A different startup blueprint
A reflection on Southeast Asia’s cultural logic for learning fast and leading through ambiguity
Long before we were taught to move fast and break things, people in Southeast Asia already knew how to navigate uncertainty. Our ancestors lived it. For them, adaptability wasn’t a phase, it was life. They moved with the monsoon winds, adjusted to the pulse of the forest, and interpreted the sky like a living map.
And yet, when it comes to startups in Southeast Asia, some say we are less adept at handling ambiguity compared to our peers in Silicon Valley. Like we’re only now learning to improvise, take risks, adjust on the fly. But uncertainty is not new.
And so we study YC videos. Mimic the rituals. Build decks in the same templates. And don’t get me wrong, a lot of that has tremendous real value. But when we adopt these approaches and business models wholesale without adjusting for the texture of where we are, our markets, people, and culture, we end up wondering why things don't quite fit, or why our results fall flat.
It’s not that SEA founders are less capable or less ambitious. But somewhere along the way, I think perhaps we’ve grown disconnected from our native fluency in navigating uncertainty.
This isn’t something I can prove with data. It’s more of a quiet hunch that’s grown over time. And I began to wonder if the path forward for SEA homegrown startups isn’t to look exclusively further West, but to look closer at what we’ve already lived.
What if we paused for a moment asking how we can be more like Silicon Valley, and started asking what within our own cultural logic might teach us about building startups? Not as a rejection of Western models, but as a way to tap into the strengths that we already have.
Let’s define the term “startup” before we go further. Because how we define a startup shapes how we build one.
What is a startup?
People define it differently. Paul Graham says the only thing essential about startups is growth. Fair. But fast growth doesn’t mean instant growth. And it doesn’t always come first.
Startups spend a lot of time searching for the right problem, product and business model before they scale. Spotify started in 2006 but only launched in 2008 before entering the US in 2011. Airbnb started in 2008, but the founders spent years photographing listings and talking to hosts before they took off.
In my time building and working with startups, I’ve found that two things matter most: tempo and truth.
Tempo matters because your learning velocity, how quickly you deliver value to customers and learn from each experiment, directly determines how fast you can adapt, improve, and stay in the game.
Truth because you’re operating without a script. You’re chasing a hypothesis. You’re building from partial information. And experimenting is your only towards what the market truly demands.
So the goal isn’t just to grow fast. It’s to learn fast, because that’s what gives you a shot at growing at all.
If we take that seriously, then our region Southeast Asia might already hold the metaphors we need to build that way.
Let’s look at three cultural practices – Austronesian navigation, Javanese puppetry, and the martial art of Silat, and what fresh perspective and approach to building startups in SEA they might reveal.
Wayfinding: What Navigators Know
Imagine sailing across an open ocean with no map. No compass. Just stars, winds, and memory. Salt wind cutting across your cheeks. You smell rain before you see it. You feel the current before it changes.
That’s how Austronesian navigators (ie: Polynesians, Malays, Filipinos) traveled for centuries. They read wave patterns. Watched cloud reflections. Noticed the flight paths of seabirds. They adjusted constantly.
There was no fixed route, only signals. Sound familiar?
Early stage startups operate like this as well. You don’t have perfect data. You can’t see the whole path. But you move anyway. Watching, sensing, experimenting, course-correcting.
Every week brings a new shift. Maybe users are dropping off, investors pull a termsheet, a competitor you didn’t see coming has launched a feature in your roadmap. You don’t wait for certainty, you move with the information you have.
There’s a saying in startup land that you build the wings on your way down. In SEA, our ancestors built the map as they sailed. They didn’t wait for the conditions to be perfect. They watched for shifts and adjusted.
From my observations, the best founders don’t try to predict the future. They stay in motion. They run quick experiments, pay close attention to signals, and make decisions even when the data isn’t perfect.
That’s why it helps to build habits that keep you moving and tuned in to what matters. For instance, at Iterative VC, we use a metrics scorecard. Each week, Visiting Partners like myself and founders review it together to discuss which experiments worked, what we learned, and what we should try next.
The idea is simple: if you check in and take action every week, you get 12 chances to course-correct in just three months. But if your experiment and review cycles are longer, you lose out on those opportunities to adjust and improve.
And while the navigator shows us how to move through ambiguity, the Javanese puppeteers teach us how to lead through it.
Wayang Kulit: A Startup Leadership Metaphor
The air shimmers with the warmth of a flickering coconut oil lamp, and the gamelan’s hypnotic hum keeps time like a pulse. The Wayang Kulit (loosely translates to “shadow leather”) is traditional shadow puppetry from Java. The puppets are cut from leather and moved behind a cotton screen, with a single light casting their shadows for the audience. It’s usually performed live for 6-10 hours.
And behind this production is the leadership of one person, the dalang. He controls the entire thing. He’s doing all the voices, moving all the puppets, directing the musicians, watching the crowd.
But while the dalang may be in control, he doesn’t dictate. He’s not consensus building, but adapting. There’s a rough outline of the story, but no detailed script. His main job is to read the room and respond. Everything else is improvised.
If the audience gets restless, he speeds up. If the audience laughs, he’ll riff off their energy by extending the joke, adding a playful voice, or improvising a scene to keep the momentum going. He’s constantly tuning tempo, adjusting tone, and redirecting energy.
That’s also startup leadership.
You may have a product roadmap but know it’s a scaffold, not a defined script. You’re responding to cues from customers, teammates, and market shifts, adjusting your pace and strategy as the narrative unfolds.
You don’t know the ending, but you steer the energy and keep the tempo of experimentation and learning alive in the face of ambiguity.
You don’t wait for everyone to agree before moving forward. You read the room, adjust in real time, and let the audience’s energy shape your next move.
The dalang leads not with rigid plans, but by staying present and having the courage to improvise as the story unfolds.
While wayang kulit teaches us to lead and adapt in the moment, some lessons only surface when we’re tested directly. That’s where Silat comes in.
Silat: Let Pain Teach You
As a kid, I’d watch a silat master train his student every weekend in the grass patch below our condo. They’d spar. The student would get hit, stumble, recover, try again. It looked brutal. But the student always came back.
Silat is practiced across Indonesia, Malaysia, and the southern Philippines. It’s not like fencing or boxing where you drill one ideal form over and over. There’s no universal kata (ie: sequence of movement).
You get hit, and you listen to that pain. You let it adjust your stance. You build reflexes you can’t think your way into. You learn by sparring, by sensing, by absorbing feedback through the hits you take to your body.
In some ways, I think that’s how learning works in a startup too.
You try a pricing model, it doesn’t land. You ship a feature nobody uses. You talk to customers and you realize you’re focusing on the wrong problem. Every bruise is a message - "Not this way. Try another."
For the silat fighter, falling down, getting bruised is not seen as something to be ashamed of, but a crucial feedback loop. The goal is to learn from it quickly and without ego.
That mindset is invaluable in our own reflections. When we do our retros, might we linger a little longer on the moments that hurt, what surprised us, what caught us off guard? Was the pain avoidable, or instructive? What part of the system absorbed the blow, and what part amplified it?
If Silat teaches us anything, it’s that we have the capacity to fall down, get bruised, and learn from it.
Reclaiming Our Own Playbook
In the decade I’ve spent working alongside founders and investors in Southeast Asia, I’ve heard the same critique repeated: we’re too risk-averse, too consensus-driven, too afraid to fail.
But when I look at practices like wayfinding, puppetry, silat, I see a region that has always known how to move in uncertainty. How to improvise. How to lead. How to listen, adapt, reorient.
So maybe the future of SEA startups isn’t about importing better frameworks.
But a reconnection to the instincts we’ve always had.