Huiting Koh: Solo General Partner (GP) Experience, Gen Z vs. Generation Alpha & Blueprint's Distinctive Strategy - E46

Huiting Koh, Founding Managing Partner of Blueprint Ventures, and Jeremy Au discussed:

1. Solo General Partner (GP) Experience: Huiting discussed her journey as a solo GP, emphasizing the complexities of establishing Blueprint, her venture fund. She shared insights into the initial setup, overcoming challenges, and the decision-making processes involved. She also highlighted the critical learning curve she navigated, making strategic choices without complete information and trusting her instincts.

2. Gen Z vs. Generation Alpha: They analyzed evolving consumer behaviors and expectations, especially how these demographics are shaping consumer technology. They also underlined how the youngest cohorts are accustomed to artificial intelligence and digital interfaces from an early age. This also differs by country within Southeast Asia, for example, the unexpected discovery that the majority of users for an English learning platform in Vietnam were women (rather than men) across all job levels, with distinct referral patterns,

3. Blueprint's Distinctive Strategy: Huiting articulated what sets Blueprint apart: consumer-focused investment mandate, targeted Asa verticals, and robust consumer behavioral analysis. She elaborated on the fund’s approach to creating value by placing human-centric insights at the forefront of investment decisions while aiming for substantial social impact alongside financial returns. Huiting illustrated how to find sticky and impactful solutions across multiple markets.

Jeremy and Huiting also talked about the influence of digital technologies on cognitive and social skills among children, the evolving definition of digital natives, and the importance of understanding gender-specific consumer behaviors.

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(01:47) Jeremy Au:

Hey, Huiting.

(01:48) Huiting Koh:

Hi!

(01:49) Jeremy Au:

Well, I'm excited to have you back again on the show. I think you've been doing some amazing career stuff where you've been launching a new fund. I believe you're the first female solo GP in Southeast Asia, or obviously if you're out there and you want to correct me, please feel free to send me an angry tweet. But you know, it's cool. You're building consumer, which is now pretty hot. So I just figured like, hey, we got to go and chit chat and swap notes.

(02:08) Huiting Koh:

Yeah, thank you for having me back again. Looking forward to our chat.

(02:12) Jeremy Au:

So, Huiting, just want to share, like, tell me what's been new in your life over the past few years.

(02:16) Huiting Koh:

We chatted last year, I think. And that was, I was just about to set up Blueprint. So that's done now. We did our first close. We've started deploying. Basically, my entire life has been Blueprint for the last one and a half years. But it's been really fun. I think it's been a really good learning experience. I think, 2023 was a year of leveling up, let's just put it that way, but, 2024 has been interesting. We did our first close at the end of 2023. So 2024 has been really focused on deployment from our first close. We really wanted to make sure that people understood what does a Blueprint company look like and I think we've done pretty well. So we've got three portfolios now actively pursuing another three or four, for the rest of the year. So I told the team, okay, let's stop looking because our investment pace is quite fast already. So as you can tell, this is my entire life, which is why I'm talking about it.

(03:07) Jeremy Au:

So you said like last year, it was a year of leveling up. So what do you mean by leveling up?

(03:11) Huiting Koh:

Oh my gosh. I mean, starting Blueprint, actually deciding to start Blueprint and then going about all of the things that you need to do to set up a fund. And all of that's just that, all of that was new to me, like talking to the lawyers, like all of the steps that need to be done, all of the different things that needed to be done.

We set it up as a VCC. So that was different from how I set up a previous fund. so it was just a lot of learning and a lot of like, being comfortable with what you don't know, but still taking a step anyway, because unless you set up a fund before when you set up a fund, you have no idea what you're doing and you're like I hope this is the right decision, but you only realize what the decision is the right one later, like I hope I can trust this person. And then after a while, you're like, okay, I think I can trust this person So that's what I mean by a lot of leveling up. You have to make these decisions before you really truly know everything, but you have to make the decision anyway.

(04:00) Jeremy Au:

Oh, I mean, how do you go about those decisions?

(04:03) Huiting Koh:

Man, I think a lot of it is trust your gut. Talk to a lot of people, trust your gut, I'm naturally a person who finds it hard to trust, so, I want a lot of information before I actually take a step, but I think just the act of setting something up requires a lot of faith. So you have to take a step, at least in my experience, I had to take a step before I actually felt the full force of my own conviction about the step that I was taking.I don't know w if that makes sense but it was more like with every step you take, your own conviction about what you want to do grows, but if you wait for that conviction to come before you take that step, it will never come.

(04:40) Jeremy Au:

Right.

(04:41) Huiting Koh:

Yeah, so I guess that was the biggest, biggest growth learning for me and the scariest.

(04:46) Jeremy Au:

What were some of those decisions that felt like you needed like a lot of hump to get over?

(04:50) Huiting Koh:

I mean, one was like partnering up with our fund manager, because they provide our license. I was introduced to them by a friend, but it was one reference. They were new in the market. I was like, I'm not sure how they work. I'm not sure, like there's absolutely no framework to determine whether you should trust what you should ask, what are you not asking, what do you not know, what you don't know that you don't know, right? If you know what you don't know, you can ask the question, but you don't know what you don't know. You're like, I'm walking through pea soup. So a lot of it is, for me anyway, maybe it's just like my inability to do research. Maybe it's just I'm a poor market researcher. I don't know.

(05:26) Jeremy Au:

How can you be a poor market researcher?

(05:28) Huiting Koh:

I don't know.

(05:29) Jeremy Au:

That's what you used to do.

(05:30) Huiting Koh:

No, I had a team that would do that, but you know, it's when you don't know what you don't know, you don't know what to ask to help illuminate what you don't know. And a lot of the decisions that had to be made had to be made before you verify whether this person can be trusted, whether this decision is the right thing to do, whether this is the right partnership that you want to take, all of those things. And I think these are things that you have to make in faith and then over time it proves itself as to whether it's a good decision or not. And I think the only sustaining thing for me at that point, cause it felt very scary, to me anyway, was look, if I made a wrong decision, I think I can still reverse that decision later. It might be very difficult. It may be very challenging, but nothing is impossible. So that was the only thing that I kept reminding myself of, at least as I was in the process of setting up the legal structure for Blueprint. But once that was set up and once that was done, it was very easy, smooth sailing. Smoother sailing.

(06:24) Jeremy Au:

And so obviously, we're talking about some of the structured decisions of setting up the fund.

What has been the social reaction to it, because you're a solo GP, which is, I think, relatively rare? You're also doing this as a consumer. And then, we were discussing that you are the first female one to do so in Southeast Asia. So I'm just kind of curious, what's the, read, are the people are like, wow, that's amazing. Or are the people are like, oh no, that's so scary. What's the spectrum that you see?

(06:45) Huiting Koh:

So, certainly for the first people that I spoke to, and these tend to be all my first close LPs, they were like, "This is great. We're going to support you." And I think they're obviously supporting me. They're supporting the thesis, what we're trying to do. but what was surprising, after the initial wave of interest, was that I started getting a lot of, especially from females, the minute I said I was a solo GP, they'd be like, you definitely cannot do this by yourself with so much conviction. And I was like, wow, I thought that at least from the female community, I would be getting, no, I'm not saying everybody said this. There were a lot of other females in equal numbers that probably were like, "You're so brave," Girls that would come up to me and, "I really want to be you when I grow up and I'm like, you can, you can just start now, but don't be so crazy." I would say, don't be as crazy as me, because it's hard. But then there were a few females that I was a little taken aback by, by their very strong conviction that if you are a solo founder and you're a female, you definitely cannot do it. And I don't know whether that had anything to do with the fact that I was female, but I find it hard to imagine that they would say that to a solo male founder with that much conviction. So that was a little surprising and maybe a little bit disappointing, but to be fair, most of the women that I've spoken to have been very positive. They have been very, very supportive. They've been, very encouraging. So that's a good thing. And I think, as a female founder, it opens up what I realized a different community of female investors and people who want to invest, but are maybe on the fence because they want to invest with their heart, let's say. They want to invest where they feel comfortable. And I think it's definitely easier, and maybe for them, it's easier for them to feel comfortable with a female investor than it is with a male investor. I'm not sure if that's, if gender had anything to do with it, but sometimes they'll tell me, they will say things that imply.

(08:31) Jeremy Au:

I think it's a combination of those different things because you're a founder, you're building in Southeast Asia, you're a GP and investor. I'm just kind of curious, identity wise, do you feel like more of a founder? Do you feel more like a GP investor? Do you feel more like a consumer person?

(08:45) Huiting Koh:

I feel more like a founder who gets to invest. So I definitely identify as a founder that gets to invest in other founders, because people that I speak to, the potential LPs, they view me as a founder. They view me as a founder who is also a GP. And they're looking to me to make better decisions than them about investing in consumers in Southeast Asia. And so, it's just, that what I do is different than another founder, but I'm still a founder. I still have to go out and find money. I still have to figure out how do I want to set team culture for the team. I still have to figure out what is the long-term vision for the firm. It's very important, in order to attract money, that we position ourselves as a firm versus a fund, which implies a tourist venture capital money.

(09:29) Jeremy Au:

What we're venture capital money from your perspective?

(09:32) Huiting Koh:

We come in for like five years, invest in venture capital for five years, and then, Oh, okay. Decide that we cannot do it or we want to do something else, dip in and out, you know, towards tourist venture capital.

(09:43) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. I get you. I think what's interesting is that you made a bunch of decisions along the way, which is, you also made a decision to do consumer right? And you're trying to make better decisions that other people would do on consumers in Southeast Asia. So, obviously that's a strategy in terms of both products and platforms. What do you think about that?

(10:00) Huiting Koh:

So the way, so we're not trying to, we're trying to show that, when you're making investments into consumer, it should start with the consumer. So what we're actually really trying to do is put the human being back at the center of investment decisions. And that human being is really the end consumer of, let's say the companies whose end products or services that they use. And what I mean by that, is that when we do that, it changes our methodology of how we go about looking for these companies because we want to start first from the human being.

And so we look and we use a lot of market research and consumer insights, and we start with consumer behavior. We start with consumer psyche. We start with understanding how do people think? What do they want for their lives? And therefore, what are some of the current constraints in the markets that they live in, whether it's structural, developmental, and how have they adapted to those constraints? Or maybe another way of thinking of constraint is the lack of fill in the blank because I think when you start with human behavior and you start with understanding cultural nuances, the values that people have, you start to really understand where you can play or what niche there is in their life, where if you find a solution for that, it will be a very sticky solution. And so that's what we are looking for because we want a multi market solution, that can spend geographies that can span cultures and span languages. And the only way to do that is, is you start with a human insight or what I would call consumer insight, but the only way to get consumer insight, a true consumer insight is to start by understanding human behavior, start having conversations with your target consumers.

So for us, our target consumers, we've got two, we've got women, because they're becoming a much more formidable economy of consumption. And then we've got the youth economy. And by youth, we are referring to millennial, Gen Z, Gen Alpha. Now, you've probably seen a lot of research in a lot of articles that talk about how Gen Z is changing how people consume, changing or influencing what people want to consume. And it's true because of their values. So if you don't understand consumption values of your target consumer, it's very difficult to deliver something that is going to truly be sticky in the long run. Now, if we bring that back to business, everybody, I think wants to invest in a sticky business because a sticky business essentially means that, you don't have to pay so much to get your revenue. That doesn't mean you don't have to spend money on marketing. You obviously do. But your loyalty, your organic brand value to the consumer is going to be naturally higher than someone else that has to pay to get the consumer to buy. And so that's how we start.

Our methodology really starts with a lot of market research, consumer insights, and then from there we identify macro themes that are relevant to our consumer, the consumers that we're targeting and then we hunt for companies within that space and yeah, so that's how we, that's how we do things.

(12:45) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. No, you mentioned Generation Z and Generation Alpha. And so, you know, I think we've obviously heard a lot of Generation Z, but I'm just kind of curious a little bit, peeking into the future here, right? So what would you say is the difference between Generation Z and Generation Alpha?

(12:58) Huiting Koh:

Let's just say Gen Z, Gen Alpha definitely is the first digital generation. Gen Z, youngest Gen Z today 27? Is that right? So they probably grew up with a mix of screens and physical books, let's just say. But Gen Alpha, which is probably your kid's age, also my nieces and my nephews. To get them to read a book, it's like weird for them. If you've never inculcated the habit of you should read a book, they're the first generation to go up to the TV screen and try and swipe the TV screen, because their first interaction with a screen was very, very young and it was with the smartphone.

(13:30) Jeremy Au:

We're all getting old as millennials.

(13:32) Huiting Koh:

I think oldest Gen Alpha now is 12.

(13:35) Jeremy Au:

Yeah.

(13:36) Huiting Koh:

So from 13 to 27 is probably Gen Z. Yeah.

(13:39) Jeremy Au:

Right.

(13:40) Huiting Koh:

Yeah.

(13:40) Jeremy Au:

I think I agree with you. I mean, I see my kids and they'd love to try to swipe TVs. They learn how to say, Hey, Google. Hey, Siri.

(13:46) Huiting Koh:

Yeah. I mean, I've seen kids where they try to swipe the book, and they're like, they swipe the page of the book and they're like, why can't I swipe the page of the book?

(13:53) Jeremy Au:

And those are growing up a lot of these YouTube channels. I think Coco Melon and Peppa Pig. So kind of global YouTube instead of like, in the past it used be like cartoons. I grew up watching cartoons on TV

(14:04) Huiting Koh:

Yeah. I mean, I think what's different, and I was talking to a parent about this the other day, is that, Gen Alpha to Z, grew up, they're growing up without really having to use so much of their imagination.

Remember when we were growing up, there was no smart smartphone. There was very little TV. There was probably only channel five, right? There was no Netflix. And so if you were bored, you would, I mean, my sisters and I, when we were bored, we put on costumes and role play at home but I was talking to a friend the other day and she was saying that she has to carve out imaginary play time for her kids to force them to use their imagination. And it's interesting because it's a generation where they don't need to use their brain so much because they're surrounded by devices that are so interactive and it doesn't actually require their minds to take that proactive role to role play or imagine something. And I think even the same for, if you think about Disney classics, when we were growing up, the Disney classics were 2D cartoons, right? And I remember the first time I saw a 3D adaptation of one of the Disney films, I was like, wow, this is amazing. But now Gen Alpha is growing up with like real life adaptation of Cinderella, real life adaptation of Snow White, where you see real characters.

(15:17) Jeremy Au:

Right?

(15:17) Huiting Koh:

So I think it's very different. And it's interesting because I was talking to a founder the other day, who said that as a result, and he noticed this in his own kids, as a result of this generation where you're surrounded by a lot more screens, your parents are also, a lot more busy because now you have, two working parents versus one what he's noticing and what he noticed in his kids is that a lot of the kids are experiencing an increase in speech delay because they, one, don't need to imagine or talk so much at an early age, because they're being fed so much information and entertainment through this interactiveness that's happening around them now and so he was trying to solve for how do we combat this increasing number of speech delay in kids, given the progression into a much more digitally enabled society.

(16:03) Jeremy Au:

Yeah.

(16:03) Huiting Koh:

Yeah. So I thought that was percent right. Yeah. I was chatting with my old professor mentor, and he was saying that, he noticed that there were a bunch of people who went through high school during COVID. And so it was all digital learning.

(16:13) Jeremy Au:

And so when real life resumed at in person at the university, these people graduated and the university was teaching them. And he realized that all of them were very stilted or stunted, socialization wise, because they've spent so much time at home. Yeah. And so they kind of didn't, or had to relearn as a freshman or sophomore, the social norms of hanging out with people or talking to a quasi-authority figure like a professor because it is, did everything remotely, and I thought it was just fascinating because he's saying that now a bit more time has passed. So, that spike of weird people readjusting to real life in person is going away. And I kind of laugh about it, but now I'm like, there's a slow motion version of that happening for Generation Alpha, which is, it starts from the age of zero to ten, right?

(16:56) Huiting Koh:

Yeah.

(16:57) Jeremy Au:

What's the consumer product for this then? Is it like AI companions? I just read Replica CEO saying that we should marry our AI avatars. And I was like, man, human civilization is so cooked because, there's a lot of lonely guys out there.

(17:09) Huiting Koh:

Mean, yeah.

(17:10) Jeremy Au:

No-brainer product.

(17:11) Huiting Koh:

Did you, see that article about the Japanese guy who married his doll girlfriend, but AI enabled? Oh, AI companion, basically, doll girlfriend.

(17:19) Jeremy Au:

I hink they already were marrying people who were not AI-enabled. Is

(17:23) Huiting Koh:

Yeah, they're marrying like the holographs. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is just,

(17:26) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, they've been doing that. This is the latest, exactly. And I think the issue is like, exactly, you're right. Yeah, more and more of it's happening.

(17:31) Huiting Koh:

I don't know. This conversation with my friend yesterday, who has kids, changed my mind. Initially, if I hadn't had this conversation with her, I would have said, yeah, maybe an AI Companion for kids who can interact with the kids is a good thing but the more I think about what she said, the more I think about the importance of parents actually don't want their kids to be spoon fed entertainment.

I think part of the reason for this generation being at least in this speech delay, their department is that they've been spoon-fed a lot of entertainment. They've not had to spend a lot of time entertaining themselves. And I think that must impact the plasticity of the brain somehow. so I don't know. I'm not a parent, so I don't know. And I'm not a child psychologist. We should definitely go and talk to a child psychologist about this but I mean, that's part of our DD because we've been looking at this company that does AI enablement for toys but yeah, it's definitely an interesting, interesting area to consider. Are we aiding or helping or, negatively impacting society if we continue investing in this type of AI?

(18:32) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. there's obviously techno-optimism and I think being a VC is about investing in that future.

(18:37) Huiting Koh:

Yeah. Or investing in the human being.

(18:39) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, that's true. And I think it's interesting because you've been building out, obviously this fund and you've been a founder and you have to build out the investment process and a thesis like, what are the granular or technical stuff that you discovered or learned along the way about building this fund?

(18:54) Huiting Koh:

I try not to remind myself of all the granular technical details cause that can really get you into the weeds and that can get very not fun especially when things don't go your way. So I think what sustains me and what keeps me going is the promise of what this could look like in the future, right? What we're trying to do? Who are we actually trying to empower? Whose lives are we actually trying to change? And how can we do that in the most efficient, affordable way that reaches the most number of people, because I think at the end of the day, that's what venture should be venture, shouldn't just be about, we invest in the most, in the best edge technology that's going to make us the most money. Sure, it will make you the most money, but if it's only going to positively impact 1% of the people's lives, then have you really moved the needle? I would say probably not. Now, my view is definitely, it comes from the fact that I used to be at Unilever and at Unilever, it's about reaching as many people and impacting as impacting as many lives as possible. positively impacting as many lives as possible. And how you do that. That's the sauce. That's the magic sauce.

Like how you do that, you go and find that out and so I think, and that's part of the reason why I like building a Blueprint because I get to define how do we want to position ourselves in the world of venture that's slightly different, maybe from other funds. How do we want to define our own culture that really helps us live these values so that when people talk to us, they understand, Hey, we're not here to just invest in the, we're not, there was definitely not the fun to say, we're going to invest in a hundred X type of company. If we can do, if half of our companies or all of our companies do anywhere between 10 to 20X, we're good with that because then we're looking at what is the actual societal impact of either the product or the technology service that we've invested in? How many of those people have actually benefited? How many SMEs has benefited? How many women have we enabled into employment? How many women have we enabled into, economic empowerment?

And not just women, but men, like how many, like we have a company in Vietnam that teaches English to working professionals and what was interesting about that is that we thought it was going to be primarily men because we thought the majority of men are in the workforce, but actually, when we looked at it, it was actually majority women who are users of this English language learning program, and not just junior women. And so we thought, I thought it was going to be mostly junior women. I was like, these are the young millennials that the first time jobbers in there. They all want to get ahead and learn English but actually it was women from the most junior role to the most senior role. All across the board, majority of those consumers were female. And so I thought that was really interesting. And I was like, and I had to check my own bias. I had to be like, wow, why did you think that it was going to be mostly men? And so that was an interesting learning for me, where I was like, wow, even I, as a woman thought that most of these consumers were going to be men but the minute you understand that, and for this company, we could deploy different marketing strategies to actually bring on new consumers, because now you understand that most of the women, most of your consumers are women.

And if you understand how women share things, you can deploy different marketing strategies. So we were in a board meeting, 50% men. men, 50 percent women in the boardroom, because there was some of the, company's team in the boardroom as well. And so I asked, I was like, I asked the women, I was like, when you find something good, do you share it immediately with your friends? And do you try and bring your friends on so that they can do it with you? And they said, yes, of course. And I asked the guys, when you find something good, will you share this with all your guy friends? They were like, only if it's been successful for, you know, So then it's interesting.

And then, so I was like, okay, so if we market to women, we probably get more women within the first one month or two months of an eight month course. You market only to men, you probably get new men at the end of the eight month course, because men only share a good thing after they themselves have proven it to be good for them. So I thought that was kind of interesting. And these are just insights that if you take, and I hate to say this, but if you take gender into consideration, you might get very different insights for how you want to deploy different business strategies, to actually help grow your business.

(22:45) Jeremy Au:

Wow. Incredible. On that note, I'd love to summarize the three big takeaways from this conversation. First of all, thanks so much for sharing about what's it like to be a solo GP, to build a company and fund and really share about some of those actions.

Secondly, thanks for sharing about, Generation Alpha versus Generation Z. I think that's interesting just to talk about the future both from a consumer perspective, but also from a technology as well as a VC perspective about what their future is.

And lastly, thanks so much for sharing about the differentiation of Blueprint, about what makes the team and fund different, in terms of the exit strategy, in terms of the consumer verticals that you're going after, in terms of your methodology, and in terms of making sure there are strong market insights as well.

On that note, thank you so much for sharing.

(23:25) Huiting Koh:

No problem. Thank you for having me.