Building the Ecosystem That Absorbs Capital: The Entrepreneur's Perspective

Episode 5 — Building the Ecosystem That Absorbs Capital: The Entrepreneur's Perspective To close Wave 1, host Ovidiu Bujorean sits down with Jeff Hoffman - co-founder of Priceline and Booking.com, Chairman of the Global Entrepreneurship Network, and a member of the OviBees Ventures Global Advisory Board. The two go back over a decade, to Jakarta and the GIST Initiative, where a young founder named Natali Ardianto was in the room - his startup Tiket.com went on to become one of Indonesia's leading travel platforms, later acquired by Blibli. This time, the question is different: after four episodes on the capital side, what does it actually take to build ventures that can absorb it? Hoffman brings the founder's view to a series that's mostly looked from the investor's chair. Why product-market fit is found in the field, not the office. Why coachability beats intelligence. Why the "missing middle" is really a communication gap, not a capital gap. Sharp, practical, and a fitting way to close out Wave 1's five-part arc from deployment gap to ecosystem building. Listen now, and subscribe to the Capital Deployment newsletter on LinkedIn for corridor intelligence and key insights from every episode - Wave 2 returns in September 2026: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/7454225038356013056/