"The Builder-Investor: Why I Write, Build, and Back Startups Across Southeast Asia"

I'm Shen Nan — a data and automations engineer at Iterative, a Singapore-headquartered early-stage fund investing across Southeast Asia and South Asia, and the founder of Fracxional, where I teach AI and data courses at institutions across Asia.

My path here wasn't linear. I spent five years as a military officer in the Singapore Armed Forces, left in 2021 to go all-in on tech, and haven't looked back. Since then I've been a senior engineer at Circles.Life, worked in DevSecOps at Partior, co-founded an AI food supply chain startup called ZOLO through Antler, taught full-stack development at Rocket Academy, and now operate as the sole engineer at a venture fund — building the internal tooling and data infrastructure that powers our investment operations.

I'm currently based in Ho Chi Minh City, living nomadically across Southeast Asia. Before this, I was in Hong Kong, and before that, stints in San Francisco, Beijing, and Germany at various points in my life. The through-line has always been the same: go where the energy is, build things that matter, and stay close to the frontier.

What I Actually Do

At Iterative, I wear a lot of hats. I build internal tools, automate deal flow operations, maintain our data stack, run technical due diligence on portfolio companies, and host office hours for 70+ founders. The work sits at the intersection of engineering and investing — understanding systems deeply enough to evaluate them, and building fast enough to keep a lean fund operating like a much larger one.

On the Fracxional side, I design and deliver AI and data engineering courses — from generative AI workshops for enterprise teams to hands-on modules for university programmes at NTU, SIT, SMU, and others. Teaching forces clarity. If you can't explain a concept to a room of non-engineers, you probably don't understand it well enough yourself.

The Builder-Investor Thesis

I think the best investors are builders. Not former builders — active ones. The kind of people who still push code, still debug production issues at odd hours, still feel the friction of shipping software in the real world. That lived experience is what makes technical due diligence honest rather than performative.

My long-term trajectory is exactly this: a builder-investor who combines deep technical product work with investment thesis development. I don't want to just evaluate startups from a spreadsheet. I want to understand the architecture decisions a CTO is making, why they chose that queue over this one, and whether their technical moat is real or a slide deck fiction.

Why This Blog

This is where I write about the things I'm working through — data engineering patterns, automation workflows, the realities of building internal tools at a VC fund, lessons from teaching AI to non-technical audiences, and the occasional reflection on living and working across Southeast Asia.

If you're a founder building in the region, an engineer thinking about the builder-investor path, or just someone curious about what it looks like to run a one-person engineering team inside a venture fund — this is for you.

You can find me at byshennan.com or reach out directly. I'm always happy to talk shop.