What is it that you do?
I accelerate founders to where they wish to be to the best of my ability.
What do you mean by accelerate?
My overwhelming experience going into a startup is that it’s always pretty obvious what they should be doing. The hard question is always, “If you know this is what you should be doing, why aren’t you doing it?!?”
And the answer, overwhelmingly, is that doing a startup is psychologically hard, knowing what you need to do isn’t enough to overcome the block. It is my contention that lack of speed at which founders can overcome blocks to their progress is, by far, the highest order bit in what stalls startups, and thus, the biggest lever for acceleration. If we are in disagreement about this foundational axiom, then we would not be good candidates to work together.
How does it work?
The job of a startup founder is extremely simple: You successively work on the most important problem until it is no longer the most important problem and you keep doing it until your startup is sufficiently derisked that it’s no longer a startup and is now a conventional company. Any founder that solves all except the most important problem in their startup has made no meaningful progress and thus, is stalled. Thus, the focus of my practice is entirely centered around keeping founders focused on the most important problem.
Every week, we will meet and I will ask the same 4 questions:
What did you learn in the last week? How has that affected your priors?
What now do you believe is the most important problem to be solving this week?
What is currently blocking you from solving that problem?
What are some things we can be doing to overcome that block?
That’s it, that’s the entire process.
And that works?
Empirically, it’s the practice that has worked well for me and the founders I’ve worked with.
Testimonials
“Hang has been coaching us closely from ideation phase to our first fund raise. It is extremely easy to get swarmed as a founder in a chaotic environment, yet a weekly session with Hang helps us anchor and identify what's the most important thing to do as a team. HIs feedback is often concise and insightful, drawing from past startup lessons and his own extensive experience as PM.”
Jonathan, Founder of Avatech
“Hang acts like a “very sensible friend” - not bossy or “hands off coach”, but more as a trusted friend with an experienced eye that will tell you something honestly. It’s not the standard coaching for sure!”
Jenny, Founder of Pronto
Hang’s support in evaluating startup ideas has been invaluable. He has a sharp ability to analyze and critique ideas productively, helping me go deeper and uncover important insights that would have taken me a long time to arrive at without him. Upon noticing this, I asked myself, “how can I get unfettered access to Hang’s mind?” and sought him out for coaching.
Adam, ex-Affirm engineer I helped evaluate co-founder roles
Why me specifically?
I describe my job as half consultant, half therapist and that’s a good framework to evaluate what makes a good founder coach.
I’ve found there are three key skills necessary for a good founder coach:
You need just enough startup knowledge to be able to point people to the most important problem but more importantly, the conviction to not be snowed in by bullshit and logically attach process to outcomes to keep focused on successively derisking (this is actually the easier part of the job)
You need enough of a grounding in human behavior to understand the process of behavior change and work to develop individualized tactics that are appropriate for each founder (this is what I thought would be hard and it is but it’s not the hardest part of the job)
You need to create a space of non-judgement where founders feel psychologically safe and prepared to do a risky thing. I tell people I’m in the trust business because I’m going to ask you to do things that are slightly scary that, coming from anyone else, you would hesitate to do and my value comes from you being willing to do them coming from me because you trust me. This is, as I’m discovering, the actual hardest part of the job.
So as far as what makes me qualified for this job, I can tell you about my 15 years of startup experience and how my tagline is “I’ve done so much startup stuff I’m equally bad at all of it”. I can tell you about my background in Design and Product and how I approach the world from a fundamentally human behavior lens. Those are the minimum things you should require from me as a baseline ability to do but the real test is whether our vibes are right and we can build that bridge of trust and you can only judge that by the character I’ve been displaying so far and the character I’ll display forward.
What are the terms?
I offer my services on a retainer basis as I’ve found these conversations can fluctuate wildly in duration based on the natural ebbs and flows of the startup journey and are usually longer in the beginning before shortening over time but eventually average out to about an hour. The retainer guarantees one session worth of my attention every week and is still charged on weeks where this session is not used. I am also in constant contact with my clients on IM over the course of the week on an as needed basis.
Scheduling
Sessions will be done in person in Singapore or online via Zoom.
Changing a future session to a different day & time requires 24 hours notice and confirmation on my end.
Changing today’s session up to 4 hours earlier requires 12 hours notice and confirmation on my end.
Changing today’s session up to 1 hour later requires 15 minutes notice and no confirmation on my end.
Any sessions that you are unable to make because of scheduling issues, we will try to find another time during the week but if this is not possible, the retainer will still be charged. Any sessions that I am unable to make because of scheduling issues will refund your retainer for that week.
On top of our weekly scheduled sessions, I’m also available for any questions or queries you may have via Whatsapp and we may schedule ad hoc sessions during the week as the need arises.
Documentation
We will keep a summary log of our sessions in a Google Doc. Each week, start a new entry at the top of the doc with the current date and fill in all the stuff you would like to cover in our sessions. I’ll generally start to check the doc about half an hour before we start and keep an eye on it until our session starts. Updating the doc ahead of time can help me stay more efficient with our time but we can also update it together at the start of your session if that works better for you.
Financials
My current retainer fee is $500 US Dollars per week with a standard discount of 40% ($300USD) until you have either raised $1M USD in funding or you have reached $1M ARR (Annual Run Rate). Other temporary discounts might apply on a situation by situation basis but I strongly believe that the long term rate should be applied equally to all my clients for full transparency.
I understand for a founder, how precious capital is and I understand even more how precious your time is. A 1 hour a week session + ~1 hour of preparatory work is 5% of a 40 hour work week so I only have an interest in doing this when I feel like I’m providing extraordinary value for the amount of capital and time you’re investing. To that end, I’ve designed my coaching arrangement to provide assurances that we’re aligned on this as much as possible.
The retainer is paid on a week to week basis with the ability to cancel at any time for any reason. I’ll do an occasional retro to check in on the relationship and see if I’m still providing value/what you really like/what could be improved, roughly every month in the first 3 months and then every 3 months after that. Despite this, I understand that realizing when my service is no longer providing value is often only obvious in retrospect so I’m willing to offer up to 8 weeks of refunds to the point where you feel like you stopped gaining value so you can feel assured that your money will not be wasted.
I also understand the importance of continuity for a long term coaching relationship so I will notify you of any increase in my standard rate and you will be grandfathered into the old rate for 12 weeks so that you can adequately budget or work on a transition plan.
How do I contact you if I’m interested?
We set up a free introductory call where I get to know you and your company a bit better and I’ll share my initial impressions on how I am thinking through your business and things I think you should try. If, at the end of our call, you did not feel like you gained disproportionate value from it versus anything else you could have done in that hour, we go our separate ways because both your time and my time are valuable.
But, if you felt like you gained a lot of value from my coaching, we can set up a retainer agreement where I make myself available at least once a week for a call that is as long as it needs to be (usually around an hour but will naturally vary. If it’s taking too long, you should be asking why you’re spending so much time planning vs doing). Between calls, I’m generally available via IM for any incidental queries or of the moment thoughts you might be having (note that I am based in Singapore).