Profile: Openspace Ventures' Hian Goh

Hian Goh still remembers the day in 2001 that he decided to start his own company following a four-year stint as an investment banker. Explaining the decision to his family proved difficult – especially for his father, who had spent 30 years rising through the ranks at Shell and couldn’t believe his son seemed to be throwing away a chance for financial stability.

“I told him I was quitting banking, and he thought it was clearly a mistake,” Goh remembers. “He said, ‘Son, you sit in an office, looking at spreadsheets, and you make the same amount of money that I earned in my last year at Shell – don’t you know about mathematics?’”

Goh knew his father had a point, but he felt he needed to push his boundaries and overcome the conservatism ingrained in him through Singapore’s risk-averse climate. His journey has been marked with failures and successes, but he has also seen an entrepreneurial spirit flicker to life in Southeast Asia.

Goh believes the region’s next generation will be even more eager to take the leap that he did, with the existing success stories – including his own – showing that a founder’s life can bring rewards as well as risks. Now, as the co-founder of Openspace Ventures, Goh hopes to provide this rising crop of Southeast Asian entrepreneurs the financial support and expertise that he needed so badly in his early days.

“Middle-class Singaporeans don’t often become entrepreneurs, because there’s a much better chance of financial security if you study hard, go to a good university, and then become a lawyer, doctor, or accountant,” says Goh. “This is a path that was given to us by Lee Kwan Yew [Singapore’s first prime minister], who made it very clear over 40 years that it’s very bad to be an entrepreneur if you have that option.”

Well-trodden path

Goh’s early career stuck close to this familiar road. After graduating from Oxford with a law degree in 1997, he went to work for Salomon Smith Barney – first in the bank’s London base, then at its newly established Singapore office where he handled investment banking for the technology, media, and telecom (TMT) sector.

Even while preparing for a very conventional future, Goh became increasingly curious about those who chose to cut their own paths rather than spend their lives as employees. His guardian in London – an immigrant who managed three Chinese restaurants – was one inspiration, while the business owners he met in Singapore showed that it was possible for a regional company to take a leading role in a globally competitive industry.

“I was in a conference room with an entrepreneur who said, ‘I think I should buy this competitor in Silicon Valley,’” Goh says. “And I thought, ‘Wow – this is a Singapore-based tech company and he’s trying to buy companies in the Valley. Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?’ That was the real eye-opener.”

These encounters helped Goh learn to recognize the drive, confidence, and intensity that are needed in a successful entrepreneur, and before long he began to suspect he had the same qualities. Despite the doubts of his family and friends – and his own misgivings – he left the bank and launched his first company, Guangzhou-based call center operator RICC, in 2001.

The inspiration for RICC came during Goh’s time at Salomon, where he met the owner of a Singapore direct call advertising business targeting consumers in Hong Kong. Goh suspected that a call center in Guangzhou, where Cantonese was more widely spoken than in Singapore and residents had an intimate knowledge of Hong Kong culture through television, would have greater success. In addition, the emerging technology of voice over internet protocol (VOIP) could be used to cut down on the costs of international dialing.

Goh moved to Guangzhou and for nearly three years he worked on getting the business off the ground. But despite its use of technology, RICC was never profitable enough to grow, and Goh’s inexperience meant the company never raised the venture capital funding that might help it fight off incursions by larger rivals.

“We were the first in the telco services business to actually get a stable VOIP line from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, and that drastically changed the cost structure,” he says. “But then within 18 months the big players came in and set up 2,000-seat call centers with sophisticated technology, like auto-dialing. As a 150-seat manual caller we just got blown out of the water.”

After shuttering RICC in 2003, Goh returned to Singapore, wondering if he had made the right decision to walk away from investment banking and whether he could resume his old career. Seeking to refresh his skills he enrolled in an MBA course at INSEAD, where he discovered the opportunity that would lead to his next start-up.

Cooking on cable

The opening Goh identified this time was in cable TV, where providers in Southeast Asia were struggling to find content to fill their growing capacity. Inspired by a lifelong love of cooking, Goh partnered with his friend Maria Brown to launch Asia Food Channel (AFC) in 2005. 

They initially struggled to gain traction, but both founders were able to leverage their passion for food along with their knowledge of the media – Brown was a former journalist and presenter with the BBC, while Goh had dreamed of being a TV chef earlier in his life and carried his love of showmanship into the early days of the channel. While neither had run a TV studio or network before, they had a feeling for what a Southeast Asian audience would want to see.

Having learned from his earlier missteps at RICC, Goh was also focused on lining up external investors to support AFC as it tried to secure content from overseas and produce its own shows. The scope of the channel’s ambition turned out to be an asset; investors such as Vickers Venture Partners were much more willing to fuel the expansion of a regionwide TV network than to back a Hong Kong-focused call center.

“This time around the amount of capital we could raise was much bigger, because the idea was big,” says Goh. “If the idea isn’t big, most VCs just won’t invest – you hear that all the time from venture capitalists, and it’s the same way with us now at Openspace.”

AFC turned into a nine-year journey for Goh and Brown, who exited the company to Scripps Network Interactive in 2013. Following the sale, Goh found to his surprise that he had been anointed one of Southeast Asia’s leading entrepreneurs. Despite his earlier doubts, now Goh himself was one of the role models that rising founders looked to for inspiration.

The experience of building AFC prompted thoughts of another career move. Growing the channel had given him plenty of opportunities to interact with the region’s developing venture capital community, but these meetings were a constant source of frustration. The investors had the resources he and his team needed to move forward, but their backgrounds were so different it was hard to see eye to eye. 

“I felt that I could add more to the ecosystem than the current venture capitalists had. A lot of the other VCs were people with financial backgrounds who had never been entrepreneurs, so they didn’t have the same intuition about a lot of things that I did,” Goh says. “I spent 10 years running a company, backed by a VC investor and a private equity investor, and I had a different lens when it comes to doing this business.”

Seeing an opening for a VC firm that could provide much-needed Series A funding for Southeast Asia’s entrepreneurs, Goh tapped Shane Chesson, a former investment banker at Citigroup, as his partner. The two then turned to Indonesia’s Northstar Group in 2014 for a strategic partnership that would give their new firm credibility with institutional investors, along with inspiring its original name: Northstar Silicon Island, or NSI Ventures for short.

Partnering with Northstar was an important boost, giving it access to LPs and visibility in the market. NSI was even taken for a subsidiary of the PE firm occasionally, despite raising its $89 million debut vehicle entirely independently. Goh and Chesson found these rumors useful as they helped to bring goodwill from entrepreneurs.

Spirit of adventure

But when it came to raising Fund II, they decided the time had come to be clear about their firm’s identity with a name that would create distance between them and Northstar. The new brand, Openspace Ventures, would reflect the adventurous spirit that helped it become the first institutional investor in Indonesian ride-hailing platform Go-Jek and fueled a number of other bets on the region’s growing entrepreneurs.

“By that time three years in we knew who we were. We’re very open and transparent, so you always know where you stand,” Goh says. “More importantly, we wanted to embody within the firm the belief that you have to charge into new, open spaces.”

Having closed the fund at $135 million last year, Goh sees a long road ahead for Openspace, with more and more start-ups seeking capital and guidance from an experienced hand. For now, his biggest hope is that he and Chesson can build a platform that will continue to support Southeast Asia’s entrepreneurs long after they are gone.

“When Shane and I started the firm, we wanted to make it very clear: it’s not the Hian and Shane corporation, it’s not Kleiner Perkins or Andreessen Horowitz, it’s Openspace,” Goh says. “We are merely the founding partners of a thing that’s hopefully going to survive for many years, and I think LPs respect that.”   

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Early-stage
• Venture
• Technology
• GPs
• Openspace Ventures