Back the Founder, Build the Bench: Leadership Lessons for Growth-Stage Investors

Ask any growth investor what decides an investment, and most will say “the people” before they mention the market. Yet the way we underwrite people is often less rigorous than the way we underwrite revenue. At Series B and beyond — where August Global Partners typically invests — that gap matters, because the leadership that took a company from idea to traction is not always the leadership that will take it to scale.

That was the theme of our panel at SuperReturn Asia 2026 in Singapore, “Sourcing talent: finding the right leader for your PortCo”, where I joined Andy Hwang of Wavemaker Partners and Navjeewan J. Khosla of Novo Holdings Asia. Between us we covered the full journey, from early-stage technical founders to later-stage healthcare platforms. A few lessons stood out.

1. At Series B, the founder must know what they don’t know

By Series B, the company is taking shape. The board is no longer debating product-market fit; it is dealing with processes, governance, regulatory affairs and decisions made on partial information. Most of the time, we are backing the founder who built the business to this point — and if that founder has the competence and the vision to take it further, we will continue to back them.

But the founder has to recognise that the next stage demands different capabilities. People say you don’t know what you don’t know. The best founders accept that, and are willing to bring in — or hand over to — people who do. The harder cases are founders who have nurtured the business like a child and find it difficult to let go. That is where emotional tension builds at board level, and where a good board has to help the founder see clearly what the company now needs.

2. The traits that travel: humility, curiosity and vision

Every stage has its own requirements, but some traits hold across all of them. The first is intellectual humility: being open to the fact that you do not have all the answers. The second is curiosity: asking questions, seeking out the right people, and delegating to them. The third is vision: a clear sense of where the company can go that others want to follow.

The absence of these traits is easy to spot in hindsight. I have seen a chief executive with too much ego, determined to keep control, play politics inside his own company — telling one board member one thing and his CFO another, and setting stakeholders against each other. When founders also hold a controlling stake, the board’s options can feel limited. That is why governance protections should be structured into the investment agreement at entry, not negotiated in a crisis. When they are needed, a board must be prepared to use them. Dealing with difficult leadership is part of an investor’s job, not a distraction from it.

3. Getting the CEO decision right can recover an investment

Leadership changes are never easy, and they do not always work the first time. Earlier in my career, I was involved with a company in Korea where the chief executive had to be changed twice. The external hires were, frankly, more focused on the trappings of the role than on running the business. The business suffered.

The answer in the end came from inside: a leader who had grown with the company and understood its operations. Even though revenue and profitability had fallen, with the right CEO in place we were able to recover our investment. The lesson I took is that the right CEO is not always the most polished external candidate. Sometimes it is the person who already knows where every problem is buried.

4. Look one level below the CEO

It is natural to focus on the founder or CEO. But some of the most consequential leadership decisions sit one level down — particularly the chief financial officer.

In one company, the CEO was spending most of his time raising capital. That is part of the job at growth stage, but no one was minding the back office. The company reached a point where management could not say with confidence how many bank accounts it had, what its inventory looked like, or how much cash remained. We worked with the CEO to change the CFO. The next CFO struck the right balance: managing internal operations and stakeholders as well as supporting fundraising, rather than spending almost all their time on the latter.

That CFO later went on to become CEO of another company we invested in. It is a reminder that a portfolio is also a talent pool. Leaders who learn what it takes to build a company in one investment can be the answer to a leadership gap in the next.

In healthcare, this matters even more. As Navjeewan put it on the panel, these companies are responsible for patients and their families, and they operate in a heavily regulated industry where clinical governance and capital allocation are central to the CEO’s role. A capable CFO, a credible head of regulatory affairs or a strong clinical leader can be as important to the outcome as the CEO.

5. Southeast Asia’s talent bench is still being built

A recurring point on the panel was that Southeast Asia’s venture and growth ecosystem is young compared with the US, Europe, China or India. Many founders here are doing it for the first time, and fewer executives have already scaled a company across the region’s many markets, languages and regulatory systems.

That is changing. Each company that scales successfully creates a cohort of operators who can do it again, as founders or as senior hires. In the meantime, investors have a responsibility to help close the gap: by exposing founders to what “best in class” looks like globally, by connecting CEOs across portfolios, by adding experienced independent directors to boards, and by supporting the transition from founder to CEO rather than simply replacing people when the company outgrows them.

The bottom line

Capital, strategy and markets all matter. But at growth stage, outcomes are decided by whether the right people are in the right seats as the company changes. For investors, that means underwriting leadership with the same discipline we apply to financials: testing for humility and curiosity, structuring governance protections at entry, looking beyond the CEO to the team around them, and treating every portfolio company as part of a wider bench of talent.

As I argued in my earlier piece on underwriting for DPI, real returns are grounded in operational truth — and operational truth is, in the end, a people question.

Back the founder. Build the bench.