Startup95 Bringing Myanmar's Startups to The World

Building Markets, a non-profit helping local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), have launched a new open-source database on startup investment deals done by both angel and venture funds throughout Mekong region. It is accessible through Mekong Angels site http://www.mekongangels.info/.

The databases is compiled from a variety of sources: published funding reports, interviews with parties involved, direct verification process by both startups and investors and a final survey. The database documents 128 deals done in Myanmar, Lao PDR, Cambodia and Vietnam. The total amount of investment listed totals to nearly USD $4 million.

While commenting on the project, Loring Harkness, lead researcher for the Mekong Angels project, lets us know the importance and value of Mekong Angels:

“Mekong Angels is the first time this information has been collected and shared with the public. Now startup founders can use local information to find investors, conduct due diligence, and negotiate a fair valuation. It’s an incredible resource.”

Parties from both sides of the table can benefit from information provided by the database according to Jonathan Kieusseian, CEO of Amyanpoh, a last mile parcel delivery and payments facilitator.

“It’s often difficult for startups to identify angel investors who may be interested in their fundraising round. Mekong Angels helps startups understand which angel investors are active, and how they invest. As a result, startups save time and energy, and investors get to see better deals.”

The database is inspired by Meng Wong’s Map of the Money (http://www.mapofthemoney.com) and is supported by a grant from Tigers@Mekong and in-kind support from Mekong Business Initiative.

What it takes to drive a successful startup?

When we think of venture business by young entrepreneurs, we explain of the ambitious and encouraging characters of the individuals that create the new startup. In fact, we can’t deny that the roles and skills of founders are as important and success factor of the business as much as the founding team does on the side.

Myanmar Context

Startup culture in Myanmar has been flourishing over the past few years and it keeps the vibe going strong at the moment. We often have seen the successful stories of the founders yet it has yet to be explored as to what it takes to drive a business even with the A-Team and a meaningful purpose. Do Myanmar Startups retain the resourceful founding members and supporting team alongside?

More or less, every startup team has found themselves the best capacity out of founding team or founder. Before we continue, what makes the successful startups team stronger? Is it about founding team? Is it about Founders strategy or founding team efforts to build sustaining business model?

“A small team of A-Plus players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players”
-STEVE JOBS

Startup95 has reached out to one of successful digital folks in town – Nex

The importance of TEAM

Ye Myat Min, CEO of Nex

“Supposed three major critical, and adequate elements: matching abilities (covering main functions), reliance, and individual ties robust ample to allow for a dynamic/candid discussion. In fact, success is the ability of the team whether it is a founding team to work well together interpersonally. It’s such a tough, and long ride. I believe in team mechanism and dedication. Each person should be treated, as they deserve. Getting quality A-team for startups in Myanmar is not difficult if one is to learn quickly from training and learning process. Some of us are born ingenious but still to be proficient better. We all need to be. Our goals to gather our mentality to be A-plus level by all means. We learn from each other and develop to one another and we love it. Tech community gains very limited resources to be honest, but it is promising as the workforce is on the rise of intelligence buildings across the industry.”

Amount of resources available in the market for dedicated industry is still a pain for many companies in Myanmar according to ILO reports as there are lack of statistics on how far the resources can cover for each industry. Education is a big barrier in this scenario in order to achieve goals for local businesses.

Since Facebook has the most influence and digital users in the country, digital community has become a key area to absorb business aspect in delivery. Digital businesses are a focal point for many of international brands pouring and local endeavors.

Moe Shinn, author, writer & Co-founder of Shwemom, one of top buzzfeed media agency

“Digital is a real deal in Myanmar market from the time when dissemination telcos’ data services booming. We have a team of real digital oriented personalities in our team. All we need the persona and the passion to play A-Game in the market. Content marketing is as hot as social media marketing. It’s all about Copywriting and content creators. Go small or Go Home, we need to be managing micro-data-mining for state-of-the-art contents in the market. We produce creative people as we construct the contents. Content comes from Content creators. We are building that and we are great to have them on our end to deliver the best in class.”

Investment ratios landed in local startups are still questionable for many startups in order to acquire brilliant talents across the marketplace.

One of earliest Digital marketing pioneers who was predicted about the embracing chance of Myanmar to be digitally coming up since 2009 Bar Camp in Myanmar, Co-founder of Blink digital agency.

“I think a stronger A-team will beat A-Plus founders or founding team in current business flow in Myanmar. Recruitment takes Top level strategy and it’s like a giant matter to consider. For Blink, it’s all about A-TEAM coz it’s totally a different scenario compared to Silicon Valley inspiration. Same of agency businesses, even if founding team has the capacity of 20 years plus experienced repatriates or expatriates – they will be nobody without a strong team culture here and of course continuous learning process. It does mean!” (who said this?)

Shout-out to all the hustlers in town who are dare to against all the odds. The now and then changing laws or put it this way- improving legislation bodies to be able to support startups businesses in Myanmar. We just prospect that it will all be great again by all means and bring a real deal for the startups in Myanmar.

Feed us (Startup95.com) your comments and thoughts for better community forwards.

Just another Startup?

Simple not complicated. This is not the basis of a business model, it’s the basis of the people who are being invested to make things different. New government new system, an exciting time for startups to pull their lean canvas off more aggressively and grow quick. The country has helped unlocking the investment doors to some extend. The startup community has now reached to Accelerator ground for startups.

Familiar tradition of Yangon’s top innovation hub, Phandeeyar has delivered startup accelerator program 6 months ago and finally come down to Demo day and featured as the country’s largest ever technology investor event. The eagle view downtown office impressed more than 30 international and local investors on the demo day where the latest edition of 4 accelerated startups empowered a series of investor pitches right in front of venture capital firms and angels.

David Madden, founder and CEO of Phandeeyar said:

“Now that Myanmar is connected, there is a big opportunity to use technology to accelerate the development of the country. There is a new generation of talented young entrepreneurs who are building the technology businesses that will enable Myanmar’s digital leapfrog. International and local investors recognize this opportunity and that’s why they have gather here today”.

Purely tech startups this time around for opportunities graduated from the accelerator: ChateSat, GoP, White Merak and Ezstay provided USD 25,000 in funding, six months of coaching, supports from strategic partners and contributions from a network of over 40 local and international mentors.

The market opportunities for the Tech Startups Accelerated in Phandeeyar

Online marketplace trend is picking up well in the market as of now whereby selling cars, shopping, job hunting and house hunting platforms are doing great at the moment in terms of tractions and users acquisition as in millions of active users. Startups like CarsDB, shweproperty.com and rocket internet’s incubatees shop.com.mm are dominating in the market with daily active users in hundreds of thousands of engagements.

ChateSat (Chatesat.com) 

The winner of the Accelerator Demo Day is building freelancers marketplace ChateSat allows freelancers to find work or organisations and businesses to contract freelance work and acquiring more than 3,700 freelancers as of now and over 680 employers actively seeking for about 220 projects to contract with freelance work online and seemed promising by generating few thousands chips already in to the business and favored by local investment folks to go further.

EzStay & GoP 

One of the acceleratees GoP is a traveling website and app that helps Myanmar users to find, compare and book tour packages. Hundreds of customers have booked tours from theirs more than 50 tours operators partners working with them sounds emerging for the market indeed.

Meanwhile, GoP is also promoting tourism with their booking platform for mid-range hotels and guesthouses in the country as they are the first platform in Myanmar allowing alternatives types of accommodations such as boutique guest houses and private homes with more than 400 listings online, and more than 200 people have booked trips on EzStay since their November 2016 launch.

Comic app – White Merak

Animated Comic reader app in its first kind created by White Merak in house team as well as well known Myanmar Comic cartoonists, grew from the scratch that is acquiring more than 10,000 registered users, many of whom are paying to their animated comic books. Featured on the Demo Day of the accelerator program.

What’s NEXT for this Lineup by Phandeeyar?

According to Phandeeyar’s accelerator program director, this new edition acquired most promising culture to the community with the powerful approach they all can be. With financial support and mentoring across the programs, they are growing rapidly and developing their businesses in real deal culture in the market. Though, the supports from international investors will enable them the financing they need to take their companies to the next level.

The startups are now raising their next round of funding – between USD 80K to 200K to expand and grow their businesses.

“What could investment have been really meant for the startups before it was cool in Myanmar?”

Four years ago. Facebook to me was English with less Burmese contents, and information sending locals abroad scrumming for updates about what’s happening back home. Tech community presumed imaginary as nothing much really happened yet.

This is what we thought or at least some people assumed. The fact though is that, some startups or startup enthusiasts had already been cooking up starters to bring it to the table, or at least it’s been in the plan of masterminds or adventurers. They made plans to secure seeds funding, some cashing-out from corporate job savings. It seemed like an all-out plan to venture towards the startup enthusiasts. The Big question mark now, was it worth it?

Pay-off time is still nowhere near for many of the startups. Tiny portions compared to the regional level of inspiration. However this is too much to ask for as an entry level or frontier markets. It’s all about tractions and building viable products or super cool tech platforms alongside major publicity. Few of topnotch startups raised impressive round of investments from international patrons and angels mostly. Earliest folks to attract the investments are- online marketplaces, classified listing web platforms, brand PR & social media marketing pioneers and first-tapped mobile app startups, during the birth of Myanmar Startups.

Moving on to 2016, few contexts lined up probably most remarkable compacts – Oway by IFC, Bindez by 500 startups, Star Ticket by BOD Tech, Phandeeyar by Omidyar Network. Totalling around USD 7 million summed up. However, it was still all hurdles for international investors to chip in on every possible playground. Presenting the three blind mice (setbacks); company laws, investment laws and banking laws.

Despite the setbacks 2017 was welcomed with early fresh round of investment for two more local startups. Globalways backed Code2lab half a million and Shweproperty.com secured Myanmar first ever Seven-digits Series A round. With that in mind, the water has been supplied still good for the startups community here. Sustainable or not there are more and more startups pouring into the hood noticeably.

“It’s important that startup should think carefully about the ultimate solutions for the market avoiding mainstream business model. Currently, there are only few capable to crack the pain-point of customers out there”. Ko Ravi, commented on recent startup competitions.

Myanmar Startup scene’s patron David Madden, whose organisation made a large number of workshops and events for startup community pointed out in general to the needs of sustainable innovative ideas to have innovative economy or an idea based economy and bringing better education to have a good understanding of what’s going on with the businesses around.

Do startups need investment to keep it alive- or go lean and sustain the business- what would be the best for them?

The question remains whether it is of a good idea to start a tech startup with the pain recognition of no immediate revenue or services that probably bring less innovation but sustainable for the entrepreneurs, the answer would remains a mystery to some extents. The fountain of water may keep flowing for the startups in Myanmar just enough to survive at the moment. Going LEAN might not work anymore or else!

Should Startups consider revenue generating business model? Are those fancy startups raised loads of cash doing good now? Will they bring impressive culture or not?

Will the startups need to consider investment oriented business model? How are those tech startups doing these days after raising millions of dollar? Will they build their own big empire in Myanmar near future? Really soon? These are the questions current and future startups will have to think about in order to sustain themselves.

“Today is cruel. Tomorrow is crueler. And the Day after tomorrow is beautiful”.

-Jack Ma

“Water is Essential”

ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔ ေငြေၾကးမတည္ေပးခဲ့တဲ့တစ္ေယာက္က VCs (စြန႔္ဦး ေငြေၾကးရင္းႏွီးျမႇပ္ႏွံသူ) ေတြနဲ႔ ေဆြးေႏြးေနပါတယ္။ သူက ကၽြန္ေတာ့္ကို ေမးပါတယ္။ စြန႔္ဦးလုပ္ငန္းတည္ေထာင္သူေတြဟာ Series A-round ၿပီးရင္ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕ကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားတာဟာ ျဖစ္ေလ့ျဖစ္ထရွိလားလို႔ ေမးတာပါ။ ဒါမ်ိဳးျဖစ္တာ ဘယ္ေတာ့မွ မရွိသေလာက္ပဲလို႔ VCs ေတြက ေျပာေနတယ္လို႔ သူက ေျပာပါတယ္။

ဒီလို မရွိဘူးဆိုတာ လြန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ၁၀ ႏွစ္ေလာက္ကဆိုရင္ေတာ့ အမွန္ပါပဲ။ အရင္တုန္းကဆို Series A ၿပီးရင္ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕ကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားတယ္ဆိုတာ မရွိသေလာက္ ရွားပါတယ္။ ပုံမွန္ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕မွာဆိုရင္ တည္ေထာင္သူႏွစ္ေယာက္၊ VCs ႏွစ္ေယာက္၊ လြပ္လပ္တဲ့ အဖြဲ႕ဝင္တစ္ေယာက္ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ မၾကာေသးခင္ကေတာ့ တည္ေထာင္သူ တစ္ေယာက္၊ VC တစ္ေယာက္ နဲ႔ လြပ္လပ္တဲ့ အဖြဲ႕ဝင္တစ္ေယာက္ဆိုၿပီး ျဖစ္လာပါတယ္။ ႏွစ္ခုစလုံးမွာေတာ့ တည္ေထာင္သူေတြဟာ သူတို႔ရဲ့ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕မွာအမ်ားစု ပါဝင္နိုင္မွုကို ဆုံးရွုံးပါတယ္။

ဒါေပမယ့္လည္း ဒီလိုဆုံးရွုံးတယ္ဆိုတာ အျမဲတမ္းေတာ့ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ Series A အၿပီးမွာကို မက္ဇူကာဘတ္က Facebook ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕ကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားပါတယ္။ ဒီလိုထိန္းခ်ဳပ္တဲ့ တည္ေထာင္သူေတြ ရွိတာက ျဖစ္ေလ့ျဖစ္ထ ကိစၥလား။ A round ၿပီးရင္ တည္ေထာင္သူေတြက ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္တာဟာ ျဖစ္ေနက်ကိစၥလား။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔ ေငြေၾကးမတည္ေပးခဲ့တဲ့ ကုမၸဏီေတြမွာ ဒီလိုကိစၥမ်ိဳးေတြျဖစ္တာ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ၾကားဖူးပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ဘယ္ေလာက္မ်ားတယ္ဆိုတာကိုေတာ့ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ မသိပါဘူး။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္က Y-Combinator မွာရွိတဲ့ တည္ေထာင္သူေတြရဲ့စာရင္းအတိုင္း အီးေမးလ္ပို႔ၿပီး ေမးၾကည့္ပါတယ္။

သူတို႔ျပန္ပို႔လာတဲ့စာရင္းေၾကာင့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္အံ့အားသင့္ရပါတယ္။ ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔ မတည္တည္ေထာင္ေပးခဲ့တဲ့ ကုမၸဏီတစ္ဒါဇင္ေလာက္မွာပဲ တည္ေထာင္သူေတြဟာ A-round ၿပီးရင္ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕ေနရာအမ်ားစုကို ရယူထားပါတယ္။

ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႔က အမ်ားႀကီးေျပာင္းလည္းခါနီး အေျခအေနေလးတစ္ခုမွာ ရွိေနသလိုပါပဲ။ A-round ၿပီးရင္ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕ကို တည္ေထာင္သူေတြက ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားတယ္ဆိုတာကို VC အမ်ားစုက မၾကားဖူးတဲ့ ကိစၥတစ္ခုလို လုပ္ေနတုန္းပါပဲ။ သင္က ေမးမယ္ဆိုရင္ေတာင္ VC ေတြက သင္ကပဲ မေကာင္းတဲ့လူလို ျဖစ္သြားေအာင္ လုပ္ေနၾကပါတယ္။ သင္ကပဲ အေတြ႕အၾကဳံမရွိတဲ့အူတူတူ လူလိုလို၊ သင္ကပဲ ႀကီးစိုးခ်င္သူလိုလို ျဖစ္ေအာင္ လုပ္ပါတယ္။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္သိတဲ့ တည္ေထာင္သူေတြကေတာ့ အေတြ႕အၾကဳံမရွိတဲ့လူလည္း မဟုတ္သလို ႀကီးစိုးခ်င္သူေတြလည္း မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ သူတို႔ဟာ ဒီလိုလူမ်ိဳးေတြဆိုရင္လည္း မက္ဇူကာဘတ္လို အူတူတူ” ႀကီးစိုးသူေတြသာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ VC ေတြ လိုက္ရွာေနတဲ့လူမ်ိဳးေတြပါ။

တည္ေထာင္သူေတြက A round ၿပီးရင္ ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားတယ္ဆိုတာ ျဖစ္တတ္တဲ့ ကိစၥပါ။ ေငြေၾကးဆိုင္ရာ အက်ဥ္းအက်ပ္က်တာမ်ိဳးမရွိခဲ့ရင္ ဒီလိုထိန္းခ်ဳပ္တာဟာ လာမယ့္ႏွစ္ေတြမွာ စံတစ္ရပ္ျဖစ္ လာလိမ့္မယ္လို႔ေတာင္ ကၽြန္ေတာ္ေတာ့ ထင္ပါတယ္။

ကုမၸဏီကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္တယ္ဆိုတာ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕အစည္းအေဝးမွာ တျခားလူေတြကို မဲေပးၿပီး ထုတ္ပစ္တယ္ ဆိုတာမ်ိဳးသက္သက္မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ဒီ့ထက္ပိုရွုပ္ေထြးတဲ့ ကိစၥတစ္ခုပါ။ ကုမၸဏီဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕ေနရာကို ဘယ္ေလာက္ပဲရထားထား ကုမၸဏီေရာင္းရမယ့္ကိစၥလိုမ်ိဳးအေရးႀကီးတဲ့ ဆုံးျဖတ္ခ်က္ႀကီးေတြမွာ ရင္းႏွီးျမႇပ္ႏွံ သူေတြက ဗီတိုအာဏာ သုံးေလ့ရွိၾကပါတယ္။ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕မွာ မဲခြဲတယ္ဆိုတာကလည္း ရွားရွားပါးပါးပါ။ ကိစၥေတာ္ေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားက မဲမေပးခင္ကတည္းက ေဆြးေႏြးဆုံးျဖတ္ၿပီးသားပါ။ မဲေပးမွ လုပ္ၾကတဲ့ ကိစၥမ်ိဳး မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ဒီလိုေဆြးေႏြးတဲ့ေနရာမွာ အျမင္ျခင္း မတူၾကဘူးဆိုရင္လည္း မဲခြဲလို႔ ရွုံးနိုင္တဲ့ဘက္က ေပ်ာ့ေျပာင္းေလ့ရွိပါတယ္။ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕နဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔ ဒါက လက္ေတြ႕က်တဲ့အေျခအေနပါ။ သင္လုပ္ခ်င္တဲ့ အရာတိုင္းကို လြယ္လြယ္ေလး လုပ္လို႔ရတာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕ဟာ ရွယ္ယာရွင္ေတြရဲ့ အက်ိဳးစီးပြားအရ ျပဳမူေဆာင္ရြက္ရတာပါ။ ဒါေပမယ့္ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕မွာ ေနရာအမ်ားစု ရထားမယ္ဆိုရင္ ရွယ္ယာရွင္ေတြရဲ့ အက်ိဳးစီးပြားနဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔ သင့္ရဲ့ သေဘာထားအျမင္ေတြက အျခားလူေတြဆီပါ ျပန႔္ႏွံ့သြားေလ့ရွိပါတယ္။

ဒါေၾကာင့္ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕ကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္မယ္ဆိုတဲ့ ကိစၥက လုံးဝထိန္းခ်ဳပ္လို႔ရတဲ့ ကိစၥမ်ိဳး မဟုတ္သလို စိတ္ကူးယဥ္ ကိစၥမ်ိဳးလည္း မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ ကုမၸဏီေတြထဲမွာ ကြဲျပားမွုေတြကေတာ့ မလႊဲမေရွာင္သာကို ရွိပါတယ္။ A round ၿပီးလို႔ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕ကို တည္ေထာင္သူေတြက ထိန္းထားတာဟာ စံတစ္ရပ္ျဖစ္လာမယ္ဆိုရင္ စြန႔္ဦးလုပ္ငန္း ေလာကႀကီးတစ္ခုလုံးမွာလည္း အေျပာင္းအလဲေတြ ျဖစ္လာပါမယ္။

စံအသစ္ကို ေျပာင္းလဲက်င့္သုံးဖို႔က အလြန္ျမန္ဆန္ပါလိမ့္မယ္။ အေၾကာင္းအရင္းကေတာ့ တည္ေထာင္သူေတြ ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားတဲ့ စြန႔္ဦးကုမၸဏီေတြဟာ အေကာင္းဆုံးကုမၸဏီေတြ ျဖစ္လာေလ့ရွိပါတယ္။ ဒီကုမၸဏီေတြဟာ ပထမဦးဆုံးလမ္းေၾကာင္းခ်သူေတြ ျဖစ္လာေလ့ရွိၿပီး အျခား စြန႔္ဦးကုမၸဏီေတြနဲ႔ VC ေတြဟာ သူတို႔ရဲ့ လမ္းေၾကာင္းကို လိုက္ရပါတယ္။

VC ေတြ စြန႔္ဦးလုပ္ငန္းရွင္ေတြနဲ႔ ေဆြးေႏြးတဲ့အခါ မာေၾကာရတဲ့အေၾကာင္းအရင္းေတြကေတာ့ သူတို႔ကို အနိုင္ယူသြားသလိုရွိတဲ့ သူတို႔ရဲ့ လုပ္ေဖာ္ကိုင္ဖက္ေတြဆီ ျပန္သြားရမွာ ရွက္တာေၾကာင့္ပါ။ စာခ်ဳပ္ခ်ဳပ္တဲ့အခါ စာခ်ဳပ္စည္းမ်ဥ္းေတြမွာ ဘယ္လိုအက်ိဳးအျမတ္ေကာင္းေတြရထားတယ္ဆိုတာကို သူတို႔ ႂကြားခ်င္ပါတယ္။ အမ်ားစုကေတာ့ တည္ေထာင္သူေတြဟာ ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕ကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားလားဆိုတဲ့ကိစၥမ်ိဳးကို ဂ႐ုမစိုက္ၾကပါဘူး။ သူတို႔ဟာ လိုက္ေလ်ာတတ္သူေတြဆိုတဲ့ ပုံစံမ်ိဳး မေပါက္ေစခ်င္တာပါ။ တည္ေထာင္သူေတြကို ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ခြင့္ ျပဳလိုက္တာကို လိုက္ေလ်ာမွုတစ္ခုလိုထင္သြားရင္ ေနာက္ထပ္လိုက္ေလ်ာမွုေတြ ျဖစ္လာမွာမ်ိဳးပါ။

VC ေတြေပၚဖိအားျဖစ္ေစတဲ့ အေျပာင္းအလဲေတြလိုပါပဲ။ တည္ေထာင္သူေတြက ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ထားမယ့္ အေျပာင္းအလဲ ဆိုတာကလည္း ထင္သေလာက္ ျပႆနာႀကီးတစ္ခု ျဖစ္လာမွာ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ VC ေတြက စည္း႐ုံးလုပ္ေဆာင္နိုင္ဦးမွာပါပဲ။ အတင္းအၾကပ္ႀကီး လုပ္လို႔မရေတာ့႐ုံပါပဲ။ သူတို႔ အတင္းအၾကပ္လုပ္လို႔ရတဲ့ စြန႔္ဦးလုပ္ငန္းေတြကလည္း အေရးႀကီးတဲ့ ကုမၸဏီေတြမဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ VC အမ်ားစုဟာ အႀကီးအက်ယ္ေပါက္တဲ့ စြန္ဦးလုပ္ငန္းနည္းနည္းေလးကေနပဲ ပိုက္ဆံရတာပါ။ ဒီလုပ္ငန္းေတြဟာလည္း သူတို႔အတင္းအၾကပ္လုပ္ လို႔ရတဲ့ လုပ္ငန္းေတြ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။

တည္ေထာင္သူေတြက ဘုတ္အဖြဲ႕ကို ခ်ဳပ္ကိုင္ထားမယ္လို႔ သိရတာဟာ VC ေတြ ရင္းႏွီးျမႇပ္ႏွံတဲ့အခါ ပိုေကာင္းတဲ့ ေရြးခ်ယ္မွုေတြ လုပ္နိုင္ဖို႔ေတာင္ အကူအညီ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ တည္ေထာင္သူေတြကို ထုတ္လို႔မရ ဘူးဆိုတာသိရင္ သူတို႔ယုံရတဲ့ တည္ေထာင္သူကိုပဲ ေရြးရပါလိမ့္မယ္။ ၿပီးေတာ့ ေတာက္ေလၽွာက္ သူတို႔ေရြးခ်ယ္ ေနရမွာကလည္း ဒီလူေတြပါပဲ။

Original Essay in English by Paul Graham here. http://www.paulgraham.com/control.html