(#11) VB Map podcast: Creating team culture, developing concept validation and incubating: A conversation with HOV Managing Director Usman Sheikh

Arnaud Rubeck is an entrepreneur and management professional with over 10 years of experience. Currently, he is the founder & CEO of TripTax. Arnaud’s expertise spans a range of areas including strategic planning, operations consulting, and project management. He also has a strong interest in AI, fintech, blockchain, travel and food tech.

Eric Saint Andre is a leading expert in design thinking, innovation, business model innovation, new business design and startup acceleration. He is the Founder and Managing Director of ASA Advisory Services, a leading Innovation Consultancy based in Singapore and also the founder of Augmented Tribe, a tech startup offering an Innovation Platform to support organisations with their innovation and digital transformation initiatives.

Ignacio Gabaldon is an engineer and entrepreneur. He is now leading Igeneris Ventures, the Venture Builder branch of Igeneris working with a team to create a curated pipeline of startups that serve both Europe and Latin America from their office in Madrid, Spain.

In part 2 of our VB Map Podcast with Apoorva Ruparel,, we dig into how philosophical questions and human history can inform the creation of startups in the Web2-Web3 world: 

• The role of standardization in scaling anything (religion, F&B, startups!) and the conditions needed for scaling,
• Categorizing human needs helps product strategists synthesize patterns and good practices in addressing problem statements,
• How the values system for the internet is broken and the opportunity for Web3 companies,
• What does a venture look like that builds for a world that transitions from Web2 to Web3?
• What verticals and problems are Web3 adoption ready? 
• The risks and dangers of having average consumers start with angel investment.

Apoorva Ruparel is a serial Entrepreneur with 3 successful exits, angel investor, 500 Global Mentor. 

Apoorva is a Partner at Venturerock, a digital venture capital platform and ecosystem of founders, backers & builders building the next generation of global tech companies. He has over 20 years of experience in Enterprise Sales, Angel Investing, Fund Raising, Go To Market Strategy and Growth Hacking.

In this episode Slash CEO Andries De Vos and Apoorva Ruparel discuss:

• Why startups fail and what the industry can do about it?
• The challenge of VCs: we don’t have a problem of choice, but a problem of quality.
• Real Venture Building has been around for a while, but is really only now arriving - but there is no perfect formula yet
• How to breakdown the VB process into 70+ milestones, the strategic importance of acquiring building blocks for each, and how to structure your VB team capabilities
• How much equity should a VB take and what is a fair equity stake for founders? We debated different models for financial inclusions between investors, founders and teams, and how those differ by region.
• VC-VB fund economics: how much money do you invest per startup, ownership targets, how much more risk can you take or should take

 In this week’s episode of the VB Map Podcast we’re going to dive into the eCommerce venture building landscape in South East Asia and India. 

Our guest is Archit Anand, the founder and CEO of Omnirio, a plug-and-play e-commerce platform serving hundreds of brands. 

Archit has been working in the eCommerce industry in SEA and India since 2015 and has seen first hand how the eCommerce revolution in Asia has transformed society.

This week on the VB Map podcast Slash CEO Andries de Vos sat down to talk with Rahul N. Bhardwaj. An entrepreneur and product engineer himself, Rahul is an investor and advisor to a number of companies. He is the co-founder and COO of Junglee Games, a company that created top-grossing games like Junglee Teenpatti and Junglee Rummy.

Check the key topics they discussed:

• Breakdown the psychology of human entertainment, what works and what doesn’t and how to anticipate if a game may work
• Designing risk-reward loops for different game genres
• The importance of having “depth” of game play and how to measure “fun”
• The challenge of policy makers or entrepreneurs to design games-for-good to nudge behaviours in certain directions
• How venture building principles and methodologies have been adopted by game studios for decades
• How he is gamifying his son’s education 
• What opportunities may lie ahead for game studios. 

Jori Clijmans is a partner of XLR8, a Belgium based accelerator of B2B technology and enterprise startups. He is the co-founder of the Belgium-based venture studio 0smosis, which created and spun off multiple venture-backed startups in collaboration with corporate partners.

Jori has a deep innovation and product consulting background and is uniquely positioned to speak to the challenges of corporate venture building and how to think about setting up innovation capabilities that deliver enterprise outcomes.

Key highlights of the episode: 

• What’s different between venture building in Asia and Europe
• Ways to eliminate corporate startup risk as early as possible in the process 
• The importance of bringing the CEO early on to de-risk the venture after concept validation
• Building a quality label, CEO pool and VC network, as a VB
• The challenges of an investment-first VB vs consulting-first studio model
• How classic consulting services and corporate VB may merge in the future 
• Building stakeholder alignment with consulting-for-equity models
• Tips for working with VCs as a VB
• The challenge of studio focus and separating internal resources for own ventures vs client ventures

Thomason Chan is a Lifetime Entrepreneur and the Founder & CEO of Singapore-based Great Full, a cloud kitchen platform. 

Podcast host, Slash CEO Andries De Vos and Thomason Chan cover a great deal of topics, such as:

• Measuring success and catching the industry wave to ensure success
• What a co-founder needs to have in them to succeed
• How venture building compares to parenthood
• What a good HR philosophy looks like

Usman Sheikh is the Managing Director of  High Output Ventures, a seed-stage fund and startup studio investing in exceptional domains experts who are building the remote  first companies of tomorrow. Usman is a  serial entrepreneur, having built, operated,  and sold companies over the last 15 years.

The conversation centers around:

• Adjusting your mindset and skillset as serial entrepreneur for investing and operating/building, and what this means for VC-VB models
• Defining your personal drive and measure of success as serial entrepreneur
• Finding the right CEOs
• Building a remote culture and remote practices
• Differences in talent in Europe and Asia, and what qualities to look for
• Creating a flywheel of concept validation for ventures, and the importance of discipline and quick iteration
• The qualities one needs to have to be a startup CEO