In this episode of View From The Top, Ganesh Nayak sits down with Chris Loh, Managing Partner at Axiom Asia — one of Asia's leading private equity fund-of-funds investors.

Chris brings a rare vantage point. He started as an electronics engineer in Japan, moved into Silicon Valley venture investing with GIC during the dot-com years, and joined Axiom in 2009 as the venture capital boom was taking off in China. From that seat, he has watched three full cycles play out across China, Japan, Korea, and India — and seen what made each one move.

Together, Ganesh and Chris explore why India today resembles where China stood in the early 2000s, how Japan's buyout-led ecosystem is now growing a venture layer on top, and why exit pathways are the single most important variable LPs underestimate when they enter Asia.

A recurring thread runs through the conversation: home-market biases do not travel well. LPs from the US and Europe often arrive in Asia looking only at buyouts because that is what worked at home. Chris argues that the firms who succeed in Asia are the ones willing to let go of those defaults and read each market on its own terms.

In this episode:

• How venture capital travelled from Silicon Valley to China, and then to the rest of Asia
• Why India's 2021 IPO ecosystem was the moment that finally unlocked exits for early backers
• What separates China, Japan, Korea, and India in their private market cycles today
• How Axiom evaluates GPs across primary, secondary, and co-investment strategies
• Why team dynamics matter more than individual brilliance when picking venture managers
• The home biases that hold global LPs back when they first deploy into Asia
• How secondary markets in Asia moved from second-choice exit to a credible liquidity path

This is a first-hand account of how Asia's private capital markets actually work — and where the real opportunity lies for the next decade of global allocators.

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