As he ran around the kitchen preparing yet another meal – it is clear that Covid-19 is liberating men like Hian Goh to find their inner celebrity chef, posting live videos of his cooking on social media – the co-founder of Openspace Ventures was also speaking about how this all-in-one crisis would remove all hesitation around some decisions.
For example, said the executive behind one of South-east Asia’s leading Venture Capital Funds, “society was hesitant in the belief that people can’t work from home. Women, however, were not hesitant and some businesses were very unaware of some of the challenges women in the workplace face, trying to balance work and home life. Well, guess what. Now all the high-powered male CEOs and senior menfolk are running around at home with vomiting kids.
“How does that change your psyche?”
Even for small companies like his, which has always offered the flexibility for staff to work from home and teams are equipped with collaborative tools, this compulsory remote-work period is making them address certain issues.
“There was always an underlying uncertainty that if you worked from home, whether you’d get as much done and now because of the fact that after four or five weeks, we’re all working from home and things still get done – that’s when the attitude changes.”
As such, at a recent partners meeting with its 24 team members, it asked for a show of hands around three scenarios.
“One is, I want to get back to normal, I want to go to work every day. The other one is, I don’t mind not even coming into the office and just work from home. And then the hybrid model, which is happy to work from the office as well as home. Many put their hands up for option 2 and 3. Some, however, insisted on returning back to work full time.
“Not unsurprisingly, I put up my hand for option one. Others who did that did that because they had kids and they need the space. I too don’t have space in the home – we have seven people under one roof here. If I had a bigger home and more private space, I would work remotely, well, not from home all the time but somewhere else.
“A lot of people were willing to embrace the hybrid model and others, with young kids, said due to the risk of exposure at this time, they’d prefer to continue to work remotely.
“So while prior to Covid-19, we always had the tools in place, I do think the situation has allowed us to finally push this agenda of being able to be a partially remote work organization.”
The crisis is also making what may have been unthinkable before, thinkable.
Commenting on the Circuit Breaker restrictions in Singapore, which will ease June 1 but will still see a lot of restrictions around socialising, Goh thinks the new normal means creating new productions and services.
This is when Goh thinks about scenarios such as “having Nespresso-like machines in our homes for testing viruses or in shopping malls, next to the photo booth” where we could do diagnostic testing.
“The technology is there. We never had an actual commercial need to do it. So it’s not an unsolvable problem if tomorrow, someone says, we are going to install 600 testing locations around Singapore to get proof of virus free health.
“It’s a function of how we get back on our feet. I read a very interesting article about during times of crisis, that all things that were previously unthinkable get rethought as possible. So why don’t we install a location tracking app on everybody’s mobile phone – before this, everybody would have said, no way; now it’s being done.”
As to whether it’s made his company think differently about how it deploys capital, Goh said, “I want to take the expected answer and say no. And because your question is very specific, I want to say, we have not changed the way we think because we always try to assess all risks. And Covid-19 is just another risk that you assess.”
On a practical level, he said, “any GMV-driven growth hacking business which spends a lot more money and says, don’t worry, profitability will come later, and then we just drive for billion dollar outcomes, well, that kind of stuff is definitely out of fashion.”
“When it comes to deploying capital, we are very insistent of having a very realistic and good entry point for us. We recommend entrepreneurs to always be optimistic about the chances and we feel our responsibility is to be a balancing force to them to some degree.”
He believes that if anything, this crisis has “reinforced our fundamental tenets”.
Openspace’s portfolio companies include families names such as Gojek, Chope and Love, Bonito and startups in the medtech area – Biofourmis and Halodoc. In travel, it is invested in Sweet Escape and oway and Goh, living up to his company’s name, is interested in exploring possibilities even at a time when travel has been decimated.
Referring to VCs such as Silver Lake and Apollo that have provided loans to companies such as Airbnb and Expedia Group, Goh said, they will benefit greatly when travel recovers.
“I think there will come a time when travel returns, there will definitely be changes in the industry, but it’s not like the whole industry will disappear. Companies may struggle, some may fail, but there are going to be ones that thrive and dominate after this episode. As a VC it would be a mistake not to start looking in the travel sector to find those opportunities.”
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