Asia Tech Podcast

I had the pleasure of speaking with Deniz Tekerek, a co-Founder of Portier Technologies.  Deniz’s background alone is fascinating.  His ancestry is both Turkish and Mongolian, but he grew up in Germany.  Still not interested?  Deniz began his career as a professional footballer in Germany but was drawn to the world of business.  After working briefly for others, he headed straight into the world of e-commerce and started his own company in the U.K. Deniz subsequently moved to Hong Kong and became one of the earliest employees in Tink Labs, The idea behind Tink Labs was to create a communication platform for tourists that supported by the hotels in which they were staying.  It was not a bad idea…but there were gaps in the execution strategy.  Those gaps created the opportunity for Deniz and his co-Founder, Mark Pope, to found Portier Technologies. Deniz, Mark and the team set out to build a business that was an extension to services in the hotel that allows them to better understand their guests.  The critical part is to ensure that the entire operation is data-driven.  This focus on using data to better understand the guests allows the hotels to create actionable insights.  This is the secret sauce. Another key change from Tink Labs is that Portier has built a cloud-based device management system and they do not own any of the phones.  By building a close relationship with Samsung they have also created an entirely new model for phone distribution to the hotels, utilizing the Samsung connection to get introduced to Samsung’s best local telco partners and striking deals with them that allows them to efficiently get phones to Portier’s hotel clients. They are also creating an internal communication mechanism for the hotels that includes a data collection layer.  Things get really interesting here as well as the data that gets collected helps manage the business side of the hotels more effectively and efficiently as well. If you liked this episode, you may also like the Thailand GameChanger episode featuring Michael Cluzel, the CEO and co-Founder of eatigo.

I had a great conversation with Ling Ling Tai in August.  Ling Ling is the Founder and Director of Spark Learning Solutions, the Chief Podcast Educator at Meavox, and the host of the Apple-featured podcast, Leaders of Learning. I was interested to find out what it would be like to do a podcast with another podcaster.  Would it get too meta?  Would the tables turn and Ling Ling starts asking me questions?  Either way, I was particularly excited to do this. Ling Ling did not disappoint.  Spark Learning Solutions was the first thing we discussed.  This place where Ling Ling uses her skills as an InterCultural Strategist and her own personal experiences to help others build better cross-cultural collaboration and relationships.  We quickly realized through our discussion that even though we were born in completely parts of the world, we had quite a bit in common.  Not the least of which was that we moved around a lot as kids. We covered a lot of ground, including how her roots as a corporate trainer prepared her to synthesize her engineering and psychology experiences to power Spark, Meavox and her Podcast.  Finally, we talked about the excitement around the Asia Podcast Awards…nominate your favorite podcast and look for the event on November 9 and 10. Also, check out the story about the Asia Podcast Summit on Podnews.net.

I had the pleasure of catching up with Keir Veskivali after an almost 18-month hiatus.  When I had first spoken to Keir, it was still relatively early days in the FinTech startup space.  In his own words, back then Keir was, “super passionate, raising funds and going full steam on”.  But the market has changed a lot in the past 18 months.  Smartly, where Keir was a Founder and CEO, was one of the first companies to foray in the Robo-advisor arena  More players have come into the market, making it naturally more competitive.  It was becoming an arms race of marketing and expensive customer acquisition…and it did not seem sustainable to Keir and his partners. However, the competition was not the only issue.  One of the things that a lot of the FinTech Robo-advisors figured out was that surviving and thriving as a stand-alone business was going to be close to impossible.  This realization came to Smartly earlier than most.  What this meant was that instead of continuing to raise investment capital for growth, the Smartly team started focusing on finding a partner to acquire the business.  After a look at the entire market of potential acquirers, Smartly decided to sell itself to one of its existing investors, VinaCapital. Building startups is hard…and while not often discussed, selling them can be emotionally hard as well.  Keir and I spent some time going over the process of being acquired and the toll the entire process can take on the founders.  It can be difficult to explain the sacrifices that founders make…dedicating 100% of their time to building something from nothing. There is a lot to learn from Kier on multiple levels.  Listen to this entire episode and you will learn something for sure.

Chitransh Sahai is shockingly insightful and mature beyond his years.  If you speak to him for just a few minutes, it all starts to make sense.  A Director and co-Founder of GoComet, Chitransh is also a graduate of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi…as are the other GoComet co-Founders.  Most of them have known each other since their university days, which makes them all well-educated, intelligent and comfortable with one another.  The GoComet team is formidable, indeed. GoComet is also not the first company they founded.  While they were still at university, they noticed some anomalies in the way proptech companies dealt with the hyper-localness of real-estate agents.  The team built a company called Plat, which was quickly noticed by Housing.com and was acquired soon thereafter.  Not a bad outcome for a bunch of kids…They made some money (not enough to retire, according to Chitransh), took a bit of a break and started thinking about the next company to build.  He reflected to me that, “Building companies is like a bug…” Not surprisingly, Chitransh and his co-Founding friends leaned on the experience and learning they got from building Plat and went back to building something new.  Initially, they started an import-export company to learn about the inner-workings of e-commerce.  They were buying products in China and selling them in the United States on Amazon’s platform.  This lead them to the challenges of the international freight market.  With the knowledge that technology companies are fundamentally about building transparency and information symmetry, they set out to attack the international freight market for the following reasons: The market is huge and offers a clear revenue model from day one. The space is extremely opaque and was not using a lot of technology. The international freight market mechanism is also very complex and provided them with some very difficult problems to solve.  If they could create the proper solutions for these problems, the resulting company could be huge. This was an incredible conversation.

This episode is a bit different.  We recorded this at True Digital Park with Leigh Kelson at an event called Startup Nation.  We sat with Chokwan (Kitty) Chopaka and had a frank and frankly enlightening conversation about cannabis and the potential for its legalisation in Thailand. Kitty is the Founder & CEO of Elevated Estate, Thailand’s industry-leading Cannabis focussed expo, incubator, fund and consulting firm. Elevated Estate, is an authoritative source of information and a vital community hub for the cannabis industry in Thailand and beyond. Kitty’s background in corporate law, digital strategy and technology has enabled her to be a unique voice for Cannabis Advocacy. She is also part of Highland Network core team, an organisation that has been dedicated to the goal of the legalisation of cannabis in Thailand. Kitty also told us that she is working with Expara to build an investment fund for the startup cannabis industry in Thailand.

I had the honor of speaking to Dana Badeen and Marijn Beije, the Founders of Lines Designworks. Design is subtle. It is always there. If it is done well, it is almost impossible to notice. If it is done poorly, it can not be unnoticed. The Lines Designworks team, from top to bottom, is pretty incredible. But do not take my word for it, take the fact that Lines Designworks has received 16 international design awards. That is a lot of awards. The conversation I had with Dana and Marijn was so much fun and so informative at the same time. These are not just impressive designers, but super nice people as well. Marijn is one of the most talented industrial designers of his generation. (And he’s not afraid to tell you.) After attending the prestigious Design Academy Eindhoven he trained directly under renowned designer Jacob Jensen. Dana is part designer, part organizer, part over-thinker. After trying her hand at engineering and working at Microsoft, she went on to design school in America. Dana is a rare all-around designer who can realize 3D and 2D as well as overall strategy. She is quite amazing, indeed. Listen to this entire episode…you will not be disappointed.

We did an episode at the end of April with Anna Ratala of Zvook which was really at the founding of the company.  Even just a few months ago, Zvook was not a fully formed thought.  We knew at the end of that episode that we wanted to catch up with both of the co-Founders, particularly after they finished the Antler Startup Generator program and participated in its standing room only demo day.  In this episode, we asked Malik Alimoekhamedov to join us as well.  Anna describes Malik as a tech wizard and the thinking brain behind the technology of Zvook. One of the tenets of the Antler program is that you should go where your market is.  Anna and Malik went to New York for more than a month and got connected to agencies and the podcast ecosystem there.  The expectation was that it would be difficult to get people’s attention there, but the opposite was true.  They actually found it easier to get meetings with influential players in New York than it is in Southeast Asia.  Anna felt that part of the reason was that there is more of a sense of FOMO there of the next big thing…they even scored a meeting with the team from VaynerMedia. One of the best stories the two Founders told to me was when they stepped away to talk about potentially become partners and they got stuck in the elevator they were riding for almost 20 minutes.  Is there a better way to understnad how someone will react to the stress and pressure of building something from scratch than getting stuck in an elevator with them?  The twenty minutes in that elevator solidified the partnership and also creates one of the best origin stories I have heard. This is a bit meta, but podcasting is exploding at the moment and the products and services that Zvook is building are key to the success of both the creators and the brands that support them.  Listen to the rest of the conversation and you will understand why these two decided to work together AND why their partnership engenders a great chance for success.

I was joined on this week’s show by Steve Monaghan, the General Partner at FinMirai.  Steve is also a Limited Partner and investment committee member in True Global Ventures, Vice Chairman of Borderless Healthcare Mobile China, Vice Chairman of the HK Israel Trade Association, a Board Member of Pulse Global and a private investor in Artificial Intelligence, Life Sciences, Healthtech and FinTech. Originally a commercial pilot, Steve has held senior corporate and banking roles in product, marketing, operations, innovation and general management. He has worked for leading corporations and financial institutions including Dell, Compaq, Citigroup, OCBC, Shinsei, DBS Bank and AIA. Throughout his career, Steve has specialized in introducing new business models, businesses and products in all major markets in Asia and has filed 6 patents in FinTech. Steve has many interesting theories, but most interesting to me is his application of the laws of physics to building organizations and organizational change, or innovation.  In summary, it goes something like this: 1) For every action, there is going to be an equal and opposite reaction.  (This basically means that change is going to be opposed.) AND everybody knows this but it is never stated as an expectation. 2) The Law of Inertia – An object will continue in the same trajectory with the same velocity unless an external force is applied.  This informs how much force is necessary to change how big organizations can be changed…with the understanding that most successful innovations usually occur externally to the main organization. 3) Force = Mass * Acceleration. In the corporate context, force is capital and people.  Mass is the size and complexity of your organization, your partners and stakeholders.  Acceleration is growth or alpha. Listen to this and the rest of our amazing conversation.

This week I finally recorded a conversation with Lily Bruns. We connected through Leigh Kelson of BeachCity Media with whom we have both been working to develop entrepreneurship content. Recently we have been enjoying many long, geeky conversations about marketing and why Thailand is the place to be these days for startups and digital nomads. A startup storyteller and content strategist, Lily is the owner of StartupChiangMai.com, lead presenter for BeachCity Media, and a founder of the Chiang Mai Entrepreneurship Association. During our chat, Lily spins the tale of her entrepreneurial journey which begins in her hometown of Chiang Mai, Thailand, wanders through business school in London, nine burnout-inducing months in New York, a stint running her family’s 150-year-old bed & breakfast in rural Virginia and more before returning to the place where it all began, Chiang Mai. This seemingly sleepy city in northern Thailand has become known as one of the world’s top destinations for digital nomads and – if Lily has anything to do about it – it’s soon going to gain a reputation for startups and digital ventures. We had a lot of fun on this chat and get through a lot of topics from what it’s like to grow up on the outside of a culture, whether entrepreneurs are just wired differently, the soft-skills they don’t teach you in business school, the power of mindset, and why you can’t wait for permission to start something.

I had an incredible conversation with Priyanka Jain, the Founder of Roaming Clan.  The origin of this episode is actually quite interesting, and maybe even a proof of concept.  Earlier in the year, I did an episode with Vikram Bharati that started off as two friends catching up and ended up having a long discussion about his new and rapidly growing business called Draper Startup House, then called Tribe Theory.  This is a must-listen. It turned out that I had to go to Singapore during May for some business and I decided to try staying at the flagship Tribe Theory (now Draper Startup House) hostel in Singapore.  I was more than pleasantly surprised.  It was a pretty awesome place.  It was there that I had the chance to meet Priyanka’s sister Prerna Jain.  She and I had a great conversation and after telling her what I did, she said that I had to talk to her sister.  The loop was closed. Priyanka tells a great story about how Roaming Clan was started.  She had been working corporate jobs, doing well and just decided that she wanted to take a 3-month trip to recharge.  That trip turned into a year-long adventure and the things that she learned and experienced during that year inspired her to start and build Roaming Clan. Priyanka and I had a true conversation.  She asked me if during my travels I had ever run into a solo Indian female traveller…and I had to admit that I had not.  That was part of her point.  There are plenty of individuals who would benefit from having others with whom to travel.  Essentially, Roaming Clan is a community of trustworthy travelers.  ‘Roamers’ can join group trips, post their plans in travel clubs & look for like-minded travel-mates.