The Hope Loop

• “The only way to get out of the doom loop is if the founder builds their own hope loop,” shares Khailee Ng, Managing Partner at 500 Global.
• Founders, here’s how to escape being ‘crabs in a tub’ — born of tough markets and VC rejections — and build your own ‘hope loop’.
• Heal from past rejections. The very first step to entering the ‘hope loop’ is to overcome grief from rejections, whether from VCs, job interviews, or personal experiences. Grief can compound and lead to a negative mindset, especially in a climate where investors are risk averse.
• Bootstrap your way to profitability. Instead of solely focusing on fundraising, stack the odds in your favor and try to get more customer revenue - by serving the same customers better to extract more revenue - or finding new customers. There is no shame in going lean or seed scrapping to keep the company afloat.
• Reinvent the company. Think of your company as a blank slate to go after new pools of revenue. This ‘second founding’ doesn't necessarily mean shutting down the existing business, but rather, reintroducing innovation through a pivot or expansion.
• Leverage AI for lean global growth. Rebuild yourself as a founder or a very lean AI founder, leveraging AI to build products quickly and serve global markets.
• Be geographically agnostic. Be religious about your success, but agnostic about how you get there. Be open to doing business everywhere. Look beyond local and regional markets for both revenue and funding.
• The ‘right to win’ starts with 3 things. (1) The ‘right to ship’: Rapid product development and deployment to gather immediate feedback and validate assumptions, (2) the ‘right to iterate’: Listen to feedback, then iterate to create a better product and go back out to market again, and (3) the ‘right to last’: Stay lean, manage your cost basis, and control your burn rate so you can outlast others through funding cycles.
• Watch the Part 2 of this two-part series on Tech in Asia. Part 1 can be viewed here.