Profile: Venturra Partners' Stefan Jung

It was 2011, and Rocket Internet, the Berlin-based start-up incubator founded by brothers Oliver, Marc and Alexander Samwer, wanted to take its business global. The firm had made its name by bringing internet business models from other markets to Europe where it could enjoy a first-mover advantage, and wanted to replicate that success in emerging economies worldwide.

Stefan Jung, a business partner of Oliver Samwer’s and like many of Rocket’s early start-up founders a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group, was among the first leaders of the firm’s India expansion. But the owners had bigger plans for him: soon after Rocket’s India launch, Oliver asked Jung to move up to international managing director, and gave him his choice of territories. For Jung the decision was easy.

“It was the combination of a massive market of close to 700 million people, with being able to build the leading players in the field, that made me the most attracted to Southeast Asia,” he remembers. “While Brazil and India were probably more developed, you could see that Southeast Asia would become the next big thing.”

Now, having spent more than five years at the heart of Southeast Asia’s booming tech start-up scene, first with Rocket and then as a co-founder of two venture capital firms, Jung is more confident than ever that he made the right decision. He believes he can continue to play a leading role in the region as its entrepreneurial culture develops in the years ahead.

Young, gifted and hungry

While Southeast Asia’s growing population played a major role in Jung’s desire to set up shop there, the demographic opportunity he saw was not only a matter of bodies. The region was overwhelmingly young, with a median age of just 28 in Indonesia at the time, and also on an increasingly even footing with the Western world through the advent of smart phones and the mobile internet.

A young and tech-savvy population was likely to be a good market for the e-commerce ventures in which Rocket excelled, and which were to that point largely absent in the region. But Jung believed there was another advantage to the picture the numbers painted. These people, who knew of the success enjoyed by the likes of Amazon and eBay in the US, were likely impatient for an opportunity to cast themselves in the same story – which Rocket could give them.

“I think we were quite successful in recruiting people because we had a clearly defined profile of people that we were looking at to start these companies,” says Jung. “It was a very specific profile of people that had been academic outperformers, and extremely disciplined and hardworking, and at some point they had had the ambition to start their own company and be an entrepreneur.”

Jung pitched this crowd on the benefits that Rocket could provide: immediate connections to a global network of start-up founders whose experience and advice they could draw on, along with financial and managerial support from Rocket to smooth over the initial bumps of starting a company.

From this talent pool Rocket drew the first crop of managers for its Southeast Asia start-ups, most notably online fashion retailer Zalora and e-commerce platform Lazada. Despite the two companies’ recent stumbles, Jung looks back at their early history as a critical period for building acceptance in the region of both technology-based business models and an entrepreneurial risk-taking spirit.

“If you just take Indonesia, where I spent the most time, for a lot of the initial founders at Zalora and Lazada, their next start-up after that became massively successful,” he says, citing Go-Jek founder Nadiem Makarim and MatahariMall CEO Hadi Wenas, both of whom formerly occupied senior roles at Zalora, as examples of Rocket success stories. “So I think it was a great entrepreneur school in a way, and that pitch and how we recruited people worked out really well for them as well.”

But as Rocket was taking off, Jung had started to look for an exit. Though he was grateful for the opportunity that the company had given him to help build a new ecosystem, he was also beginning to recognize that his talents could be put to better use in a different part of this ecosystem.

Taking the plunge

Global Founders Capital (GFC) was the seed that would grow into Jung’s next career as a VC investor. The Samwer brothers had founded the firm in 2012 to invest in early-stage start-ups worldwide, and Jung had come on board to help source investments in Southeast Asia. It was while pursuing the dual role as company founder for Rocket and investor for GFC that Jung decided to fully commit to the investing world.

“There are better CEOs than I am, and I’m just much more interested in the intellectual exercise and understanding new trends in technology and what are really great investment opportunities,” he explains. “So my personal passion and skill level is a much better fit for VC than for the operating side.”

After this realization Jung could have stayed in the Samwers’ orbit by moving over to GFC full-time. Instead, he decided to take the entrepreneurial plunge himself and found his own firm. To that end he began to look for the right group of partners for the new venture.

Despite his years with Rocket and GFC and his understanding of technology, Jung recognized that he was still a relative novice in Southeast Asia and as a VC investor. To complement his outsider’s perspective he sought co-founders who shared his investment philosophy but could provide a deeper insights into the local market. Interwoven founder Peng T. Ong and Kuo-Yi Lim, former CEO of Singapore-based VC firm Infocomm Investments, provided the right combination, and the three set up Monk’s Hill Ventures in 2014.

With Monk’s Hill up and running Jung now had his place in Southeast Asia’s venture community. But even as the new firm lined up investments including logistics start-up Ninja Van and online real estate marketplace Zipmatch, a new opportunity was on its way from an unexpected source.

Jung’s latest move came at the invitation of John Riady, director of Indonesia-based Lippo Group, whom he had known for some time. In 2015 Riady and Lippo Digital Ventures (LDV) managing partner Rudy Ramawy asked Jung to join them in founding Venturra Partners, a new VC firm with a $150 million debut fund and LDV’s entire portfolio of Southeast Asian technology start-ups.

Though it would mean leaving Monk’s Hill, Jung saw the new firm as an opening he couldn’t pass up. Taking over LDV’s portfolio meant the firm would have a ready-made network with which to connect founders, while the Lippo Group, the fund’s largest LP, could provide additional support.

“I was extremely excited about working with them, because when you build a new firm it’s like starting a company – you work day and night together. So you should really be excited to spend every day with those people,” says Jung. “And with John, Rudy, and now Tee [Plern Suraphongchai, a former director at Ardent Capital who joined Venturra last year], it’s just a perfect match.”

Among Venturra’s four managing partners, Jung sees himself as a valuable counsel for start-up founders thanks to his experience globally and as a local leader for Rocket. For instance, Rocket has always emphasized the importance of data collection and meeting metrics among its start-ups, and Jung makes the effort to impress this upon founders of Venturra-backed start-ups as well.

The next generation

But Jung is clear that his role is not to be a supervisor of entrepreneurs, as at Rocket, where founders often have little real authority in the running of a business. He believes that start-ups are well served by VC backers who will guide and warn them, but must ultimately be allowed to make decisions on their own.

“I want to give feedback and ideas to entrepreneurs, but ultimately they build the business and I’m on the sidelines,” says Jung. “The benefit that we have as investors is that we see so many data points and so many patterns across different industries, so I can say, ‘I see something in a portfolio company in the healthcare business which is actually a very good parallel to something that we’re seeing in financial services. Have you thought about that?’”

Jung has been in Southeast Asia long enough to see some of his early investments become regional leaders, such as flight booking service Traveloka, the first investment by GFC in 2013 and now one of Indonesia’s tech unicorns. But in his view the community is just getting started. The start-ups that Venturra has backed, including Thailand’s online fashion retailer Zilingo and Singapore-based online car marketplace Carro, have the potential to be even bigger than the region’s first batch.         

“I hope I can find companies extremely early, when nobody knows about the founders. These are companies that are probably not major household names, even in the investment circle today, but that I think in two or three years will be massively big companies,” says Jung. “I’m pretty excited and pretty clear that I think they will be successful in the future.” 

• Tweet  
• Facebook  
• LinkedIn  
• Google plus  
• Save this article  
• Send to  

• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Venture
• GPs
• Venturra Partners