Hey! Thanks for being here for Edition #20. You're one of 330+ subscribers, and I genuinely appreciate every single one of you.
This is the 20th edition, which I'm pretty happy about. I haven't missed a Friday yet.
I didn't post as much this week, but a couple of the stories I looked at had the same problem. The headline numbers are huge, and when you dig in, there's not much signed behind them.
Let's get into it.
$50B of AI investment is coming to Malaysia. Maybe. In a speech on October 24, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said SoftBank's Masayoshi Son has picked sites in Kuching (Sarawak) and Peninsular Malaysia for $50B of AI and data centre investment. The number came from a video call with Son. SoftBank hasn't confirmed it - it says it's "exploring" opportunities. The only signed document is an October 8 framework in Kuching, and it has no dollar figure attached and obliges nobody to build anything. The proposed split: SoftBank brings compute, chips and physical AI, Grab brings its Southeast Asian ecosystem, and PETROS brings power and local participation.
For context, Malaysia has already pulled in $94B of data centre investment since 2021, with Amazon, Microsoft and Google all building there. $50B would add more than half of that again. If it's real, it's a big deal. Right now it's a speech and a non-binding framework. How much of the AI capex boom is announced, and how much is actually committed?
Also this week:
The Pentagon is lending into space infrastructure. The Office of Strategic Capital has made a $150M conditional loan commitment to Stoke Space - a month after Stoke's $1B Series E initial close, taking total raised to $2.3B. The money isn't for launches. It's for a second pad at SLC-14, Cape Canaveral, built for Nova Block 2 (15t to LEO, fully reusable, targeted for 2029). Stoke hasn't reached orbit yet - Nova Pathfinder is targeted for early 2027. The OSC was set up in 2022 to use loans and guarantees instead of grants, so private capital stays in front and government credit fills the gap. Launchpads take years to build and are hard to finance privately, and Washington would rather lend into that gap than wait. Is government credit becoming the new venture capital?
What's crossing my desk and my conversations this week:
A very strange offer. A man reached out cold asking whether any very large traders, funds or family offices would want access to "very private" data. His words: "When I say private, I mean private private." No name, no company, no source, no explanation. I passed and told him it sounded like hacked data. He took that personally, said I was disrespecting his reputation - a reputation he never told me a single thing about - and blocked me. If anyone sends you a pitch with no name, no source and no explanation, the answer is no. What's the strangest offer you've received?
60 investor calls last month. My pipeline is a short list of investor profiles: family office principals, institutional investors, private credit lenders, LPs looking for co-invest deals, and GPs sitting on dry powder. None of those calls came from a generic sales sequence - more on how I approach it in Sponsor Tips below.
No Deal Spotlight this week - back next Friday.
If you have deals you want me to look at, please reply to this email.
Reach investors in their first 90 days.
For years, my outreach was painful. Find the right person on LinkedIn, guess their email format, send something and hope. Half bounced. The other half landed with a junior analyst and I never heard back.
What changed it was one filter: people who have stepped into a new seat in the last 90 days. I target principals, CIOs and heads of private credit at investment managers, PE and VC firms across the GCC, Singapore, the US and the UK - but the new-hire filter does the heavy lifting.
The logic is simple. Someone who has just become CIO is trying to build out their book. They're far more open to a conversation than someone who's been in the same chair for eight years.
From there I work the list two ways: connect on LinkedIn first, then send an email. Most of the time it's the email that gets the meeting over the line - which only works if it actually lands in their inbox, not a bounce folder. And when people move firms, keep your data current so you're reaching them in the new seat, not the old one.
Who on your target list changed roles this quarter?
No Live Deal Flow this week - reply to this email if you want your deal to be featured.
That's all for this week. See you next Friday.
— Jordon
P.S. I get 500,000+ monthly impressions on LinkedIn and a growing list of private capital readers right here. If you'd like to get your company, fund, or raise in front of this audience, just reply to this email.