BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)

Karthik Gandhi is an engineering leader at Stripe. His current role is to help Stripe expand into SEA and India. Before Stripe, Karthik worked at Grab, where he managed critical economic levers such as Pricing, Surge Engine, Forecasting, Demand Shaping, Supply Shaping, and the ML platform that powered it all. Karthik built his career in Silicon Valley before moving to Singapore. He started his career at pre-IPO VMware as a kernel developer. Later he started an NLP startup (General Sentiment) with his advisor Prof. Steven Skiena. Even though the company didn't succeed, the experience shaped his career. Karthik was inspired to become a leader at Microsoft, where he was part of Azure team. His most significant career breakthrough came when he joined Uber as one of the early employees and spent close to 4 years there. During his time at Uber, Karthik helped Uber build its business in China, built its core infrastructure that helped Uber scale to millions of transactions/second. Later, Karthik transitioned to build autonomous vehicles and trucks. Karthik became part of the Uber Freight team when the automated trucks program was suspended and helped build a marketplace from scratch.  Karthik graduated with a Master of Science from Stony Brook University, New York, and later did a distributed systems specialization with the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He moved to Singapore in June 2019, where he lives with his wife (Software Engineer@Facebook) and his 3-year-old daughter. He is into adventure sports such as ice climbing, diving, canyoning, skiing, and any outdoor activity depending on the season. His indoor activities include reading books about leadership and human evolution - past, present, and the future, tinkering with my Raspberry PI cluster for distributed systems development. Shownotes at www.jeremyau.com/blog/karthik-gandhi You can find our community discussions on the podcast episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/karthik-gandhi-on-engineering-leadership-styles-feedback-by-travis-kalanick-us-vs-singapore-tech-culture

Nat is an Investment Associate at Monk’s Hill Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in early-stage tech companies, primarily Series A, in Southeast Asia. She is based in Thailand and is responsible for deal sourcing and execution, investment analysis and portfolio management. With a strong passion for financial inclusion, Nat brings in a decade of experience in fintech, capital markets, and macroeconomics from Thailand. Prior to joining Monk's Hill Ventures, she spearheaded fintech and blockchain investments at Beacon Venture Capital, a corporate venture arm of Thailand’s top three largest banks. Prior to that, Nat advised corporate and SME clients on financial management and hedging strategies at Kasikornbank (KBank). She was also an Economist at the Bank of Thailand where she contributed to the set-up of Southeast Asia's US$240 billion reserve fund. She graduated with an MBA from Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. You can listen to her podcast at https://www.theventurejourney.com Shownotes at: https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/nat-wittayatanaseth

Gorick Ng is author of THE UNSPOKEN RULES: Secrets to Starting Your Career Off Right (Harvard Business Review Press), a guide on how to become a top-performing employee, based on 500+ interviews with professionals across geographies, industries, and job types. Gorick's book is quickly becoming required reading for new grads and new hires across universities, Fortune 500 companies, tech startups, and non-profits around the world. Gorick's book has been endorsed by Arianna Huffington (Founder of Huffington Post), Cal Newport (Author of Deep Work), David Carey (Former Global President of Hearst Magazines), Edith Cooper (Board Director of Slack and Etsy and Former Global Head of Human Capital Management of Goldman Sachs), Ginni Rometty (Executive Chairman of IBM), Julie Zhuo (Former VP of Product Design of Facebook), Rich Lesser (CEO of BCG), and Ratan Tata (Former Chairman of Tata Group). Gorick is a career adviser at Harvard College, specializing in coaching first-generation, low-income students. He has managed new employees at Boston Consulting Group, worked in investment banking at Credit Suisse, and is also a researcher with the Managing the Future of Work project at Harvard Business School. He has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Fast Company, CNBC, and more. Gorick, a first-generation college student, is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Business School. Find him at gorick.com. Shownotes: https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/gorick-ng

Kei Shibata co-founded Venture Republic Group in 2001 and has been serving as CEO since the foundation. The company runs a group of online travel websites and apps across Asia including LINE TRAVEL jp , Japan's largest online travel metasearch/media (26 million monthly users on Web + 22 million followers on LINE app), Trip101, a Singapore-based global online travel media for modern travelers, and allstay, a leading mobile accommodation search app in Korea. He led the company to IPO (2177. JASDAQ) in 2008 after 7 years of inception, to buyout by the management in 2012, to sales of “coneco.net,” its online shopping engine business in Japan to Yahoo! Japan in 2013, and to bring in LINE Corporation, Asia’s leading mobile messaging company as an investor in 2018 as a liquidity event. Kei also serves as co-founder/organizer of WIT (Web In Travel) Japan & North Asia, the largest international business conference in North Asia focusing on travel & technology, Chairman of Keio University's alumni association for startup founders/CEOs and Executive Committee Member of Harvard Business School Club of Japan. Kei is also an angel investor in the travel & technology space across APEC and America regions for over 10 years. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Law from Keio University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. In his free time, Kei is an avid nordic/alpine skier & snowboarder. Shownotes at https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/kei-shibata You can find our community discussions on the podcast episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/62-kei-shibata-on-founding-with-1-equity-taking-risks-in-risk-free-environments-non-ideal-startup-paths

John-Simon Purcell (‘JSP’) is Senior Director, Product & Technical Strategy at Prosus Group/Naspers where he advises on new venture investments and provides operating guidance to Prosus’ worldwide portfolio in the areas of product, growth, and technology. Prior to Prosus, JSP was Technical Director at Medialets, where he scaled systems to collect & analyze data for a product that was at one point on 85%+ of all iOS and Android devices. JSP had also guided Nokia’s Ovi Store, a B2C mobile experience with on-device and web based storefronts for billions of customers in every corner of the globe. He also held several technology leadership roles at MTV Networks and Sun Microsystems.  JSP started his career at Cambridge, MA startup Vermeer Technologies which was acquired by the Microsoft Corporation. He holds a B.A. from Boston University and a M.S. from Columbia University, in Computer Science respectively. Shownotes at https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/john-simon-purcell

Koh Shiyan is the Managing Partner at Hustle Fund, a venture capital fund that invests in pre-seed software startups in the U.S., Canada and Southeast Asia.  Prior to that she was VP Business Operations and Corporate Development at NerdWallet, a Fintech Startup that helps users with a range of financial decisions through content, community and tools. Over the course of six years at NerdWallet, she led product teams, ran business operations and corporate development, and helped grow the company from US$1M to US$150M in revenue.  Shiyan’s first exposure to technology was as a summer intern writing technical documentation for a small 30 person startup Telenav, that is now listed on NASDAQ. She has also worked in a series of finance and investing roles at JPMorgan, Institutional Venture Partners and Bridgewater Associates before joining NerdWallet. Shiyan graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Biomechanical Engineering and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Stanford University as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School.  Shownotes at https://www.jeremyau.com/shiyan-koh You can join community discussions at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/60-shiyan-koh-on-choosing-bosses-learning-acceleration-building-investor-founder-trust

Andrew Barry is currently the Program Director for the On Deck Course Creator Fellowship, where On Deck is building the first global community of Superstar Teachers. He is also the founder of Curious Lion, a boutique training agency reimagining the way companies like PagerDuty, Pinterest and KPMG upskill their people. Prior to that, he was Head of Learning at Lobster Ink, a video-based training provider in hospitality, later acquired by Ecolab. He was also in charge of content for KPMG's Executive Education business before entering the world of startups and entrepreneurship. Andrew received his Bachelors in Business Science, Finance and Accounting from the University of Cape Town. He is originally from South Africa, and now lives in New York City with his wife and son. Shownotes at https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/andrew-barry You can find our community discussions on the podcast episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/andrew-barry-on-disrupting-education-infinite-distribution-designing-catharsis

Youngrok is a partner at Ginza Ventures, cross border early-stage venture capital fund based in Japan and the US. Currently, he is structuring the fund while raising the capital from potential limited partners. With an emphasis on B2B and FinTech, the fund intends to invest in startups in various industries and aims to help its portfolio companies expand in Japan (and Korea). He also launched a media project called VRidge. Along with the current weekly newsletter written in Japanese and Korean, he also plans to start podcasts and Youtube channels for the audiences in Japan and Korea featuring investors, founders, and builders from other countries. With full of curiosity, he has always aspired to challenge new things. Born in raised in Seoul in Korea, he decided to go to Japan to play guitar in a rock band when he was in high school. While he was serving for Korean Army in 2005, he volunteered to go to Iraq for 7 months. Post-college, after spending six years as an engineer at Goldman Sachs in Tokyo, he decided to go to the US for the MBA program at the University of Chicago to try out his venture capital journey. He spent one year at ARCH Venture Partners in Chicago before working at Recruit Strategic Partner, corporate VC arm of Recruit Holdings, the parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor. He currently lives with his beautiful wife in the Bay Area. As for hobbies, in addition to playing guitar, he enjoys all outdoor activities https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/youngrok-kim

Yishi is an entrepreneur and investor.He was born in China and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first job out of college was as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs in San Francisco. He worked for 3 years at a fundamental-value hedge fund thereafter. After 20 years in the Bay Area, he moved to Boston in 2016 to pursue an MBA at MIT Sloan. While at MIT, he co-founded DeepBench. The company connect customers with experts on any topic in any industry.In 2020, he transitioned away from being the full-time CEO of DeepBench. Hee started a start-up studio called Optionality Partners. He uses his own capital and that of a few close friends to build businesses and invest in companies. He also blogs at the intersection of investing, entrepreneurship, and personal growth: https://yishizuo.com Currently, Yishi lives in Los Angeles. Shownotes at: https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/yishizuo

Ricky Willianto is the Co-Founder and CEO of Ravenry, a knowledge work platform that connects companies with the top 5% freelance researchers and writers in the world. Previously, he was involved in strategy and research, having been Managing Director for Dash, a Senior Consultant at BTS, and an Industry Analyst at IBISWorld. Ricky received a Seth Godin’s altMBA, and his Bachelors in Commerce, Economic and Finance at University of Melbourne. Born in Indonesia, he now lives in Singapore, working to build a network of creators in Southeast Asia.  Shownotes and Transcript at https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/ricky-willianto You can find our community discussions on the podcast episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/56-ricky-willianto-on-bootstrapping-vs-vc-funding-entrepreneurial-childhood-asian-financial-crisis-impact-on-family