Asia Tech Podcast

The post Episode 24 – Akemi Tsunagawa – CEO BESPOKE – The Closest Thing I Found Was Tinder appeared first on Asia Tech Podcast. I have known Akemi Tsunagawa for almost a decade.  I was always impressed with her ability to just get stuff done, even in an environment that was not conducive to doing so.  She is intensely persistent, works extremely hard and is immune to obstacles that may get placed in her way.  Akemi is also a persuasive leader…people naturally want to work with her and are inspired by her ideas. Graduating in 2009 and wanting a job in Investment Banking…at the tail end of the financial crisis, Akemi came back to Japan. We discussed the big 2011 Tohoku earthquake and how it was indicative of just how surreal the market was back then. After her first job at Macquarie Securities, she moved on to Fidelity where she ironically explains that the biggest skill she learned was how to make slides…Powerpoint slides. After leaving Fidelity in the summer of 2015, she travelled in Asia and while the trip was good, it was not as authentically local as she would have liked.  Upon reflection after her trip, she realized this was a common problem while traveling that had no good solution. Bespoke was born…and is now a company that develops AI Chatbots for Airports, Hotels and Train Stations.  It already has access to over 50% of the tourists coming to Japan and is expecting to expand internationally by the end of the year.

The post Episode 23 – Alan Jones – GP M8 Ventures – A Smooth, Beautifully Balanced V12 Engine appeared first on Asia Tech Podcast. Alan Jones takes a unique and non-conventional approach to his investing.  As a much sought after investor and mentor, Alan remains incredibly down to earth and humble. However, do not let his quiet nature fool you.  Inside is a burning desire to build big things and impart years of acquired knowledge to those that are smart enough to listen to him. Alan was there at the beginning of the internet boom, not just in Australia, but globally.  Initially a tech journalist, Alan flew around the world to interview the likes of Bill Gates.  Wanting to get more directly involved in the growth of the tech ecosystem, Alan and a partner somehow convinced Yahoo! to give them the rights to build its first international launch. It was a pretty wild ride and has allowed Alan to continue to leave his fingerprints across a wide swath of the Australian tech startup ecosystem.

The post Episode 22 – Mark Gustowski – CEO QUT Creative Enterprise Australia – The Speed at Which You Need to Move appeared first on Asia Tech Podcast. Mark Gustowski has been involved in startups for longer than you have known about them…particularly in Australia.  As the CEO of QUT Creative Enterprise Australia, QUT CEA is a unique hybrid business that includes an incubator, accelerator, c co-working space and an investment fund.  This is a very well integrated investment and business building entity. This puts Mark in the perfect position to take advantage of almost two decades of working with “innovative, fast-growth and creative businesses”. Back in the late 1990’s, Mark started working with both the national and state governments and built one of the earliest accelerator programs for startups.  At the time, the word ‘entrepreneur’ in Australia still carried some negative connotations, due to some negative press that financial entrepreneurs had received in the previous decade. However, a competitive environment between the Australian states and a national government that recognized the need for a structural change to the economy created the first $20MM allocation to fund startups. Mark tells so many great stories and shares some amazing insights in this episode…

The post Episode 21 – Ken Lau – CEO & Founder, Adventoro – Mass Travel Just Doesn’t Cut It appeared first on Asia Tech Podcast. Ken Lau was born and raised in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and went to Melbourne to study Computer Science at University.  While he did not necessarily intend to be a lifelong programmer, he knew that combining this knowledge with business acumen would give him a significant edge.  As it stands today in Southeast Asia, that is still a rare combination. Prior to his entry into the startup world, Ken worked in marketing research and sales transformation roles at companies like Hennessy and Accenture.  Also, during the South African World Cup, Ken and his friends started a cafe and bistro.  At that time, group buying sites were all the rage and he was constantly being approached by them to list on their platforms.  He joined a few of these sites and saw traffic at his cafe grow quickly…signaling to him and his partners the real power of the online world. Ken was now hooked into joining the startup world! He sold his cafe, joined MaGIC as a mentor and noticed that while startups were enthusiastic and optimistic, many did not understand the real risks associated with starting and building a business from scratch. While acting as an entrepreneur in residence at 123RF, he was given time to develop his own business that grew out of his passion for travel and outdoor activities…Adventoro was born. Adventoro is an adventure travel platform that includes unique packages in everything from hiking and caving to culinary tours.  The global adventure travel industry is over $250BN in size and is still growing rapidly.  Adventoro is already the largest player in Malaysia and  intends to be the largest in Southeast Asia over the next 18 months.

The post Episode 20 – Dr. Aubrey de Grey – SENS Research Foundation – Bridging the Valley of Death appeared first on Asia Tech Podcast. Dr. Aubrey de Grey and I had an amazing conversation…which, frankly, can mostly be attributed to his brilliance and me listening to it. Dr. de Grey is a pioneer in BioGerontology.  It is not the case that this field did not exist prior to his involvement. It did. However, through his dogged persistence, his innovative perspective and his unrelenting vision, he has slowly, but surely, convinced others that there was a better way. We spoke at length about life, longevity, suffering and aging.  We also discussed the role of medicine and its overall approach to solving the aging process.  There seems to be an inherent belief, developed and augmented throughout history, that aging is accompanied by senescence at both the organism and cell level and that there is nothing that can be done about it. Dr. de Grey and the sens research foundation work tirelessly to fund and support research that uses regenerative medicine to repair the damage of aging.  With a stated goal of building the industry that results from this research, this is truly groundbreaking in its scope. The results of these efforts are already starting to bear fruit.  You can see some recent funding news here and get more information by subscribing to their newsletter here.

The post Episode 19 – Shaun Rein – Founder CMR – A Reordering of Economic and Political Power appeared first on Asia Tech Podcast. Shaun Rein has maintained an insane travel schedule over the past three months, but it has been well worth it.  Traveling the world and speaking to opinion leaders and large audiences alike, gives Shaun a unique perspective on the ever-changing perceptions of China’s growing power and how it exerts that power. We talked about Trump’s trade war with China and whether it was calculated policy, an ideological response or some combination of both.  Regardless, a lot of unease remains around the instability of Trump’s policies and the unpredictability of its results. Ecosystems in general, but political ecosystems in particular, do not like uncertainty and Trump’s behavior is potentially driving traditional allies closer to China both politically and economically. Shaun’s tenure in China continues to give him insights that other China commentators simply can not get.  While he has mused about entering the political ring in the United States, for now Shaun is extremely busy managing a booming business at China Market Research Group.

The post Episode 18 – Greg Nance – CEO at Dyad.com – Push the Frontier of What I View As Possible appeared first on Asia Tech Podcast. Greg Nance is from Bainbridge Island in Washington State and he loves the outdoors.  Greg is an ultra marathon runner and an entrepreneur.  Neither of these is easy to do, much less do well. Greg also passionately believes that Education = Opportunity and he works tirelessly to expand access to top tier education. Greg maintains a real sense of being fortunate, in that he “had supportive parents, teachers that believed in me, and mentors, coaches and pastors that invested so much in me.”  With such luck on his side, Greg wondered if he could engineer that luck so that others can get the expert insight and mentoring that he received. In this spirit, Dyad.com was built to encourage and support those less fortunate to get the education of their dreams and help them unlock the necessary scholarships to pay for it. Finally, Greg is running 7 Marathons in 7 Days on 7 Continents to help students overcome the financial barriers to a college education.  Support him by clicking on the image below.

The post Episode 17 – Chris Rawlings – CEO Judolaunch – Shameless With the Cards I’m Dealt appeared first on Asia Tech Podcast. Chris Rawlings is not your average tech startup founder…then again, maybe he is.  Chris was raised in an off the grid, solar house in a small town in New Jersey.  His father had been given a government grant to test and develop solar power, which meant that there was a constant flow of people to his house to see how the solar thing was going.   He also loved mathematics and physics and watched Nova as a child… Chris grew up with a real sense of being different, which actually comes in quite handy later in life.  To be truly successful, one has to be comfortable feeling different and doing things that others will not attempt… After graduating with a degree in Engineering and Applied Physics, he was working at his father’s solar business when he essentially life-hacked his way into spinning out and running a successful subsidiary of the parent company.  Pretty impressive for someone under 25 years old… Chris was learning that he preferred to figure out how to engineer human organizations rather than simply being an engineer.  He wanted to understand the first principles around human motivation and what makes them want to build things and just do things.  To do this, he had to venture out on his own and build his own business. Listen as Chris talks about the story of Judolaunch…

The post Episode 16 – Eric Fear – co-Founder Inspace XR – It Takes the Guesswork Out appeared first on Asia Tech Podcast. The business feels so compelling and the support for it is so widespread, I went back for more.  In this episode, I spoke to Eric Fear, the co-Founder and XR Product Manager at Inspace XR. Eric comes out of a gaming background and was a professor at the Academy of Interactive Entertainment in Sydney, when the other co-Founder of Inspace, Justin Liang, rocked up for a hackathon that Eric had organized. Eric essentially made himself the champion of VR at the college and at the time was not looking to start a business.  He was simply trying to get the technology into the hands of more local developers, as there was simply not enough VR content being created. After meeting Justin and workshopping the Inspace XR idea, the opportunity to co-found was too good and Eric made the leap.  He believed then that the intersection of games and architectural design provided a powerful and large opportunity. Eric explained, “Sometimes you want to be able to grab someone’s attention and steal it away…sometimes you want to let them discover things on their own and sometimes it should not be on their plate at all…”  Implementing those gaming paradigms inside of a B2B tool are both challenging and rewarding.  Part of the idea is to build tools that seamlessly bleed into the background to create design magic.

The post Episode 15 – Mathew Ward – Helpster – Curated, Validated and Substantiated appeared first on Asia Tech Podcast. Mat Ward is the co-Founder and CEO of Helpster.  Understanding how he came to start Helpster and where he learned some of the skills necessary to succeed as an entrepreneur, one must go all the way back to the year he graduated from high school. Mat turned down a chance to go to university and instead decided to hone his sales skills by slogging products door to door in New Zealand. Go forward less than 10 years and Mat was Head of Sales at AdMax, a pioneer in the AdTech space in Southeast Asia and on his way to being its CEO and managing its trade sale to Komli Media. Mat has learned so much during his time in Southeast Asia and is one of the best entrepreneurs in the region at building teams and scaling businesses.  He shares some pretty amazing insights with me as we discuss the development and growth of Helpster.