✌🏻 The Runway Ventures 2025 Wrapped

Hey Founders,

Today’s issue is a bit special.

Instead of sharing another failed startup story, I want to take this time to share my reflection, learnings, how far our TRV community has come in 2025 and my vision for TRV in 2026.

In 2025, we’ve covered 55 failed startup stories (including podcast + founder interviews) in Southeast Asia and beyond.

Now, you might be thinking, “Hey, the number doesn’t add up. We have 52 weeks a year, why 55 but not 52 stories?”

You want to know the real reason?

Well, we removed a few stories after receiving lawyer letters from founders upon the publication of their stories.

You might not even know this but yeah, that’s the reality of writing failed startup stories in Asia.

But someone needs to tell these stories.
Someone needs to share the lessons.
Someone needs to help founders avoid these mistakes.

Might as well be us, right?

Anyway, so yes — in 2025, we wrote 1 story. Every. Single. Week.

The result?

Our TRV community has since grown to ~20k founders (still blew my mind as I was writing this). I still remember struggling with 100+ subscribers in the first 3 months when I started writing failed startup stories.

Initially, whenever I felt like nobody cared, I told myself, “Fk that, and I hit the button to publish.”

Because as long as the story can help just ONE founder out there, I’ve done my job.

💟 Recently, I met some readers who have been reading TRV newsletter since day 1. The feeling was surreal when I heard them saying how much they loved reading and learning from our newsletter stories.

Hearing this positive feedback means everything to me. LITERALLY.

🙏🏻 If you’re reading this now, thank you so much for riding this journey with us.

You’re exactly the reason why TRV exists to help more founders become better operators by learning from other people’s mistakes.

So, if you can refer more founder friends to subscribe to TRV newsletter, that’d mean the world to me.

So, where’s TRV going in 2026?

4 things:

• Go broad

  • Expand failed startup stories to cover more regional countries in Asia

  • Cover more traditional businesses (instead of just tech)

• Go deep

  • Deeper analysis of stories + share more actionable learnings

  • Launch a private founder community for top 1% founders in Southeast Asia (more on this in Q1 2026)

• Go online

  • Expand TRV social presence on Instagram and TikTok (follow us!)

• Go offline

  • Organise more physical events (i.e. Startup Fxckups) for our community to meet and learn from other founders

Want to share a failed startup story with TRV?

🙏🏻 As I’m looking to cover more failed startup stories in Asia, here's my ask:

• You share a failed startup story in Asia (tech / traditional) (VC-backed / bootstrapped - doesn't matter)

• It could be your own company (ex-founder), or the company that you previously worked at (ex-employee).

No worries - your sharing is entirely confidential.

Also, The Runway Ventures is a community-driven platform.

We rely on the community's contribution like yourself to help us share failed startup stories with more founders so they can become better operators by learning from others' mistakes.

If you're keen and want to be part of this movement, please take 1 minute to fill up the form here.

I’ve published a few stories previously because some readers reached out to share about the failed startups that they wanted me to cover.

So yes, your voice can literally shape our next story ✌🏻

Till then, happy 2025, and I’ll see you in 2026.

Cheers,

Admond