Purposeful Life - 2020 in Review

This year was a tough year due to many many adjustments for COVID. But in terms of purpose and the philosophical breakthrough i had in 2019,  i think the mantra of being useful, focused, grateful and having fun still works very well. So hopefully after 5 years of retirement, I have hit on a good formula to lead my life.

To recap, below is what i came up with in the period from 2014 (retirement) to 2020.

Purpose 1 - help and be there for family. Extend to friends if i can.

Purpose 2 - be as healthy as I can

Purpose 3 - Be a good custodian of wealth and knowledge. help grow startup ecosystem via angel investing & AngelCentral.  Contribute to broader society as volunteer.

From the above, I generate goals and results as posted before. Below is an update.

Purposes 1 :  Good relations with Family & Friend & contribute to their lives

Goals: High level of family/wife/friend time. Share more learnings with kids.

COVID circuit breaker definitely helped with family bonding time. For 2020, we already planned to stay home a lot more as 3rd son had PSLE and 1st son has A levels. So not traveling our usual 80-90 days in 2020 allowed us to do that. 

We continued our regular dinner discussions with boys on learning topics. As they mature, Ning & I are thinking about how to pass key learnings we have in the area of daily quality living, business  and personal finance. Continued routine with Dad and made good time for dinners with friends. My own feel is that zoom sessions to maintain relationships are better than nothing but very inadequate. 

Purposes 2  : Be Healthy Mind and Body

GOALS: Keep lean, weight below 70kg. Pick up more outdoor sport. Control mood even better through exercise and mindfulness.

Kept with regular exercise routine of 5-6 times a week. Mostly jogging, yoga with some swimming and a bit of tennis lately. Critical to keeping healthy and warding off depression. I did not cope well with circuit breaker initially. Felt cramped and locked up. Ning said i kept going to supermarkets every other day. Took me almost 5-6 months to adjust well. What helped was opening up in July and adjusting my own mindset to find joy in the small things and be grateful for what i have.

Eg. watching sunset daily during circuit breaker. consuming a whole lot more wine, heading out to local beaches to satisfy my inner beach bum, did a 17km walk with old friend etc.

Purpose 3 :Portfolio mgmt & Work role in Society

Goals: min 6% (change to 10%) long term annual growth on investable net worth.  hit 100 startups for angel investment doing well as a portfolio. Quality volunteer in any such work I take up.

Portfolio Work

Big wins this year include SEA (first 10 bagger), Baidu, BABA, Tencent, FB basically tech companies. Biggest mistake is buying into SG stocks too early in Feb. Overall did a decent teens returns which far exceeds our 6% annual target.

After 9+ years of running own funds, I now know myself better and feel more confident in asset allocation, analyzing of companies and markets. Read a great book called Masterclass for Investors by Martin Sosnoff in Dec and it reminded me on the power of compounding.  Learned that in USA,  besides entrepreneurs, the other big group of UHNWI (>50M usd) are wall street asset managers who made a pot of gold in late 30s or 40s and then compounded it at 8-15% for 30-40 years. 

Our original decade goal of growing investable net worth 6% annualized has been revised upwards to 10% as we managed to beat the 6% significantly last 9+ years. 10% is a stretch goal and will require me to treat portfolio like my main work next 10 years. Hope it works out well!

So next few months, will be spending time with Ning re-planning asset allocation and modeling returns and cash flow.  

Startup/AngelCentral Work 

Angel portfolio side now at 35 startups in total. We invested in 6 more startups. 4 without even meeting the founders face to face! Did our first Vietnamese and Thai startups.

Interestingly and to my surprise, this downturn has not been a very big hit on our startup portfolio. The K shaped recovery is very clear. We have 4 startups badly hit (1 has closed down), 10 more hit but the majority all managed to grow in 2020 revenue compared to 2019. Deeper analysis here.

Ning & I are very proud of our startups and the AngelCentral team for navigating well through this downturn. Some founders took a month more back in April to watch first before acting, but most of them took our advice to act fast and make needed cost or product changes. And i think most of them are better off for it. 

As a portfolio, our private equity investments in 40+ startups, VCs and PE funds grew in value by almost 20% year on year thanks to it being very tech heavy. On the downside, one big drag was due to L Capital fund 2 which held lots of retail plays and which in my opinion was badly managed by previous owner.

On AngelCentral side, when COVID hit, Shao Ning reacted quickly and ran experience sharing sessions for AC/own startups. We also offered our experience about downturns with our startups and helped quite a few look over their revised business plans. We also had to switch completely to zoom based pitching and classes. 

While we see some weakening of appetite on angels part, more than half still continued investing like us and we still saw a good $4-5M being funded by AngelCentral angels in 2020. Valuations too are slightly more reasonable now with a good 10-20% drop in seed round valuations. 

Volunteer Work

Still volunteering with ITE, PEP and SWCDC. One project of note I did was to help ITE make use of crowdfunding platform giving.sg during COVID to raise funds to help with the expected increase in social assistance recipients. Ning & I donated 10K and the campaign raised over 200K (with dollar for dollar matching by govt) for this purpose. 

I am beginning to realize that sticking to what one is good at matters a lot. So while $200K may sound a lot, its value is low compared to what we do for the startup ecosystem. So i am mindful that if we want to add good value, it must in the areas where we have an edge, have the brand and the people network. 

 

Hope 2021 is a much better year for everyone and that we can finally put COVID behind us and travel again!

On Purpose - 2019 in Review

Another year passes so quickly. I have always been searching for the right framework to live and the picture seems slightly clearer this year. Previous posts have always been on stuff done and learning. I think i have enough to now take a step back and frame all the stuff. See if it makes sense and is useful to you.

Life is about having purpose. Purpose creates motivation and challenge which generates plans, execution and hopefully reward. It also acts as a time allocation device. Goals are what we set to achieve our purpose. One can have multiple purposes though it’s best to keep it to a few at best. Purposes can change after many years.

Life is also about pleasure or fun. Pleasure can be physical, mental or spiritual.  Exercise, beauty, learning new stuff, travel, eating etc.

Life needs connections with others. Can be family, friends, fellow workers, volunteers even animals etc. the mental need for social interaction should not be underestimated.

Life is about balance. The trick is to exist at the dynamic moving intersection of all the above and be happy with the current state and future trajectory state. This requires me to cultivate gratitude and contentment to handle the inevitable tension and trade offs between various purposes.

And what of happiness? Happiness happens easily when above is achieved. However, personally for me,  the issue of focus and the problem of drifting and feeling like a bystander is still there because this more multi-faceted life is still in vast contrast to the obsessive single purpose life I had previously in JobsCentral. Ning says it best when she remarked about how life was simpler but when we only just wanted JobsCentral to succeed.

So bearing above in mind, here goes:

Purpose 1 - help and be there for family. Extend to friends if i can.

Purpose 2 - be as healthy as I can

Purpose 3 - Be a good custodian of wealth. help grow startup ecosystem as angel investor.  Contribute to broader society as volunteer.

From the above, I generate goals and results as posted before. Below is an update.

Purpose 1 :  Good relations with Family & Friend & contribute to their lives

Goals: High level of family/wife/friend time. Share more learnings with kids.

2nd son had O levels. Very proud of the way he studied hard without much pressure from us. Our boys are a major focus for Ning & I. Number 3 also did well and seems to have matured. Likewise number 1 and 4 are growing up nicely. Perhaps a little too quickly for number 4. Goal is to bring up well adjusted, contributing and happy people.

Celebrated wedding 18 years anniversary. Love wife very much. Dad still going strong and traveled with us to Taiwan for 20 days. He also went to South America for almost 4 weeks with my sister earlier in the year! Still miss my mum and think of her every few days.

A very old friend of mine finally found a life partner and got married in 2018. This year became a father. Its actually hard to keep in touch with old friends and it requires a special effort to always organize group dinners. Still, my experience is that its worth it each time.

Purpose 2  : Be Healthy Mind and Body

GOALS: Keep lean, weight below 70kg. Pick up more outdoor sport. Control mood even better through exercise and mindfulness.

Body - improved with cholesterol dropping a bit. Weight maintained at 68-70kg range. Health screen all clear. 5-6 times exercise per week.

Mind- mentally up and down but not too dramatic. Regular contemplation of death helps keep perspective and having Gratitude. Mindfulness keeps my attention on right things. Boredom and bystander issue is still there.

Traveled 72 days. Less than last few years 80-90 days but it’s due to our commitment to stay at home for the various kids exams.

Purpose 3 :Portfolio mgmt & Work role in Society

Goals: min 6% long term annual growth on net worth.  hit 100 startups for angel investment doing well as a portfolio. Quality volunteer in any such work I take up.

Portfolio Work

Portfolio YTD gains of 17%. Tracking the 6+% annualized since 2011. Big mistake on baidu + overallocation to value funds + 1H delevering so took some money off a little early. Big wins on sea, fb, alibaba and shinvest help us to at least match index.

Still in progress to switch to even more etf index investing. Can’t significantly beat index so might as well don’t try. We also want to be more disciplined in giving. Will have more discussion with Ning on this. 

Startup Work 

Angel side very active. I think because we now see so many deals, we actually hit our upper limit and did 6 new investments. Also had 3 big up rounds from previous startups. Almost all grew by revenue. 30 startups now. Thats 30% of the way to the 100 startup goal. Portfolio doing well  if mark to market.

AngelCentral side ramp up a lot. 130 paying members and we ran angel education workshops for easily 200+ more. Also spent lots of time vetting and meeting the 700 startups that register with us.

Volunteer Work

Still volunteering with ITE, PEP, SWCDC. This year a bit less time due to AngelCentral but the education related projects are still very meaningful to me. Of note, spent 4-5 sessions on an  ITE project. It is a highlight as it involved helping plan continuous education pathways which is something I firmly believe in. 

So for next year, should be continuation of the same and reminder to self to focus on 

Purpose, Fun, Balance & Gratitude.