Lifecycle of Startup

Venture businesses are modern, high-growth, high-impact enterprises. This lesson provides a crash course on startups, how they differ from traditional business models, and the key stages of launching and scaling a venture. You’ll explore the maturity process of a startup and the critical execution phases in its early development.

Startup Language & Communications

Running a startup is an unique experience. This lesson provides an orientation for first-time venture founders and executives pivoting into venture business, helping them navigate the fast-paced, growth-driven environment and understand the unique rhythm, mindset, and language of startup operations.

Pitching Structure And Narrative Arcs

Learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurial pitching, including how to write effective pitch scripts and create structured pitch decks. The focus will be on developing clear and concise presentations that effectively communicate business ideas to captivate various audience. The session will provide practical tips and techniques for organizing content and delivering compelling pitches with different narrative arcs.

Team Dynamics: Roles & Responsibilities

How big of a team do you need to launch a venture? This lesson explores the fundamentals of team dynamics, how they evolve with growth, the role of knowledge and feedback loops, and how early-stage founders can maintain a lean, highly productive, and mission-aligned team structure.

Mitigate Your Venture Risks Using The VANGUARD Framework

Risks in starting, running, and scaling a venture can be mitigated. The Four Venture Risks Framework provides strategic guidance for venture operators—both entrepreneurs and executives—to navigate challenges, avoid common mistakes, and overcome execution pitfalls. By applying first-principles thinking appraoches, in this lesson we introduce this framework to help current and aspiring venture leaders make informed decisions and build resilient businesses from the get-go.

Comparing Private Limited vs. Limited Company

Private Limited (e.g., Sdn Bhd or Pvt Ltd) and Public Limited (e.g., Berhad or Plc) companies are often seen as steps on a linear growth path—but each serves fundamentally different purposes. This session dives deep into the strategic, governance, and compliance differences between private and public limited structures. Founders and startup teams will explore when and why a company might stay private, go public, or transition via listing or acquisition. You will also gain clarity on shareholder rights, capital access, and board responsibilities under each structure, with a focus on long-term planning.

Special Purpose Entities

Special Purpose Entities (SPEs)—also known as Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs)—are powerful legal tools for structuring investments, managing risk, isolating liabilities, and enabling venture-scale innovation. This session unpacks what SPEs are, why they’re used in startup and investment contexts, and how they can support growth, fundraising, or partnerships.

Business Models with their Preferred Business Entities

Your business model determines how you create, deliver, and capture value—but it also influences how your venture should be legally structured. This session helps founders explore how different business models (e.g. SaaS, marketplace, consulting, manufacturing, nonprofit, content creation) align with optimal business entities. You will examine examples across industries and regions to understand which legal structures support growth, funding, and compliance best—ensuring that their company is not just viable, but scalable and investor-ready.

Choosing the Right Business Entity to Start

The legal structure you choose for your startup isn’t just paperwork—it shapes your funding options, tax obligations, ownership model, and long-term scalability. This session helps founders and early teams understand the pros and cons of different business entities (e.g., sole proprietorship, partnership, private limited company, LLC, or corporation). You will walk away with clarity on which entity best suits their goals, risk profile, and funding plans—and what mistakes to avoid when registering or restructuring.

Manage Profit & Lost As A First Time Business Manager

Designed for those without a finance background, this lesson simplifies key financial controls and levers, helping you understand different revenue models through a profit and loss lens. You’ll learn to make informed operational decisions by analyzing business costs, sales margins, and growth vs. profitability dynamics, enabling you to effectively balance profitability and scalability while managing the pace of growth.

Startup Capital Options

What truly defines ‘smart’ capital? This lesson provides a comprehensive overview of the different types of venture capital funding, their typical requirements, and a practical approach to raising equity financing, offering synthesised insights from experienced practitioners.

Capital Efficiency

In today’s funding environment, capital efficiency is no longer optional—it’s a strategic advantage. This session unpacks what it means to be capital efficient, helping founders and growth teams learn how to maximize every dollar raised or earned. You will explore how to measure efficiency, optimize resource allocation, and design lean but scalable operating models. This session shifts the conversation from “how much have you raised?” to “how well have you used it?”

Term Sheets Tecnicalities And Fundraising Instruments For Ventures

Understanding the structure and fine print of term sheets is crucial for startup founders navigating early fundraising rounds. This session dives deep into the mechanics, legal language, and strategic implications of term sheets and venture financing instruments. Participants will learn to interpret key clauses, compare instruments like equity rounds, SAFEs, and convertible notes, and anticipate how these documents shape future control, dilution, and exit outcomes.

Startup and Venture Valuation

Valuing a startup is both a critical and challenging task, especially when traditional financial metrics may be absent or unreliable. This session introduces participants to the key methods of startup valuation, the rationale behind different approaches, and how valuation affects fundraising, ownership, and strategic planning. Through frameworks, interactive modeling, and scenario analysis, participants will develop the skills to justify, negotiate, and evaluate startup valuations across stages.

Exit Pathways and Strategies

This session provides an in-depth exploration of exit strategies available to startups and venture-backed businesses. Participants will gain a comprehensive understanding of different exit pathways such as acquisitions, IPOs, management buyouts, and secondary sales. The session will cover how to align exit strategies with venture goals, how investors view exits, and how founders can navigate timing, valuation, and stakeholder alignment.

Equity Ownership, Distribution, and Financing

We explore the foundations of equity ownership and its strategic implications for startups across various financing stages. You will gain a clear understanding of how equity is distributed among founders, investors, employees, and other stakeholders. The session covers dilution, equity rounds, term sheets, convertible instruments, and cap table dynamics.

Strategies to Achieve Economics of Scale

Scaling isn’t just about doing more—it’s about doing more efficiently. This session explores how startups and growing ventures can intentionally design for economies of scale across operations, production, technology, and customer acquisition. You will learn the difference between growth and scalable growth, understand cost structure dynamics, and explore strategic levers that reduce unit cost as volume increases. Whether you’re building software, delivering services, or running a product company, this session will equip you with the mental models and operational tools to scale sustainably and profitably.

Strategies for Revenue Generation & Recurring Revenue Models

Revenue is not just a result—it’s a strategy. In this session, participants will explore proven methods for generating revenue and the power of recurring revenue models in building long-term, predictable growth. From subscriptions and licensing to consumption-based and hybrid models, we’ll examine how different business models can drive both monetization and customer retention. You will walk away with frameworks to test monetization strategies, increase lifetime value, and build revenue engines that support scaling with stability.

Product Sales Growth

Asia and Southeast Asia represent some of the world’s most dynamic markets—but growth here requires more than just translation and distribution. This session explores how startups and product companies can drive sales growth across Asia’s diverse landscapes by understanding regional buying behaviors, channel preferences, cultural nuances, and digital ecosystems. You will gain actionable insights into scaling B2C and B2B products, adapting GTM strategies across borders, and leveraging local partnerships for sustained sales growth.

Qualifying High Quality Sales

Early traction can be deceiving. Not every lead is a good lead—and chasing the wrong ones can drain time, burn resources, and stall growth. This session helps founders and sales teams define what a high-quality sale looks like and how to consistently qualify leads that are not just easy to close, but valuable long-term. You will explore qualification frameworks (like BANT, MEDDIC, and CHAMP), identify red and green flags in early conversations, and design a qualification process that aligns with their unique product, sales cycle, and customer value.

Establishing An Unique Position In The Market

In a crowded marketplace, clarity and differentiation are everything. This session guides founders and startup teams through the process of defining a strong, defensible, and unique position in the market. Participants will learn how to go beyond “better” or “cheaper” by crafting a value proposition that resonates with the right customers and sets them apart from competitors.

Developing a Sales Deck

A strong sales deck can make or break early traction for startups. This session helps participants design a compelling, structured, and customer-focused sales deck that resonates with target buyers. You will learn how to map their narrative to customer pain points, build trust, and close deals—whether they’re selling software, services, or physical products.

Pricing Strategies for Scalable Products & Services

Pricing is one of the most powerful yet overlooked growth levers for startups. This session explores how to develop pricing strategies that align with product value, customer psychology, market dynamics, and business goals. You will learn how to set, test, and iterate pricing models for scalable products and services—whether SaaS, marketplace, B2B, or consumer-focused.

The Sales Flywheel

This lesson explores how to achieve compounding growth and sustained sales momentum by shifting from a traditional sales funnel to a flywheel approach. You’ll learn how to synergise marketing and sales channels together to open up new tactical and opportunitic sales touchpoints, and build the foundation for product- and network-led sales growth.

Capturing Emerging Needs with Insights Selling

This lesson demystifies the enterprise sales process by introducing the buying center concept, exploring traditional solution selling, and diving deep into insight selling strategies. You’ll learn embedded tactics to engage organizations and institutions effectively, helping you shorten sales cycles and drive more strategic sales outcomes.

Head-on Strategy vs. Market Creation Strategy

How do you carve out your own space in a crowded market? This lesson explores the risks, key attributes, and case studies of two contrasting market growth strategies. It also provides an execution-focused perspective on market share dynamics for early-stage venture operators.

Network Effect: Critical Mass, Tipping Point and Virality

This lesson dives into the marketing mechanics driven by social networks and network effects at both the product and sales levels. With deconstructed case studies, you’ll learn the tactical building blocks that enable network effects to happen, accelerating your product or service toward critical mass and reaching the tipping point for product-led organic growth.

First Adopter Sales

Not everyone will pay for something they’ve never heard of. This lesson teaches you how to identify early adopters, craft effective sales strategies for engagement, and leverage social proof to build credibility—ultimately attracting more users and converting them into paying customers.

Building A MVP For Early Market Validation

In this lesson, you’ll learn best practices for building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) by developing a streamlined version of your offering that focuses on essential features solving key customer pain points. You’ll test market viability, leverage user feedback for continuous refinement, and establish key growth indicators to measure success and drive ongoing improvement.

Market Validation: Product-Market-Fit

Launching an unproven business model requires market validation. This lesson explores the principles and importance of Product-Market Fit, guiding you in identifying key assumptions, formulating hypotheses, and de-risking the market aspect of building a venture.

Product & Service Experiences

As you embark on the early stages of building a venture, you’ll learn to map out essential in-person and digital interactions to uncover customer needs during the discovery and market validation process. From there, you’ll design impactful experiences that drive satisfaction and loyalty.

Analysing The Finance Performance of A Venture Business

Clarity around financial performance is crucial for early-stage venture operators to ensure sustainability, attract investors, and make informed business decisions. You'll be equipped with financial metrics like profitability, burn rate, runway, and revenue growth rate. The session will also explore common financial pitfalls that early-stage ventures face—such as overspending, mispricing, and poor cash flow management—and provide practical strategies for optimizing financial health.

Sizing Up A Business Opportunity

Sizing up a business opportunity is crucial for early-stage venture success. This session will teach you how to evaluate market potential from both the top-down and bottom-up approach, analyze competition to estimate market potential.

Analysing Quality of Conversion Loop

In early-stage ventures, acquiring customers is only the first step—ensuring high-quality conversions that lead to retention and long-term growth is key. This session will break down the conversion loop, helping you to identify drop-off points, measure key metrics like lead-to-customer conversion rate, CAC vs. CLV, and retention rate, and optimize their processes for better engagement.

Analysing Customer Success For Early-stage Ventures

Customer success is not just about support—it’s a strategic driver of growth, retention, and long-term sustainability for early-stage ventures. In this session, you will explore the fundamentals of customer success, learn how to track key metrics like churn rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), and net promoter score (NPS), and analyze real-world case studies of startups that have successfully scaled their customer success strategies.

Deciding on Compensation Structure

Designing a compensation structure in a startup isn’t just about salaries—it’s about aligning incentives, attracting talent, managing runway, and building long-term commitment. This session explores how to craft a smart, scalable compensation plan using a mix of base pay, bonuses, equity, and non-monetary rewards. You will learn how to set compensation philosophy, benchmark competitively, communicate offers clearly, and handle sensitive trade-offs. Whether you’re hiring your first employee or scaling a team, this session helps you create compensation that motivates without breaking the bank.

Crafting Job Description For Venture Recruitment

In early-stage ventures, every hire is critical. This session focuses on how to craft clear, compelling, and strategic job descriptions that reflect your company’s mission, stage, and culture—while attracting the right candidates. You will learn how to define roles in a lean team, avoid vague or bloated job ads, and align expectations around performance and growth.

Building And Managing A Lean Team

Startups often face resource constraints that require building agile, mission-aligned teams capable of driving growth with limited headcount. This session explores how to structure, hire, motivate, and manage a lean team without compromising on culture or execution. You will examine different startup team models, founder roles, early hiring priorities, and techniques for managing talent and output through clarity, accountability, and trust.

Venture Hiring Techniques

Avoid costly hiring mistakes! This lesson explores the key aspects of venture recruitment, helping you navigate the hiring process with a strategic approach. You’ll learn the advantages of venture hiring, what a realistic venture-culture-fit talent profile looks like, and how to improve talent discovery and search. Additionally, we’ll cover alternative hiring options to build a strong, mission-aligned team.