WELCOME TO ANTLER INSIGHTS

This week, we speak to David Almroth, an experienced CTO and full stack developer with 20 years of software development experience and expertise in machine learning. After a decade in the startup ecosystem, David takes some time out to share with us his motivations, aspirations and overall founder journey. Come January 2019, he will also be joining our inaugural Stockholm program.

‍

Started my day in the company of great women, moderating a female entrepreneurship panel, jointly hosted by Antler and Ladies Investment Club (L.I.C.). The esteemed panellists included some amazing female founders and women in business including Grace Clapham, TEDx Speaker, Co-Founder of The Change School; Joanna Wong, Founder in Antler's inaugural cohort, CEO of All Woman Co.; Prerna Sharma, Antler's Director of Talent Acquisition; and Tanya Rolfe, Founder of L.I.C. and Head of Corporate Sales at Gifts Less Ordinary.

We spent five minutes with robotics and tech engineer Alok Pathak to learn more about his entrepreneurial journey with Antler and the different aspects of building technology and prototyping that gets him excited.

Nobody operates in isolation, especially when you’re building a company. It’s a challenging journey that you’re not going to accomplish if you try to go it alone. Learn the fundamentals to approach effective partnerships.

One of the most common hurdles when setting out to build a new company is figuring out where to even start. It's sometimes overwhelming to frame things when the possibilities are endless. It's easy to get lost or frustrated without a clear framework to guide your thinking. Here, we share an easy-to-use framework to help think about new ideas in a consistent and comprehensible way.

Design thinking is a solution-based approach to problem-solving. It is a process that draws upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systematic reasoning, to solve complex problems by exploring possibilities of what could be and create desired outcomes that benefit the end-user (customer). Solonia Teodros, co-founder of The Change School*, breaks down the science of design thinking and how any professional can benefit from it.

‍

How can a $1 horse be sold for a hundred bucks? Pretty easy, there are multiple ways to weave a narrative around your product or service which can set you apart from the crowd. Anh Nguyen, subscription marketing lead at YouTube APAC, shares her valuable insight into the secret to good storytelling for any product or brand. Storytelling is a crucial skill to master for any startup as it helps to inspire potential hires, customers and investors - to believe in your brand. The aim is to cut through the noise and communicate succinctly but effectively. Inspirational stories form the bedrock of effective communication, and they help to convey the sheer passion and drive behind incredible ideas.

‍

After months of preparation, the first Antler cohort is finally in full force in Singapore. It has been an intensive 120 hours as we introduced our 62 founders to the program, each other, and ran through key topics and exercises that broke down barriers in getting to know each other. These sessions were formatted with the intention of bringing out different personalities and working styles, through a range of high and low pressure settings. There was a variety of light-hearted icebreaker sessions to intensive product building hackathons. Lots of laughter, chatter and hard work ensued. Here, we've put together a little roundup of our first-ever week!

‍

"Try to make every lunch lead to a meeting with two new strangers" Lisa Enckell is a partner at Antler leading Marketing and PR. She shares how marketing for startups can be a challenge, but used right, the restrictions can be turned into a blessing.

‍

Finding and recruiting talented co-workers is one of the hardest tasks as a founder. Antler's head of recruiting, Prerna Sharma, hired hundreds of people to Uber's Southeast Asia operations, and at other companies like Flow Traders, a Dutch proprietary trading firm which has the same hiring values as any growing startup. She has several years of experience in recruiting talent for startups. Here, she lists the crucial prerequisites you need to consider before building your team.

‍

Jordan Dea-Mattson is a 35 year veteran of high tech, having worked at Apple, Adobe Systems, Yahoo and a number of Silicon Valley startups. He is now site director for Indeed.com's Singapore Engineering Centre, and recently he joined our Happy Hour to share some valuable advice with the Antler founders.

‍

We are all familiar with the startup worlds of Berlin, Stockholm and Silicon Valley, but where do we look for Asia's startup hub? You might want to switch your gaze away from the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Russia. Southeast Asia could be your much-overlooked getaway into Asia, and here are some reasons why.

‍