VC | Founder & Startup Advisor | Empowering Founders to Scale | Global Citizen & Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Bridge Builder

I work with two types of people:

⚡Founders and business owners preparing for capital, acquisition, or exit
⚡Investors seeking curated access to high-quality opportunities and communities 

I sit in between - connecting the right capital with the right opportunities, globally.

WHO I AM

I’m Anna C. Mallon - a serial entrepreneur, investor, and ecosystem builder with 25+ years operating across Asia, Europe, and the U.S.

I split my time between Singapore, London, and Amsterdam, after spending 15 years building companies and ecosystems in Asia.

My edge is internationalisation, scale through partnerships, and exit strategy - seen from both the founder and investor side.

TRACK RECORD (CURATED)

• Founder of 5 companies
• Involved in a $289M exit transaction (2010)
• Supported 330+ startups, raising $500M+ collectively
• Formerly led VC & Startup Ecosystem partnerships at AWS
• Led innovation programs with Meta, Google, Shell, Daimler, Bosch
• Invested across startups, private businesses, and real estate
• Worked with and alongside leading funds including Sequoia, Northzone, and global VCs
• Ran and advised venture builders, accelerators, and investor-backed programs
• Board member of a publicly listed company
• Featured in Forbes, Channel NewsAsia, Web Summit, and global media

WHAT I DO NOW

Today, I build and steward global wealth ecosystems connecting:

📍Investors seeking curated deal access
📍Founders preparing for investment, scale, or exit
📍Operators and acquirers seeking quality businesses
📍Ecosystem partners bringing capital, deals, or distribution

My work spans venture, M&A, property, and private capital — with a focus on cross-border scale, partnership-led growth, and exits.

HOW I WORK

I don’t pitch deals publicly. I don’t run mass-market funnels. LinkedIn is where I share:

✨ how investors and buyers actually think
✨why good businesses struggle to scale or exit globally
✨how partnerships compound faster than capital alone

The actual work happens outside.

In parallel I’m also a mother of two teenagers - fuelled by strong coffee ☕️and a high tolerance for complexity.

WHO THIS IS FOR

👉 Exited or near-exit founders transitioning into investors
👉 Angels, HNWIs, family offices, and allocators
👉 Operators, acquirers, and ecosystem builders

If this resonates, please reach out here or at the link below. I would be delighted to connect and hear more. 
https://www.annacmallon.com/more

Anna C Mallon ⚡⚡⚡

Most business owners don’t really own a business.
They own a job. And it’s usually not one a buyer wants.

I learned this the hard way.

For a long time, I thought I was building a company.
What I’d actually done was build myself into it (a cage).

Every decision came back to me.
Clients want me.
If I step away, things slowed.

But that’s not ownership and not transferable...
...the business is leaning on one person

When I started working with owners who wanted to sell - and when I looked honestly back at my own earlier businesses - I kept seeing the same thing.

Good businesses on the surface.
Very shaky underneath.

Buyers notice it straight away. If 

📍 the owner is the bottleneck.
📍the knowledge sits in one head.
📍the business only works when someone is constantly jumping in.

That is not something they (or we) want to buy.

That’s why these businesses get discounted.
Not because they’re bad.
Because they are risky.

The fix isn’t fancy.
And it’s rarely comfortable.

You...

👉 Hand things over.
👉 Write things down.
👉 Set it up so the business runs when you’re not there.

...Build it so you can step back.
Not so you have to save it every day.

When you do that, a lot changes.
The value improves.
The stress eases.

And the business finally starts to give some freedom.

Many owners never make that shift.
Which is why most businesses never become sellable.

5x Entrepreneur & Investor | M&A | Investor Communities I Private markets & exits | UK • EU • Asia

Exit Carousel

Jaïr Halevi

Founder-minded ecosystem builder leading the global Startup Program at Miro. Previously worked at Airbnb and partnered with leading VCs, accelerators, and startup communities worldwide. Former social entrepreneur and accelerator lead. Author of Advantage: Culture, focused on helping founders build teams and cultures that scale. Open for keynotes and workshops on startup culture and psychological safety.

Head of Culture & Mentor

Democratizing Acceleration in Latam.

Last week, we hosted an ASIF Ventures startup event at Miro HQ.

150 founders and operators in one room, sharing Y Combinator experiences and lessons from building early-stage companies.

It worked because the conversations were concrete, experience-based, and useful.

That’s also how we think about the Miro #Startup Program:
helping early-stage teams go from idea to product faster, using an AI shared workspace that supports how #founders actually think, explore, and make decisions. https://miro.com/startups/

Thanks to ASIF, the speakers, and everyone who joined.

Fini Venta AI (YC S23) Minimal AI (YC S25) Orderli

Head of Miro Startup Program | Author – Advantage: Culture | Startup Culture Trainer & Advisor

We're optimizing for everything except the thing that actually matters.
Meetings are up 250% (since 2020). Productivity tools multiply. AI captures every word. And yet teams feel more disconnected than ever.

Here's why: we've confused presence with productivity.
Before Covid, presence was the default. Now it's optional. We show up on screen while checking Slack, scanning email, switching tabs. 92% of us admit to multitasking during meetings.
We're there, but we're not.

This isn't just about focus. It's about psychological safety, the foundation of team performance. And psychological safety depends on attention. It's built through eye contact, silence, unguarded moments. When minds are split between apps, those signals disappear.
Remote work didn't kill presence. But it removed the mechanisms that sustained it naturally. What used to happen through proximity now requires intention. And intention rarely survives a calendar full of back-to-back calls.
The uncomfortable truth: some tools meant to "fix" hybrid work are making it worse. AI note-takers are efficient, but they change behavior. When everything's captured, we listen less. We talk for the transcript, not each other.

In a world where work is automated, summarized, and optimized, presence becomes the scarce resource. Not speed. Not productivity. Presence.
Individual discipline can't overcome systemic design. That's why Deepak Mallick and I built Presence Mode, a way to intentionally protect attention during meetings and make presence the path of least resistance again.

I wrote about the quiet erosion of presence at work and what we're building to address it (see link in comment).

If this resonates, we're launching a limited beta with 50 teams who want to experiment with strengthening presence and psychological safety in hybrid environments. Join the waitlist (see link in comment)

Your best engineer knows this launch will fail.
They’re not going to tell you.

Not because they don’t care.
Because speaking up hasn’t been safe.

This is what kills velocity in January.
Not bad strategy. Not unclear OKRs.
Silence.

Google spent two years studying 180 teams to understand what actually drives performance.
The #1 factor wasn’t talent. Wasn’t experience. Wasn’t reporting lines.
It was #psychological #safety.

Teams where people felt safe to speak up:
 • surfaced problems earlier
 • generated significantly more ideas
 • had much lower turnover and burnout

Teams without it moved in slow motion, protecting the CEO’s feelings instead of the company’s future.

This is my favorite topic in the book, and the one I’m asked to speak about the most, because it’s still unfamiliar to many founders and far more influential than they expect.

Here’s what psychological safety actually unlocks:
 • Faster truth — risks show up in planning, not after promises are made
 • Better decisions — assumptions get challenged by people closest to the work
 • Real innovation — people stop self-censoring their “crazy” ideas

As Matthijs Welle (CEO of Mews) told me:
“As CEO, I'm really the Chief Culture Officer. Culture and psychological safety starts at the top. Then it trickles down.”

Most founders think they have psychological safety because no one is yelling.
But real psychological safety isn’t about comfort. It’s about productive conflict.

In the book, I break down:
 • The founder behaviors that create psychological safety (or kill it fast)
 • A practical starter kit to build it through small, consistent actions
 • How to track it using observable signals you can actually see
Huge thanks to Yair Levy and Elena Churilovafor the honesty that helped shape this chapter.

Question for founders:
When was the last time someone directly disagreed with you in a meeting?
If you can’t recall a specific moment from the past two weeks, you (probably) don’t have psychological safety.
You have people managing you.

Book link in the comments 👇

#startups #culture

How does it feel when you’re in a work meeting and the other person is clearly multitasking?
(If I’m honest, I’m guilty of it too.)
#Hybrid work gave us flexibility, and made distraction the default.
When attention fragments, connection weakens, and #psychologicalsafety quietly erodes.
I wrote an article about what this shift does to presence at work — and why it’s not a willpower or productivity problem, but a design one.

Deepak Mallick

Before Covid, work forced presence, and presence quietly did a lot of the work for us. Office life wasn’t perfect, but it created accidental connectio

Open article: The Quiet Erosion of Presence at Work by Jaïr Halevi • 5 min read

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The Battle

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Jaïr Halevi

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Anna C Mallon ⚡⚡⚡'s LinkedIn Performance

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