WomenInTek needs assessment

The brief

The Asia Foundation was running the Women in TEK Network, a USAID-funded program to grow Cambodia's women-led technology startup ecosystem through community, mentoring and policy influence. They asked us to figure out where the program could add real value for its member startups, which meant first figuring out where each startup actually was.

A framework, then interviews

TAF wanted an existing framework rather than an invented one, so we took the open standard from Startup Commons, adapted it to the Cambodian context, and used its six development phases: ideating, concepting, committing, validating, scaling, establishing. Each of the 18 startups in the program did a pre-assessment survey, then sat with us for an in-person interview.

The interviews changed almost everything. When we compared survey scores against what founders told us face to face, most startups moved phases. That didn't surprise us. There's no standard checklist that fits companies this different, and self-assessment tends to measure confidence as much as progress. It took listening to place each startup honestly.

What the founders needed

Across very different industries, the same themes kept surfacing. Founders wanted access to markets, which makes sense in one of Southeast Asia's fastest growing economies. The gaps that held them back were understanding and building the technology itself, and the soft business skills around it.

We gave TAF two levels of output: individual next steps for each founder, matched to their phase, and program-level recommendations sorted into mentorship, training modules and workshops. Most startups fail in their first few years. A program that meets founders where they are, rather than where a survey says they are, shifts those odds.