By SGN | 13 Feb 2024
After graduating from Georgetown University, Thomas took on roles in consulting. Positions at Boston Consulting Group and Gartner took him from D.C. to Virginia and Singapore, where he led the advisory team for their financial services practice in 11 markets across the Asia-Pacific.
But not being able to own the execution made him question the impact of his work.
“Delivering a perfect report and workshop could quite possibly lead to no action whatsoever,” he says.
His first foray into the tech and startup space came when he decided to pursue an MBA at Yale. In an early stint in venture capital, Thomas assisted a founder with creating a basic budget in Google Sheets.
“He was so grateful. The budget allowed him to successfully raise capital. My support had directly changed the trajectory of his company – I was hooked. The prospect of having a greater impact, even at a smaller scale, led me to join the startup world,” he says.
Lessons from one founder to another
Inspired, Thomas made the bold leap of founding his own startup in New York.
Based on his experiences in consulting, he set out to build a platform called Junction that would help founders, product managers, and designers in the startup world become paid advisors to financial institutions.
“It turns out the average banker doesn’t necessarily have much experience in areas like UX design or product management. A lot of them were struggling with digital transformation,” Thomas quips.
“Frankly, I was a terrible founder at the time. As a first-time CEO, I made every mistake possible in my approach to building the team, fundraising, and pretty much everything else. Above all, I didn’t talk to customers enough,” he reflects.
Knowing the customer and being laser-focused on your core value proposition are two takeaways from Junction that Thomas now imparts to founders he coaches. “It’s key to scoping down the work of building a startup, which is already difficult, by creating clarity and to avoid overextending,” he says.
One mistake Thomas has seen many startups make over the past few years is neglecting the fundamentals in terms of unit economics. “Too many teams were focused on getting adoption and driving a growth narrative instead of developing a vision for sustainable profits,” he shares.
“A second, more insidious mistake is hiring without being clear on what issues you’re solving and the competencies required to succeed. Many founders I meet hire executives from a top brand while giving vague definitions of their expected responsibilities. The result is almost inevitably confusion, disappointment, and waste.”
Becoming an accelerator leader with 500 Global
One positive thing that came out of Thomas’s experience with Junction, was getting connected to 500 Global and joining them in Silicon Valley. Initially part of a team that collaborated with governments and corporations around the world to build startup programmes like accelerators, Thomas would go on to lead business development at a global level.
“Our work revolved around enabling entrepreneurs to succeed in building new ventures. We spent long hours designing and re-designing learning experiences to democratise the best thinking from the Silicon Valley ecosystem. I was able to develop partnerships in emerging ecosystems globally, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Cambodia, Azerbaijan, Singapore as well as the United States,” he says.
It was rewarding for Thomas to see startup founders immerse themselves in the content and make significant progress in the span of a few months.
“The programmes transformed the way they thought about markets, product, and pitching. I still use much of the content we developed in my work at Aspire for both internal and external consumption today,” he adds.
Thomas elaborates, “I often remind founders – especially those from more technical backgrounds – that they know more about their space than 99.9% of their audience, and that they need to streamline their pitch to make it more intelligible to investors.”
One of the 500 Global accelerators he worked on was with Enterprise Singapore and called Global Launch: a coordinated programme with the Global Innovation Alliance, which brought startups to and from Singapore.
“Seeing the support the government had and the ambition to build the ecosystem was one of the reasons that I was attracted to come back here,” he shares.
Navigating startup growth from Singapore
Today, Thomas is General Manager at Singapore-based B2B fintech Aspire, managing its local operations and supporting its regional expansion.
In Q1 of 2023, Aspire raised US$100 million in a Series C funding round that more than doubled its valuation, coming out strongly amid a market downturn for young tech firms.
With Aspire hitting monthly net profitability and tripling its yearly revenue in June 2023, Thomas’s insights are indicative of how much his team has their collective finger on the pulse of the region.
“I’m pretty excited to see what comes next after the recent deflation of the startup bubble,” muses Thomas. “Too many companies with shaky business models were propped up by venture funding. Valuations also got way too far ahead of the actual fundamentals. I think we’re seeing a more realistic recognition of what’s required to build and grow businesses in the region.”
Compared to Silicon Valley, which has been a technology epicentre for generations, with a massive domestic market that startups are able to scale from, Thomas notes that Singapore’s technology ecosystem is comparatively nascent, and where, with its limited domestic market, founders are required to go international quickly to reach meaningful scale.
“Many of the leading tech companies in Southeast Asia have been basically twists on Silicon Valley models. But that can only get you so far, given the differences in markets,” he says. “I believe we’re seeing the beginnings of a playbook specific to the region. It’s going to be more complex and difficult to execute, but will actually be viable.”
One observation he’s made is that startups in Singapore are going cross-border, and even global, earlier in their life cycles. He is confident that globally ambitious companies will take root in the region, especially in sectors like fintech and trade, aligning with Singapore’s rich history as a commercial hub.
“There are really two different Singapores,” says Thomas. “There’s Singapore the domestic market, which is small and tends to be dominated by SMBs. You need to set up your team in a certain way to succeed – hire local frontline teams and recognise that you may saturate the market relatively quickly.
“Then there’s Singapore the regional hub, which gives you an incredibly stable legal and financial platform, a pool of top management talent, and access to the headquarters of MNCs and local champions. It’s entirely possible to tap into both, as long as you’re clear from the beginning on what you want to accomplish.”
Thomas remains excited by Singapore’s tech ecosystem still being relatively early-stage, without ossified big company mentalities. The fragmented and developing nature of Southeast Asia’s markets and ecosystems, he reckons, are also conducive to providing defensible moats for startups to solidify their position against competitors after market penetration.
“If you have an angle where you’re building using the unique capabilities and networks across Southeast and East Asia, tailored to needs within each market, which American or European players are less equipped for, then I think you’re onto something compelling,” he says.
Meet Thomas
Thomas is a startup consultant with an extensive track record across North America and Asia. He is a mentor at Iterative, Young Founders Summit and 500 Global, where he was formerly Head of Global Business Development and Strategy. Thomas is currently the General Manager of Aspire, a B2B fintech startup headquartered in Singapore.
Connect with him here.
