Jeremy Au breaks down the "David vs. Goliath" dynamics of startups challenging industry giants. Startups face unique marketing challenges but can thrive by focusing on experimentation and innovation, creating entirely new market categories. Just like the rise of oat milk and nicotine vapes, disruptive marketing turned once-unknown products into billion-dollar industries. He covers the case study of Southeast Asian unicorns Grab and Gojek who leveraged their agility to outmaneuver Uber and local taxi fleets in Singapore and Indonesia.
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(01:04) Jeremy Au:
For over a hundred thousand years, life sucked for humans. The next generation was going to have the same life as me. I would have the same life as my parents and my grandparents. I was fighting for berries and fruits and surviving out there, and life was forever going to be the same.
Something special happened around a thousand years ago, and you can see that in your religious texts, you can see that in the course of history, but especially over the one thousand years, from the Industrial Revolution, life has been changing rapidly to the point that now, it is understandable that my grandparents' time, they were running away from a war that was with bullets. Our parents' time live in a war of the nuclear war. Today we're living in a world where war is done by drones. Next generation, you already know, is probably going to be AI, robot dogs.
Every generation is going to be different, and we see that evolve very quickly, right?
(01:56) Jeremy Au:
So my grandparents never saw a computer. My parents saw the rise of the first PCs. They let me use the internet. My generation is the first that grew up on the internet. But I never had a smartphone when I was a kid. I never had a tablet, I never had an iPhone. I was using a Nokia phone. You guys are the first generation to be smartphone or digitally native.
My two year old kid was asking Google to play Wheels on a Bus. She was trying and she eventually got it. Too bad, the Wi Fi didn't work. She was very disappointed. But, at two years old, she's going to be AI native. She's going to grow up with an AI avatar for her entire life. We are the first generation, where every generation, we expect a new technology upgrade.
(02:30) Jeremy Au:
And so we see that in the GDP per capita. And so we saw is that the US has grown tremendously that a market leader in terms of technology over the past 60 years. Singapore is really neck and neck with the US and our GDP per capita is higher than that off the U. K. And the other kind of European countries are out there. And we are, of course very lucky. And We talked about how most people overestimated the difficulty of building a billion dollar company. A top C startup has about a one in 40 chance of becoming a billion dollar company after getting funded.
The key takeaway here is that it is a lot of work. It is hard, but it's actually quite doable. If you put your mind to it, you could potentially build a billion dollar company.
And so what I shared with you that not only can you build a company, but there are eight different ways to build a company. Last night, I sent a tweet. This guy said, cruise missiles are very expensive. Very difficult for the defense primes to basically be able to do these things.
These are billion dollar contracts to make cruise missiles. We're going to make them 10 times cheaper. They believe that the US government will buy a hundred million dollars of cruise missiles from them eventually, which is quite doable if there's any conflict with a peer power like Russia or China. Highly believable that you can blow a hundred, and the best part about defense tech is that, it's not a reusable thing, right? You buy a laptop, you can always resell it. There's a certain number of Apple devices that can be in circulation. If you use a cruise missile, guess what? It gets blown up by design in one week's time.
So that's why we have about eight different ways to build a unicorn.
(03:57) Jeremy Au:
So what I want to share with you, is that actually, there are a high number of countries by unicorn, right? United States is about 200 plus unicorns, China is about 100 over, United Kingdom is about 25, India is about 23, Germany, South Korea is about 12, 10. Brazil, Israel, France is about 7, Indonesia is 5, Singapore is about 3, this data comes from about one and a half years ago.
Obviously, there's a few more that I've added but the truth of the matter is that there are unicorns in Southeast Asia and in Asia. So we see Indonesia. We see Singapore. These companies are not only worth a billion dollars, it could be worth a ten billion dollars, a hundred billion dollars over time.
So these companies are highly valuable, and they generate so much growth through all these countries, including Singapore. The world is ready for the internet. The world is ready for new startups to emerge and come to existence. And so what we are looking at on the golden age here is that if you look at the X axis from 1960 to about 2020. So this is the time scale that we have here. And then if you look at the Y axis again, it's the GDP per capita. So this is the wealth of the country. The US is roughly about $60,000 of GDP per capita. If you look at Australia, it's roughly around there. Japan is also about 30, 40. Southeast Asia right now is about, on average, including Singapore, is about 5,000 GDP per capita on a weighted basis.
As these countries go from bottom to top as they get richer, they build new types of billion dollar companies. And so, for example, in India and Bangladesh, they have M-Pesa, which is about wiring money. In India, you saw Flipkart, you saw MakeMyTrip, and so so forth.
In Southeast Asia, we saw new unicorns, like Sea Group, it's e-commerce. You have logistics like Grab and Gojek. We have Lazada and Tokopedia. So these are a new wave of unicorns. And If you look at China, that has been more aggressive on their growth rates because of their better policy openness.
and ability to absorb foreign direct investments. We see that they have Alibaba, Tencent, JD, Baidu, Meituan, ByteDance, TikTok, so they have generated a new generation of unicorns. Of course, when we go to the most advanced economies that have the highest GDP per capita, you see them doing the most advanced type of unicorns.
So obviously, ChatGPT, OpenAI, that many of us use today is the newest unicorn. We see Netflix, Uber, Rakuten in Japan, Yahoo Japan, Google, Apple, Amazon. There are different types of unicorns that come into existence.
(06:10) Jeremy Au:
But a key thing to know is that in Southeast Asia, we're going to see more unicorns come into existence rather than less.
If you look at this chart on China, we see a progression from 1995. What we see here on the Y axis is the progression of the services and infrastructure stack so, the way to think about it is if you look here, at the bottom is telcos.
You can't get internet if you don't have a telco. Then next is film, television, telecom equipment. So people are supplying the telcos. You have semiconductors, hardware, consumer electronics, you work your way up to online advertising, data centers.
Again, you can't have a data center without telcos. You can't have a data center without semiconductors. So you're working your way up. You have online games, online travel, online HR, online education. Then you go all the way to fintech, online payments, online lending, wealth management.
So there is a certain logic to how civilizations and countries develop their technology stack. You can't have high speed smartphones without having a telco or semiconductors but you can have fantastic Netflix entertainment if you don't have a smartphone or a device. So again, there is a linear logic that we have to understand, an inherent logic. And that is actually one of the biggest opportunities that we see in Southeast Asia. When you look at Southeast Asia, there's a lot less unicorns against the same map. There's enough space and there are 50 corners and grids that each one of you can go try to build a billion dollar company in.
It is being underwritten by VCs. And the VCs across Southeast Asia are saying, why do we not have X for Southeast Asia? The answer is some countries are too early. We can't have online travel in Cambodia because they are at a younger GDP per capita.
(07:51) Jeremy Au:
They don't have some of the technology stack in Cambodia. But there are Cambodian entrepreneurs starting to build based on an assumption. So what we want to think about is there are opportunities here for example, when we look at online education, Khan Academy, there's a very famous U. S. thing. What is a Khan Academy for Indonesia? Obviously, new ones have come into existence but what I'm trying to say here is that there are, and there's white space for new unicorns that are predictable based on the experience of America and China that have higher GDP per capita.
Now, Singapore is a small market, only 5 million people, so we have the same GDP per capita as the US, but we can't have that same stack in that sense. So, it's not big enough necessarily for a unicorn. you look at Indonesia, for example, I was just talking to a team and they were saying, there's a unicorn that does car financing there's a billion dollar company that does car loans in Europe. Why is there no automobile financing in Indonesia? So that's why they are going out to build, right? These guys are relatively young, in their mid twenties as well. So again, all of you can predict and I 100% guarantee you that this chart will look very much like the previous chart in time to come.
A lot of companies in Southeast Asia have taken two major approaches to date. I think there's a third one emerging, This is from the Asia Partners Report.
(09:01) Jeremy Au:
The first approach has been the Indonesia only approach. Indonesia has 300 million people. Its GDP per capita is around $5,000 to $6,000. It's a big enough market size. They're saying, I just want to do car financing for this country. I want to do, I just want to do rice farming, e-fishery. I just want to do fish for Indonesia.
They're saying, I only care about Indonesia. It's a big enough market. It's the same population as America. But it is much poorer. But I don't look at poorer as a negative thing. I see it as an opportunity because I understand that Indonesia will get richer over time. And so, I can build basic businesses and I can copy the best insights from China, from India, and deploy them in Indonesia.
This is a no-brainer way to copy and paste and localize a unicorn for the Indonesia market. So that's one type.
The second category that we've seen is the Singapore pan-regional approach. So we see that we've, to some extent, Sea, which is your Shopee, we see that with Grab.
We want to be the best at logistics. We want to be like Ninja Van, best in cross border shipping. For Shopee, we want to be best at cross border commerce because to you as a user, you think I'm trying to buy, a massage gun, right? To massage my back. but actually, that device comes from China.
So it's about cross border trade. This is a way for Singapore HQ companies to do this SPAN region. The third category we're seeing is that if you're in Philippines, or Vietnam, or Malaysia, or Thailand, these com it's neither here nor there.
It's not big enough as a population to go for there, but it's very difficult to expand to new countries, a lot of them are doing multiple blades of monetization within the same country. So, for example, you see a pizza chain in Thailand. They're doing very well. They're doing pizza. They're basically a pizza hut, but then they're vertically integrating. They're doing their own agriculture. They're making their own stuff. Basically, they're trying to monetize instead of a hundred million dollars across, they say, I'm going to build ten times ten million dollar businesses in Thailand.
So it's your mini conglomerate within the country. Because they're saying, it's easier for me to stay in Vietnam and build ten things in a row for the same Vietnamese person than it is for me to go to another country. Whereas for Singaporeans, they're like, wow, I really understand the region.
I'd rather build Grab in as many different countries, but build one product across multiple countries. This is a different competitive strategy. And of course, the fourth category that we see, is that companies are truly global, right? So you happen to be serving the U. S. or Europe, but you just happen to be based in Singapore.
We see this a lot for crypto, for example. They don't really service the domestic market. They're servicing a global market in many ways. For example, with Binance and so forth, is they're serving a global, probably industrialized market, but it's happened to be headquartered and remote distributed across Southeast Asia. So those are the four types of unicorns' paths that we're seeing in Southeast Asia.
(11:33) Jeremy Au:
So when we think about this as a result, we see that there has been VC capital deployed. America has seized the largest amount of U. S. capital deployed to startups.
Europe is second, and then China is third. India is getting about 25 billion. Southeast Asia is getting about 10 billion, Latin America is about 8 billion Africa is 5 billion, and Middle East is about 4 billion, right?
So this is a way for you to think about how much money is flowing into Southeast Asia? The good news is that in Southeast Asia, all the $8 billion comes via Singapore because people feel comfortable with a Singapore domiciled company. Similar to how people like a Delaware registered company in the U S, you have the law. You have the finance years. You have the courts. You have the systems. You have the incorporation services. You have accounting services. You have fund managers. But the reason why there's a lot of foreign direct investments are being headquartered in Singapore. What we're trying to say here, of course, is that it will go up. Technology goes in bull and bust. There was a growth between 2013 to 2021, and then there was a decline 2022, 2023, 2024 has relatively been flat since then. In general, I think the way to think about it is that there is a general uptrend. We are going to see more technology startups being built in the hope of building more unicorns over time.
I am pretty sure that many will take jobs with one of these unicorns either because you want to crush it, and a small one to make it a unicorn or just join Shopee or Carousell or other companies out there. What I'm trying to say here is that you'll become more and more present instead of less and less present. And so, as a result, you see that valuations have been growing over time. So this is a way to think about it from for example, I think the easiest way to look at it is that in general, a lot of companies in 2021, were raising about a million dollars, and they had about five million valuation. So Imagine I've seen this, right?
So imagine, you could have two million dollars in two years if you just figure out the right startup. After two years, they become $17 million dollars. Another two years, those that survive will become about $55 million of valuation. So within six years, and this is the dream, right? How hard do you want to hustle? Why do you want to be paid 100,000 for the rest of your life?
Why not own $20 million, $30 million of stock within five years? That's kind of a dream. But of course, the odds are hard, right? 1 in 40. But, you know, do you want a 100 percent chance of being a DBS middle manager for the rest of your life? And you tell your grandkids that, you should be proud of me. I am a DBS middle manager.
Nothing wrong with DBS, or, do you want to tell your parents, or your kids, you know what? I took a shot. 1 in 40 chance. And guess what? I have 100 billion dollars in my name. And we already see that it's happened multiple times. The Grab founder, they have their GCB, Good Class Bungalows, your Razer, which is Hardware and Gaming Electronics. It's really has hundreds of millions of dollars that many Southeast Asians that have gotten there and they all started around the same age from you. The recent liquidity due to interest rates, et cetera, has caused a drop in valuations about by one third, I would say, for later stage. But generally, in Southeast Asia, most of our startups tend to be earlier. They tend to be pre AMA startups.
(14:16) Jeremy Au:
So, in conclusion, startups, are about creating value. Instead of paying a hundred marketers to write one blog post each in a year, why don't I create ChatGPT and create a hundred blog posts for ten cents? And that's what happened. So Many people's marketing jobs have basically started to evaporate now, right? because everyone's like, I can use ChatGPT to write social media posts.
Secondly, Southeast Asia will have more unicorns. Not less, not the same number, there will be more. It will be built by young people. It is inevitable. Every year you're going to open up an article. Every day I open up an article, I'm like, shit, there's the thing. So more unicorns will come.
Lastly, we can choose to improve our odds to found, operate, and fund successful startups. Startups, it's a game. It's a system. It's hackable. It's learnable. It's a skill we can improve. I'm not telling you that you'll become the best player.
(15:01) Jeremy Au:
Anybody who's giving a million dollars, if they're an idiot, they lose their job very fast. Can you imagine being a finance manager and deploy a million dollars and I'm like, oops. Some people are better at picking than others. So obviously Y Combinator is a good picker. Sequoia USA is a good picker. Union Square Ventures are good pickers. And I will show you some of their caliber of picking. So the number I gave you is out of all people who receive a million dollar check, which is a certain signal, right? Then, it's about 1 in 40 chance in the US side. But if you were being funded by YC, you have slightly better odds. I won't say the exact numbers because I don't want to get it wrong. If you're funded by U squared vendors they have better odds than 1 in 40.
So, to some extent, there are better quality VCs because they attract better founders on average, but they also are better at picking. They see more deal flow, but they also pick better even though they have more deal flow. YC is a lot of deal flow, but they could have picked badly, so, it's about that ability to pick from the VC perspective. As a startup, all of you think that you're the best, and you're trying to become the best. From a research perspective, the threshold is, all of you receive a million dollar check. The way to think about it is that after you receive a million dollars, there's roughly your seed stage. The average death rate is about 50% at every stage. So there's a cull, like the Hunger Games. Every round, roughly about 50% would die. Now, that's obviously on average across all the rounds. There tend to be a higher death rate at the earlier stages, seed to Series A, then as you go to the later stage, when you are like Series D, going to the IPO, be better. So it'd be less than 50%. But on average, it's about 50%.
(16:24) Jeremy Au:
For example, Ant Financial was a private company, and it was supposed to be a no brainer IPO. Jack Ma, Alibaba, and then our Singapore funds were like, this is a no brainer deal. For sure, IPO. Make money for our taxpayers dollars. And then Jack Ma was like, ah, Chinese banking system needs to improve. I mean, he said it in a very different way and a little bit more poetically than that. The Chinese regulators decided that Ant Financial has too much market power as a monopoly. I think we need to break up Ant Financial. Ant Financial IPO was stopped. The tricky part, is some people tend to over bias. What I mean by that is, you see a late stage company like Bolt, very big company, and I think most people tend to think, like, for sure to make it to IPO, and I think most people tend to underestimate the chance of failure for these later stage companies.
And we also saw that a little bit with FTX, which was also invested in by our Singaporean funds The key thing here is, everybody was like, wow, FTX, big! Wow, Sequoia backed it. Of course, the board is great. Turns out FTX, as be it, and Sam Bankman-Fried caused a giant crash in the global crypto markets. I think people tend to underestimate the risk of failure for large, highly visible startups. And I think people tend to overestimate the death rate for young, early startups. You need to think through this. Some of you are joining companies like ByteDance because you think it's a secure job. How secure your job at TikTok is highly dependent on the US election results whether they are pro-TikTok ban or not when they joined, they were like, Oh, 100 percent is going to be fine. but of course it was kind of funny because, Trump used to be anti-TikTok and now he's pro-TikTok. And then Biden and Kamala now anti-TikTok, right?
The way you think about it is now it's 50-50, right? If Kamala wins and Biden wins, TikTok has to sell, or exit the U. S. market. If Trump wins, they continue having a job. So, I think you really have to think through some of the odds about this.
(18:09) Jeremy Au:
So, what I want to talk about next is marketing versus startup marketing.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince. I recommend the book. He has a bad name, a bad rap, but you read the book, it's actually quite straightforward. It describes the world as it is, not the world as it should be, not the world we wish it could be. It describes the world that he saw in France, in Italy. But the key thing is, what is this guy saying?
And I felt, when I read this book, I saw this paragraph, I said, Oh my gosh, this perfectly describes startup marketing, because every technology, have you tried explaining technology to your parents? They're like, crypto? What is that? Can never work, right? They say no, they don't believe that.
And then you see all these startups, is it unethical for unicorn to do things? But then, guess what? All the things they're doing is illegal. Uber and Grab were illegal, because no one should be renting out, and they should be employees and not contractors, right?
So, when Airbnb came out, everybody was gray zone, right? Can you rent out? Now it's all accepted. Now it's normal. It's illegal in Singapore, but most places in the world, you probably book the Airbnb. We have to understand the difference between marketing and startup marketing, which is that we are introducing a new order of ways.
We are changing the present to bring the future into birth. There's a difference when you listen about marketing between incumbent marketing and startup marketing. For example, incumbent marketing is your Comfort Delgro, your normal taxi, so forth. And now you see Grab and Gojek.
Those are new. Somewhat normalized. But I think this is a recent enough case over the past 10 years. I remember when Grab first came to market, everybody didn't really know about it. Is it weird? Is it safe? Are you going to be safe on the car or not? And, you know, it was a fantastic time to watch.
The key thing you want to understand is that startups against the incumbents is really a story of a story of David versus Goliath, Goliath is a big giant, the number one person of the entire army.
This country decides to send one person, full of armor, breastplate, shield, helmet, everything. And then they send this guy called David. David is a shepherd, he's only armed with a slingshot. When we say something is David and Goliath, we mean a very difficult situation. When we say David and Goliath, it means the Goliath should win. But, what we have to say is, wait a moment, a slingshot. Why did he bring a slingshot?
And if we think about it, Malcolm Gladwell did a great book about it, called David and Goliath, and he spells this out. The slingshot was a well known military weapon. In fact, the Roman military specifically conscripted people who used a slingshot. They were always on the lookout for slingshots, because a slingshot, when you do a good job at it, when you're trained to use a slingshot, is the equivalent of using a revolver.
The impact of a slingshot to your head is like firing a revolver in your head. A well aimed slingshot guy, right? The Roman military was like, we want all the slingshots you can have. They were always sourcing for people who were good at using the slingshot. The story of David and Goliath is not really a story about somebody who's small fighting against somebody who's big, actually it's a story about how a Goliath that was armored and fought in a conventional way, of military weapon and so forth, versus somebody who's smaller, who's agile. And The story of that book is that David, they offer David armor, and the guy said, I don't want armor. I got to play to my strengths. I'm going to use a slingshot. He said, I don't want to fight the same way Goliath does. I want to use this technology called the slingshot because I'm going to go for the kill shot. You can't fight Goliath the way Goliath wants you to fight. You have to fight the way that pays to your strengths. And this is really the story of startup marketing versus incumbent marketing.
And what I'm trying to say here is that when you are an incumbent, your job as a marketer, as a finance person, is to maximize profit. When you open up your S1 for the IPO, you are asking them to get more profit. When you get more profit, you want to get more SKUs.
For example, when we open up the shopping mall, we see multiple SKUs. Yesterday I was at Lazada, and I found out that KitKat now has breakfast cereal. I looked at it, I was like, wow, KitKat has cereal. Amazing. I really tended to get it. I shouldn't buy it, and so forth.
KitKat basically said, here's the opportunity, we have KitKat, we can make it into cereal, let's maximize it, so they want to maximize marketing. And trust me, there were people in your shoes, there's a finance guy, a supply chain guy, an ops guy, all of you sitting in a team and say, Okay, how do we bring KitKat breakfast cereal to market?
Now, all of us today, are very into oat milk. But you know what? Oat milk has not been around for more than 20 years. It is a startup that made oat milk and now it's a billion dollar category. In fact 10 years ago I never heard of oat milk and now everybody loves oat milk because this guy in Europe said what if you take oats and blend it with vegetable oil and sugar and sell it as healthier for you? Everyone wants oat milk, premium, and so forth. Before 20 years ago, you guys can see on Wikipedia, there's no such thing as oat milk. There's some ancient Chinese history about some guy, thousands of years, discovered soymilk, right? Oat milk did not exist until 20 years ago. It's the newest invention, and it's marketed as healthy, it's marketed as natural, but I always tell you people, I was like, it was so natural.
Why didn't it exist 20 years ago? It's as processed as everything else, which is why some people are starting to push back against oat milk, push back against the marketing of oat milk. But again, oat milk is a startup. The key thing we're trying to talk about is that incumbent marketers are about scaling.
It's about maximizing, lowering costs, it's about getting as much margin as possible. And startups is about experimentation, creating new things. So if you think about it, it's that in cigarettes company, in tobacco, they are trying to get as, as much tobacco that's out there, right? They're trying to cut costs, make sure they play nice with regulators, etc.
About 15 years ago, some Chinese guy in Shenzhen was like, you know what, I really like smoking, but can I make a smokeless cigarette, that's what he called it back then. And so in Shenzhen, this guy tinkered with himself, and then he created the first ever vape.
Vapes never existed, 20 years ago. It only came to exist over the past 15 years. So this guy, Asian guy, created it, and he made a vape. And then it became very popular, and now everybody's vaping everywhere. What I'm trying to say here is that this is a new technology that some guy invented and it happens all the time.
(24:14) Jeremy Au:
And so, what I'm trying to say here is that every startup really goes through a jungle, dirt road, and highway. When we talk about startups, we know that there are different sizes of startups.
There's a big startup, a small startup. But what I'm trying to say here is that we should think about it as a jungle, the dirt road, and the highway. A jungle startup is when you are in the jungle.
And that means you have no idea where you are, you have no idea where to go, your job is to figure out the direction. Normally startups at this stage, are one person, maybe two person teams, and they are trying to figure out, What am I building? How much do I charge? What problem am I solving?
If you look at the story of Spanx, which is athletic wear. The founder was saying, you know what, my pants don't work for exercise. I want to get something like Spanx.
And so it became a billion dollar company eventually. By that point everyone's like, what in the world is happening? People look down on these startups, right? Because they're kind of lost, they're confused. And we talk about valuation and staging that we have here.
Tend to be very low valuations or maybe they're worth $0 because this stage.
The dirt road happens when you kind of know what's happening. You kind of know the customer. You kind of know what you need to charge. You kind of know all these things, but it's still hard.
It's still like have to rustle up people. I can tell you that I'm at a startup that is exactly at a stage because I know the product. Nobody wants to die from cancer. It's got, it's got, 126 million valuation, it's got A star support, government support, and you know what?
I made two job offers over the past week, and both times I got turned down. To me, it's a no brainer. I'm like, guys, this is a product. This is gonna make it. For sure it's gonna make it. And then both of them were like, thanks for the job offer. I'm going to do something else a little more stable.
And then the third category that we have is the highway, and this is your very large startups that are not necessarily public yet, but they have everything that is a routine.
They understand the repetition. They understand the guidebooks. They know their customer. They know the price. They're optimizing. Their job is to get as many trucks down the road in convoys as possible. And so this is a three types of startups. Obviously you have other companies like Apple, like Grab.
These are public companies. They're no longer a startup. These are three types of startups that you can see. Jungle, dirt road, highway. At each stage you will have a different set of metrics. Different marketing tools, and so forth, the kind of person who likes to work at Intel or IBM is very different from somebody who wants to work at Facebook or Meta. There's a different type of person, even in technology, which is very different from working at a highway company. Not too many at this stage now in Singapore. I guess ChatGPT may be close to that. I mean, it's a billion dollar company now. They know what they're doing, they know what they're building, they're iterating, they're improving, that they know what they want, right?
So I think ChatGPT is a good example that is on one end of the scale. And then the middle of the scale is like your company is around 100 million valuation, 50 to 100 mil, and then your jungle is really like zero to 10 to 20 mils. You have no idea what's going on, you're trying to figure out what's going on.
(26:51) Jeremy Au:
And so, this is a good example of Jeff Bezos, you know, Amazon, billionaire, he used to be a finance guy. When he graduated from college, he said, My dream is to be a finance person, and he became a finance person. And then one day he said, You know what, I want to buy and sell books.
And so, that was his first idea, and then, he has this early group, right?
And then he was fighting against Barnes and Nobles, he was fighting against Borders, Popular books, all these bookstores publishers, etc. And now, we know Amazon's a giant. It's a billion dollar company.
They run AWS. They have stores. And everybody is kind of like Amazon right? When we think about Shopee, we think about Shopee is copying Amazon, right? We look at Temu or Shein, they're trying to out Amazon which is that the key realization is that people want cheap stuff, really fast, and everything else can, you know, whatever.
And so everyone's kind of learning that. And now, this startup that has gone through the jungle, dirt road, and highway, now he looks like this, when you think about marketing, most of the marketers today and most of the methodology you're learning are really focused on companies in highway mode, the public companies.
You may say PNG, Unilever, DBS, Capital, like these companies know what they're doing. And when you become a marketer of them, you're going to learn. a sub aspect of an aspect, the marketing team is a hundred people, a thousand people, you are part of the playbook, and you are supposed to execute the playbook.
And it's not a bad playbook to do, but you just have to be self aware, that these, by nature, are large teams. Number two is anything to launch requires a lot of preparation and coordination to get everything done. And lastly, the cost of a mistake is more expensive than the reward of discovery.
For example, CrowdStrike, you saw all the computers went dead around the world. CrowdStrike was a very large company that was servicing. It was a billion dollar company that didn't exist 20 years ago. Then some person on the team was like, you know what, I can release this without testing it.
And he created a global economic catastrophe, because all your Intel computers went into blue screen of death, so, you can imagine that after that, everyone was cursing and swearing at him. And they created all the SOPs to be like, you cannot do this, you cannot do that.
The cost of his small mistake, caused a global economic crisis. So in a large company, the cost of mistake is very expensive. But the reward of a discovery is small versus that.
(28:58) Jeremy Au:
For a startup, you have nothing to lose.
Who cares?
Just do it.
By then, when he was the marketing message, guess what? He became a millionaire. Too bad he didn't fulfill on that marketing message, more importantly, he allegedly, made certain promises that he didn't disclose I'm not saying that he did anything wrong. I'm just saying that he didn't know what to do, right? Marketers tend to struggle when they join startups because they are used to the highway company lifestyle. They want high cash, high stability, work nine to five, lots of leave to go on holidays
No. If you're a startup marketer, your job is a startup, it's high risk, hard, you're on call all the time. When you are a great startup marketer, or you understand great startup marketers, you see they are able to discover and mobilize. You and I both know there's a lot of marketers out there that can neither discover new things, neither mobilize. But a startup marketer, you gotta discover. You gotta grab the opportunity, persuade people to do it. Whatever the campaign is. Time is money. Money is time. Let's go get it done. That is the mark of a great startup marketer, someone who hustles and gets stuff done. They need to be able to mobilize and execute, but they also have to be able to discover the customer.
They need to understand what is the message that works. They have to discover what is the truth that makes us tick. Much.