For the second episode, I speak to Chia Jeng Yang and Maansi Vohra.
Chia is a Principal at Saison Capital, a leading FinTech-focused venture capital fund, who has done especially well in emerging markets like Southeast Asia and India. Their direct investments include Grab, Southeast Asia's largest startup and super-app, as well as ShopBack, Southeast Asia's largest shopping and cashback rewards platform. Their limited partner investments include some of the top- performing funds in Southeast Asia, like East Ventures and Beenext, as well as global funds like Quona Capital and Antler.
Previously he was the fifth employee for Antler, the leading global pre-team venture builder. He also both invested and launched markets for them in Europe. He was also at Rocket Internet where he helped build out an eCommerce company in Pakistan and Sri Lanka that was bought by Alibaba. His educational background includes a law undergraduate degree from Cambridge and will be doing his Harvard MBA in the future. He likes indie music, hiking and writes about venture capital
Maansi graduated from Brown University and began her career in New York, working in Citigroup's Technology Equity Capital Markets team.
Inspired by some of the businesses that she worked with, she moved to India to help build a new venture - The Wedding Brigade - a digital platform for Indian weddings. At The Wedding Brigade, as the Chief Business Officer, Maansi launched and scaled the e-commerce vertical, growing it by over 300% in 2 years, and worked in conjunction with the founder to raise over $3MM in pre-series A funding from both institutional and angel investors. Outside of work, she started a fun web-series called Tech & Tequila, where she and her co-host interviewed founders and funders on how to build and scale technology-enabled business in India.
She is currently working on the investments team at Lightbox, a consumer-focused venture capital fund based in Mumbai, where she spends her time speaking with founders, working with existing portfolio companies on any and all operating and financial projects, and reading (lots of reading!). Maansi plans to join the INSEAD MBA program in January 2022.