Adelene Low is Head of Investments at Bintang Capital Partners, a B Corp Certified impact investing private equity firm that deploys capital into innovative fast-growing mid-sized ASEAN companies.

Bintang has backed companies like Blue Planet and Involve Asia.

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👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

My job is to seek out promising entrepreneurs and companies, invest in and work with them to help their businesses grow and succeed. 

At the end of the journey, our team’s goal is to make a profit while also making a positive impact on society through our investments in these companies.

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🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

A lot of entrepreneurs we meet are not only passionate about how much money their businesses can make (profit), but also see other aspects of their business including purpose, people (their workers, their customers, and their community), and planet (the impact their business has on the environment) as intrinsic to their businesses’ success. 

I really didn’t expect this when I first started in the impact investing space, having come from a more conventional PE background.

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🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

The greatest sense of accomplishment for a private equity manager lies in successfully exiting a portfolio whilst generating attractive returns for their investors. 

Equally important to me are the friendships that I have made with the people I’ve met along the way. 

I am continuously learning from and being inspired by the amazing entrepreneurs and colleagues I work with.

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🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?‍

At the market peak in 2021/2022 when the world was flush with liquidity, lots of companies were valued at high multiples despite continuously burning cash. 

As funding declined in the past year due to the higher cost of capital, there’s now a stronger focus by companies to establish a clear path to profitability. 

I expect that this trend will continue as the shift towards commercial sustainability continues, where companies will now need to utilize capital more efficiently to ensure healthy long-term growth—as opposed to funding growth for growth’s sake.

Also, other than financial return considerations, investors are now increasingly demanding investee companies commit to environmental and social responsibility. 

This shift will see companies adopting sustainable practices and ethical operations and making positive contributions to the communities and ecosystems they belong to. 

Companies will also need to learn how to measure their environmental footprint and assess their social impact in order to meet these demands of investors.

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💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry? 

Always ask yourself if you would personally invest in a company, and always be ready to get your hands dirty to help create value. 

Deploying capital is often the easiest part of the job: building strong and lasting relationships with founders, contributing value to the company, and ultimately engineering successful exits—these are much harder things to do. 

I’m a big believer in the saying, “You reap what you sow”. To reap rewards, you need to be persistent (it takes consistent hard work to succeed), patient (it takes time to build a good business) and ultimately you need to persevere (you must persist and have faith in yourself to endure challenging situations).  

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🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours? 

I’ve always been a good listener: I prefer being the one asking questions rather than doing most of the talking. 

However, I have been known to give long lectures about the importance of recycling and would love to give everyone tips on how they can recycle at home!

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🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show? 

The Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) TV series from the original Las Vegas series to the New York and Miami spinoffs!

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🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?‍

Anything chocolate!

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FYI. We've edited this interview for clarity.