Asia Tech Podcast

I caught up with Michael Smith, Jr., a Partner at SeedPlus.  SeedPlus is a seed-stage venture firm based in Singapore that invests in teams based in the Southeast Asian region that want to build global, transformative businesses.  It has been about a year since the last time Michael was on the podcast.  A lot has changed in that year and we also talked in-depth about what has changed during the more than three years since the fund was founded.  There have been many changes in that time, not the least of which has been the structural change in the amount of funding available for founders in Southeast Asia, from Southeast Asian funds.  In many ways, it is a great time to be a founder in this region’s major technology and startup hubs. While this IS true, launching a startup is still a difficult and arduous process.  SeedPlus’ Project Alpha, in conjunction with AWS, aims to make that process a little bit easier.  Part of the premise of Project Alpha, according to the conversation we had, is that it is prohibitive to set up accelerators in every major Southeast Asia city.  So, why not travel to those cities and create a targeted event to help educate and inspire the next generation of founders.  After building the program in four cities last year (Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Bangkok, and Singapore), the team is adding two new cities this year…Ho Chi Minh and Manila. This year’s event in Bangkok is taking place at True Digital Park…which we discussed in our conversation as well.  I am frequently recording at TDPK and I can say without hesitation that this is an incredibly ambitious project.  Dovetailing nicely with the recently launched Thailand GameChanger podcast, Michael and I also spent some time discussing some of the aspects of the Thai Startup ecosystem that need to be improved to make Thailand even more competitive than it already is.  Michael never disappoints with his insights and straightforward opinions.

Nikhil Kapur and I had a fantastic and insightful conversation that ran a gamut of topics around the venture capital and investment space in Southeast Asia, Japan and India.  Nikhil is Head of Investments for Southeast Asia and India at STRIVE.  He is an accomplished computer engineer and a successful startup founder.  He built a profitable B2B media-tech venture in India called TommyJams. Recently, STRIVE (the former GREE Ventures) has been in the news as it has completely re-branded and has also announced the first close of its third fund and expect to announce a final close by year-end 2019.  Among other things, we discussed both the rebranding and the new fund.  We also spoke about the firm’s commitment to sit in the same boat as the founders into which it invests.  This exemplifies STRIVE’s passion towards building big businesses along with the founders. Nikhil noted that each successive fund of STRIVE’s moves more and more into the B2B sector, believing that enterprises in Asia still maintain a technology stack (or lack thereof) that has yet to be fully disrupted. We moved into a discussion of SuperApps, Grab, Alibaba and TenCent and why chat was really important to their growth.

I had a pretty amazing conversation with Jussi Salovaara, a co-Founder and the Managing Partner of Antler in Asia. Jussi, who is originally from Finland, has over a decade of experience in areas of investment and strategy across different industries including engineering and IoT. Before founding Antler, he was the Vice President at Nokia’s headquarters in Helsinki, running Product, Strategy, Sales and Commercial functions. He has also had his experiences built working with prominent international companies such as McKinsey, Deloitte and Morgan Stanley.  It was actually at McKinsey where he met his co-Founder, Magnus Grimeland. Antler was partially born out of Jussi’s passion to help entrepreneurs and Founders and a desire to start something on his own.  He struggled with the issue of how to actually find a co-Founder…and his quality bar was quite high.  Frankly, it should be high when trying to find someone with whom you will have to work very closely.  This was when he reconnected to Magnus who was just starting to think about Antler and the concept of sustainably supporting talented individuals and becoming founders of companies.  At Antler, Jussi focuses on running the overall strategy and operations in Asia. Antler is not a typical accelerator program.  This is a people-centric platform, believing deeply that teams matter more than ideas and getting the right team in place is key to building a big business.  In fact, if you ask the Antler team, they will say that they are a startup generator and early-stage venture capital platform. They do not take this word ‘platform’ lightly.  They already have 8 locations globally and aim to have 30 locations and programs within a few years.  This looks like venture capital and venture building on steroids.  They take their own advice as well, building with speed and velocity that most VCs would not recognize.  A growth company building growth companies…nice.

I was talking to Pavel Zaslavsky, the Head of Israel for LisutoAI and it could not have been more interesting.  Pavel has almost two decades of experience in the intersection of e-commerce, data analysis, algorithms, product discovery and product cataloging…Pavel has had an insane amount of experience at companies like shopping.com and e-Bay.  He was actually responsible for building out e-Bay’s Catalog team in Israel.  When Pavel talks about e-commerce, product discoverability and search, people listen.  Pavel not only has two degrees from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, but he also lectures there as well. Pavel and I had a fascinating conversation about data and product discoverability and its impact on both Sellers and Buyers on big digital marketplaces.  We touched on structured versus unstructured data, how different marketplaces implement and use their data structures and how navigation comes into play. We initially discussed searching via a text box, something that most online shoppers understand.  We also move to video search, image searching and audio searching at scale.  Few people, if any, understand the difficulty and nuances of this as well as Pavel. Finally, we discussed how he is attacking all of these complex issues in his current role at LisutoAI. Lisuto is a leading provider of AI solutions for e-commerce, dramatically reducing time to create, augment, translate and insert listings into marketplaces while significantly improving exposure and conversion to sale on global platforms like Amazon, Ebay and Rakuten in Japan. Lisuto’s proprietary technology is based on human-like linguistic understanding combined with deep analysis of structured product data and capabilities of AI processing of big data efficiently and cost-effectively.

Well…This had to happen. I was originally introduced to String (Suzanne) Nguyen by Ben Bickford and Zac Jacobs what must have been 5 years ago…but who is counting?  We finally caught up on the podcast and had a super conversation. I say at the beginning of the pod that Suzie is one of the most talented people I know and the hardest working woman in Australia.  Watch her videos…she is filled with energy, gall, and moxie.  When you meet her, you will notice that it is hard to keep up. String started her “String Story” brand about 10 years ago. She started off as an artist and realized it wasn’t sustainable. She is now paving her path in video and startups. It has only been in the last four years that String helped pioneer video on social media. She leveraged various social video platforms to interview and “geek out” with over 500 startup founders and entrepreneurs. She geek’d out with Gary Vaynerchuck, Holly Liu (Kabam) and Hugh Forrest (SXSW). In 2017, she produced an award-winning channel on Snapchat called “Women In Tech”. String is now writing her first book, String’s Fried Chicken Story. She is also focusing on building an engine to help influencers monetize their knowledge and community. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

On this episode of the Asia Tech Podcast, I was joined by Leigh Kelson the Founder and CEO of BeachCity Media. Leigh was born in Melbourne, Australia. His father was in the mining business which took the family to Christmas Island, a small island off the coast of Indonesia. Interestingly, there was no television, no media, no nothing there. The family lived there for 6 years and then moved to Kununurra  in Western Australia…a pretty remote place as well. This was the beginning of Leigh’s entrepreneurial journey. There were a little news agency and book store up there which he ended up buying. With his business fire lit, he started bringing bands up through the Kimberly…and started a motor vehicle dealership as well. At the dawn of the web in the early ’90s, Leigh started building web sites for others and got into online and web media production…back when nobody else even knew what to do. Having been involved in almost the entire evolution of web-based media, Leigh can understand not just where the medium is today and how it got here, but also that it will continue to rapidly evolve and change as we move forward. Leigh notes that originally the media business got built around celebrities creating content and the minions below consuming that media. Now it is much more peer to peer. We spoke a bit about Chris Anderson’s long tail…the democratization of production and distribution. Seeing the democratization of video changed the game for Leigh. Peer to peer matters at large because it is less about journalists to consumers and more about teasing out shared experiences and learning something from your true peers. Leigh believes that the entrepreneurial mind is a collision of different spaces of thinking that come together and converge. The fascination lies with what is the interplay of the five or six biggest trends are and what they mean and portend. When we talked about how BeachCity Media convinces entrepreneurs to tell their story, Leigh notes that strategically, they just go to where the stories already are…global or regional conferences. In some cases going 80 to 100 5 minute videos over a three-day conference. When he is there, he is still amazed at the way these events are covered by mainstream media…with traditional camera crews, lighting, etc. We can do this with an iPhone or two and some software and it makes for a much better and more authentic experience. Agile producers can also turn around production much faster…volume and velocity are important in the age of social media. “Last minute’s content is the next minute’s fish and chip wrapper…” We continue our conversation talking about curation, quality and how to sift through the all of the noise. Curation becomes important because of the ease of content creation and the sheer amount of things that get posted every moment of every day. How does one curate at scale? Leigh posits that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are the pillars upon which new media will be built. Frankly, Leigh and I agree on this wholeheartedly. We end on True Digital Park…and how buildings are great, but TDPK is much more than just a physical location. Some of the best ecosystems are borne out the programs and the people that exist inside of and help build those ecosystems.

I spoke to Daniel Maggs, the CEO, and Founder of Bisu.  Bisu is a Health and Wellness startup…that helps people capture data and understand what their body needs. Bisu was founded to help you understand and meet the needs of your unique body, so you can live a healthier, happier life. Daniel was moved to start Bisu after his father’s early death from prostate cancer. Bisu’s CTO, Wojciech Bula, joined the team to bring medical-grade sensing to an affordable product anyone can use. When most of us think of IoT, they think broadly about the ‘Internet of Things’. Daniel and his globally distributed team think more precisely about the ‘Internet of Toilets.’  The idea is that every day, humans are literally flushing extremely valuable data about their personal health and well-being down the toilet.  There are in fact many biomarkers for which urine, not blood, is the gold standard – including for instance electrolytes, dietary acid load, and hormone production levels.  Capturing this data and enabling its analysis is important to understand your personal health. Daniel and I also discussed the benefits of going through SOSV’s HAX Accelerator program.  I have been following Bisu’s development for most of its existence and I can confirm what Daniel told me.  The impact on so many facets of Bisu has been positively affected by its ongoing relationship with HAX. Daniel, originally trained as a lawyer, has worked super hard to understand the details around the health and wellness space.  You will be surprised by his depth of knowledge and expertise, particularly as it relates to biomarker testing.  He has built a pretty incredible team and works with some amazing advisors as well.

I spoke to Anna Ratala, a co-Founder of Zvook and the former Founder of Slush in Singapore.  Anna’s journey into the tech startup world was not pre-determined nor was it a straight line.  After working at a SaaS company in Singapore and figuring out that tech was a tool to be utilized, Anna worked to build the Slush events in Singapore to great success. She also realized that entrepreneurship was her calling and joined the second cohort of the Antler Startup Generator in Singapore.  The 3 month Antler program is a good example of what entrepreneurial life is like.  The program is hard and challenges participants to work together, learn new things and tests their ability to succeed under pressure.  It is a cool filtering mechanism.  If you can not put up with the intensity of the program, you are likely not cut out to be an entrepreneur, Anna believes. As part of the program, Anna met a co-Founder (Malik Alimoekhamedov) and they are building a platform that helps match brands with podcasts.  Essentially the platform is being built to help podcasts monetize and to help brands find and better target their desired audience.  Anna and her team realized that podcasts and the entire audio content space was exploding rapidly…the number of listeners. Listeners are much more engaged than any other medium.  Their observations show that the podcast medium is much more intimate than others and that listeners feel very close to the podcast hosts.  Zvook’s research also shows that most people listen to the podcast throughout and rarely skip over anything. Zvook’s aim is to build a sophisticated, tech-enabled platform to tightly match brands with podcasts based on the podcast’s tone of voice, word clouds, sentiment analysis, and other indicators.  It is more than just the monetization.  There has to be a good, fundamental fit and alignment.  Unlike traditional radio which can easily be played in the background, podcasts are actively chosen by the listeners and this enhances the intimacy and helps build that relationship between the host and the listener.  It is this intimacy that means that traditional advertising won’t work.  There has to be a real fit and partnership between the show and the sponsor.  This is vital to the success of both parties. Podcasting is not a ‘reach’ media, it is an ‘engagement’ media.  Brands are realizing this and are starting to think that “audio is the next video…”

I was joined by Maurizio Raffone on the podcast and it felt like I was catching up with an old friend. Sometimes, you can have a conversation with someone and you just don’t want it to end…and this was one of this times. Maurizio and I reminisced a bit about our times woking in the traditional space of global finance, working at firms like Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank Securities and Bear Stearns. It was the reading of Michael Lewis’ “Liar’s Poker” that inspired Maurizio to go into the business after getting his Masters degree at the University of Cambridge. After a successful first career that spanned London, Tokyo and Milan, Maurizio is now back in Tokyo as the Founder and CEO of Finetiq, a FinTech Consulting and Advisory firm. We delved in detail into the FinTech landscape in Japan and the challenges startups face from a funding, regulatory and general banking perspective. The sector is being pushed by the unbundling of financial services as a whole and regulators in Japan are taking a top down approach to improving the environment for startups. We also talked about the Crypto and Blockchain space, noting that Liquid recently raised a round that valued it as a another Japan-based Unicorn. Many challenges remain in the Japanese market, not the least of which is the ticking time bomb of the aging population, but this also creates opportunities for new, innovative FinTech companies to address the related issues.

I think interesting people come from interesting backgrounds…and Vikram Bharati falls deeply into this category. Vikram was born in a part of India most people have not heard of…Nagaland.  Vikram’s father was from Delhi and his mother is of Burmese descent, from the Naga Tribe in Northern Burma. Vikram’s father was part of an elite group of Indian Bureaucrats called the Indian Administrative Services.  He was sent to Nagaland from New Delhi, which is more than 2,300 kilometers away, to help integrate that part of India to NewDelhi economically, culturally and socially.  This was during the early 1960’s when that part of the world was so disconnected from mainstream India…and, frankly, the rest of the world. We forget sometimes how connected we are today.  Vikram explains that there were not even phone lines readily available for communication between New Delhi and Nagaland.  Vikram’s dad used to have to send letters (real, physical mail) back to Delhi to get anything done.  Today, Vikram feels like most of the work he does to build his business he can do on his phone…the mini-computer in his pocket.  In a way, it feels like magic. Vikram started his career in the Banking business.  He worked at JP Morgan for the better part of  decade and enjoyed the big company experience and learned a lot.  After getting the most out of it that he could, Vikram decided to take 6 months off and travel.  That turned into a two year trip around the world and the genesis of his idea for Draper Startup House, rebranded from Tribe Theory. Tribe Theory, in its own words, is “a new category of hostels for startups, a community curated, business friendly hostel accommodation, designed to cater to the travelling startups, creative and entrepreneurial community.”  This is more than just a group of physical spaces scattered across the globe. Vikram is fascinated by the idea of people banding together to build a culture.  Each Tribe Theory location is meant to be a node of a global network and an aggregator of people, ideas and skills. The big goal is to aggregate people in small spaces all across the globe, thus creating a massive network and then building multiple businesses on top of the network. This is not only a bold idea, but a very new one as well.  The competing business model is to aggregate inventory and then resell that inventory at a margin.  Tribe Theory’s business model is not to be interested in aggregating as much physical inventory as possible, but in aggregating people.