I was on a Google Meet call trying to convince a Senior Vice President from Gojek to join Recompound and be our first customer. He had an illustrious career in the growth and strategy department and his LinkedIn profile was glittered with awards, achievements, endorsements, likes. You know, the meet and greet with important people. Speaking at prestigious events. And reposting genuinely insightful articles with his experiences stitched together.
“Deep down inside me I was also thinking when can I be this cool of a guy?”
A little back story, you could judge us, but we are a VC-backed startup and I happen to co-found it. And now you might be wondering how are you not cooler than the Gojek guy you called? You guys got money from well-respected VCs!
Well that is because we are a VC backed startup with none of its glory and all of its folly. For a simple prototype to build a copy trading app with 0 customers, we received a $200k investment cheque back in 2022. That’s a sizeable amount no? Well, two thirds of it we lost within 6 months. Poof, gone like magic…
We lost most of it because of a Co-Founder break up (pecah kongsi). Past Co-Founders I am sure are good people with convincing backgrounds too. Influencers, having a family business in the brokerage firm, but just a little different mindset. The reason why we had a Co-Founder break up was because we (Toby and Budi) didn’t believe in fund raising for the sake of fund raising and maximising our company valuation. Our past Co-Founders wanted to fund raise and ride the fund raising momentum. So we decided to part ways and “buy them out”, which made our company broke instantaneously.
So the money gone.
3 other Co-Founders also gone.
But expectations from investors remained the same.
So how on earth are we supposed to produce results?
Maybe, convincing the Senior Vice President from Gojek to join Recompound was one of them. But what did we have to offer?
I was prepared with all the core value propositions that we could give.
You don’t have to transfer your money to our account. Keep the money to yourself. You execute the transaction.
No need to pay us management fees. Just pay us when your portfolio performs.
We help you monitor your portfolio. If you don’t like us, you could cancel anytime with no fee.
Even then I wasn’t so sure if he were to be convinced. I could even recall myself stammering as I explained our core offering. Not because I wasn’t sure of our core product, but I felt ashamed of talking about an investment opportunity. He must have thought that I am a scammer with ill intentions of giving bad investment recommendation. Like this is literally a brand that no one has ever heard of, with super shitty landing page, a broke Co-Founder with no formal work experience in investments in Sudirman.
Frankly, I was ready for him to criticise our product, politely decline the offer and hang up. So I dug down and prepared myself mentally for another rejection (note: another rejection, because we have been rejected n times before).
So of course he mentioned,
“I have tried investing in stocks for 4 years since the COVID period. I followed this xxx guru who provides with stock tips with all of the supporting reasons and key indicators to look, but when markets turned against my favour, I asked my guru a harmless question why is the market down? My guru turned passive aggressive and blamed me for not managing risks properly. You should have done this and done that. And I was wtf I didn’t have the time nor the capacity to manage my own risks, and I have lost a yyy (where yyy is a ridiculous amount of money).”
I nodded and tried to offer some words of comfort. I said “I am sorry to hear that you lost a huge amount of money from a person you trusted”
He went on to say
“Well that’s part of the risk in investing. But I don’t trust him as he didn’t set the expectations clearly at the beginning. Anyway, your service seems genuine. I’d like to start with the minimum amount”
Budi and I turned off our camera muted our gmeet, pretended that our internet went choppy for a minute so that we could dance like crazy monkeys.
Dancing aside, that’s when we realised that capital market is a super hostile place for most people. Even for a high profile individual like the guy we were calling, money is easily lost even when they seem to have received good information. An investment guru with years of illustrious track record, does not cut it to be a source of help for these busy professionals.
And the crazy thing is, call after call, we kept seeing people with similar patterns of problem. One person tried buying cryptocurrency in the hopes of recovering losses they made from stocks. It was completely heart wrenching when they shared that their crypto investments also ended up further in a loss. And these are unsuspecting buyers who buy into the argument of a group of people promoting these “investment opportunities” online and labelling it as education. Saying that this coin or that coin are going to change the world and be valued at a ridiculous amount of money.
These calls made me reflect on my personal journey into the investment space as well. My father is the most enthusiastic person when it comes to investments, till this day even when being semi retired from work. He still boasts about the premiums he gets from selling put option in the futures market. He still draws those charts to determine the support and resistance zones in a bid to make a little bit more money late into the night. Why? Because perhaps at the back of his mind, he needs to recover the losses that he took when he purchased GOTO shares at IPO price with his hard earned money.
That is when I realise that every time I took a phone call with a potential client who’s had tremendous investment losses in the past, I am seeing myself and my family who’s frankly just in need for some help. I see a person who’s half (maybe more towards three quarters) skeptical yet utterly helpless. They choose to pick up a call with a no body because they want to learn that maybe not all hope is lost. Maybe there’s someone who could be of help. And I guess that’s why I am here.