The path I walked, and the path I want to build for you.
I started as an entrepreneur in 1999. Twenty-five years later, the most useful thing I think I can offer the next generation of founders isn't capital. It's a shorter, less bumpy road to the public market than the one I had to figure out for myself.
The path I walked
In 1999 I co-founded GeoFoto in Singapore, a digital imaging business that was acquired by Fujifilm in 2001. From there I went on to build Pictureworks into a tech-led entertainment imaging platform that today operates across 13 countries and serves more than 100 million customers a year. Along the way I led 11street Malaysia (Celcom Planet) as CEO, took on the operating seat at PUC Berhad as Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer (Bursa Malaysia: 0007), and now sit alongside the team taking Pictureworks International to Nasdaq under the ticker PICW.
What the public market taught me
Two and a half decades of operating, fundraising, and steering listed companies, across the U.S. and Mexico, London and the Middle East (including Egypt), Australia and New Zealand, Korea and Japan, and our home markets in Southeast Asia, taught me one uncomfortable truth: the capital markets are not as accessible as they should be. There are information gaps everywhere: gaps in audit readiness, gaps in governance, gaps in corporate restructuring, gaps in how to talk to underwriters, gaps in what "Day-One" actually looks like on Nasdaq versus Bursa versus NYSE.
These gaps don't kill bad founders. They kill good ones. They turn what should be an 18-month listing journey into a 36-month one. They turn IPO preparation into a series of expensive re-do cycles. They quietly cost founders meaningful equity. And they keep the privilege of access concentrated in the hands of those who already know how to navigate the system.
Why I built Robinhood
I built Robinhood Ventures because I believe a great founder shouldn't have to learn IPO mechanics the hard way. The same playbook I had to assemble across two decades, including the structural reorganisation, the PCAOB audit pathway, the governance frameworks, the underwriter introductions, and the post-listing IR, should be available to the next generation as a service, not as a tax on their education.
Our mandate is simple. We help entrepreneurs walk the path to IPO with fewer obstacles and a smoother road, to the standards of institutional capital, but with the speed and judgment of a founder-led firm. We sit on the same side of the table as the founder, because we have been the founder, and we still are.
The flywheel I'm betting on
The deeper bet behind Robinhood is reciprocal. The founders we help today become the senior operators, mentors, and capital allocators of tomorrow. Their experience flows back into the ecosystem: into pitch sessions for the next cohort, into co-investment alongside our funds, into board seats on companies still finding their footing.
If we do this right, every successful listing makes the ecosystem stronger. The bridge widens. The path gets easier for the founder behind you. And eventually the privilege of access stops being a privilege at all. It becomes the default.
That's the company I want to build. That's the future I want for the next generation of founders across Asia. Strike it with purpose. Strike it with pride.
