Danny Goh – Look for Vision, Execution, Flexibility

Danny Goh is a serial entrepreneur and an early-stage investor. He is the founder and CEO of Nexus FrontierTech, an AI research firm that easily integrates AI into organizations’ processes by using natural language processing to transform idle information into structured data, enabling the organization to run better, leaner, and faster. He also is a general partner at the G&H Ventures fund, which invests in early-stage start-ups primarily in Southeast Asia. The fund has invested in more than 20 portfolios in deep tech and is building its third fund to help start-ups into the growth stage.   Danny currently serves as an entrepreneurship expert at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford and is also an appointed research fellow at the Center for Policy and Competitiveness at the École des Ponts Business School in France. He is an advisor and judge to several technology start-ups and accelerators, including Microsoft’s accelerator program, Startupbootcamp IoT, and LBS Launchpad. Danny serves as a visiting lecturer at various universities in Europe and is a speaker at various conferences, including TEDx and fintech events.    “As early-stage investors, we are not investing just in the products or the growth, we are actually investing in people, the founders themselves”  Danny Goh   Worst investment ever  Danny’s focus is as an early-stage investor. He made his first such investment around 10 years ago in an education tech start-up in Israel. After that early success, he was so confident after that he believed and acted on the belief that he could just as easily invest in start-ups in Europe to help them to grow. After he spent around six years trying to build ventures and help founders in Europe “it was a complete disaster”. He puts it down to his perspective that perhaps doesn’t suit everyone that “as early-stage investors, we are not investing just in the products or the growth, we are actually investing in people, the founders themselves”. He says that is the very reason why founders come to meet investors for just US$50,000 or $100,000 to start creating a business.  So he arrived at his technique of looking into the founders, hearing what the founders say about their “beautiful” vision, and realized that it is more than just about the vision itself. He discovered that to be a successful founder requires three things for the investors to actually buy (see “Some lessons” below)      Some lessons Danny has arrived at three key items investors should look for in a start-up founder: Their vision has got to be big. Strong execution skills.Flexibility. He defines this as the ability to keep going and the ability to pivot. He went on to explain that in his experience this applies particularly in Europe and perhaps...