A few weeks ago I spoke to a group of MBA students from the University of St. Gallen, here in Singapore on their Business Study Mission. We spent an hour on Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition — what it is, how it works, and why it matters in Southeast Asia specifically.
The conversation was lively. But what stayed with me afterward was a simple observation I kept coming back to: when an acquisition is structured well, almost everyone wins.
Four parties, four genuine outcomes.
The company gains continuity — a custodian who will keep it running, invest in it, and protect what made it worth caring about in the first place.
The founder sees the business they spent thirty years building passed on to someone who will treat it with care. Not absorbed, not rebranded, not stripped for parts.
Investors gain access to durable, cash-generating assets — the kind that compound quietly over decades rather than swinging with market sentiment.
The entrepreneur-acquirer gets the privilege of building on top of an established foundation: real customers, real cash flow, and a team that already knows what it is doing.
This positive-sum structure is not the norm in private markets. In most leveraged buyout frameworks, financial engineering extracts from one party to enrich another. In venture, the operators and early employees are often the last to benefit. ETA — done with genuine intent — is one of the few structures where the interests actually align.
That alignment is what drew me to this work. It is also what makes it worth doing carefully. The four wins only materialise if the acquirer is the right one — patient, capable, and genuinely committed to the business and the people inside it. Get that wrong, and the positive-sum framing collapses quickly.
I am grateful to Stefan Morkoetter for the invitation, and to the St. Gallen students for the quality of their questions. If that conversation is any measure, the next generation of ETA practitioners understands what this work is really for.
— Lucien Ong, Co-Founder, Enduring Ventures