"I am in town and can meet your students next week." This is how Shannon Kalayanamitr, Founder and Ex-CMO of Orami (Moxy), started her first journey to SUSS. Shannon is based in Thailand, she is a highly sought-after speaker and sits on panels of large international conferences as domain expert in female entrepreneurship, fashion and e-commerce. She raised $15 million for her own startup, and is involved in many more initiatives, organisations and, of course, about to launch her next gig.
The students of the Alibaba Cloud – SUSS Entrepreneurship Certificate/Minor understood how rare the opportunity was to meet Shannon face to face, quickly confirmed their attendance, and waited desperately to shoot out some burning questions. During the 2 hour session on a Tuesday morning, Shannon started to give an overview of what type of funding the student startups can receive, the how, when, and what goes in a teaser deck, a presentation and a follow up email. Sharing very practical advice helped our student entrepreneurs to tackle the challenge of receiving funding for their startup, which is a requirement to pass the Entrepreneurship Certificate/Minor.
One question came from Rayner Loi, Founder of Good For Food: "Shannon, as you know we are all pre-revenue, how do we tackle the valuation talk?" While Shannon shared from her own experience how the equity – funding discussion with investors is in the end pure negotiation, she also pointed out some very useful studies about SEA's startups and which type of assets will help the young founders to give away less equity. Finally the students couldn't wait to pitch their startup ideas to Shannon and get connected for future mentoring sessions.