Why Startups Always Fail in Asia
A closed-door, Chatham House conversation on the mistakes founders usually keep off LinkedIn: failed launches, bad hires, broken systems, funding pressure, compliance scares, and decisions that looked right until they weren’t.
Honest lessons on what failure really costs, how trust gets rebuilt, and what founders change when they have to start again.
🎯 Why You Should Attend
- Hear candid stories from founders who have built, failed, pivoted, and started again.
- Get an investor’s perspective on which mistakes are forgivable and which ones can be fatal.
- Learn from the operational, funding, hiring, and strategic decisions that don’t usually make it onto LinkedIn.
- Join practical workshops designed for founders navigating the realities of building and scaling.
- Meet other founders, operators, investors, and builders dealing with the same messy problems.
🛠 Before the Conversation
The evening begins with two practical workshops designed to help founders build stronger foundations before the main panel discussion.
- Workshop 1: 🤖 Building Your AI Operating Layer
with Ade Nat and Mell Gao| Co-Founders, first AIde
Discover practical AI workflows to streamline operations, boost productivity, and build an AI-powered way of working. - Workshop 2: 🌍 Building Your Global Legal Foundation
with Paul Charoenpao | Partner, PD Legal
Learn the legal fundamentals every founder should know when building, fundraising, and expanding across borders.
🎤 Who’s Taking the Stage
Jonathan Low: Co-Founder, Elephants Inc.
Broken systems. Messy decisions. Operational blind spots. The reality behind scaling across borders.
Arun Pai: VC Partner, Monk’s Hill Ventures
An investor’s view on what goes wrong, what can be recovered from, and what changes how investors see a company.
Gabriel Yang: Deputy CEO, ARC
A community builder’s perspective on the challenges, opportunities, and realities of building startups across Asia.
Rishab Patwari: Co-Founder & CEO, HiveBotics
What building ambitious technology businesses really looks like behind the success story.
🙋 Who’s Getting In This Room
This is for:
- Founders building and scaling startups across Asia
- Operators navigating growth, hiring, product, and operations
- Investors and VCs working closely with early-stage companies
- Builders who want the lessons behind the success stories, not just the success stories themselves
🗓️ The Evening:
4:30 PM – Registration
5:00 PM – Workshops
– Workshop 1: 🤖 Building Your AI Operating Layer
– Workshop 2: 🌍 Building Your Global Legal Foundation
6:00 PM – Panel Discussion
7:00 PM – Networking
Together, we are bringing together founders and operators for an honest conversation about the failures, hard decisions, and turning points that shaped stronger companies.
Because sometimes the most valuable insights come not from what went right but from what almost didn’t.
🤝 Who’s Behind It
🐘 Elephants Inc. is a payments platform built to help modern businesses run their money, not just process payments.
We help companies receive payments, manage spend, issue cards, move money globally, and operate across multiple currencies and stablecoins from one system, with real-time visibility and AI-powered workflows built for how businesses actually operate today.
We’re not a bank. We’re building a smarter alternative to the fragmented financial stacks most businesses still rely on, starting in Southeast Asia and expanding beyond.
Powered by:
AWS Startups partners with the world’s most ambitious founders — from first commit to global scale. In Singapore and across ASEAN, we work closely with the startup ecosystem to provide the infrastructure, programs, and community that help founders build faster and grow further.
ARC is architecting a new model for digital-native individuals to come together as a single entity. Our ambition is to build the first-of-its-kind powerhouse for collaboration and project incubation, through aggregating the resources and networks of the membership collective we have brought together.
