Last week I caught up with a top angel investor, Outlander.VC’s Paige Craig, and his partner in both work and life, Leura.
Paige has put early money into more than a dozen billion-dollar startups, including Airbnb (No. 382), Lyft (No. 22), and most recently Scale AI, which he found before the startup was even called Scale AI and had a valuation of just $3 million (in case you’re keeping track, Meta just paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in the company, netting a huge return for Craig).
I asked him and Leura how they pick winning founders early. The pair identified 38 traits they screen for, including one Craig noticed immediately in Scale AI cofounder Lucy Gao: being “obsessive.”
If you can focus all your energy on your startup’s mission without getting easily distracted or discouraged, it’s a big green flag, they say.
At Fortune, we have an obsession of our own: covering the largest, most successful companies globally, and focusing on how leaders are growing—or blowing—the businesses. We’ve historically done that through the Fortune 500, which for 71 years has been the gold standard ranking of the highest revenue-generating companies in the U.S.
More recently, we’ve expanded our purview to rank the largest companies in other parts of the world. On Tuesday, we unveiled the Fortune Southeast Asia 500. This group of companies is much smaller than the U.S. cohort, producing $1.8 trillion in total revenue last year versus the $1.8 trillion in total profits produced by the Fortune 500. But there are a few key takeaways from the data.
“The Southeast Asia 500 is a snapshot of an economic region on the move, ready to take advantage of booming industries like AI and EVs,” Fortune Asia editor Nicholas Gordon writes. “Energy dominates the list, generating a third of the list’s total revenue. Finance, too, plays a key role: Singapore’s ‘Big Three’ banks are the list’s most profitable companies. Tech has a smaller presence on the list: Just one internet company, Sea (No. 15), sits in the top 20.”
Explore the Fortune Southeast Asia 500 here, and for more must-reads from our newsroom, check out the stories below.
