximum reach.
The event kicks off with a short introduction from Iterative before transitioning to the pitches. Founders get three minutes to pitch, followed by a round of live Q&A for 1.5 minutes. Investors ask their questions via the chat function, and Brian and Hsu Ken act as the medium during the Q&A. After all the company pitches, we ask investors to connect with founders via the Demo Day website.
The Demo Day virtual event is for investors only—we do due diligence and only allow approved investors to attend. This is intentional because (1) effective fundraising requires founders to talk to many investors in a short amount of time, and (2) founders’ time is limited, and we want them to engage with only investors.
The Demo Day website is an essential tool for facilitating connections between founders and investors. It includes detailed company information and recordings of the pitches, making it easy for investors who couldn’t attend the live event to catch up. Investors can express their interest by clicking "Show Love" or "Connect About Investing," which sends an email directly to the founder.
After Demo Day, founders follow up with interested investors. Iterative also assists by facilitating introductions to warm contacts within our network. The website is a major driver of founder-investor connections, and in the past, we have made over 300 introductions.
Only investors and founders have access to the website. We do due diligence and only give approved investors access.
Demo Day is an unparalleled opportunity for founders to pitch to a wide network of investors. Our reach extends beyond Southeast Asia, spanning from the US to Taiwan. This event marks the beginning of our founders' fundraising journeys, putting them in front of investors who are eager to discover the next big thing.
We view our program as a 12-week orientation into the larger Iterative community. After these 12 weeks, you are officially part of our community and will continue receiving support from us as well as other alumni founders.
We have a team dedicated to helping our portfolio companies, from network introductions and navigating investor conversations to growth challenges and expansion questions. Here are the ways we continue to help founders after the program.
Office hours don't stop after founders graduate. All Iterative founders continue to work with Iterative Partners indefinitely. We encourage all founders to reach out if they need help, especially when making decisions or thinking through particularly difficult problems.
Common issues we've helped with include pivoting, hiring senior executives, and becoming a larger organization as companies grow in size. The partners act as a sounding board to ensure the founders are making the best decisions for their startups.
This support extends to founders who have pivoted to a different company and even to those who are no longer founders. Founders are part of the Iterative community for life—no matter what happens after the program, founders will always be part of Iterative and continue to have access to partners and the wider community.
Iterative was founded by founders, for founders. We’ve started from zero multiple times. We’ve faced rejection, struggled, and persevered. Our experiences have taught us the value of empathy, honesty, accountability, and open-mindedness.
Our mission is to build the most vibrant, supportive, and intellectually honest community of founders. The founder journey can be lonely, and we've experienced firsthand the power of a community where founders can reach out for help. Iterative’s community consists of past program participants, visiting partners, and our network of experts.
Our Slack community now has 200+ founders, with over a quarter of a million messages exchanged since 2020! More than 50% of the founders are active weekly—answering each other's questions, sharing what’s working, or simply providing support. For example, here is how the community helped answer a question from one of our founders: “How do you reinforce the culture you want in your company?”.
While we do our best to support founders, the support often happens organically within the community.We also understand the power of in-person connections. We hosted our first-ever in-person orientation in Bali last year, and we've since doubled down, hosting co-working days, hikes, and graduation dinners and drinks.
We regularly host workshops and community events to continue supporting founders. For instance, fundraising was particularly challenging in 2023, so we hosted multiple fundraising workshops and helped founders with pitch deck reviews.
All Iterative founders have access to our founder concierge, where they can request introductions. We connect them to investors, experts, and partners through the warmest connections in our network.
As requests for help grew, we needed a scalable system for our portfolio founders. That's why we launched a help system, allowing founders to reach out via an email helpline. Since its launch in October 2023, we've resolved 200+ tickets. We've facilitated investor introductions, referrals for business development leads, and provided fundraising and business strategy support.
Iterative founders get an early look at the companies in each batch at Alumni Demo Day.
Every Iterative company gets access to discounts on essential tools and software needed to grow and run their business. These discounts can save startups thousands of dollars.
Hiring top talent is notoriously challenging, especially for startups that are often too busy building their product. This can result in promising startups like the next Grab or Xendit being overlooked by eager job seekers who lack connections in the startup ecosystem. Iterative Startup Jobs helps founders overcome this hurdle by assisting them in building their teams, from the first employees to leadership roles.
There are two main factors that set Iterative apart from other programs in Southeast Asia.
We have an in-person orientation and the rest of the program is fully remote.
If founders choose to participate in all program offerings, they can spend between 3-4 hours per week in structured activities with partners and other program participants. Additionally, founders can also informally connect with partners and other participants throughout the program.
The program itself is not cohort-based. All founders begin the program together, regardless of growth stage or industry. Depending on the batch, we have organised certain group office hours by industry, geography, etc.
No, the program and Iterative’s investment are the same thing. We do not make investments without acceptance into the program. To accept the investment, you must confirm your participation in the program.
We believe our program is the most valuable part of Iterative and that participating in the program will do more for the long-term success of your company than our investment. In fact, our investment is often based on our anticipation of how much more valuable a company will be after they participate in our program.
No. See answer to question above.
US $500K investments typically look like companies that are farther along. For example, companies that have at least $1M ARR, are already growing 5-7% weekly, or have landed or implemented major contracts with enterprise partners.
On very rare occasions, we've made exceptions to our standard offer. Exceptions typically can happen only if a company is already making significantly more than $1M ARR and growing much faster than typical (2x monthly), and/or has a exploding term sheet from a top tier investor. No promises, but please apply and we're happy to consider these exceptions.
Iterative has everything needed to get you funded properly. We can connect you with resources to establish your entity, clean up your cap tables, redomicile, etc. We've even helped founders work with their previous investors on company recaps. We use a simple SAFE agreement and are quick to wire funds.
Having navigated this process hundreds of times now, we've seen and fixed most issues. We'll help.
In November 2022, Iterative raised $55M in its second fund.
Fund II was led by Cendana, K5 Global, Village Global, Goodwater Capital with participation from a large network of Silicon Valley founders and execs including Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox), Achmad Zaky (Bukalapak), Andrew Chen (General partner a16z, Uber), Qasar Younis (Former COO YC, Applied Intuition), David Shim (Foursquare), Kum Hong Siew (Head of Airbnb Asia), Moses Lo (Founder, Xendit), and many more.
Learn more about Fund II here.
If you’re unsure whether you’re at the right stage, we recommend you apply.
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