From Military Service to Tech Investing: The Journey of Ethan Tan, Harvard Student and Web3 Investor
I had the pleasure of interviewing Ethan Tan, a Harvard student and Web3 investor. Ethan is currently a Venture Partner with Contrary Capital and founder of a stealth startup. He previously did sourcing work for Susa Ventures and Sequoia, and was a Venture Analyst at the ventures arm of QCP Capital, a Singapore-based full-suite crypto trading firm.
Thank you so much for joining us!
Thanks for having me here!
How did you break into tech investing? Why crypto specifically?
In Singapore, every male serves 2 years in the military when they’re 18 — this was about 3 years ago now. I first got into crypto partway through my term of service: The Gamestop/AMC craze was at its peak, and since the army paid us a small monthly allowance, many of my peers were throwing their money at that. I did something a little different, and threw my money into crypto instead.
At that point, I didn’t really know what crypto was or what I was doing. After the bull run and the market blow-off top happened, I decided to take the space more seriously and took myself from 0 to 1 in crypto-literacy by researching the space. Working at QCP Capital then helped me develop my domain knowledge from 1 to 10.
What is it that excites you about investing?
I’m the type of person who finds it hard to stick to one thing. It’s something I’ve been working on, to be sure, and investing kind of provides a healthy outlet for that compulsion. In early-stage VC especially, you get to talk to people at the cutting edge of every vertical in tech, be it finance, housing, healthcare, or education. Nowhere else can you get exposure to this many talented people across a base this broad.
What should VCs focus on when it comes to finding the “right deals”?
I’m a big believer in talent — especially when it comes to early-stage VC. Ideas are replicable, and most are rarely original. Thus, a startup’s moat and competitive edge — if anything — will come from its founders’ unique skills and experiences, and the synergies between them.
Contrary’s methodology, for instance, focuses on leveraging student VPs like myself to support and connect the world’s most talented student builders and entrepreneurs, whether they’re currently working on an idea or not. Statistically speaking, the likelihood that the people I currently know are going to be my most ideal co-founders is pretty slim; we want to scale that probability by making as many connections as possible and keeping those people in our radar.
What’s one trend you expect to see in crypto over the next 5 years that excites you?
This recent market collapse was a test for DeFi, and I believe it passed with flying colors — while centralized lending was plagued with defaults, DeFi’s immutable loan conditions meant that DeFi loans were always paid back first. While many protocols except the simplest remain relatively inaccessible to laypeople, I believe DeFi’s reliability will inevitably entrench it as part of our financial system in the future. For this reason, I expect the next wave of DeFi to focus on integrating real-world assets — like real estate, commodities, or even art — with protocols on chain. Projects like Goldfinch have already pioneered this with loans backed by real-world assets.
If you had to share “words of wisdom” with a Founder who’s about to start their own startup, what would they be?
Test your ideas rigorously before moving forward with them. Get as much information as you can from your target demographic on the problem you’re trying to solve: Is this an issue many of them face? How do they currently deal with it? Does your product or service accurately address the pain points you’ve discovered, and if not, how can it be changed? Asking the right questions here is key — The Mom Test provides a good set of guidelines. The last thing you want as a founder is to waste valuable time and effort on something nobody wants.
Once you’re actually building something out, it’s crucial to be as scrappy as possible in the early stages of your startup. Even the best ideas are initially fragile: rather than spending all your time coding in your room, one or more of your team will have to get out there and manually acquire as many users as possible. Talk to people, demo your product in front of them, or sign them up for your waitlist on the spot. Scrappiness applies to the creation and launch of your MVP as well — if you can rely on existing systems like Airtable or Typeform, do that instead of creating something proprietary. The goal is to get something in front of your customers as quickly as possible, in order to get as many useful data points as possible.
How can our readers follow you on social media?
I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter at linkedin.com/in/ethanchristiantan and @ectan_.
This was very insightful. Thank you so much for joining us!
Thank you!
