The Parting Shot | What Shark Tank Never Showed Me

Growing up, I was obsessed with Shark Tank. It was my first real introduction to the world of investing, to the idea that backing the right person at the right time could change everything. I'd watch founders walk onto that stage and, in a matter of minutes, make or break their dream. I thought that's what startups looked like: a great idea, a great pitch, and if you were lucky, a deal.

Vertex showed me everything that came before those fifteen minutes.

I sat close to the founders' stories, layered and unfiltered in the best way. Through editing Hard Truths, our podcast, I heard founders talk about years of doubt, pivots nobody claps for, and long days that didn't make it into any press release. The struggles behind finding product-market fit, surviving COVID, and building through uncertainty, all of it before the IPO. It taught me that in business, working hard is never the whole story. Sometimes the universe just throws something at you.

My role spanned communications, digital marketing, and events. It was through events that I learned the most. My mentor, Rahul, introduced me to Murphy's Law early on: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. I smiled and moved on. It wasn't until we were standing in the venue for an event in partnership with Google Cloud, weeks in the making, that I realised he wasn't joking. Our mics didn't come through until the very last minute. It taught me that planning only gets you so far. Sometimes you just have to adapt and pull through.

Beyond the chaos, events gave me a chance to do what I loved most: meet people. Founders, speakers, attendees, people I'd never otherwise cross paths with in a regular day at the office. There was always a checklist running in my head: pre-event, during, post-event, a hundred small things that needed to go right for the whole thing to feel effortless to the people in the room. Running an event from start to finish taught me more about staying composed than any brief or deck ever could.

Outside of events, I found myself constantly switching hats. One hour I'd be putting together the newsletter, writing the content and designing the layout; the next I'd be editing our podcast, or working on a creative asset. Every platform had its own rhythm, and learning how to move between them quickly became part of the fun.

I started developing an instinct for what made a hook work, why some posts took off and others didn't. One portfolio announcement outperformed our usual engagement by over 400%. The design was deliberate: a bold funding number front and centre, with the founders taking up the frame. Numbers stop the scroll, and pairing that with the faces behind the company gave it a weight a plain announcement never would. In social media, cadence and consistency build the foundation, but every so often, something just lands. Working in VC taught me that's true of investing too. You back many, but it only takes one to change the game.

Part of what made the content so interesting was getting to know the companies behind it. Vertex's portfolio spanned everything from demi-fine jewellery and clean-label food rooted in traditional Indian nutrition to companies operating in semiconductors. One week I was writing about A2 ghee and cold-pressed oils; the next I was sitting in a room at our GTM Playbook event with SuperAI and HubSpot, listening to founders talk about enterprise AI and where the industry was actually headed. Each industry had its own language, its own audience, and figuring out how to reach them in a way that actually resonated was its own challenge every single time. It also taught me that in VC, marketing isn't about reach. It's about building the kind of trust and credibility that makes the right founders want you by their side.

One thing that stood out was how genuinely open Vertex was to experimenting with new ways of working. As a firm that backs many companies building in AI, they actively used the tools themselves. I got to be part of that, trying out Claude's newly launched design feature for a LinkedIn carousel and exploring how emerging tools could be woven into the way we worked.

Being part of a team of two gave me a kind of freedom I didn't expect. Every project felt fully mine to shape. On quieter days, I'd come back to my desk, look out at the Singapore Flyer, and recharge for whatever came next. My internship taught me that startups, like most things worth building, are made slowly, messily, and with a lot more heart than glamour.

*Edited by *Rahul Thayyalamkandy, Director, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India.

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