Earlier this week, we drew commonalities across three companies we had partnered with in the past two years, Konvy, Surfin, and Dr Clear Aligners Group — specifically how these three were already building a track record of sustainable growth prior to their first venture investment.

We take another set of three companies today, and why, with the right background, starting a venture-backed company in today’s funding environment might be more boon than bane.

• Fluid, a platform offering flexible payment options for B2B companies
• Finmo, a next generation treasury operation system for global businesses
• And BroilerX, a provider of poultry farming inputs, outputs, and productivity solutions in Indonesia

What ties these companies together despite being in different industries is the quality of the founding and management teams that came together to start these companies in the past four years, signaling a maturing pool of entrepreneurial talent coming out of Southeast Asia:

(1) Founders able to translate their breadth and/or depth of experience into competitive advantages, with proven growth execution in prior leadership roles.

It is one thing to have been a tech exec in the resume or deep industry expertise, and another to take this experience and turn it into a competitive edge for the business.

Fluid co-founders Trasy, Steven, and Ruoyun take their combined experiences in BNPL, e-commerce, and lending to redefine the B2B payments journey for businesses, starting with buyer payments. In our call with CEO Trasy Lou Walsh, she talks about how it was important for their business, to bring Ruoyun as a CFO onto the team

Finmo’s founding team of seasoned payments and fintech executives put them in a position of insight when it comes to digitizing treasury management and build trust with customers and regulators for a solution that involves a significant amount of money movement across borders. In our call with CEO David Hanna, he talks about the significance of their leadership experience and portfolio of licenses across the region.

The BroilerX founders came from the industry, with a slant towards developing digital solutions. CEO Prastyo in particular has been involved with poultry businesses throughout his career, developing key relationships that are key to driving adoption of technology and new ways of operating in a traditional industry like Indonesian poultry.

(2) These founders may not the young upstart common in popular narratives, but they are still constantly learning.

At least for these three companies in our case study, while the founders no longer qualify for Forbes 30 under 30, they are not bogged down by their experience and developed perspectives. In fact, seeing what they have seen through the years has given them a more opportunistic perspective on innovation (knowing things can and have changed over the years).

In our call with David, he talks about the importance of continuously engaging with their primary users — treasurers and finance leaders — to regularly adapt their product development trajectory.

Trasy talks on our call about the things she has had to relearn about bringing their take on BNPL into B2B, in spite of the experience she had already built in the industry.

While BroilerX initially started with providing IoT and ERP solutions to poultry farmers, they continued to evolve their business to drive farmer productivity in other ways, like owned input sales and flexible payments on outputs. This expansion across the value chain has allowed them to better position their company to sustainable tackle the US$45B poultry market (today in 20 cities and partnered with more than 2800 farmers)

(3) These founders are likely to have reduced bias from the hype cycle, and able to grow from more stable footing (i.e., realistic expectations on growth).

“No where else to go but up” the saying goes. In some ways, this applies to startup founders and management teams that are learning the demands of company building in a harsh funding environment from the get go.

In partnering with these founders we have seen how they have taken a more pragmatic approach to growth, especially in terms of prioritizing resource allocation around what new products or business lines to open up. Both Trasy and David talk about their prioritization approaches in our podcasts with them.

While these observations are limited to the three companies in this case study, the emergence of founders and leaders with such qualities are important to Southeast Asia’s maturing startup ecosystems.

While pop culture has promulgated narratives of the young outsider founder, there is value in supporting the transition of ambitious seasoned executives into venture building, as startup CXOs if not founders.

If you are interested in learning how we are supporting these transitions for professionals, reach out to Insignia Ventures Academy head of programs Jiaway Koh to talk about the “StartCXO” program.

If you’re interested in any of the three companies mentioned here, check them out:

• Fluid was recently in this year’s Slingshot Top 50 and CEO Trasy Lou Walsh is in this year’s 100 Women Founders to Watch by Founders Forum
• Finmo will be exhibiting at this year’s Singapore Fintech Festival
• BroilerX is hiring!