I am a partner at Golden Gate Ventures in Singapore. Golden Gate Ventures is an early-stage VC firm in Southeast Asia with over 25 investments to date. Golden Gate Ventures invests in internet & mobile startups regardless of sector: ecommerce to payments, mobile applications to SaaS platforms. Companies include online grocer RedMart.com, mobile payments platform Coda Payments, and webbased developer software Nitrous.io. Golden Gate Ventures has been ranked as a global Top 50 startup investor by Mattermark comparing over 300 incubators, accelerators, and VC firms based on web traffic, mobile downloads, employee count, and social media reach.

Venture capital has showed and continues to show strong growth in South East Asia and has driven much of the increase in deal count in recent quarters of 2015. It helped push capital invested in South East Asia to US$3.7 billion.

A New Day. You can start a new day whenever you want. The middle of the day could be your start of the new day or in my case 4am in the morning as I go out to cycle before the Singapore heat starts to kick in. Today is a New Day for me because I have revamped my newsletter using Revue and I am personalizing the content a bit more. Besides sharing what’s happening on the M&A side of venture, I also want to share more personal experiences from my day to day job.

http://digests.michaellints.com/issues/michael-h-lints-a-new-day-55627

The distinction between eCommerce and traditional commerce is becoming less obvious. eCommerce players open brick and mortar stores to market their brand, and traditional retailers look to acquire tech startups for their experience, knowledge and sometimes their brand. The horror stories of US retailers closing stores and not keeping up with innovation (see articles) are plentiful. Is there a similar trend in South East Asia? If we look at China (often called the future of shopping), 19.6% of the shoppers buys online (globally it’s 7.1%, measured in 2015). Interestingly enough South East Asia heads up the leaderboard when it comes to online shoppers that buy through social media (Thailand and Malaysia are respectively n0. 1 and 3 with 51% and 31%). These numbers are something for brick and mortar retailers to think about.

http://digests.michaellints.com/issues/michael-h-lints-brick-and-mortar-battles-55874

Quit social media your career may depend on it

This article explains the effect of using social media in relation to your professional career.

Good investors are guided by patterns not by trends

This blog post is written by Justin Hall, Principal at Golden Gate Ventures. Justin's blogs have been picked up as essential reads by all major tech blogs in South East Asia.

A Harvard philosopher’s argument for not loving yourself just as you are
The importance of loving yourself is a common catchphrase among feel-good gurus and the subject of countless self-help books.But Harvard University’s Michael Puett argues that loving yourself—and all your flaws—can actually be quite harmful (original article on @QZ.com