AV5 | Starting A Business With Your Partner And The Art Of The Reverse Pitch | Kevin Hoong, Oyen Insurance

Convincing A-players to join a new company in a completely new industry may sound nearly impossible. How do you create a winning team when you have no funding?

Discussion Topics: Starting a Business with Your Partner and The Art of the Reverse Pitch

• Getting started in pet insurance
• The first three hires
• Starting a business with your partner
• Hiring a growth marketer
• Establishing company values and ensuring new hires are aligned with them
• Blending disruptive youngsters with experienced professionals
• Generating employee referrals
• Hiring before funding
• Setting newcomers up for success
• 4 key learnings as a new manager
• Staying on track amidst distractions
• The art of the Reverse Pitch

Transcript: Starting a Business with Your Partner and The Art of the Reverse Pitch

Hau Ly: Hi, everyone, we’re your hosts, Adrian and Hau, and welcome back to AVV Founders and Friends Podcast Season one. We’re sitting down with successful founders in Vietnam in Southeast Asia, to get a behind the scenes look at their first hires in early teams of their companies. And today we have a special guest, Kevin Hoong, Founder and CEO of Oyen. Thanks for joining us, Kevin. When Adrian and I were brainstorming potential speakers for this season, you were one of the first names that came to mind for us. And I know that you’ve had a lot of experience building teams, at different organisations and in different markets. So I’m sure our audience would be keen to hear a little bit about that. How about a quick introduction?

Kevin Hoong: Yeah, thank you so much for having me Hau. So my name is Kevin. I’m the CEO of Oyen Insurance. We are a digital direct to consumer insurance company based out of Malaysia, Southeast Asia. I’ve always been interested in startups. Even when I was studying in university in the UK, none of the consulting or investment banking jobs appealed to me. But the whole thing about running an online business came to me very early on. And as soon as I came back from the UK, I wanted to start my own business. So a lot of people don’t know this, but I actually launched a food experience platform and it’s called Hungryhippie, and this was out of just me and my partner wanting to build something. So that was really my first experience into bootstrapping, and I even learned how to code. I eventually realised that that’s not really my calling, but I figured growth was or building on operations it’s something that I was very interested in. And that was when Airbnb first decided to come to the Asian shore and they were looking for growth operators to launch their businesses in this part of the world. I spent five years there, in different roles. We always joke about how every six months, we would have a new title and we have a new job scope and that’s because the business was accelerating so much. And of course, after that I stuck with tech and joined different businesses in healthcare, marketplaces and subsequently decided that it was time for me to come back home to Malaysia, to start my own business. Prior to joining Airbnb, I was actually working for my family business, and the family business is in insurance and I’ll tell you how I went full circle back to insurance.

Adrian Latortue: Kevin, to be 100% transparent I know nothing about pet insurance, and I’ve never owned a pet. So I’m really interested to learn what kinds of people are in this industry and building alongside you, and what motivates someone to come into this space?

Kevin Hoong: Sure. You know, it was quite serendipitous, I came back to Malaysia, just 10 days before the lockdown started. And I was then in this situation where I had to understand everything I needed to know about insurance, because my family business is insurance. And I was sort of looking for opportunities where we can make a difference in the insurance sector, because it’s such a traditional space, where there’s little to none innovation, at least in this part of the world. But we want to start somewhere and my partner and I were looking for a product that appeals to the younger generation, the people who are more savvy digitally and we saw this product, it’s called pet insurance. And you know, when we did a couple of research, we know that people around the world or in developed countries, the product is quite prevalent, people were buying pet insurance to cover for the vet bills. And in this part of the world, it didn’t really take off. So we soon found out the problem was because of the broken distribution channels. And so we thought that, hey, wait a minute, we can just build something that is direct to the consumer, we don’t need any agents, we just sell direct.

And then the biggest pain point as a pet owner today, if you’re just excited about this cute little puppy or cute little kitten, you have no inclination about what could happen. Pets don’t tell you when they’re sick. In fact, when they show that they’re sick, it’s probably quite late because they have quite high pain tolerance. So the uncertainty of that build is super, super high. So immediately, we took that as an opportunity to build our first product, and the rest is history, like in 18 months, we are now providing nearly 100 million ringgit or about 20 million US dollars of coverage to pet owners in Malaysia only and 1000s and 1000s of happy customers. And personally I always feel that the insurance industry lacks the authentic customer experience or the ability to provide delightful user experience to customers, because the whole system’s broken. And I don’t know if either of you have experienced an insurance claim, but no one’s ever given you a call and say, you know, I’m really sorry to hear about what happened, don’t worry about the bills, we’ll take care of it. Like, here’s a handwritten note, or I’m sorry to hear about your pet care here is a customised keychain for you to remember your pet. You don’t expect that from the insurance company. So to me and to us, like, we just feel like there’s a huge opportunity to turn this around and pet is just the beginning for us.

Adrian Latortue: This sounds like one of the most positive experiences with insurance I’ve ever heard of. You mentioned a few things that were really interesting. You talked about digitally savvy individuals and working with the younger generation. You also mentioned that pet insurance hadn’t really taken off in this part of the world. So that brings us to the question, who were your first three hires?

Kevin Hoong: That’s a great question. My first hire is my co-founder, and there’s a lot of background story to that and more content that we can talk about, because she’s also my partner. So we were partners first, and then we were stuck at home during COVID, and we built this business together. The second hire is in customer success. So she does both sales and claims at the beginning. She’s someone who was referred to me by my ex-employee. To me, it’s always best to hire from people, you know, either their friends, or people who used to work with your hires. The third OEM team member is someone who is doing growth marketing, he was responsible for everything, you know, content, paid marketing, producing the right email marketing campaigns, the paid campaigns, blogs, to drive SEO. So that’s kind of, you know, under the domain of my co-founder, so she looks after growth and product engineering, design. And then I look after sales, customer service, everything insurance related. So these are the three early people other than me.

Adrian Latortue: You mentioned that your co-founders, your partner, and you said that you guys were partners first and then you started the business together. One, it’s not that it’s a typical, but it’s sometimes cautioned against like, don’t go into business with your partner. So what was that decision making process like? And you talked about, hey, this person was referred to you. Did you have that conversation kind of together first, and then the referral came? Or was kind of the prospect that your partner would join you in this business kind of remote, and then you decided that it would happen after referral?

Kevin Hoong: Yeah, I mean, with my co-founder is quite a deliberate and very, very intentional decision. In fact, when we came up with the MVP, it was initially just me going to her and saying, like, I need help on social media, can you help me with that? And then it became like, Okay, I need a designer and software engineers for some code and she’s I know someone, because she’s been working here, I haven’t been working here. I’ve been in Singapore and outside of Malaysia. And over time, it just became clearer and clearer to us that, like, she’s adding so much value to the business and she compliments my skill set. And that’s very important, because we don’t want to be doing the same things. And I think it took us about six to eight months to finally make the decision that she’ll join me as a co-founder and be in this full time. And we definitely have had a lot of conversations about work and personal life. Like, we literally have a separate WhatsApp chat, for work and personal, like, the first thing we did was that because we don’t want to mix work, and our personal life, inevitably it would be mixed, but we don’t want it to be more convoluted, and that’s very important. Of course, it’s also important to sit down and talk about worst case scenarios, like what happens when things go south. And on the more technical or rather on the more administrative stuff is to of course have like a proper shareholder’s agreement. So that everything is spelled like back and white, you know, if there’s a separation like what happens to the business, what happens to your share.

So all those we’ve really done all the due diligence, but I would say, it’s also not very straightforward, it’s not easy. Communication is really important. How do you manage the feedback, like, how do I get feedback to my partner, without it being personal, or without it getting too sensitive. I think you have to learn stuff from personal communications and apply to work and vice versa. But I think the most important thing is that like, when this works, and it does, so far, it can be very, very powerful because we’re so in sync. And even though we’re on the same page, like there’s room for debate, there’s room for, like, straight up feedback. without holding back, you know, partners will do that to you, they don’t hold back. So if your ego is high, like then you have to suffer. But then if you can manage your ego, like it can be very, very powerful because not many things get buried under the rock, we just talk about it. And the most important thing is how we manage ourselves in front of the team, because that’s also important and we need to manage that as well. But I believe so far, because of our sense of sort of frequency alignment, it helps a lot with decision making and going forward then. The most important thing is supporting each other, because running a business isn’t always easy. There are down days and there are up days, and you just want to have a co-founder who has your back.

Adrian Latortue: There’s so many lessons in there. I want to dive into all of those. But let’s talk about the growth marketer that you guys brought on. One, how did you really know what you were hiring for? Was this kind of a joint decision between you and your co-founder?

Kevin Hoong: Yeah, I think it is a joint decision, you know, when we decide to hire people it is always like, okay, can you scale up yourself with this person, because all the work was done by us initially. And then we needed to do other things in order to grow the business. So we needed someone to do the things that Michelle can do. Michelle is my co-founder. So she was doing content marketing, she set up the whole foundation and paid marketing. And we needed somebody who can do a bit of everything. And by growth at that time it meant paid was our big driver. And we needed somebody who is analytical, and also structured, to run campaigns, to test, to experiment, and who can also run like email marketing, quick to learn tools that we use, and also can do reporting very well. Because in the early days, you want to keep very, very close eye on your CAC, and also managing your performance, like your leads your conversion rates, I think he applied to LinkedIn, or we reached out to him that the idea was that we needed somebody who can wear multiple hats, and he was the right fit. Yeah, so that was our first hire. And the second hire, the other hire was somebody who can do customer success, because when you’re early in the business you are in the financial industry, you can rely entirely on the online channels, you have to call customers, they want to make sure that they’re speaking to the person. So it’s important that we have somebody who can do chat, who can make calls, both insurance claims and sales. So these were our two early hires in the business.

Adrian Latortue: It sounds like you’ve thought a lot about the skills and complementary skills, which is important for any role to be filled. In the early team what we’ve heard other founders talk about is aligning on values. So were there any indicators of similar values with the people that you brought on? And what were they?

Kevin Hoong: So, the thing about, and I’ve been in companies where values evolve, and values are articulated, very well documented, utilised, and it can be a very, very powerful tool. Now, most startups don’t know those values so early on the startups values are literally my values and Michelle’s values. I think those were the early days, and I feel like it’s a combination of all our past experiences on how we’ve seen the values were applied. And Michelle worked for a telecommunications company called Digi, they tend to rank very highly in terms of culture and value. And for me personally, it was Airbnb, like, there’s no other gold standard when it comes to culture and hiring. I think what we were potentially looking out for are people who definitely must have startup experience. So the hustle and going against the status quo. I see that a bit more mindfully now because like, it’s not always so straightforward to say, I just want to disrupt, like when you’re in a financial industry, you can’t have that mindset. You need to have a partnership mindset. But the point is that like people who just don’t settle for the same things, because we are coming up against insurance is a very traditional topic.

Secondly, I personally feel that what the insurance industry lacks a lot is in how they provide customer service. We always get our employees or sometimes I do that to put them in front of a customer, or give a customer call to reject their claims. It’s not an easy thing to do rejecting claims. But if you’re good at delivering bad news to people, and people still like you, and they still love you, because they know you’ve tried your best, I feel like that’s the kind of like the people we want to hire, like, being super good at communications and being a very good listener. So those were just some points. But of course, for us, it’s overtime, the culture is shaped by the new people you bring on board. And then you find more intersections between people’s personal values and the culture of the company, like one and a half years, and I think we’re at the stage where we can now start to find those commonalities because you want the culture to also be built from bottom up, you don’t want to say like, oh, you know, Kevin says this, or Michelle says this, and then follow what we preach. It’s a bit hard because then people don’t feel included. So I think for us, we want to find those little moments, little rituals that everyone, especially the first 15 employees can relate to, and then from there, we will be able to hire the next 10, the next 20, 100 people at scale.

Adrian Latortue: Awesome, thank you for sharing that. You talked about kind of insurance being a slow moving industry. And then you’re attracting this group of young, maybe individuals who have this, you know, rejecting the status quo so this element of contrarian ism, they don’t necessarily mix well. And you don’t find somebody who embodies kind of the understanding of insurance. So how were you able to convince some of these people to join when the company was so early, especially like pet insurance, which is already under the belt industry?

Kevin Hoong: You know, I feel like a lot of people was that, like we’re doing something completely different. Some kind of insurance like we’re not selling life or auto, if you talk to pet owners, they have complete fanatics three months in or six months, and you’re like, I know, 10 different places where you can get 10 different types of vet food. Or like, I know this groomer is good, and that groomer is not good. I think the thing about the pet community is that it’s so strong, and their appeal is that it’s a topic that is completely different from your usual boring stuff. And building a business is always finding your beachheads. Similarly, for your employees, like, finding your beachhead employees who believe in that one thing that you do, and then our challenge is then to get them excited, or get them to learn about insurance, and then scale the product to more than pets. The problem with corporate insurance is that no one relates to them anymore. All they think about is distribution, distribution. How can we sell more, how can we sell more, but people don’t stop to think about what insurance is all about. It’s how you slice and how you tell the story about insurance. And I know long enough to understand the intrinsic value of insurance and the intrinsic value of insurance is trust. It’s an entire topic around your life. It’s about risks, it’s about giving you a peace of mind, it’s about helping people, it’s about impact. We talk about pet insurance, like we’re helping all the pet owners not just sell, sell, sell, sell. Like that’s been the generic way of people talking about insurance, even for startups. and hopefully, what we do it differently and get more bright minded people to join us.

Hau Ly: Kevin, I feel like after this conversation with you, you will have much more of a positive impression of insurance as an industry.

Kevin Hoong: Thank you. I’m glad. Somebody should pay me for this.

Hau Ly: I want to double click on something that you said earlier on when you were introducing your first three hires, or first three team members, rather you said that it’s always best to hire from people you know. And I think this is something that a lot of founders know on principle, but they are unsure how to go about in practice. So do you have any advice for founders on how to leverage their network or expand their network in order to find potential first hires?

Kevin Hoong: That there’s a lot of hustle just like everything. I mean, I treat hiring as just a sales pipeline. You know, there’s no hacks around it. You know, it’s a numbers game just like how fundraising is like you would just get 100 noses out of the 102 people that you talk to, and then just two investors are enough. It’s the same for hiring, because even if you have the right fit, and even if somebody wants to join you it might not be the right timing. And I think there’s no two ways around it. Like, you just have to sit down and go through all your contacts, build a pipeline, ask for referrals, talk about your business and because it’s early days, so people will be sceptical about your work. And use that as an opportunity to plant the seeds, because they might not join you today, but they may be your tech lead one year from now. And if they don’t join you, they may refer somebody who’ll join you like when you get one person to buy into your vision, even if they don’t join you they’ll talk to other people. They will say like, Oh, I know this founder, like he’s doing something super interesting. Got some traction already. Do you want to talk to this person?

So going back to my contact is the most natural first step because, like people know me, and I know them, and I trust them because I’ve worked with them before. So having a pipeline from like referrals help. I stalk people on LinkedIn a lot. I always run out on my free credits, like the free search, but write a really good cool introduction message, just to talk to them. Like hey, you know, I see that you’ve been in this company for a while, like, I want to learn about your career growth, take interest in them. So, selling is not just like you wanting to tell them stuff, but like, how can you help them. Offer value to them, and then get on the call with them so that you can pitch to them. Last advice, not advice but the last thing that we think works is hiring your customers. We’ve hired people who are our customers before. I think that’s really just the best like keeping it in the family also, because they know your business, they love your product. From my understanding a lot of early Airbnb people were Airbnb hosts and guests. So everyone has been a host before and then they applied. That’s usually a good indicator of your business that you’re able to get these early adopters to become employees and that could also be a deal flow for you.

Hau Ly: Absolutely.

Adrian Latortue: You know, what I’m hearing you talk about, you talked about selling insurance, there’s really a human element that you’ve brought into not just the hiring process, but also the insurance industry itself, right, you talk about intrinsic values of trust, community question is, you know, when you’re finding high performance, you have people who are buying into these values, they really want to be a part of this hiring can still be really difficult, especially for early stage companies, because of funding. You don’t have funding, it’s hard to bring on that dream person that you’ve connected with, you had this great conversation. So how do you recommend or how did you navigate hiring at an early stage when you’re constrained by funding?

Kevin Hoong: Yeah, that’s a good question. You know, when we started our MVP, we hadn’t raised then, we had only raised in June. So we didn’t have the money, we didn’t have the funds, it was just our personal money and we needed to get talented people to run the business. The idea is to not think about hiring them full time right away. The idea is that like, think about building something with the least amount of effort to just get it out there. Because we don’t need these people to work like eight hours a day to put out that MVP. Realistically, it’s like, one hour a day, because we want to prove that next thing, we wanted to prove that people would buy pet insurance online. And we literally get people to work on a contract basis for us. And we went to the drawing board and said, what would cost us the least amount of money to get this going? So as you’re selling the dream to these, like, amazing people, you’re also telling them that okay, you know, we’re going to take this one step at a time. Like, I don’t have the funds now. But can you just help me design a logo? Or can you just do you know, Webflow? Like, can you just help me build a five-page workflow and like, how much do you know about Google script? Can you just put together a script so that we can automate, generate things from Google, and we don’t have to do anything. It’s like just hacking and automation, there’s so many like, there is no better time to build a business than now because the tools that are available out there allow you to test super quickly and at super minimal cost.

And these people that we get help from like, of course, we want them to work full time for us, but they need to see our milestones in order to take that leap. We’re co-founder, so we’re different. We have this insane amount of positive bias because we tend to think that everything is possible, but not for these people. Because they have their jobs, they rely on salary. So they need to see your milestones. Okay, we need this, this and this. So, as we build this MVP, as we see customers starting to pay us, we know that we’re onto something, and then we use that to raise funds, because what you need is just that proof of concept, to then be able to go out and raise money. The question you have to ask yourself, is that, do you need this expensive person at this point of time? Or can you go for a cheaper solution? I’m just talking about like, preseed, seed companies, and most of the time, we really don’t need to pay someone 10,000 US dollars a month, unless it’s like a super engineer who can build many things or replace more than two or three engineers. And this is in Southeast Asia. Yeah, just to put into context. So, I think there’s more to that, like, more questions to ask before you say, I can’t afford this person.

Hau Ly: I love that. I think that’s very interesting, think creatively about how you can leverage somebody that you want to bring on, maybe not full time, but give them more limited scope. So it will be less commitment for them, less risk for them, and also give them some time to build conviction towards your business and convert them slowly. I like that a lot.

Kevin Hoong: And negotiate with them. So you negotiate and say, okay, give me your best rate. And then when we hit this milestone, we will increase your pay because we.

Hau Ly: Yeah, absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about what happens after hiring. People don’t really talk a lot or talk enough about, you know, what happens after you bring on that person that you really want to bring on. How do you set them up for success? How do you make sure that they thrive in your team and will continue to stay with you, and when you were mentoring for one of our programs for women entrepreneurs and you raise that as a really important point.

Kevin Hoong: Today we want to make sure that everyone gets on board very, very intentionally, I think the first two weeks typically make or break your time in the company. We have a complete schedule for them. So we deliberately think about, okay, what’s important on the first day, second day, third day, and we paste the content. So that it is not like, these are all your work, and that’s always difficult, because they don’t have context. So it always starts with more high level stuff. So the vision, the history, or like teaching them insurance, one on one, and then depending on their roles, they will go deeper and deeper into different topics. And then there’s like, talking to them about the, you know, walking through them on the tools of the company, I think that’s like, there are a lot of little things that if you’re a new joiner, if it’s not there readily for you, like you’re just wasting time looking for it and it’s not a good practice, or it’s not a good host to not give your employees all these tools, because you might miss one thing and then three months in, you realise that you couldn’t have gotten in on your first week. Like, the tradeoff is super high if you don’t get it right in the first two weeks. And I’ve seen this happen in some companies, like what? I didn’t know there’s a depository of all our resources somewhere, and I didn’t know that I could do this.

So, everything, like giving them all the access. I know, these are basic stuff, but if you’re a small company, there’s no excuse for you to miss out on these things. Like you just can’t have a founder that says okay here, so firstly, now go figure it out yourself. I don’t think that’s good practice, no matter how small or how busy you are, like, getting them set up for success is important. And then the second week is normally things that are more future looking. So what’s the vision of the business? How will we potentially evolve? What’s our company OKR, you know, like setting goals for them. So then they know their individual goals, rather than you just like letting them float, and they don’t really know what they’re measured against. And then the rest are more company level stuff, getting them to know, like, HR policies or people policies, those are the more basic stuff, but I always want to capture the okay, what do you want to make out of this next couple of months? Or this next couple of years? Like, what do you want to learn? And then going back to that, notes that I took on the first week and say, like, what have you done for this? You told me that you wanted to learn about people management like, how can we help? So I think that’s important. And then also, having a buddy, buddy is important. Because sometimes there are things that you don’t want to ask your CEO, like, where’s the toilet? So having a buddy, it’s important.

Hau Ly: Absolutely. And from what I know, you made some mistakes, as well as a people manager as a leader in the team. So I’d love to dive into that. What are some of the mistakes that you made in the past when you managed these people?

Kevin Hoong: You know, the thing about being a people manager is that there isn’t always a formalised training program for you to be a people manager, especially in your early days, and especially if you’re working with early stage companies, and you just sort of have to pick it up yourself or like, read stuff for Google stuff, but they’re not always very useful in practice, because nothing beats having personal experience. So, when I was transitioning from these companies, as an individual contributor to suddenly when I joined a new company I had to be a people manager overnight, you’re just kind of learning as you go. And I think the biggest shift is the mindset shift the mindset of like, okay, now I’m responsible for another person’s growth and another person’s wellbeing, it’s not just about me, because all these while it’s just about how can I learn the most or how can I grow the most, how can I make the most impact is always me, me, me. So I think everyone needs to get that mindset. shift. And we need to detach ourselves from, like, relating good individual performance to being a good manager automatically, because it’s not a straight transition.

So personally, for me, I think it took a while for me to switch gears to that mindset. So where I had made mistakes was not really understanding what the role of a manager is. To me, it was more about getting things done, like checking things off the list, and just let’s just go, go, go, go. And it is never about the other person, it is never about asking about, what do you want to achieve or what are some of the growth areas or getting a bit more involved in their personal life, like, as much as they want to share because you’re meant to be there as a support system. So I think I never had that mindset shift. So when I was working with one of my previous teammates, I went a little too much on the let’s just get shit done versus like, Okay, let’s take a pause, how you doing really, like, how are things going. And I think, over time, that, I mean, because I didn’t do that, at that point of time, I just felt like, there was a growing distant with me and my team member, and it slowly became quite toxic, like, toxic in the sense that other employees could sense the tension in the room, like, this person is not talking to me and that’s bad. And I just felt like, at one point, I somehow couldn’t recover the relationship anymore, like something had snapped. Because maybe she just felt like, you know, just felt abandoned by me, or I just didn’t care.

So ultimately, we had to get the founder involved and this wasn’t pleasant. And especially when your team gets bigger and bigger, and having the conversation of communications is key. I remember when I was in Airbnb, one of my managers set all of us down. And we spent half a day talking about communications, like, what pissed me off, what motivates me, literally, like, down to the details of I hate people writing email like this, I hate it when people don’t schedule like time, because then you’re getting to an alignment of communications, because you’ve never had that you wouldn’t know. I learned a tool about personality preferences. So it’s an insightful discovery. So we used that a lot at Airbnb, and it’s using colours as a way to describe your communication style. So we break it down to like red, blue, green, yellow, if you’re red, you tend to be more brief, succinct, decisive, aggressive, if you’re green, you’re more consensus building, if you’re blue, you’re more logical analytical, if you’re yellow, you’re more like, inspirational and just very high level, you’re more charming. So each colour has its disadvantages and advantages. And we just need to understand each other because if I don’t know your colour type, I may think that you’re doing this intentionally. Rather, I will blame you for not adapting to my style, but I’ve never told you what my style is. So then there’s a breakdown in communication. So that’s super important at the start. And then the communication is one, but the other one is the personal growth, because not everyone may want to be doing the same role forever. Some people may have things that they like, secretly want to do, but just never got around doing it or some just want to be I see you forever like they just want to be a people manager.

I think having that conversation is important and like documenting it, like I document all of our sessions when it comes to growth and communications. Because one day, I might not be there people manager, somebody else will be right. I want to have good documentation on like, Joey is like a green, yellow, and he or she wants to grow in this way, within a few years. And then I think ultimately, the empathy skill is super, super important. I’m not a naturally empathetic person, like I’m very open about this, it took me many years to come to a point where like, I have to build this skill, and through practice, and use it in a way that will help support other people, especially being a founder and the CEO of the company, because you’re at a natural disadvantage with your employees in the sense that people might not always tell you the bad stuff, because they want to say good things to you. They want you to hear good things. And people might not give you feedback openly because they’re afraid of pissing off the CEO. So you’re at a natural disadvantage. And you have to cover the gap and every leader has to do that. You have to create a safe environment for them to give you feedback. I mean, that’s how people want to be managed these days, they no longer want to be managed by fear. So if you want to bring in the brightest and the most talented people, you have to build the ability to support them. And personally for us, like I have so many employees who’ve had family problems, family problems, it affected their personal lives and then affected their performance. And it’s difficult because on one hand, we want to support on the other hand, we have a business to take care of, like, what’s the right balance, and team member that, like, just, we have to give feedback, while they are facing difficulties in their personal life, like, how do you do that. So these are all unique challenges, and everybody’s different.

Hau Ly: Got it. Wow, so much to unpack there.

Adrian Latortue: You as a founder, your hopes, dreams, fears, aspirations and as you’re building out the organisation that naturally has translated into different relationships that you have within the team and the way you work and stuff like that. But as more people join the organisation, then the company starts to be a manifestation of themselves as well. And so being able to uncover all of these, and these conversations that you’re having with the team, I think, is really powerful.

Kevin Hoong: Yeah, completely agree. And at some point, it’s not just your company anymore it’s as much as it is the employees, your customers, your stakeholders, and you’re there to make sure that there is a core, like, you wouldn’t want it to go straight. So that’s why values are called core values because it’s impossible to keep all the values. I hate to borrow a term from Airbnb, but I want people to feel like they belong here. Because it’s very difficult to find a place where you can be your best self, and enjoy your day, like working in a company.

Adrian Latortue: Just a quick follow up on that. Something else that stands out is that you’re very intentional about all of this right? And maybe that comes from past experiences, you’re fundraising, you’re growing the business, you’re hiring new people, you’re managing these people, do you have any routines that would help other founders maintain that level of intentionality?

Kevin Hoong: You know, it starts with the mindset of loving the people aspect about the business, like I think 99% of businesses are run by people, unless you can build a business that can completely eliminate that. So you need to enjoy the people building part, like the coaching, the growing, the culture, like building values, depending on what stage of business like rituals to help, you know, especially when you’re small, and the rituals just evolved, like, it can be when you’re 10 people, you celebrate everyone’s birthday, but when you’re 1000 people, you can’t do that, like, you just got to change your rituals. So we do have our sessions intentionally, like games night, or like board games, you know, all these are the smallest stuff. But to me, having off sites, even if it’s once or twice a year, I would give it a good frequency at an early stage is to like get the team to take a step back and to do activities or to conduct activities that are more cultural related, core values and also communication related.

Adrian Latortue: Okay, so we’ve heard you talk to founders about the reverse sales tactic. Can you share a little bit more about that and maybe share the reverse pitch for our audience?

Kevin Hoong: The reverse pitch is usually the last route or the point where, you know, they’re interested. But it’s the time where you want to put all the expectations up front, because when I’m selling to you, you’re like, you’re super excited about it, but I need to manage your expectation at some point. And that’s about like, okay, having said that, we’re still a startup and you will wear multiple hats, and we don’t have a lot of structure. If you want to join us, you have to expect that hours are going to be long, and like, we still have to deal with our insurance company today and that might be shitty. And we don’t have a product manager, surprise, surprise, or like our engineer just left last month. And you know what, this is the reality of startups. I know that you’re from corporate, and you may have all these resources in hand. But I want you to think hard about joining us because this might not be for you. But if you want to make an impact and be a part of history, then maybe we are the right company for you. So you should think about it. But yeah, I think the point is like you don’t want to oversell and make people think that you’re joining some kind of you know, everything is perfect company and you want to pull the brakes a little bit hence the reverse selling.

Hau Ly: Speaking like a true insurer right, managing the expectations, right?

Kevin Hoong: Yeah, that’s what’s excluded in your policy, you know, I just want to be a friend. You have to do that.

Hau Ly: Absolutely.

Adrian Latortue: That transparency, that managing the expectations, it goes back to the idea of building trust. It’s like less reverse sales than really just like, hey, this is what you’re really stepping into. Thank you so much for sharing. Kevin. Really appreciate the time with you today. A lot of gems you dropped. Looking forward to hearing more about Oyen, and the growth and maybe that some of our listeners are interested in joining you on your journey.

Kevin Hoong: Thank you so much for having me.

Hau Ly: Thanks, Kevin. If you ever get a corgi as an office pet or your company mascot, then you might have a chance to just give them a little bit of a tip.

Kevin Hoong: Sure, sure.

Hau Ly: Joking aside, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure. And I really enjoy our conversation as well. So thanks.

Kevin Hoong: Likewise, yeah.

Our Guest: Kevin Hoong

Kevin Hoong is the co-founder and CEO of Oyen Insurance, a digital pet healthcare insurance and wellness platform aiming to provide the best support and protection to the pet lover community and their furkids in Asia Pacific