Will Fan🕊

Spent 10 years building a challenger university in Asia. Now building a challenger world bank. $8.1B SOUL WORLD BANK™ is live—partnered w/ @animocabrands, backed by $5B equity line, public on NYSE ($SOUL). From classrooms to capital markets. Let’s go.

Introducing Circuit Accelerator - @baseapac is supporting @newcampushq to launch a Southeast Asia-based accelerator program focused on getting funding for startups that are ready to take the next step in their growth phase. Throughout the 1 month high-touch program, founders will also get to immerse themselves at @ns, connect with GTM partners, and prepare to meet investors based in Singapore. We're looking for teams who can reimagine the following from an agentic angle (including but not limited to): - Tokenized RWA - Payments - Trading - Prediction Markets - Robotics - Commerce If you're ready for your growth journey with @base, sign up now!

My son will never meet the version of me that built @newcampushq And honestly, I wouldn't want him to. That version was useful. High urgency, always on, constantly thinking about cash flow, hiring, survival. For a long time I thought that was just what ambition looked like. Then I became a dad and started noticing how many behaviours that help you build a company become liabilities everywhere else. Impatience. Inability to switch off. Measuring self-worth through output. A lot of immigrant founders escape poverty. Very few escape scarcity. That survival wiring got me through the early years. But I'm not sure it's something I want passed down unchanged. Because scarcity isn't always financial. Sometimes it's the inability to feel safe even after you've already built safety. I still care about building at scale. But these days I think more about what gets transferred unintentionally. Not money. Not equity. Patterns. Some patterns are useful for building companies. Just not for building families.

I've now scaled to over 100+ vending machines. When I started, I had limited experience. Commercial model was still being proven. The questions came after the commitment. > Where do the machines go? B2B or B2C? > What does deployment actually look like at that scale? Most people wait until those questions are answered before they move. I'd push back on that instinct. Humans are wired to plan first. But sometimes you need to write the playbooks as it goes. @newcampushq was the same. We knew who wasn't being served long before we knew what the business should look like. First-time managers at fast-scaling companies in Asia, getting no real development until it was too late. The model took years to figure out. Most people wait for the full picture. That's usually the slower path.

The org chart that worked 10 years ago doesn't work now. And the one that works now won't work in 5. Most leaders know this. Few are doing anything about it. Here's what I'm watching: the fastest moving companies aren't hiring for what people know. They're hiring for how fast people can learn, adapt, and make good decisions with incomplete information. That shift changes everything about how you build a team. Ten years ago, a lawyer was valuable because they had specialised knowledge locked in their head. That knowledge took years to accumulate. Today, that same knowledge is a prompt away. The future lawyer isn't the one who memorised the most case law. It's the one who knows which questions to ask, which outputs to trust, and when to push back. Same logic applies across every function. So the question I'm asking at NewCampus isn't "what do my people know?" It's "how fast can they upskill when the job changes beneath them?" Because it will. We've built to 22M learners and multiple seven figures in revenue by betting on this side of the argument. The companies still training for knowledge transfer are building for a world that's already gone. The window to reposition your team is shorter than most leaders think.

A $5K contract and a $5M contract aren't just different in size. They're a completely different sale. I've signed both. Here's what actually changes. At $5K, you're selling to one person. They find you, they like you, they sign. The decision is fast and it's personal. If they trust you, you close. At $5M, you're not selling to a person. You're selling to a room you'll never be in. The champion who wants to work with you has to walk into a committee with procurement, legal, the CFO, and a regional head who's never heard of you. Your pitch has to survive that room without you. Most don't. So everything changes. The proof points change. The contract language changes. The risk framing changes. You stop talking about what you do and start talking about what it costs them to stay where they are. The other thing nobody mentions: the buying cycle at $5M is four to six times longer. A great call, then silence. A follow-up, then a new stakeholder you didn't know existed. Then a legal review. Founders who win at $5K panic here. They think they've lost the deal. They haven't. They just haven't learned to sell on a longer clock. The operators who close $5M contracts aren't better at pitching. They're better at mapping the org, managing the champion, and making sure their story holds up three layers deep. That's the gap. If you're converting $5K clients but can't crack $1M+, the problem usually isn't your product. It's that you're still selling like the decision-maker is in the room. They're not. What's the biggest shift you've had to make moving upmarket?

There's a new class in crypto: the revenue chains. The leaders are Hyperliquid & Solana. Both do some overlapping things, and some different things. Both have exceptional communities, usage, use cases, etc. I think that both will rise together, just as iOS and Android both rode the structural adoption of mobile. In the case of the revenue chains, they are riding the wave of capital markets coming onchain. Right place, right time for both. If you are rooting for HYPE or SOL or both, success will be less about the competition between the two (healthy ofc), but rather the rise of onchain capital markets. Root for capital markets coming onchain. Love seeing crypto succeed —

A lot of immigrant founders escape poverty. Very few escape scarcity. My parents came to Australia after the Vietnam War with almost nothing. Survival became the operating system. Work more, save more, never get comfortable, never slow down. That wiring helped me build. The early startup years were brutal and that instinct kept me going. But having a kid changed something. I started asking whether the behaviours that built the company are the ones I actually want him to inherit. Scarcity isn't always financial. It's checking your phone at dinner because you can't switch off. Feeling guilty when you rest. Tying your worth to how productive you were today. A lot of founders build wealth but never leave survival mode. I'm realising those are very different things. The goal now isn't just building security for my son. It's making sure he doesn't inherit anxiety dressed up as ambition.

No MBA got us to 22 million learners. No textbook taught us how to close multiple seven figures in sales. No framework told me how to hold together 15 people across 4 time zones. We have a portfolio of 140+ companies. The founders we return to fastest don't have the cleanest credentials. They have the longest time inside the problem. Most capital in Asia still chases the polished pitch. Wharton degree, clean deck, recognisable logo on the CV. I get it. It's a fast filter. It's also the wrong one. When I started NewCampus I'd turned down a job offer, run one company that didn't work, and had no formal business background. What I had was a problem I'd been living inside for years and no real option to walk away. That's what got us here. Multiple seven figures in revenue. 22 million learners. Contracts that started at $10K and now run into the millions. The operators I respect most in Asia didn't have the cleanest start. They just didn't stop. Are we funding the pitch, or the person behind it?

What if learning unlocked real rewards, instantly? @Cris7ran shares how Open Campus and Luvia are turning good study habits into tangible benefits for students in Vietnam. When education feels rewarding, engagement follows.

The worst thing you can do with a remote team is manage them like they're in an office. We've got 15 people across 4 time zones. For the first few years we ran it like everyone was down the hall. Standups, check-ins etc. It didn't work. Every quiet week felt like disengagement. Every missed deadline felt like a trust problem. We kept layering process on top of process trying to fix something we didn't understand yet. What we didn't understand was that remote teams don't slow down because people are lazy. They slow down because the work isn't defined tightly enough to execute without someone nearby. When we replaced meetings with documented outcomes: what's done, what's blocked, what moves next - the team got faster. Not because we trusted them more. Because there was no room left to be confused about what mattered. That's how we got to 15 people, multiple seven figures in revenue, and contracts that started at $10K and now cross $10M. The scale didn't come from hiring better. It came from getting more precise about the work itself. How are you managing distributed teams right now?

One thing I didn’t appreciate before getting into the vending machine business in Singapore: The landlord is often more important than the customer. A machine can perform well operationally and still become a bad investment if the location agreement is structured poorly. > Some landlords want fixed rent. > Some want revenue share. > Some only care about extracting maximum yield per square metre. The difference compounds quickly once you scale across multiple locations. I’ve seen cases where a machine with lower gross revenue produced better actual returns simply because the commercial terms were cleaner and operational access was easier. Another thing that surprised me: The best performing locations are not always the busiest. High foot traffic means very little if people are moving too quickly to stop. Some of the strongest performing machines are in semi-captive environments: office towers, hospitals, student housing, staff break areas. People with time, context, and a reason to be there. It's the same thing I've noticed building NewCampus. The most engaged learners rarely come from the highest volume channels. They come from the right environment, where the context is already there and the intent is real. After a while, you stop evaluating locations like a retail investor and start evaluating them like infrastructure. How operationally annoying is this site going to become at scale? A lot of businesses look attractive at 5 locations. Far fewer still look attractive at 50.

Circuit is an experiment that turns capital deployment on its head. Instead of blanket assumptions and impersonal cookie-cutter formats, we've designed a program around real-world matching and meaningful chemistry between founders and investors. With support from @baseapac, NewCampus is hosting an intimate 4-week residency at @ns where founders will share culture, code, meals, workouts and other inputs for accelerating growth. If you're a Southeast Asia-based investor or founder who prefers IRL coffee chats over big demo days, express your interest at circuit-accelerator.com

I took a work call recently while holding my son because he refused to sleep unless someone carried him. Halfway through the conversation, I realized I was discussing a fairly meaningful business decision while simultaneously trying not to wake a baby. A younger version of me would’ve found that situation inefficient. Now I’m not so sure. For most of my career, work happened in highly controlled environments: quiet rooms, structured schedules, back to back meetings. Parenthood removes a lot of control from your schedule. Your time stops feeling fully owned by you. What I’ve noticed is that it changes your relationship with urgency. A surprising number of things in business feel critical mainly because groups of ambitious people collectively decide they are. I still care deeply about building businesses. I’m just less convinced every problem deserves immediate escalation anymore.

One thing that surprised me after moving from smaller contracts into larger enterprise deals: The product mattered less than I expected. At a certain contract size, the buyer is really asking: “Will this create problems for me internally?” Nobody cares if your sales process was smooth if onboarding becomes messy across procurement, finance, IT, legal, regional teams, etc. We lost a fairly large expansion years ago and the feedback had almost nothing to do with the product itself. The client basically said: “Your team still feels like a startup.” At the time I found that frustrating. In hindsight, they were right. > Response times were inconsistent. > Different people gave different answers. > Too much founder dependency. > Processes lived in people’s heads instead of systems. The actual implementation became harder for the client than we realized. That’s what changed my view on enterprise sales. Large buyers aren’t just buying software or training or services. They’re buying operational predictability. Especially in Asia, where trust gets built slowly and reputations travel quietly between networks. A surprising amount of enterprise growth is just making it easy for large organizations to keep saying yes to you.

Key to winning: Choose to be positive and grateful. Then, just keep at it. Time is the great compounder and will do the rest. So many people just don’t have the discipline to stay positive and grateful. Then time compounds the bitterness instead.

Leadership is often measured by what you can carry, but true growth is defined by what you’re willing to put down. Most founders are slowed down by internal friction, resentment toward old bosses, failed partnerships, or their own past mistakes. That bitterness is an anchor. If you want to scale, you have to audit your grudges. Forgiveness isn't weak; it's a strategic necessity for anyone who actually wants to win.