Maaike Doyer

International Women's Day Special with Maaike Doyer of Epic Angels, Singapore

Episode 2

Written by

Krista Goon

Published on

March 24, 2023

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Womenpreneurasia S06 Maaike Doyer

When I just arrived here in Asia, people were telling me that I had to invest $50,000 in one startup. No, you don’t. That’s a little bit old school, I have to say. And right now with the current technologies, with the way you can organize finances, you can already invest with as little as $1,000 into a startup. Typically what we see at Epic Angels I mean, we can go as low as $1000, but on average we see about $5,000 that you do per startup because $1000 is really a small amount.

maaike doyer

We continue the conversation with Singapore-based entrepreneur, Maaike Doyer who is the founder and managing partner at Epic Angels.

This is the second episode of Season 6 is in conjunction with International Women’s Day! It’s a two-parter episode where we talk about women in business and what it takes to be involved with angel investing.

Maaike is an entrepreneur, educator, and investor who is passionate about Maths! Before she moved to Singapore, she was in Silicon Valley for 6 years and her company produced the famous business model canvas book, Business Model Generation.

This episode is about how women can become angel investors and Maaike will debunk some of the myths about angel investing as well as invite you to find out more about angel investing. Maaike wants to democratize angel investing and make angel investing as accessible as getting a cup of coffee!

As a collective, they focus on early-stage startups in Asia across all verticals and invest in pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds. 

As a beginning, angel, don’t do more than 5% of your assets into angel investing because it is a pretty risky business. It really is while it can get really high returns it can also go to zero.
So the, the risks are bigger.

As a founder herself, Maaike declares that she is proud that within a year of starting Epic Angels, she has a group of more than 100 female angels and has invested more than half a million US dollars in startups. They are presently the largest female-only angel network in the Asia Pacific.

As a collective of female executives and operators, they want to give women the confidence to invest, by learning about the investment process, and understanding how other women invest.

​​Some people think, oh, but I don’t have time because then I need to every month be on calls with a startup or I need to analyze their documents. No, you don’t have to. If you want to, you’re welcome to, but if you don’t want to, you don’t have to. That’s up to you. 


She derives great pleasure from turning great ideas into real businesses. Besides running Epic Angels In Singapore, she is also an adjunct professor at SMU-X and other MBA programmes.

What did you think of this episode? And have you listened to the first episode? In the first part of this two-parter episode, Maaike talked about how you as a female startup founder can get funded, when you should consider funding and how should you approach investors in terms of your pitch deck. She also shared about the cupcake test in the first part which just translates into “Do I really want to be with you in your business?” 

Next Friday, we are back to regular programming which means we will feature every single week, a story of an Asian woman entrepreneur.

Find out more about Maaike Doyer through these links: