Audra Pakalnyte: Lithuania To Malaysia, Adapt & Localize (Groupon Malaysia, KFit & Fave) & First Move VC Partner - E478

Audra Pakalnyte, Partner at First Move, and Jeremy Au discussed:

1. Lithuania To Malaysia: Growing up as the youngest of three daughters, Audra's childhood was shaped by Lithuania's national post-Soviet transformation. Her parents' dinner table conversations about multiple entrepreneurial ventures taught her first lessons in business dynamics and the necessity for adaptability. These early experiences instilled a deep understanding of market dynamics and the entrepreneurial resilience required to navigate them. With serendipity and seeing the right opportunity, she moved to Malaysia and begun her startup journey with Khailee Ng and Joel Neoh at the first generation of local startups.

2. Adapt & Localize (Groupon Malaysia, KFit & Fave): Audra helped adapt and localize daily deals, exercise class subscriptions (ClassPass) and consumer payments to Southeast Asia. Says was acquired by Groupon and KFit pivoted to Fave which eventually bought back Groupon Malaysia. As an early employee and executive, she led teams to meet diverse market demands across the region's intended audiences. She shares her top learnings for founders looking to execute this strategy.

3. First Move VC Partner: In her transition to venture capitalism, Audra shared insights into establishing a VC fund that primarily targets early-stage consumer tech startups. With investments in over 16 early-stage companies, she underscored the critical role of understanding local consumer behaviors and market conditions. This knowledge guides her investment decisions and helps support her portfolio companies in scaling successfully across the diverse and fragmented Southeast Asian landscape.

Jeremy and Audra also discussed her digital detox sabbatical, emotional resilience required for entrepreneurship and thinking through the right technology stack.

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(01:39) Jeremy Au:

Hey, Audra, really excited to have you on the show.

(01:41) Audra Pakalnyte:

Pleasure to be here.

(01:42) Jeremy Au:

Well, it was fun being on the same, E27 Echelon panel and I was like, you know what? they didn't record this. They're not sharing this. We gotta have another conversation with you on top of this. so excited to have you share your story. Audra, could you share a little bit about who you are as a person?

(01:56) Audra Pakalnyte:

Sure. I grew up and studied in Lithuania and, 15 years ago, I arrived to Malaysia. And that's where my, I would say, startup entrepreneurship buck started because, within very first year, I joined a team, who is Joel Neoh and Khailee Ng were building their first startup. So the OGs of 2008, started the ecosystem in Malaysia, they were building their first startup. It seemed to be fun. When we met first time, there was a lot of laughter in the room and I was like, okay, this is a good team to work. So, and, 15 years later, I still work with Joel on the so-called fourth venture together because we build a media company back in 2009, e-Commerce, Groupon, that was 2010. 2015 we started FinTech SAFE, and only the last year we set up a fund. So that has been my journey throughout. And in between, I dabbled with my own startup for a couple of years as two female founders couldn't fundraise. Happy to cover more in that, and, it worked a little bit in startup ecosystem, organizing, hackathons and programs for aspiring entrepreneurs, even going as far as Sabah to energize over there. And now we are here today, running a founder led operator led fund, and really happy to be contributing back to the ecosystem.

(03:10) Jeremy Au:

So what was it like growing up in Lithuania?

(03:12) Audra Pakalnyte:

Well, it was fun, I had a real good childhood. You know, I come from a family of three daughters. My father jokingly would say, I don't have children. I have three daughters. That's not very correct to say in today's you know, world but yeah, I grew up in a middle income family. My parents, where I think that's where I got the understanding of entrepreneurship subconsciously, cause when I was six years old, we broke up from Soviet Union. So I was born in a country that doesn't exist anymore, soviet Union. And then suddenly country becomes independent and there is just so many opportunities to build businesses from scratch, build economy. So, parents have dabbled every couple of years of some new business.

And I've always been, seeing that at the dinner table, the conversations of like, Oh, this didn't work out, what do we do next? And, I think understanding that you have to try all over again is just ingrained in me. So I think, when I was growing up and I was choosing things to do, I studied linguistics and I'm like, I want to be a teacher, but then actually down deep, I was like, that's not what I want to do. And I took up a second major in business administration and, later, a few years down the road, I start working in the business aspects. And that's where I realized that actually, whatever you take, it's up to you what you want to create out of that. So maybe I'm grateful to my surroundings and family for subconsciously growing those values into me.

(04:29) Jeremy Au:

So were you like the oldest, the middle, the young child, which one? I'm so curious.

(04:33) Audra Pakalnyte:

I'm the youngest one, which can do whatever she wants. It was zero expectations cause you know, first, you had expectations to study this, work that. For me, it was, you are the third one. Do whatever you want, whatever makes you happy.

(04:45) Jeremy Au:

And so were you like very studious because of that, or were you very rebellious? Were you the funny one? I mean, how did that show up as you became a teenager, a student?

(04:53) Audra Pakalnyte:

My grades were good, but I was always at the back of the classroom with the bad boys, so I had a good balance of have fun, but yet perform well.

(05:02) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, I mean, you don't want to be too bad a person, otherwise, too much attention on you, but you can do just enough, right? and so there you are, you're doing university and, how did you kind of like make a way to Southeast Asia?

(05:13) Audra Pakalnyte:

Funny story. It was winter and our winters are brutal, sometimes minus 20. Quite cold. I'm sitting there and I had a friend. She was in Malaysia on a program and she was posting pictures from islands like Tioman and Perhentian and it's beautiful tropical islands. And I'm like, what am I doing in this cold, cold winter? Let me, navigate this. So, very quickly, she made a couple of introductions and I landed a few months later in Malaysia and I was saying, you know what, maybe a year here would be fun, travel around later, but you know, that traveling later never happened because I got to work with startups, which became so exciting. And one project after next, one bench after next, it just kept me here engaged because I really saw the opportunity in these markets because it was so nascent when it comes to building e-commerce or internet businesses. So yeah, that's my journey to Malaysia. Very serendipitously ended up here. I never thought it will be home for 15 and more years.

(06:05) Jeremy Au:

Wow, that's amazing. I think it's nice to hear that kind of like little bit of luck really changed things for you. So how did you end up working at that first startup? I mean, I think it's one thing to be like, Hey, I'm gonna go to a warm place for the winter. Not a place to be like, Hey, let's build a startup together right in this country.

(06:19) Audra Pakalnyte:

I think that when I reflect back on any of my career moves, decisions to take up one or the other opportunity, it's always been, Is it gonna be fun? Am I gonna learn something? Am I gonna work with great people? So, when I was already in KL, it was like meeting people, networking, and I was like, who is here working on some stuff that is interesting, that's meaningful? I would want to speak to those people. So very randomly, a friend of mine, gave me an email of Kylie. Kylie says to come. Me being me, I even didn't Google what they do.

(06:55) Jeremy Au:

Interesting.

(06:55) Audra Pakalnyte:

I just send an email to Kylie and I was like, Hey, Kylie, this and that person said we should chat because you're working on something exciting. A couple of days later we are chatting and that one led to another and ended up working on their first project, building this Southeast Asian youth summit and building a report about how the Southeast Asian youth feels about prospects of next 5 to 10 years. So that was quite interesting program to work on.

And then later we build entire, you know, what, what was forum turned into media company that later got acquired by Rev Asia. So again, it was very opportunistic of me. I believe if you verbalize what you want, things do come to you because that's pretty much all what I've done came that way that you just speak to people and opportunities present themselves to you.

(07:41) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, obviously Kylie is now a legend in the Southeast Asia ecosystem. What was he like back then? You met him for the first time, both of you were in your first time founder mode. What was it like?

(07:50) Audra Pakalnyte:

Yeah, we were young kids, 25 years old figuring out what to do. And there was a lot of hustle late nights, figuring the strategy was the best way to go about it. It was a lot of fun. And I think what I appreciate from the early teams back in the days and later Groupon was that everyone cared about people, right? So Kylie, Jewel, always prioritize people and never compromised over results of the business deals and what's or not. So I think that instilled the culture from very early days that followed in the later years. And I just had massive fun, like our office was a bungalow with a pool, you know, with after parties. That were the crazy days of the startups back then. We had a lot of fun for sure.

(08:29) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. and what's interesting is that there you were building a first company. What was that first company about from a media perspective?

(08:36) Audra Pakalnyte:

What started as a youth forum, like literally back in 2009, it was your sort of Quora of young people talking about opportunities, potential challenges that turned into affiliate advertising platform, helping brands to reach out to the younger generation with a brand positioning and promoting their campaigns. That later turned into media company where it's local news aggregate, which what we see space is being today. So quite a few pivots. I think that's the real journey off of every startup that you start with something smaller, see opportunity and you progress, building business cases.

(09:11) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. And then, there you were after that first company and then you started to build a second company. What was the context of that?

(09:17) Audra Pakalnyte:

Oh yeah. Opportunity to present it suddenly the same. You've said says team saying let's pilot with this e commerce business that's coming up in US and 2009, 2010, we were looking up to US a lot, saying what works there, let's, let's replicate businesses here. That was the ecosystem back then. And, yeah, deals, deal sites, discount sites where, growing really rapidly. So we carved out small team within the company is saying, let's experiment. Let's build that. And, that was quite fun to see that every single day that we just start building, launched the first landing page, we see 10 different websites coming up in the same space from daily deal, milky deal to whatever deal.

Little did we know, six months down the road, Groupon International comes down to the market here and says, okay, we want to acquire. So which one we're going to acquire. And, I ended up being our company groups more. and then later the team went on to operate a Groupon for a number of years in this region. So yeah, it was, we've seen opportunity. We carved out the team, let's experiment. And then it turned out to be a spin off business model.

(10:18) Jeremy Au:

What was it like building that? Because obviously the Groupon deal. Well, super hot. Obviously today it's no more, but at a time, super hot. So what was the inside view.

(10:27) Audra Pakalnyte:

I still remember our first deal, five ringgit for ice skating in Sunway.

(10:31) Jeremy Au:

That sounds like a good deal. I gotta say, that's a good deal.

(10:34) Audra Pakalnyte:

And the second deal was archery. I'm like, who's going to go archery, right? It's so random, but when you start, you just grab opportunities, whatever is possible and low entry points. It was very interesting to work in a very fast paced growth company because, two days, two weeks, two months later, the team has grown, outgrown itself. We really needed to move up in different office and split the teams and segregate ourselves from says and Groupon. So that's where the decision came to spin off two companies instead of one. And then, suddenly all the other players in ecosystem saying, how do you guys do that?

And honestly, it was probably like, combination of luck and market adoption and execution. It was just heads down execution, getting the best, hungriest people to work on it. It was very interesting to see that. And then, you know, fast forward six, seven years later, we got to acquire back Groupon. So that's also quite interesting twist that doesn't happen very often in the ecosystem. So, yeah, we went full circle with with Groupon, being built, being acquired, and then reacquiring, repurchasing it back in our care.

(11:35) Jeremy Au:

Why did you decide to repurchase it?

(11:37) Audra Pakalnyte:

Well, it was good opportunity, a good deal on the table. So 2015, that's when we came out to build what was then a fitness membership app called K fit? The class bus models were on the rise again in the US market. We've been passionate about fitness. We're like, Oh, that's a great opportunity. Let's do that. And within first year of running K fit, we were at the juncture saying, do we want to go deep into fitness, from integrating your wearables to launching a pair of lines. And what's more, you can go really deep in fitness or go broad, looking across different e commerce verticals.

So we had fitness and we say like, what if we add wellness category. And then so happened Groupon in Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia where on sale, they were exiting the markets because for internationals, it was quite hard, maybe more difficult to manage out all regions and meet the growing demand in markets in terms of product offerings and what's or not. So we were like, look, we know the business. We know the team, we could integrate into our platform. We can leverage on the business as a cash cow, because deals were still cash cow as a business model and then innovate on top. So that's where the QR based payments came out in 2016.

And that was even before Grab Pay, GoPay. So we were like, then we start looking to China saying, what is China doing? Let's replicate that in Southeast Asia. And that's where we inspired by Ali Pay said, what if we dabble with mobile payments and loyalty aspect? So on top of all the Groupon business model, we build payments. So that was our transition from green to pink. Was quite a journey when we had to integrate teams, culture, not only technology. And so, I was working on those projects on how do we merge and make sure everyone is buying into the same vision and mission.

(13:18) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, so I think this is an interesting piece, right? Because, you're describing this in a way where, you're being a fast follower of something else that's happening in another market. How did you think about that localization piece and inspiration piece, from your perspective?

(13:31) Audra Pakalnyte:

Quite tough. I think we had hit and miss us with that. So when we were saying, Hey, let's go into payment space. We did it. I would say very well in Singapore market, where adoption was much faster, and probably the size of the locality itself helped because it's so condensed and this product has to be hyper local approach in terms of marketing acquisition and adoption. Malaysia, we did well. Indonesia, we failed with payments. We were not able to adapt to the needs of consumer, perhaps stopping up wallets or what's or not because for us, it was payment aggregation rather than the wallet model. And I think that's what Indonesia needed. So while we had the objective to go in and localize, but we also failed in certain markets.

And, looking back, it's probably taking bets on how do you diversify your team? How do you prioritize and which opportunities you want to tackle? Yeah, it was hit and miss when localizing as well.

(14:24) Jeremy Au:

And I think what's interesting is that you also use this as a way to inspire yourself in terms of the right product for the right market. So how did you go about that search process? I mean, there's so many ideas to borrow from the US. There's so many ideas to borrow from China as well. Is it like a whiteboard? Is it an Excel spreadsheet? You're voting? How does that work across your cluster of superhero cofounders who are like the Avengers.

(14:45) Audra Pakalnyte:

A lot of late nights, a lot of whiteboards and meeting rooms. A lot of bouncing ideas via framing. We had a brilliant designer back then, UI designer who would be like on the fly, why you're framing while we talk about different models and we're like, yeah, we see this, we can visualize.

And, it's really about sitting and saying, which bed do we want to take? Where is the bigger opportunity? Obviously, no one is a future teller in that space, so you just take your bets and execute the best you can, but definitely, it was a lot of leadership flying from all the countries and having the offsides, having late nights and, figuring things out. It's like taking a bet, which one will win.

(15:23) Jeremy Au:

I gotta ask, like, were there any ideas that you remember that you threw away? That you're like, no, this is not going to work for Malaysia and Southeast Asia.

(15:31) Audra Pakalnyte:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was very early days, when we just integrated Groupon into the new platform of Fave and the payments were just kicking off, we didn't have lots of acceptance points. So we're like, we need to reinvent the deals. We need to gamify that. So there was a project where we built a chat. Now it could be Chat GPT. And then, that was actual humans chatting. Then, I could send a chat around the deal. I want to share with you. If we want to go for dinner, I would send a chat, how about we buy this together? So it's kind of imagining group buying through social.

And then, we had buyer frames of TikTok like videos of you sharing what you had in the spa, beauty salon or restaurant. So that was what I think were quite cool ideas. Maybe premature, too early, that we tabled.

(16:13) Jeremy Au:

Oh, well, I guess now you can come back to ChatGPT maybe. And so there you are, you built these several companies along the way. And then you said that you wanted to build your own, but maybe not the same gang, in some ways. Then, you said that unfortunately it didn't work out. Could you share a little bit more about that?

(16:27) Audra Pakalnyte:

That was between says Groupon and Fave period of time. For a couple of years I was like, you know what, now I figured out how it's done, I wanted to build it on my own. So, with another co-founder, we built a home dining platform, social dining platform, which would, was Airbnb for dining, Airbnb have not started their Airbnb experiences back then yet.

It was just a booking of the rooms and accommodation. We thought that if you can book a dinner at somebody's house, you learn the culture, your experience, you make people, it's very social aspect. So we ran it for a couple of years. We had probably like eight to nine markets, including Taiwan, Japan, Australia. Those are smaller markets. Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, where bigger ones and that was one of those, learnings for me where if all your friends says, this is such a great idea. I love it for you, but they don't go for it. They don't buy it a service. That's a kind of red flag for you, right? Your friends are encouraging and it's great idea. It's a great story. Media loved it. We had so much free coverage by media back then, but they repeat a rate was not there. The unit economics was not really adding up. So all these like very early mistakes built me up for it. Next time when I do it, I really look at the unit economics from day one to build out a business, but yeah, it was, I would say a good experience, a fast forward MBA in building a business.

(17:46) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, definitely not an easy piece to go through. And I think what's interesting is that, when founders, obviously, you've had some wins, right? And after that you had this failure and that's perspective. What made you say, I'm going to become a founder again, and I'm going to join Fave, for example, was a pull or was it more like, hey, I want to be a founder again, or, were there other career paths to be like, hey, I can be chill, and do something chill?

(18:07) Audra Pakalnyte:

Exactly. going back to the point where things just happen at the right time, right place, opportunities come about that. I do remember that I was literally like thinking, maybe it's time to take a break. I had my volunteering experience booked out in Japan. I was supposed to go in this little Japanese village and help farmers to farm for a month saying that's going to be my disconnect.

And, then, I get a message from Joel, which back then, we would exchange messages every couple of months. Usually it's about like, Hey, do you want to go clubbing? Which my answer usually would be no, thank you. Or the second type of messages would be, Hey, I have an idea. I was already used to entertain Joel's ideas of different businesses. And then, we met out for dinner and he was talking about this fitness membership, democratizing fitness, business model in the West. And I was like, you know what? This could be a fun gig to do one more time with the same team and all the same CTO. And then, it's the kind of people that we know already.

And, that was no brainer for me the same evening. I said, look, I'm in. And I was the first one officially to start, like I was officially first employee because everyone else still were working on different gigs and had their resignation period to serve. So I was the first one to say, let's do it cause I'm committing and then everyone else had like, a month or two to on board and then we quickly start hiring a team, but honestly it was a no brainer for me because it's interesting people, great people to work with. maybe it's good opportunity as well to build a business in that space and let's just do it.

(19:35) Jeremy Au:

Amazing. So, you've done all of these kind of like journeys as a founder and then eventually decided to say, Hey, I'm going to do and be a VC. So what happened there?

(19:43) Audra Pakalnyte:

I'm very accidental again. When we sold Fave, three years ago as a leadership, we were staying for a couple of years to ensure smooth transition. And then, mid last year when we were handing over the wrapping up things, we're exploring opportunities. Okay, what's next? Is it new venture? Is it going into another scale up to work or going into corporate or helping startups to kick off from the ground? And very accidentally, we got funds saying, Hey guys, if you want to help startups, here's a fund allocated for you if you want to do it.

So we did not really fundraise, therefore our fund is quite small and we took it as a pilot saying, okay, let us set it up, have a pilot, we came up with a thesis where we want to invest. And we just started deploying capital. So quite accidental, but I think that very well aligned into the process of us wanting to give back to the ecosystem that helped us out all these years ago.

(20:33) Jeremy Au:

So what are the parameters of the fund you're looking at deploying from a startup and LP perspective?

(20:39) Audra Pakalnyte:

So it's a consumer focus, partly because our experience comes from building consumer tech companies, partly because there is a great opportunity in Southeast Asian market, raising, growing middle class demand for accessible and affordable products and services locally, and also matured ecosystem enough to build companies from here to serve the world. So we thought all that adds up so it's consumer focused. What we really differentiate, or I would like to think we differentiate is that we take bets on people and, we invest in a lot of times pre product and pre revenue startups. And that's the gap that I believe we are filling because usually that stage it's your angels grants and accelerators where naturally you need to commit some time, or even full time.

And at times it can be difficult. So we fill that gap where we invest pre product pre revenue. And the last 16 months we deployed, invested in 16 companies, which at the speed of one per month on average, and out of those 16, 40 percent were pre product. So that's super early stage where essentially we just, bet on the founder, capabilities. Obviously, we'll look at the market and potential of the growth, and underwrite, at a super early stage. And we help out to, in whatever way it's needed to build it out to the next stage, to validate the product and market.

(21:51) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. Amazing. And when you see this, what's the difference between the founder lifestyle versus the VC lifestyle from your perspective?

(21:58) Audra Pakalnyte:

Oh, quite relaxed, huh?

(22:00) Jeremy Au:

Well, I've been there as well. I've been a founder and I've been a VC. So, we're swapping notes here.

(22:04) Audra Pakalnyte:

I'm laughing. Yeah. I think different stress level. cause as a founder, you're so focused in one area. you want to be the best in what you do. in the last eight years running fintech, you're in attending only fintech events, only talking to fintech ecosystem, you're like so deep into it and on the other side of the table, sitting at the investment side, it's so divergent. And that's what I love about it because every single day I speak to startups building in different industries and different verticals. And, you have to be on top of your game. You need to learn and go deeper and understand.

So that's, maybe engaging yourself in different capacity, while you do not, commit to deliver certain results for every single startup, but you are there to support in whatever way possible. From introductions to other funds, to helping to hire a team, to setting up strategies. So get to dabble broader, which is quite, fun and engaging. And I get to learn a lot during this journey as well. So it's quite rewarding.

(22:57) Jeremy Au:

Amazing. What's interesting, of course, is that from my perspective, it's also, as a VC, you get to travel a a lot more. I think, as a founder, you're in your room, whiteboarding aggressively. And then as a VC, flying to conferences in Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Singapore, just to do your, trips and just to speak, but I think what's interesting as well is you also have a wider geographic mandate across Southeast Asia as well, because, just doing Malaysia, you're doing the region as well. So how are you thinking about the geographic spread?

(23:21) Audra Pakalnyte:

Yes, mandated Southeast Asia, six countries predominantly in Southeast Asia. So, you have to be on the ground to capture the super early stage where people just thinking about to start. and I think that's the most challenging part because, a lot of, deals and, and founders come through the feral, so if you're not on the ground, you're barely going to get any, but also looking back maybe in the last one year. Organically, we invested probably 50 percent of companies are that are in Malaysia or its Malaysian founders incorporated Singapore. And actually, one case is Indonesia. and actually, it's because, your initial investments goes through your first and second layer of your network, the outreach effort. So it's been quite interesting to see the growth and development of Malaysian startups, and an ecosystem. And I think it's very well positioned to build great companies here because the operational cost to operate out of Malaysia is definitely lower compared to Singapore.

And maybe at times, Indonesia depends on the setup, decent talent, and also how we work with our companies is credit identifying, is this the product that's gonna be global from day one, or is it going to be serving local market or markets, in the region? because if you're building global. If your mindset is to build a global product from day one, you're not limited to only Malaysian talent. We have one company, very early, very recent investment, early stage, serving the globe with the product and able to onboard people from San Francisco to work for a Malaysian CEO set up, just because, everyone is able to work remotely. If you find people passionate about what you're building and that makes sense, you can attract people from various, regions as well. That's why I'm quite hopeful for Malaysian startups, building not only for Malaysia, but also for the region or the globe.

(25:02) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, and when you think about consumer, what are some quirks or what are some nuances, because, you learned that as a founder, you'll see applying that experience as a VC, also seeing that now across many divergent countries. What do you think are some of the nuances that folks may not know if they're not a consumer or they are not in Southeast Asia about this consumer Southeast Asia thesis?

(25:22) Audra Pakalnyte:

My biggest pet peeve when I see slide with market size, you say Southeast Asia market size, addressable market size, you know, in reality, it's not. Even taking Indonesia, a lot of products are being built for metro areas, right? Not in Thai Indonesia, which is so, vast distribution is very difficult and affordability is also an issue. So really depends what kind of products and solutions you're building. But in reality, Southeast Asia is just super fragmented. Even integrating various payment options, just to enable, accessibility in payments on whatever product you're building, you have to integrate deeply with a lot of local providers.

It's getting better within interoperability and all, but, still quite fragmented. User behavior is super different, right? Where, you know, let's say, you know, if, DTC startup is building out in Singapore, they would have a very beautiful website, optimize the conversion out of that, and do quite a number of sales through the website. Where in Indonesia, DTC companies don't have websites anymore. It's just Linktree driving into Shopee, live sales and different marketplaces, and that's very different user behavior and consumer behavior that you need to understand and adapt. And if you're running, same, brand company, you need to localize in that sense into your channels, payments.

And then, your distribution has to make sense. Your costing has to make sense. So it's a lot to take in, especially when you build consumer company, if that's in the CPG category, if that's tech also different challenges to build, so, exciting, big market, big demand, lots of gaps to be filled, but also as a founder, you have to be quite focused on what you want to deliver for which markets and how to bet on which feature comes in first, which market comes in first. So you have to do a lot of modeling and betting.

(27:06) Jeremy Au:

I think you're one of the few founders that have also built consumer, but also multi-country because most people who built consumer actually tend to focus on one country and she trying to go as deep as possible, maybe different consumer products. How do you think about that strategy versus a more focused one single country strategy?

(27:23) Audra Pakalnyte:

To succeed in a regional play, you have to have local people on the ground in whichever capacity it means, whatever product you're building. Is it sales? Is it customer support? Mostly sales and marketing has to be localized. Without that, you would be shooting blank. and, I think, we learned that from, very early days in where we wanted to do local news aggregation in Philippines, but we didn't have local team there. How can you do news, which is so fast phase without having people on the ground. Then when we started K FIT in the first six months, we did eight markets and we immediately hired local people in every single market, same was with Fave.

Every country had solid sales and marketing functions on the ground. So then you are able to support local needs better rather than operating from hQ. So that's consumer space, but I get every model would be a bit different. If you do a product and then you'll find good distribution partners and scale that or logistically, you figure out how you can serve beyond just Southeast Asia. So it depends on the model. But having understanding in local markets and having local people to execute is best strategy.

(28:28) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, and I think what's interesting is that you've also made a set of decisions about your technology stack, right? So obviously, you've started out in the deal side, then you're doing the payment side. So there's actually, in some ways, more complexity, I would say, that you've also been trying to figure out. So what do you think is the desk, the amount of technology or play, because I think you see a lot of founders like overbill, like in a sense of like, they built something like way too advanced for a Southeast Asia market. And then other people are bringing it to Chinese, whatever the one to one copy is. So I'm just curious, what do you think is the desk right component?

(28:59) Audra Pakalnyte:

I wish I would have an answer. Honestly, every single time is just different things you dabble and play with. I think looking back at Fade journey, we had quite a bit of legacy to integrate, you're taking over some tech you need to integrate. So then that's your point.

Do you integrate or build from scratch, which takes longer time? during a period of, fail, we have acquired a couple of companies. We bet on the new use case like table ordering and we dabbled on a bit of that and we acquired a couple of companies in that space to integrate technology.

And we quickly realized that, it's better to rebuild because that's going to be easier interface with all the other tools. So it's the opportunity cost you have to evaluate. Buy versus build. If you buy, how do you integrate? what's the effort? and so that's maybe advanced stage where you you know, trying to serve more use cases, more markets, where you just start from scratch.

The leaner, the better. And I think that's, everyone's teaching. it'll start simple. Don't over complicate and always prioritize use experience. Because a lot of times when business people interact with product people, there's always a good business case, right? That's where we monetize. But if you compromise user experience, users are so demanding.

If I don't know how to navigate on this platform, I'm dropping off, right? So you can't expect that, suddenly by adding more use cases, it's going to be success. And I think that's where the all the super apps that we have, usually one to two use cases are core and everything else is noise. And even though companies are trying to validate that there is business case, but at the end of the day, big picture is just the stack that is not being fully utilized. So, go leaner, less use cases is probably better than more.

(30:36) Jeremy Au:

So Audra, could you share a time that you personally have been brave?

(30:39) Audra Pakalnyte:

It might be sounding so basic, but, last year I was brave to give myself a proper holiday. What does it mean a proper holiday? Yeah. So after 15 years, I did go for different holidays and breaks, but it always would be, and you open up the laptop, you check the emails, you're always on WhatsApp chat. This was first time when I was handing over fav and then before, jumping into the VC work. I went for a solo hike to Everest base camp, 12 days, just me, my backpack, and going into the wild. And that's when I realized that without digital interruptions, without internet by choice, without shower for seven days, not by choice. You're just with yourself, your thoughts, you're present in the moment you're enjoying. And I think that's one of the things that I truly recommend for everyone to be able to disconnect. So that you can recharge emotionally, physically, you get your motivation back, you get your new ideas, new perspective and couple that up together with, maybe better nutrition choice and workouts and good sleep. That's when you really, really appreciate it. Prioritize yourself. And I think for many years I did not do that. so now that's my new playbook, you know, sleep, exercise, eat well. Go out in nature, be present, because only when you provide for yourself, you can provide for others as well, and take care of others better. So yeah, being brave to go on holiday with no phone. That was great.

(31:58) Jeremy Au:

Thank you so much for sharing Audra. On that note, I'd love to summarize the three big takeaways. First of all, thank you so much for sharing about your childhood, growing up as the youngest of three girls and being able to be free to do whatever you want, while also being rebellious and having good grades. And how you found true luck and serendipity found yourself, in Malaysia.

Secondly, thanks for sharing about your experience as a founder, not only multiple startups, but also building multiple times from the same geography same thesis on consumer with the same team. It was fascinating to hear about how you thought about product market fit and iteration and localizing the right models from the US and China.

Lastly, thanks so much for sharing about your experience, building a VC fund, and I thought it was fascinating for you to share about how you think about consumer and how it varies across the region and how founders should be thinking differently, about how to approach the business in a way that makes sense, for the region.

On that note, thank you so much, Audra for sharing your experience.

(32:49) Audra Pakalnyte:

Thank you for having me. It was fun.