Founder’s Letters

Keep up to date with the Collective, with letters from Arthur Bastings.

To the stakeholders of Arthur Bastings Collective,

This is the third of our letters where we discuss the collective, its focus and initiatives in the coming period.

We started Arthur Bastings Collective to work with start-ups, investors and corporates on growth. Pure and simple. The reality has been that the overall environment for growth is tough. Global investor sentiment has been weak in the last 18 months; many start-ups did not survive, including two of our own founders. Traditional businesses continue to be caught out by the accelerating pace of tech; yet the prevailing mindset among boards is defence. If things are so unsteady and uncontrollable, how to move forward? The only real option is to be aligned with positivity – being relentlessly focused on growth and opportunities where they do arise. From our vantage point in Singapore, the Asia Pacific region never wavered in growth terms; Gen Z dominates long-term trends across all industries; and we correctly saw datafication & AI along with Web 3.0 as two prevailing tech disruptions some years ago. Going forward, we see strong potential in the wider “Global South” in addition to the Pacific Rim.

Right now we are partnering with founders in three spaces, where we deeply believe in the long-term thesis:

Games & video content — Games remains dominant in the entertainment sector at large. Both Mighty Bear Games and Hungri Games have been early movers in the shift to Web 3.0, and remain well-positioned to take advantage of this evolving space. After four years of partnering with founder Simon Davis and his talented team, we stepped down from the Mighty Bear board to make way for a new generation of directors. Meanwhile, global demand for premium video content continues apace. We are proud to have co-founded Asia-based Empire of Arkadia, a content and talent incubator focused on everything hot coming out of Korea/Japan. A pre-seed venture, founder Fotini Paraskakis is currently scaling its slate with over ten productions confirmed for 2024.

Commerce — Cross-border B2B commerce has recently been identified as India’s next big opportunity. Its growing status as a goods exporter presents a prime opportunity for start-ups connecting producers with global buyers. Nowhere is this more true than in India’s thriving pharma sector, already the world’s third largest. Most of it is going to the West rather than the fast-growing “Global South”, and here is where founder Avijeet Khaitan is looking to make a difference with seed-stage start-up Pharmint.

Deep tech — Our deep-tech engagement is mainly in fintech tools with Singapore-based White Gate. We are also supporting other founders in this space on a mentoring basis.

Reinvention is the key to continual growth. And so it turned out for two large corporate boards. Giants in their respective sectors of finance and media, both engaged us to think harder about the “financial services group of the future” and the “media company of the future” respectively. We chatted, sparred and brainstormed. We helped re-set vision, culture, roadmap and products towards Gen Z. Thinking ahead one board further engaged us to help drive expansion and investments into Asia Pacific. We very much enjoy partnering with corporate CEOs and boards on igniting their growth agenda.

Finally, as always, everything begins and ends with great people. We love our impact work with the fantastic pool of diverse leaders who trusted us with their personal development journey or their start-up incubation.

Let’s continue to grow!

Arthur Bastings

24th June 2024

To the stakeholders of Arthur Bastings Collective,

This is the second of our letters where we discuss the collective, its focus and our initiatives in the coming period.

Certainly the business environment has changed dramatically over the last year. Global macroeconomic fundamentals have turned and investor sentiment is tenuous. Meanwhile, the shift to Web 3.0 is accelerating (despite recent crypto turbulence); and datafication & AI begin to be the norm for all companies. Amidst these developments, the Asia Pacific rim remains the key driver of global tech. Southeast Asia is coming into its own as China growth slows; California remains leading even if its tech community is spreading over other parts of the US.

Over the past year, we partnered with founders in three spaces and the Collective supports them with a range of world-class experts. Our thesis for these sectors remains strong in the face of recent trends:

Games & video content — Consumer interest in games remains very high and the sector is in the midst of a once-in-a-generation shift to Web 3.0. The last such paradigm shift took place around 2010 as the sector embraced mobile. Both Mighty Bear Games and Hungri Games aim to be early movers in this space. Meanwhile, global demand for premium video content remains high across streaming platforms even as the market questions investment levels. Asian content is having its moment for the first time in modern history as a result of Netflix hit series Squid Game; Korean and Japanese formats; and Oscar winners such as Drive My Car. Empire of Arkadia connects this super wave of Asian content innovators with global platforms and investors.

Consumer tech — Whereas early-stage consumer tech is no longer benefiting from strong investor sentiment, we believe Bimble is special and uniquely positioned to disrupt its category of place discovery.

Deep tech — Our deep tech engagement is mainly in Web 3.0 tools. The IoTAL and GeoBlocks teams aim to connect the physical and digital worlds – creating the so-called “digital twin”. They build robust tools, nodes and observability around massive data streams to work flawlessly on standard devices. We believe the future for such products, B2C and B2B, is strong.

Thinking ahead, the Collective’s top priority is to sustain strong fundamentals across the start-ups we are currently engaged with. While the overall environment is mixed, it has never held back strong businesses from building great foundations.

We will also be pleased to re-engage with corporates. Capturing and re-capturing growth is the name of the game, more than ever. In that context, we are excited about a collaboration with London Business School in the fall.

Finally, as always, everything begins and ends with great people. We look forward to continuing our impact work with the fantastic pool of diverse leaders who trusted us with their personal development journey or their start-up incubation.

Let’s continue to grow!

Arthur Bastings

15th June 2022

To the stakeholders of Arthur Bastings Collective,

This is the first of our letters where we discuss the collective, its focus and our initiatives in the coming period.

We started Arthur Bastings Collective to work differently with start-ups, investors and corporates in delivering strong sustainable growth.

What is the problem when great ideas abound to make the world a better place and there is plentiful capital available? Why is it that so many start-ups, even late-stage, fail? Why are corporates having such a tough time in transitioning to digital? We feel it is down to strategic execution and, almost always with a muddled vision, weak talent and the wrong culture.

There has been considerable maturation of the tech ecosystem. As a result, it has become much harder to cut through as a tech start-up. Separately, the continuous rollout of cloud, wireless infrastructure and devices across global markets is now pushing even traditional industries into becoming tech hybrids. In other words, the past is no longer a guide to the future and different leadership behaviour is required to succeed. We aim to partner holistically with businesses to structure and deliver a sustainable growth and scaling agenda. We chat, spar and brainstorm without limitation and whenever the issues come up. We help drive the leadership, people & culture agenda alongside vision, roadmap, operations and partnerships.

Fundamentally, that means we truly partner with the founder or CEO. We are in it together for the long term.

While we are global, the Asia Pacific rim is our primary focus. We are based out of Singapore and Palo Alto, because we strongly believe in the Asian and American economies with their fast-growing clusters of capital, talent and expertise. East Asia has increasingly been setting the agenda for consumer mobile-centric innovation in recent years. In our own backyard in Singapore, Southeast Asia is rapidly scaling world-class technology companies and we aim to make a special contribution through our ventures and related companies; by leveraging our global network of relationships; and by embracing a generous talent nurturing mindset. That is how we intend to be a collective.

At launch, we are proud to be working with 3 pre-series A start-ups: Mighty Bear Games (games studio) in Singapore, Bimble (consumer digital) in Oxford and Tikel (social fintech) in London/New York. We look forward to meeting start-ups, investors and corporates to discuss their post-COVID turnaround, growth and scaling plans.

Arthur Bastings

9th August 2021

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