It has been a great experience writing on Medium. I think Medium still remains a great platform but I have found that the longer-form deep-dives that I prefer to create and co-create is more frictionless on Substack, hence I will be spending more time on Substack.

In the meantime, come find deep-dives into Fintech, Crypto and Marketplaces at messyproblems!

Chia Jeng Yang, Principal at Saison Capital, dives into consumer, SaaS, and fintech investment trends across the U.S. and Asia, builds projects in the venture capital and public policy space, works closely with early-stage (Pre-A) founders and can be contacted at jengyang.chia@gmail.com. Previous work here: http://chiajy.com

Full-Stack Marketplaces are one of the most interesting and misunderstood developments in the world of marketplaces. I try to understand the levers that go into why a full-stack (as opposed to ‘lite’) marketplace evolves, the current discourse within the VC community and its relevance to emerging markets.

Content

• What is the…

I am a big believer in building in public so this is my report from my experience in the deferral years before I went to HBS. I was admitted into the 2+2 program/graduated in 2017.

In those years I went down a crazy rabbit hole as an emerging markets startup…

Canva.com, the leader in graphic design tools, sits at the core of the creative economy. Casual individual designs and serious design corporate teams use Canva for everything design-related. Canva, as the content creation layer, owns the surface of creative image expression.

Hypothetical: Canva could acquire Redbubble, the leading marketplace for…

One of my favourite e-commerce business models is a 15-year-old listed company that very few people have heard of before: Redbubble (ASX: RBL).

Redbubble is an Australian-based global e-commerce business where shoppers can buy quality products with designs on them that are created by artists who upload their designs and…

A few years ago, as I was early in angel investing, I was offered angel allocation into a deep-tech computer vision company. One of the arguments given for investing was that the founders and team were highly technically competent and that there was at least a downside valuation floor of…

In this article, I talk about the two types of legitimacy [Brand + Filter] that constitute Community Branding, how various communities have actioned such legitimacy, and how to effectively segment communities into sub-groups and sub-brands.

The process for attracting members to a Community consists of two levers:

• Legitimacy — how…

I got an award from Forbes recently for the startup/VC work I’ve done, and this comes with attention that I want to redirect to something more important than me — how we think about the state of mental health and normalizing getting help for it.

This seems fitting because while…