THE START-UP WHISPERER

Golden Gate Ventures co-founder Jeffrey Paine tells us what entrepreneurs need to succeed and shares his insights on SEA's "Startup Golden Triangle".

- KAREN TEE

My insight is that entrepreneurs are 80 per cent trained and 20 per cent born with it. So not everybody can be a founder, especially in high-growth start-ups that are very stressful,” says the Singaporean co-founder of venture capital firm Golden Gate Ventures (GGV). 

While it may go against the grain of those who claim entrepreneurship is a skill that can be taught, Paine argues that certain personality traits — agreeableness and fluid intelligence, for example — are innate.

“Fluid intelligence is how people process information and reach a conclusion. Founders have to make decisions with little to no data within a certain deadline, so they have to grab as much knowledge as they can and process it to figure out what decisions they need to make,” says Paine, who also helped launch pre-seed start-up accelerator The Founder Institute in Asia.

“If you are too agreeable, you cannot make decisions because you will listen to everyone. To be a good founder, you have to be disagreeable, but humility is also needed.”

Paine, a serial entrepreneur with Silicon Valley experience before he co-founded South-east Asia-focused GGV in 2011, has always been interested in working with and mentoring entrepreneurs in the region. In fact, GGV was born out of a need to solve a pain point he identified among start-ups in need of funding from Bay Area investors as SEA’s entrepreneurship scene was relatively unknown back then.