Pick the right battle to fight.

If you try to fight every battle, there is no hope of any victory. Therefore, careful selection of where to expend resources is a critical aspect of venture success. In the end, the effectiveness of an executive all comes down to making the critical decisions as to where to invest time and money in order to expand the business. Chua Kee Lock, Partner of Vertex Ventures, elaborates, “When you talk about successful venture capital companies, one of the things you need to talk to them is the concept of building companies. Entrepreneurs build lasting businesses, so they are not just looking at short term opportunities. They are trying to build a product and create a category. As a result, the first thing you must do is be convinced that there is a market opportunity. Be it whatever market, it could be something emerging, or could be an existing market where there is a better way to solve a problem. The first thing is that the market must be big and you must address a large market. Your solution must be able to address a very large market and to solve a large problem. The innovator has to assess larger markets and the opportunities involved. ‘Big market solves big problem’, that is why Vertex is investing in online-game company (fast growing sector) in China (big market). The next thing is what the differentiation is, and what you are trying to do. If what you are embarking on is being done by twenty people, then what you are doing is incremental and it doesn’t do much help, you are just one of the ten thousand people. If you talk about innovation, it can be innovation of business model, product, technology, many things. You must be able to address certain sectors, so that is where the innovation comes in. Hence, In order to evaluate an investment, there are three main things that a venture company needs to consider: market opportunity (either it is new market or a different way to do business in existing market), differentiation (in product, people, business model, etc) and the team.