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

Frederick Daso is a LinkedIn Top Voice and has written 100 startup profiles for Forbes.com. He has profiled startups ranging across enterprise tech, eSports, Fintech, HRTech and EdTech. These startups are backed by renowned VCs such as Y-Combinator, 500 Startups, Accel and Craft Ventures. He has over 350,000 followers on LinkedIn and his LinkedIn newsletter, The Startup Conversation, has over 100,000 subscribers. Frederick is a full-time aerospace engineer at Boeing in the Engineering Career Foundation Program. He was previously a Venture Fellow at Rough Draft Ventures, General Catalyst’s student-led team funding student entrepreneurs in tech, and Castor Ventures, a smart, simple fund for MIT alumni to add venture capital to their portfolio, while investing in MIT-alumni led companies. Frederick Daso has completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Aerospace Engineering from MIT and has been admitted into Harvard Business School's 2+2 program. In his spare time, he can be found playing video games and spending time with his family. You can follow him at https://www.linkedin.com/in/frederickdaso/ and connect with him at astoryforsoda@gmail.com. Shownotes at https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/frederick-daso You can find our community discussions on this episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/15-frederick-daso-senior-contributor-forbes-and-software-engineer-boeing

Nisarg Shah is the cofounder and CEO of Affable.ai. Founded in 2017, Affable.ai is a Singapore based startup leveraging artificial intelligence to run highly effective influencer marketing campaigns. Their Machine Learning and platform helps brands like Shopee, Huawei, and Chanel engage with the most authentic and relevant influencers. Affable is backed by Decacorn Capital, SGInnovate, Entrepreneur First and strategic angels from organizations like Google and Microsoft. Affable is also the first EF startup to be funded by Startup Singapore Equity scheme, which stimulates and accelerates private investments into local startups with intellectual property and global market potential. Before starting Affable, Nisarg built scalable automation systems at Goldman Sachs while working with their technology department in Bangalore. He also previously founded another company, Visualive, which was an AR platform to help consumers visualise 3D product models in their surroundings before buying them online. Nisarg graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, majoring in Electrical Engineering and minoring in Computer Science and Management Studies. In his spare time, he researches and writes for his highly-subscribed newsletter about Unique Business Models, a short weekly summary of how different companies like Duolingo , Unsplash and Robinhood actually generate revenue. You can follow him at www.linkedin.com/in/nisarg259/ and his newsletter is at bit.ly/ubm-ss. These links are in the show notes. Shownotes are found on https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/nisarg-shah You can find our community discussions on the podcast episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/14-nisarg-shah-cofounder-ceo-of-affable-ai

Jeremy reflects on his journey from personal loss in high school, studying SATs in the army, to securing a spot at UC Berkeley and the experiences there that culminated in his decision to attend Harvard Business School. He also shares his most formative lessons such as meeting Clayton Christensen, the professor who developed the theory of disruptive innovation, consulting for a large Turkish retail brand as part of his FIELD program and on-campus life. You can find the show notes at https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/jeremy-mba-pt1 You can find our community discussions for this episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/13-jeremy-au-harvard-mba-class-of-2017

Looi Qin En is the co-founder and former COO of Glints. Founded in 2013, Glints is now the number one tech-enabled recruitment platform in Asia for employers to build successful teams. Their mission is to help all people and organizations to realize their full human potential. They were the youngest founders to have raised venture capital in Southeast Asia. They are backed by VC firms such as Monk's Hill Ventures, 500 Startups, Wavemaker Partners, Golden Equator Capital, MindWorks Ventures, Fresco Capital and Singapore Press Holdings. They have been featured on Forbes, Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Yahoo News, The Straits Times, Business Times, Today, Tech in Asia, e27 and Channel News Asia. Qin En led people operations and grew the user community from zero to 250,000 across Singapore and Indonesia, managed enterprise accounts and led the internal human capital strategy. At the age of 15, he wrote his first research paper on predicting personality through social gaming and went on to publish 12 more human-computer interaction papers in international peer-reviewed conferences and journals. He fostered student entrepreneurship as a partner with Dorm Room Fund, associate lecturer at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Entrepreneur In Residence at Entrepreneur First and advisor to the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Singapore Management University. He has worked in management consulting at Boston Consulting Group, founded and sold the web design agency Half Grand and has been a brand strategist at Training Edge International. Qin En graduated with distinction in two years from Stanford University, majoring in Management Science and Engineering. He was honored with Forbes 30 under 30 and Entrepreneurs 27 under 27. His hobbies are high intensity cardio and watching action movies. You can follow him at his social media profile online in our show notes. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/looiqinen) Show notes at: https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/looi-qin-en You can find our community discussions on the podcast episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/12-looi-qin-en-co-founder-and-former-coo-of-glints

Successful founders and investors have shared their reflections in other episodes. This podcast is a time capsule from 2018 where I shared my personal journey with GroundBreakers on tackling America's childcare shortage and founding CozyKin, an early education platform for new and expecting parents. We grew rapidly across Boston and New York and raised $8 million of venture capital funding from pre-seed to Series A. CozyKin was eventually acquired by Higher Ground, a global education leader that runs Montessori-inspired education services across USA, Europe, and China. Show notes at https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/groundbreakers-jeremyau You can find our community discussions for this episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/11-jeremy-au-ceo-co-founder-of-cozykin

Professor Randy Howard Katz, the Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Berkeley and the United Micro Electronics Corporation Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. He is a pioneer who helped develop many of the wireless tools and fast, reliable, computer storage, we take for granted today. Katz is well known in the computer industry for his development of RAID computer storage systems in the 1980s with Professor Emeritus David Patterson, and then graduate student Garth Gibson. Short for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks, RAID storage today is a $25 billion per year industry sector that allows the storage of data in multiple places across an array of many small, parallel computers for quick retrieval and protection against loss or corruption of the data. He is also known as the scientist who brought the nascent internet to the White House. In the 1990s, he set up the email accounts of former President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore, and built the original whitehouse.gov site, which has been the main portal into executive brunch ever since. Katz has also helped shepherd other innovations into common usage, wireless computing, wide area wireless networks for mobile devices, cloud-based applications and cloud storage and ways of managing and protecting computer networks. He currently is involved with the RISElab – Real-time Intelligent Secure Execution — where he collaborates on projects that use machine learning to control complex infrastructures like buildings, energy, and transportation systems. He is focused on exploiting "serverless computing", a way to harness lightweight, low cost, stateless virtual machine images typically found in cloud computing environments to perform long-running data-intensive computations. He has published over 250 referee technical papers, book chapters, and books. His textbook "Contemporary Logic Design" has sold over 85,000 copies and has been used at over 200 colleges and universities. He has supervised 43 Master theses and 31 Ph.D. dissertations (including one ACM Dissertation award winner and eight women) and leads the research team of over ten graduate students, technical staff and academic visitors. His recognitions include thirteen best paper awards (including one "Test of Time" Paper Award, and one selected for a 50 year retrospective on IEEE Communications publications), three best presentation awards, the Outstanding Alumni Award of the UCB Computer Science Division, the CRA Outstanding Service Award, the Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award, the Air Force Exceptional Civilian Service Decoration, the IEEE Reynolds Johnson Information Storage Award, the ASEE Frederic E. Terman Award, and the ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. Katz has also had a profound impact on engineering education at Berkeley, and has been recognized for his dynamic teaching and mentoring with numerous honors, including the campus's distinguished Teaching Award. He has been a frequent instructor in the freshman seminar program, teaching courses on the history of communications technologies. Katz is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has also been inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. He was awarded the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal in 2010. He received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University, and his Master and Ph.D. degrees from UC Berkeley, all in computer science. Katz lives in San Francisco with his wife, psychologist Zoi Eliou and his two rescue dogs, Benji and Lulu. He is an avid Giants fan and amateur actor and playwright, a voracious reader of fiction and history and enjoys board games. Show transcript: https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/randy-katz

Andrew Ive is the Founder & Managing General Partner at Big Idea Ventures. Big Idea Ventures is a hybrid venture firm with a VC arm and accelerator program. It runs the $50M New Protein Fund, which is the world’s first and largest plant-based accelerator fund. The fund is backed by giants like Tyson Foods and Temasek, the Singaporean government’s VC arm. They focus heavily on plant-based protein startups and 10 percent of their money is allocated for cell-based endeavors. They have launched physical accelerator programs in New York City and Singapore. They aim to back over 100 companies. Their first investment was the cultured shrimp company Shiok Meats. Shiok Meats is based in Singapore and has already done successful taste tests of its minced alternative “shrimp” in dumpling form. They have been featured on The Economist, the World Economic Forum and Techcrunch. Andrew is focused on supporting entrepreneurs to solve the world's biggest challenges. He formerly launched and grew businesses at Procter & Gamble. While in his dorm room at Harvard Business School, he took a new product idea, raised angel funds, established a manufacturing facility in China as well as a sales force to sell his first solo product line into major US retailers. In his second Silicon Valley based company Open Shelf, Andrew raised $20M+ from VCs to focus on the data challenge between retailers and their vendors. That company was also acquired. Andrew has focused on innovation, developing high-growth business opportunities and serving as a business advisor in multiple verticals. He served on the Board of the Small Business Council of the Department of Trade and Industry advising the UK Government on entrepreneurship and high growth companies, the National Science Foundation on startup grant awards, the Investment Task Force and the Center for Policy Studies, and the UK think tank Small Business Council. He also served on the board of Tufts University’s School of Nutrition. Andrew is also an author and currently has a bestselling book, ‘Choose Your Startup: Funding Your Company’ in the startups and entrepreneurial categories on Amazon. He holds a BSc from the University of London and an MBA from Harvard Business School. His first product design, the X-IT Ladder, is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He is passionate about climate change, animal welfare and sustainability. His favorite hobby is writing and has ten books that he’s working on. You can find him on Twitter @TheFundingGuru Shownotes at: https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/andrew-ive You can find our community discussions on the podcast episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/10-andrew-ive-founder-managing-general-partner-big-idea-ventures

Nurul Jihadah Hussain is the Founder of The Codette Project. Operating since 2015, The Codette Project is a nonprofit ground-up initiative to improve access and opportunities for minority & Muslim women in technology. The Codette Project runs classes, workshops, panels, networking sessions and social events regularly, including Singapore’s only women's hackathon. She wants to create better communities, networks and opportunities, and to diversify what success means in society – to prove that success can look like anyone.  She is one of 115 global community leaders selected into Facebook's inaugural Community Leadership Programme. Nurul also sits on the Gender Advisory Panel for Accelerating Asia Ventures, an independent and award-winning startup accelerator in Singapore. She has led on multiple steering committees at Yayasan Mendaki, the leading self-help group in Singapore uplifting the Malay & Muslim community’s resilience, education and adaptability. She is the Chairperson leading a team of experienced founders to help create better ecosystems and support for minority & Muslim entrepreneurs. She had previously been on the steering committees for CLF Labs, a platform for youth in organizations to adopt intrapreneurship, as well as Digital Transformation for the the Malay Muslim voluntary sector. Nurul graduated with an honors Master of Arts in Arabic and Politics from The University of Edinburgh and a Master of Business Administration from Singapore Management University. She has worked in higher education, Japan and Singapore’s banking system. Her hobbies are reading fiction, cooking and crochet. You can support her work by going to www.thecodetteproject.com Show notes at https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/nurul-hussain You can find our community discussions for this episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/9-nurul-hussain-founder-of-the-codette-project

Hsu Ken Ooi is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Iterative. Iterative is a Y Combinator-style accelerator focused exclusively on Southeast Asia. In their latest batch, they chose the top 9 companies out of over 300 startup applicants. The domains range across proptech, fintech, direct to consumer and logistics.  In 2009, he co-founded Decide.com with Hsu Han Ooi, Brian Ma and Ian Ma. Decide.com was an early machine learning company that predicted the future price of consumer goods. It raised over $16M total funding and was acquired by eBay in 2013. Since then, his other tech executive roles include being the Chief Product Officer at Workmate, an on-demand blue collar staffing platform in Southeast Asia that has raised over $10M total funding. He was formerly VP of Product at Weave. Weave was a platform that delivered a personalized professional introduction every week and was part of the YC summer batch of 2014.  Hsu Ken has a Bachelors of Science in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Washington. His hobbies are books, cooking, and football. You can find him on Twitter at @hsukenooi. You can find the show notes at https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/hsu-ken-ooi You can find our community discussions for this episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/8-hsu-ken-ooi-co-founder-managing-partner-iterative

Amir Salihefendić is the founder and CEO of Doist, the remote-first company behind the productivity app Todoist and Twist, a team communication app. Todoist keeps track of all your tasks, projects, and goals in one beautifully simple place. It syncs across all your devices and integrates with all your favorite apps. This app is for people who need less chaos and more peace-of-mind. Todoist has helped millions of people complete over 1.5 billion tasks in 150+ million projects.   Todoist is the top-ranked productivity app. It is Google Play’s “Editor’s Choice” with 4.7 stars across 187K+ reviews. It is on the Apple store as a featured app with 4.8 stars across 30K+ reviews. The Verge reviewed Todoist as 9/10 and “The best to-do list app right now”. Doist is a remote-first team with 75 employees collaborating across 18 timezones and over 20 different countries. Doist has published the leading guides and best practices for starting, managing, and scaling a remote team from the world’s most successful distributed companies. He graduated with a Bachelors of Science in Computer Science at Aarhus University. He was born in Bosnia, grew up in Denmark and is currently splitting his time across Barcelona, Spain and Santiago, Chile. He is a dad of two and enjoys football and surfing. He speaks Bosnian, Danish, English and Spanish. Find the show transcript at https://www.jeremyau.com/blog/amir-salihefendic You can find our community discussions for this episode at https://club.jeremyau.com/c/podcasts/7-amir-salihefendic-founder-and-ceo-of-doist