John John Kim is a Singapore based VC investor who has worked at some big firms such as Goldman Sachs and Mercuria. He talks about his new cross-border venture capital firm Amasia, and what kinds of investments they look for. John also discusses the startup ecosystem in Singapore, including the special government schemes the Singapore government has put in place to encourage investment in entrepreneur ventures. And perhaps most interestingly, John gets into Bitcoin, and why he thinks the future may be in Bitcoin, not as a currency, but as a platform.

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Hello. Today I’m joined by John Johan Kim. Mr Kim is a Singaporean VC with a pretty interesting history in both venture capital, angel investing, and also entrepreneurship. So I’m going to let him do his own introduction today, contrary to what we typically do here on the podcast. But John, thanks for joining us, it’s good to have you here.

Thanks a lot Edmund, it’s a pleasure to be here. my first angel investment was in 1998, and it was actually the same year that I invested in my first company…or started my first company rather. So it was an electronic books company, and like many investments of the era, I thought I was a genius for awhile before the whole thing crashed and went to zero.

Beyond that, I’ll just tell you a little bit about my background. That first company that I started was an internet music company. It basically came out of an internship that I was doing for IDG (International Data Group), which is the largest technology publisher in the world. I was building an online decision support system, kind of an online data base for the CEOs of their subsidiaries. And I though it would be interesting to use this technology to solve a pain point that I had. I was very passionate about music—I still am—and often I would think about what music events were taking place in a particular city, and I wanted to know and figure out where to go. So I thought it would be nice to build an engine like that.

I hired a team, went out and built this thing, then realized that a lot the companies, the bands, the venues, and the companies that were looking to list in this engine didn’t have sites of their own or any understanding about the web. So we started building out some of their websites and thinking about online marketing and online strategy, and helping them with that. So, we had two different parts of this company, and our advisers suggested we start thinking about focusing a little bit more. And because the consulting part of the business was generating more cash, I decided to take that with a couple of my other partners. And then the other folks who kept the online music engine, they actually joined forces with some folks at GoLite Tonight, and that eventually became part of CitySearch, which I think was a much better ultimate outcome for them.

But it was a great experience, I made a bit of money, and what I found—and this is something I tell entrepreneurs all the time—was that I lost my passion. You know, the original impetus for the business was that I was passionate about music and a pain point that I had. But once it was just about e-consulting, the money wasn’t in the music industry. So we were doing projects for manufacturing companies…we actually built a small incubator. MBAs at school that were wanting to build online communities or commerce sites.

And so it lost its passion a little bit for me, but from there I decided that I wanted to get back to my passion. So I started my third company, which was a Delaware incorporated rock-n-roll band. We had some success with that. We toured around the US, did some session work, and played in Korea as well with some folks. I did that for a while. It was a really great experience, but it wasn’t really my calling at the end of the day. I think a lot of—kind of like starting a company as well—what you see on stage is really quite appealing, but all the rest of it is a lot of hard work that goes into it. There’s sometimes conflict with bandmates, and you get punched in the nose, you know it’s just like starting a company. So all of that stuff I hadn’t really reckoned for, and ultimately I just wasn’t sure if it was my calling at the end of the day.

So I went to Korea, and that’s when I kind of started my financial career. So I was at a hedge fund for four years, and Goldman Sachs for five years here in Singapore, and then joined a privately held Swiss commodities trading and investment firm called Mercuria. Before this opportunity presented itself with my current partner, who’s been a VC investing in tech companies for over 20…22 years now. And we felt there was an interesting opportunity in entrepreneurship in technology in Asia, and so we kind of put our heads together and we started this firm called Amasia, so we’ve been doing that. We started talking a little over a year ago, and started investing a little about eight months ago. So that’s currently what I’m up to.

That’s great. can you tell us a little bit more about Amasia since we’re on the topic. What typically is that fund looking for? What type of investments have you made and are you looking to make?

Sure. Amasia…we’re kind of a cross-border venture capital firm, with a presence here in Singapore and in Silicon Valley. Basically the thesis is this: because there’s certain technology trends that have allowed startups—and companies in general, but particularly startups—to go international a lot earlier then they’ve ever been able to before, think about mobile penetration, think about computing, there are businesses here that have…there’s one computing company here that has 40,000 clients that we can speak to, and over half of them are in the US, but I don’t think they’ve ever taken a business trip to the US to make any sales. So this is one example of companies that can really go international a lot sooner than they were able to before.

Now simultaneously, top-tier companies…they don’t need money. They have their choice in investors—it’s really about what you can bring to the table as an investor beyond your money? What’s your value proposition on top of that? And there’s this trend in Silicon Valley where some of the top-tier VC firms are really proactively adding value. So take as an example, Andreessen Horowitz and Google Ventures have been at the forefront of this trend. If you take a look at Andressen’s website, i think they have twenty people on the investing team and seventy people doing everything else. So you know, helping companies with PR, with hiring, with everything.

And so, there are these VC firms that are focused on adding proactive value, but the nature of VC investing is very…it’s a little bit less codified and distributed than later stage private equity investing or public equity investing. The reason for that is: once a company gets more mature, you can encapsulate more of the value of a company—whether it’s got good prospects ahead of itself or not, in numbers. So you can codify it in numbers because there’s a longer track history, you have top line/bottom line, you can have growth, and for all these things you can actually capture numbers. And when you can capture something in numbers, you can actually distribute the decision making. So when you look at later stage private equity firms, they’re almost like mini investment banks—they have offices all over the place, you can actually have analysts go out and look for companies that fit certain numerical criteria—and the thing in venture, as you move earlier in the cycle of a company, it becomes much more intuitive, the decision making. So you don’t have that same kind of numerical track record and history, and because of that when you are making an investment decision with a committee of people, the partnership needs to be very tight-knit. Because you need to be able to convey to your partners, “Well, yeah, this team was really inspiring. This leader is a visionar