Blurb

FooWar is a not-for-profit startup advisory group that occasionally angel invests.

Our aim is to create a pay-it-forward mentorship culture to support fast growing S+SEA based startups, with a special focus on India, Indonesia and Singapore.


Advisory


Portfolio


Advisors

Aakash

Aakash is currently SVP Engineering at the GO-JEK group of companies. He was CPO of GO-JEK during it's most hectic growth phases over 2016 and 2017, where he worked with a team of first-time product managers to launched a new product every other month while simultaneously sustaining >10% WoW growth in transaction volumes.

He started his career at Infosys in 2005, after which he moved to Burrp! before founding C42 in 2010. In early 2014, C42 merged with CodeIgnition to form CodeMonk, where he served as CPO.

Ajey

Ajey is currently the Group CTO of the GO-JEK group of companies.

He started his career at NCST (now CDAC) as a Staff Scientist in 1999. He then moved to ThoughtWorks Inc. in 2001, where over a career spanning 11 years he rose to the position of Head of Technology of ThoughtWorks India. He then served as CTO of Hoppr, before founding CodeIgnition in 2012, where he served as CEO. In early 2014, CodeIgnition merged with C42 to form CodeMonk, where he served as President.

Niranjan

Niranjan is CTO of GO-JEK's Transportation, Food and Logistics business since 2017, which includes GO-RIDE, GO-CAR, GO-FOOD and GO-SEND with a combined GMV of over $3B.

He started his career at Infosys in 2005, after which he moved to ThoughtWorks before founding C42 in 2010. In early 2014, C42 merged with CodeIgnition to form CodeMonk, where he served as CTO.

Nishant

Nishant leads Product Engineering at TrustingSocial.

He started at IBM in 2006, and also built a crowdfunded Hardware IOT Products Company. Later he co-founded Oogway Consulting which exited to TrustingSocial in 2018. He is a firm believer of learning by doing and has been holding meet-ups since 2010. He also organises DsConf.in

Piyush

Piyush Verma is a serial entrepreneur. He has built Siminars.com, datascale.io (exit to Datastax), and oogway.in (exit to TrustingSocial.com)

He heads Infrastructure, security, and SRE at TrustingSocial, which serves credit scoring to 1 billion people daily across SE Asia.

Sidu

Sidu is currently MD of GO-JEK India.

He started his career at ThoughtWorks in 2005, and moonlighted at mobile startup Activ between 2006 and 2008 where he was a co-founder. He founded C42 in 2010. In early 2014, C42 merged with CodeIgnition to form CodeMonk, where he served as CEO.

Steve

Steve is currently working with a Fin-Tech business as Director of Projects based in Singapore and India.

He started his career in Investment Banking in 2005, and has spent the majority of his time across various geographies and advisory roles. Between 2015-2019 he Co-founded and managed Edith Grove Capital, a seed stage fund focused on India and SEA.


Backstory

Aakash, Ajey, Niranjan and Sidu have collaborated as friends, co-founders and colleagues for over a decade. Their startup was acquired by South East Asian superapp GO-JEK in its infancy in 2015. In the four years since, they've had the rare privilege of helping build one of the few hypergrowth product businesses that didn't start in a first world market.

The journey re-inforced the stark absence of a netural, not-for-profit mentoring ecosystem in S+SEA for the folks dealing with growing startups and the problems they bring.

FooWar is a community initiative towards creating that ecosystem.

We are actively growing the FooWar advisor network, and are looking to add folks with deep domain and/or startup experience that can spend a couple of hours a month to support founders and executives of fast growing startups of all scales.