In 2024, I launched 50 Horizons with a co-founder, providing revenue-based investing to private companies.
This venture represents a shift towards building scalable, automated systems that generate consistent revenue without requiring constant active involvement. The key learning has been simply this, a great team beats a great idea any day.
50 Horizons - Building Passive Income Streams
In 2023, I decided to join a venture builder to take a semi-break from the ups and downs of inconsistent cash flow and endless consulting side-gigs. A good friend of mine alluded to it as being on the entrepreneurial treadmill.
This time, I had key objectives in mind:
In 15 months, I managed to hit my objectives and as a vindication of my ability, successfully built and secured funding in the mid-millions for a wealth-tech venture. Miza Capital, Democratizing Access to Previously Inaccessible Wealth Products
In 2022, my sister had the idea of starting a property platform in Singapore for direct rentals and transactions. The tag team would work as follows: I would build, she would sell. We built a simple prototype using bubble which took about a month or two of hard work, spent a hundred bucks or so on social media ads and held our breath.
The result? Less than 5 sign-ups. We had a working, functioning product, we saw competitors excel in the market. Why did we not gain any traction? We built way too early. We should have tested the market literally with a spreadsheet and some good old cold calling before trying to build a tech platform.
The hard lesson, always delay a build as long as possible until you can no longer test the market.
I joined a former colleague to run Tocaya Capital Management in the spring of 2021 after spending three years at a Long-Only Value investor running USD2.5B. At Tocaya, assets were in the USD4-5M dollar range, running a quantitative strategy that exploits price movements after significant news announcements.
Returns were strong, but growing assets which was my responsibility was incredibly hard. I have always been with a strong brand name, and in my last shop we had basically zero resources spent on gathering new assets (that's right, zero cost of customer acquisition). Here, I learnt the hard way what go-to-market channels were. I learnt that having the best product does not mean sales will follow. I learnt that all business plans are over optimistic by nature. Finally, I learnt that listening to what the market wants and incorporating feedback into the product is key.
As of 2025, Tocaya is still very much happily up and running and well into the tens of millions of AuM
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