Asia Tech Podcast

EP 166 - Hsu Ken Ooi - co-Founder and Managing Partner at Iterative - We Were Short on Ideas That Week

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Hsu Ken Ooi and I had such a great conversation, we had to cut it short.  Otherwise, it felt like we could have gone on for hours.  Hsu Ken is a co-Founder and Managing Partner at Iterative.  Iterative's vision is to "Increase the GDP of Southeast Asia through entrepreneurship" with a mission "to build the most vibrant, supportive, and intellectually honest community of founders".

Some of the topics that Hsu Ken and I discussed:

  • Born in Penang, Malaysia and traveling back and forth between the United States and Penang as a child
  • His father was Intel's fixer and reported to Andy Grove
  • Moving around as a child and the importance of adaptability
  • Working for a small consultancy right out of college for only 9 months
  • Coding during his free time, loving it, and realizing he wanted to do it full-time
  • Meeting Brian Ma
  • Working with his friends to build a new product every week
  • The building of Decide.com
  • Working with Oren Etzioni, a well-known entrepreneur who had built and sold several ventures including Farecast
  • Thinking about the world probabilistically
  • Translating that company building experience into the way they invest
  • Silicon Valley cardinal sins - Stealth Mode and NDAs
  • How to apply technology and crypto to set incentives in the VC space

    • Some of the other titles we considered for this episode:

    1. I Was Making PowerPoints All Day
    2. This Thing Is Fun, How Do I Spend All My Time Doing This?
    3. I Missed the Boom of My Generation
    4. Startups Just Seemed Fun
    5. Can My Brother Come?
    6. We Thought There Was a Bug
    7. Do You Guys Have Any Money Left?
    8. The Only Thing You Have to Be OK With Is Looking Silly
      9. ...more
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      Asia Tech PodcastBy Michael Waitze Media