Johann Wah: Student Founder Beginnings, Amazon to Nika.eco Founder & Climate Change Perspective - E483

Johann Wah, President & Cofounder of Nika.eco, and Jeremy Au discussed:

1. Student Founder Beginnings: While attending Yale-NUS, Johann founded a sustainable apparel company to pay for his university expenses and dates with his now-wife. The business started gaining traction after a Straits Times article featured their eco-friendly fabrics, but the COVID-19 pandemic led to canceled orders and an overwhelming inventory. Faced with financial challenges, he borrowed money from friends and family to meet his Minimum Order Quantity (MOQ) for the fabrics. When B2C sales dried up, he pivoted to B2B, cold calling and knocking on doors of corporations with sustainability mandates. After three months of high risk, he secured contracts with Western multi-national corporations headquartered in Singapore that allowed him to clear his debts and pay for his university fees.

2. Amazon to Nika.eco Founder: Johann landed a role as on AWS’s startup team after three attempts. Despite achieving his dream of working at Amazon, he felt compelled to explore climate tech, motivated by a conversation with his best friend and co-founder who had already left Amazon to pursue the same vision. Together, they launched Nika.eco to democratize climate and geospatial modeling, making it more accessible to smaller universities, researchers, and consultants. Their product simplifies climate modeling by offering a one-click virtual machine that automates setup, cutting down the typical three-day setup process to mere minutes. This solution addresses the cost and complexity barriers that smaller institutions face in accessing high-end cloud computing resources.

3. Climate Change Perspective: His passion for climate tech is deeply rooted in his childhood experiences in Chiang Mai, Thailand where his father, a part-time missionary, worked closely with indigenous farmers. The farmers were reliant on deforestation and monoculture farming practices to sustain their livelihoods, which sparked his interest in environmental sustainability. His wife, the cofounder of Thryft.sg, Southeast Asia’s largest secondhand bookstore, shares his commitment to sustainability. They frequently discuss the future of the planet and their hope for raising children in a better world. Johann remains optimistic that human innovation will help mitigate the effects of climate change. He also believes that although the world faces significant ecological challenges, technology and adaptability can pave the way for a brighter future.

Jeremy and Johann also discussed how spatial analytics transform insurance risk pricing, how his time in the oil and gas industry shaped his sustainability approach, the importance of public-private partnerships, and Southeast Asia’s potential to become a hub for climate-focused solutions.

(01:17) Jeremy Au:

Hey, Johann, how are you?

(01:18) Johann Wah:

Hey, Jeremy, I'm doing well.

(01:19) Jeremy Au: Well, good to see you and have you on the show. so, you know, tell us about yourself.

(01:24) Johann Wah:

Thanks so much. Just a quick introduction. my name is Johann. I'm a cofounder of Nika.eco We are a early stage climate tech that is really focused on building software infrastructure to make climate and geospatial modeling more affordable and accessible.

(01:36) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. Amazing. So, can you tell us about what you were like as a university student?

(01:41) Johann Wah:

So in university, That was actually where I got into my first foray of entrepreneurship. I really enjoyed the space of climate and sustainability. I actually founded a sustainable apparel company to, pay for my university bills. It didn't do so well initially on the B2C side. So pivoted to B2B to help corporates procure their more sustainable base apparel it was really great. I enjoyed it through my university years. It helped me pay for my university fees, helped me pay for my, my dates and that, that, that same woman I went on dates with and my, my sustainable apparel company managed to pay for, is now my wife.

So, really, really enjoyed my university days running that startup.

(02:15) Jeremy Au:

So I think what's interesting is that you did a lot of that. Did you always want to be a founder at that point of time in university? Or did you say like, Hey, I want to. I don't know, be a big tech, for example.

(02:26) Johann Wah:

Actually, my initial dream was really to actually be more on big tech. That was why I get everything towards wanting to work at Amazon. Specifically. I also really wanted to work at Amazon. I, when I was growing up, I really loved reading the books by Jeff Bezos. I love understanding kind of his thinking about business and how he managed to scale Amazon. Amazon was my dream company. Yeah. And that was a big tech that was always what I was going for, becoming a founder even at the university days was actually, as I mentioned, purely out of necessity, more out of necessity, to pay for, higher end dates to attract my now wife.

So that was a bit more of the goal, but later on, I started to fall in love with it, really enjoyed the process of challenging myself, building new things. it slowly grew, but it wasn't a, Oh, I wanted to be a founder out of the gate type of thing.

(03:08) Jeremy Au:

So, yeah, so let's talk about those two different experiences. First of all, what was it like being the founder of MBF at the university days? What was it like to be doing that?

(03:17) Johann Wah:

Oh my goodness, it was absolutely chaotic. The apparel business is really tough, especially on a B2C level. When we first started, we got really lucky. we came up with an MVP product on a newer type of fabric that was a lot more sustainably sourced, had some sort of properties to really make yeah, yeah, just make it a little bit more sustainable in its active use we managed to randomly get picked up by kind of a Straits Times article.

So that's where the B2C segment really started to fly off. This was in my early second year of uni, got really lucky there. And started to make quite a good sum of money. Usually for apparels, you need to actually meet something called an MOQ requirements, which is a minimum order, and it can be quite tough to hit. So, one of the tricks there is to kind of like, make small products, get people to test it. Once you hit the MOQ kind of quantity, you can ramp up production. Judging that is very difficult. that's how we managed to start.

(04:05) Jeremy Au:

And what was your learnings from this experience? What did you learn from that?

(04:08) Johann Wah:

I think in university, I really learned, I guess the, the, the kind of entrepreneur, like you almost have to love the kind of the grind to keep trying even though we had the initial pop in sales for the B2C segment, The real tough part happened was actually when COVID kind of hit, right?

So we were starting to get our traction and our momentum going up on the B2C side, and I was really happy. And then that's when really Circuit Breaker kind of hit. We had quite a few cancel orders because I think everyone wanted to be in their pajamas, they didn't really want to buy outside clothes.

And then our clothes, obviously, because it was more sustainable, it was a little bit more pricey. So at that time, in kind of Circuit Breaker, everybody was struggling. So, the real struggle was, we had a MOQ, we overordered a little bit, got a little bit excited. So we had kind of all this access inventory and I, I didn't have the money to pay for that. So really had to borrow from some friends and family to kind of make sure we can even hit the MOQ. And then after I hit the MOQ, I had lots of supply that I didn't know what to do with. So that's always a huge challenge and struggle, right?

So I learned how to deal with that and had to innovate out of this huge problem. Right? what we managed to do was hit the MOQ for the fabrics. We brought the fabrics in, but didn't finish all the clothes. My friends and I kind of had this idea where we took the fabric, access fabric that we had, we started to go knock on doors around businesses and try and go like, Hey, like, would you guys have a use case for this? And that's how we managed to pivot to the more B2B side which was the, the much larger portion of the business later.

(05:25) Jeremy Au:

Wait, so how does pivot, so you had a, you had a product, I guess, literally you had a product in hands, the product. but then you didn't know who was going to buy as a customer, right? So how did you find the right customer?

(05:36) Johann Wah:

We really knocked on doors. I kid you not, this was me, like really trying to like I, I LinkedIn message people. I like, cold email people. I really went to knock on doors and managed to find a couple of people that really believed in what we are doing and the sustainability movement. These typically tended to be more corporates that actually had, sustainability mandates and agendas. So I started to target those. They were Western companies that were headquartered in Singapore, had these sustainment mandates for sustaining certificates. And we already kind of had the supply chain for that.

I targeted all those companies and went like, Hey, we already have these certified things that meet your requirement, right? You want some corporate coding. I can let you have it for a really affordable, start and hopefully you come with us for a longer term and that's what happened.

(06:16) Jeremy Au:

I'm glad it worked out. I mean, it sounds super scary because, wait, so you

(06:19) Johann Wah:

It's super scary.

(06:20) Jeremy Au:

Cause you have friends and family money, but it's literally in,

(06:23) Johann Wah:

I know I loaned it.

(06:24) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, but like, like how much material was that? Like they fill up a room or how much.

(06:28) Johann Wah:

So the way clothing works is that there's kind of like two main parts to it. So that's like procuring the fabric. And then the cutting and placing of the clothes together. Usually there's kind of two different especially want to go to more sustainable route.

They usually can't be from the same person. People who are very good at cutting may not have access to sustainable fabrics. But we managed to negotiate our way out of it we had to hit the MOQ for the fabric. But then we didn't want to hit the MOQ for the cutting and stuff. So we just did whatever orders we had to fulfill. We had a little bit extra and then got the fabric to save costs on the cutting side. So that's what we did. We brought it all to Singapore. And I had to find another use case for the fabric.

(07:01) Jeremy Au:

Wow. It sounds so scary. You walk in, you're like, I converted my family's money into cloth.

(07:07) Johann Wah:

I had no choice. Like I said, this, this is the, the, the challenges of being a entrepreneur and just trying to figure it out.

(07:13) Jeremy Au:

If you convert it into food, at least you have eaten it.

(07:15) Johann Wah:

I really, really wish.

(07:16) Jeremy Au:

How long did it take for you to find this right customer? Was it like one month, two months? How did you feel during the search?

(07:22) Johann Wah:

Oh, it was really tough. It was during COVID. So I guess we were quite fortunate. There was a little bit of extra time, school sometimes moved to zoom so had more time to work after hours. To find our first customer, it took about two to three months, where we really just.

Grinded every day. And my honest agenda back then was to make up the loss that I had hopefully just try and find a use case. Cause you know, in the end I still did care quite a bit about climate and sustainability. So I just didn't want the fabrics that go to waste. It's like 10 rows of big fabric, sitting in my college dorm room, and taking a lot of space so yeah, that's pretty much just us figuring out a great use case for it that managed to build products other people enjoy.

(07:54) Jeremy Au:

So, there you are, you successfully find out that new customer. And you said that you paid off for your dates with your now wife. So how do you feel? It was like, do you feel like relief or was it like a high roller

(08:04) Johann Wah:

I wouldn't really define it even as a startup. I'll say it's more of a small business, right? our goal was to be profitable. We were mostly looking to pay off, like I mentioned, our university expenses and a bit of extra cash. So that was really what we, what, what, what, what I think we, we, we started to have a goal towards. It felt great, to have a bit of spare cash, I was able to take my, my then girlfriend now wife to some cooler dates. Like, it's kind of a Singaporean thing where you always dreamed of going on the cable car kind of thing from, Sentosa. Then that one's like a hundred dollars per person type of thing. And yeah, being able to splash a bit of cash on that in university days felt great. Really enjoyed it. So, I mean, obviously she's now my wife, so I guess it worked.

(08:38) Jeremy Au:

So, you've built this company and then, what's interesting is that you also had this dream to go to Amazon, which you eventually did. what was that decision making process where you were like, okay, I'm going to apply for a job at Amazon versus doubling down on your small business?

(08:51) Johann Wah:

Yeah, I actually saw it as even though I am Singaporean, I always thought that the Singaporean education system was a bit too rigid for me, that's obviously why I chose to go to Yale NUS. So that was my university of choice.

It was a lot more liberal and American, and I guess a lot more open ended in the way you could learn things from that type of thinking. I saw entrepreneurship as a really important part of my university education. obviously I worked a lot in the business, so it was a really important part of my education as a whole. I managed to create a very compelling story for that, right? So I think to, to get into Amazon is incredibly competitive. that was always my dream. So I always knew that I think for usually for these type of companies, even selective schools, you got to really, I guess similar to startup, right?

Differentiate yourself, you have to be very different from the crowd, right? So I also thought that, this entrepreneurship experience was a stepping stone. Having those newspaper articles written about a little bit about a story and then obviously my bit more experience in in dealing with a small apparel business was Quite compelling to Amazon as a story. And I also read a lot about Amazon's culture. So I understood what they were looking for. I didn't succeed the first time I got I tried for Amazon. So I actually tried to apply Amazon my freshman year, my sophomore year, and I only got in my third year. So I actually failed two times. So that allowed me to really learn from those experiences. And then Yeah, I was able to actually turn even my MBF story, and my MBF experiences into a compelling narrative and research the roles that I felt really fit that narrative. And that's actually where I started, becoming on the Amazon startup team. Really servicing different sorts of, startups that wanted to use AWS. That was a large part of my role at Amazon finding ways for that. That's the first time I met you, Jeremy. I don't know whether you remember. We met at an Amazon event I sponsored. I worked together with Adriel and we sponsored one of the events.

I remember that's the first time we met and connected and just really enjoyed those conversations we had.

(10:30) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, I actually do remember that So, obviously it was putting together one of our brave community events for our founders and education tech. And I think it was a fun time. I remember, we were chatting over food. And you shared your dream about doing something in climate tech.

(10:43) Johann Wah:

That was where, you know, it was a starting, you know, that was above, I think you remember it.

(10:46) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. I think the crux of it was I was impressed that you want to do climate tech. And also I was unclear how you would go about doing climate tech from Singapore. I think there's a lot of good sustainability solutions in Southeast Asia.

Like you, for example, there's a ecosystem that does like plastic recycling in Indonesia. There's Iratani that has fish rice farming support in Indonesia as well. So I think there's a lot of agri tech or other sustainability solutions in the emerging markets. But from Singapore, it was like, what the right place to create climate tech was a bit fuzzy, but you made it happen and you became startup founder and we've decided to invest in you as well. tell a little bit more about how you kind of like, okay, first of all, you were Amazon, like what you did, you hated Amazon or you were like, I want to do something like what's going on here at first.

(11:28) Johann Wah:

Don't get me wrong. I absolutely loved Amazon. I still am very close to my, to my previous boss. And once again, they was a startup team, right? So obviously they understood. But yeah, I really really enjoyed the I really I really loved amazon every bit of it I love my team.

It was more just like I think that I don't know It was weird the person that convinced me To make that, jump was actually my other co founder Lawrence he was my best friend at Amazon. So we were actually interns together at Amazon. We got converted together at Amazon and he became one of my groomsmen at my wedding as well. So we are basically like best friends. he left Amazon first, so I have to give him all the credit.

We've been talking about this climate modeling thing Then he came up to me one day and was like, bro, I'm leaving Amazon. And I was like, oh, you're crazy, bro. Like, I kind of just got here, I'm just getting started, So yeah, it was really him that convinced me because he left first. he's always wanted me to join, but he had a period where he wanted to try things on his own later we reconciled and joined together. it wasn't a natural transition It was really like, I think, a natural progression of like, him kind of like continue to tell me about all the cool stuff happening in climate modeling geospatial side and the prospects. the real thing that tipped me over the iceberg, was him showing me a video.

I remember of actually Jeff Bezos. When Jeff Bezos was a very young entrepreneur, and Jeff said something, which was that, The reason why I started Amazon was wasn't because I was, scared of my job. He was actually a very popular, like, banking finance person, And making good money. But he said if he didn't do Amazon, he worried he would regret it later. That led to my thinking where I really thought to myself, like, if I didn't try this, would I really regret later? Even if it didn't work out, right? Would I really regret later? And I felt like I would have.

So that's, that's pretty much why I did. I just really didn't want to regret things. And I felt that I really enjoyed the big tech. I really kind of like, I achieved a lot of my, the goal that I wanted, and I just didn't want to regret an exciting opportunity to challenge myself again. So that's actually why I made that decision in the end.

(13:17) Jeremy Au:

And how did you learn an idea of doing climate modeling? So obviously climate tech is a passion that you had.

(13:23) Johann Wah:

Yeah, I think, like I said, you've been hearing this, this goes into kind of that, not everything for me happened all at once It was really a natural progression of lots of variables coming together. The main thing was actually, my family is Christian, and my father used to be a part time missionary growing up. And a big part of kind of, my dad's work was actually, working to support the the indigenous farmers in the mountains of Chiang Mai in Thailand.

I think growing up, the main thing I kept seeing here is that farmers really really continually needed to keep deforesting lands, keep like, slash and burning, because they needed to keep their yields high. And to keep their yields high, they had to do more monocultural crops like, like corn that were a lot less sustainable.

So really like, My passion for climate tech and climate modeling stemmed from that. my skill sets are more in tech and software. So, really, like, I think trying to find an angle for that. Obviously, I'm not the kind of a hard tech guy. There's lots of all those cool climate techs as well.

really trying to find a great angle for that from a software angle. That was always what, what I was very passionate about and trying to solve. right? When, Lawrence first left Amazon, our clarity on what we were going to build was not super, super clear, but it came clearer over, over time that there was a huge, there's a huge growing movement.

I think this will only grow bigger over time for, for what we're going to call this general topic of, I would say, spatial analytics which is using spatial data points to understand what's happening in the world and the environment around us. And I just realized that, as we continue to validate and try new things, a lot of the infrastructure that people was using to set up those machine learning environments and building those models. was just chaotic. And for something as important as climate, we really wanted to build a powerful solution to help everyone set up their modeling and a lot more accessible and easier manner.

(14:58) Jeremy Au:

When you think about that, what's wrong with climate modeling anyway, I mean, who even uses climate modeling, what's wrong with it?

(15:06) Johann Wah:

Yeah, that's a great question. Climate modeling is similar to AI, your, for example, a large language model is simply predicting with super accurate precision. What the most likely next word to be, right? So common modeling is the same thing. It's understanding and trying to predict what's going to happen to our climate in the future using a lot of historical data points, right? So the main issue that we saw is that lots of climate modeling now is really reserved for very, very, I would say high end corporations, institutions, because they can actually, you know, spend a lot of that money to invest in heavy, virtual machines and cloud computing resources in order to really build some of those best models, right?

But what we were really seeing was that there were lots of other institutions. There were consultants, there were smaller universities and researchers. That also wanted to have those capabilities, right? But they were struggling to optimize their computing environments. So that was one of the largest things that we saw, there's a huge potential cost barrier and efficiency barrier for larger companies that could create customized solutions. So that's where we really see the opportunity we want to provide a one click kind of you can spin up a virtual machine that's essentially optimized for these sorts of climate modeling to help anyone to model out and have an optimized architecture to really model these sorts of climate and spatial situations at a much more affordable cost than what they traditionally used.

So that's really what we're trying to gear towards and the problem we're trying to solve.

(16:27) Jeremy Au:

Are you trying to be better? Are you trying to be faster? Are you trying to be cheaper from your perspective?

(16:32) Johann Wah:

I would define it more as accessibility, right? anyone can do it, but spatial and climate modeling have It has a different computing language, right? That computing language to actually set up the appropriate software packages within your environment.

Sometimes if it gets very complex, can even take up to three days, right? To actually set it up, update all the packages correctly. And it's a, that's a very, very manual process, right? So what we've essentially done is that, we want to make the scaling part automatic and also the part to set up the environment entirely automatic.

They just literally kind of choose the main stuff that they want, click one button, boom, everything is set up instantly and they can start to build their models straight away.

(17:09) Jeremy Au:

What's the upside of letting more people do this, right? I mean, you tell me, Hey, more people know how to I don't know, plant trees. Then I'll be like, okay, that helps the world. what's the upside from helping more people be able to access modeling?

(17:22) Johann Wah:

I think the beauty of, climate modeling is in spatial analytics, more and more people will need to use spatial analytics. It's very, very similarly to how machine learning is supporting so many businesses in making a lot better decisions, right? The way that we see it is spatial modelings help makes better decisions that then help increase ROI effectively, right? If you actually understand now the use cases that we are starting to see in spatial analytics, let me give you one example, right?

Specializing and common is having huge use cases in insurance, in insurance businesses, right? Insurance businesses are increasingly turning to Climate and spatial modeling to help them price their insurance premiums. This is critical For them to know how to price their premiums based on certain risk factors, now having to include climate, considering, how climate is becoming such a huge risk factors with all the floods and all the, all the kind of unpredictable rainforests coming on is going to be business critical for insurance companies who really understand how to price their premiums and how to price their products, these are important decision making tools to help make better decisions over time.

(18:23) Jeremy Au:

From your perspective do you believe the world is doomed? You know, a lot of people are pretty pessimistic, right? About, the climate, the world's gonna end. I shouldn't have kids because, it's adding more burden to the world, right? Because the world's so ecologically stressed already.

What are your thoughts about that?

(18:39) Johann Wah:

That's an interesting conversation I have with my wife a lot. For context, my wife is also from Yale-NUS and one of the co founders of Thryft,sg, the largest secondhand online bookstore in Southeast Asia. we're both very into climate and sustainability use cases and business.

we have that conversation all the time, especially as we, think about kids and stuff all the time, right? I think that we are on the side where we are a little bit more, we, we want, we were a little bit more optimistic. You can call us a bit more delusional I'd say, but we are optimistic that, I guess just looking throughout history I also love to read history.

I guess we've seen humans be able to continually adapt to their environment using newer technologies, using newer tools depending on the use cases. So I'll say that definitely I'm optimistic that we can find solutions, but whether or not I'm right that one, I'm not sure. But do I want to, potentially give a large part of my efforts trying to make a little bit of a difference that I'm interested in trying.

(19:30) Jeremy Au:

As we think about all of this kind of like climate modelling, how do you think about the dynamics of what climate models can capture versus what they can't capture from your perspective?

(19:40) Johann Wah:

That's a really good question. I would say similar to all sorts of different modelings it is essentially a probability, I don't think anything in this world can give you anything of certainty. If not, it'll be, I, I guess we'll all be making the right decisions all the time, I really think it's all about probability. So I think what climate modeling does is it has a great Power to tell you with a certain probability what is likely to happen based on what we've seen in history, Obviously, with, things like COVID it is incredibly hard to predict these very abnormal events, what we are seeing is that climate models can predict things like, even be moving to spheres of, for example, predicting how, like, different sorts of, different sorts of climates and heat waves or whatnot is giving rise to certain diseases and stuff to then help certain governments even prepare better resources or whatnot, to meet the potential demand some of this research has actually already been used by certain governments, right? So I definitely say that there's huge use cases and learnings but do they get it wrong at times? Yes, it's not a hundred percent.

(20:33) Jeremy Au:

On that note, could you share about a time that you personally have been brave?

(20:36) Johann Wah:

Yeah. I'll say that the time I really have been brave was when I took a huge step to leave my comfort zone of corporate life and start a climate tech in Southeast Asia. I applaud anybody who's trying to do it is incredibly difficult.

Still my huge dream is for Southeast Asia to embrace more climate focused solutions. Currently, most of our customers are overseas so we have yet to make that change, but I'm excited to be brave in Southeast Asia to try and build climate solutions for this region and hopefully the world.

(21:03) Jeremy Au:

Yeah, I think the interesting part is that you're choosing to do something that's hard. Obviously, there are other companies like Unravel Carbon, Grace Sai, she's also part of Climate Tech. She's been a prior guest of Brave as well. But I'm just kind of curious from your perspective you've done so many different industries, right? You've gone into oil and gas. You have gone into banking. why is climate tech such an important thing for you for so many years? Why is this cause important?

(21:25) Johann Wah:

I think it really goes back to my childhood. Hearing the pain of people suffering from the effects of, our capitalistic mindset and how it's harmed certain areas and then the effects of how climate has harmed certain people, right?

Like, for example, it was, I had very close interactions and know quite a lot of the farmers, like I mentioned, that in those Thailand regions that are still really struggling quite a bit, right? And I guess it drove a huge thought in me to continually just keep pondering and thinking about, is there, is there a way we could make some of this better? finally managed to find a way from a software angle, which is a little bit more what I specialized in, from a climate modeling perspective.

(21:58) Jeremy Au:

Yeah. On that note, thank you so much for sharing. I'd like to summarize the three big takeaways I got from this conversation. First of all, thanks so much for sharing about your time as a founder, as a student, where you had borrowed money and struggled to figure out who's going to buy your literal, physical product. and so it was a fun, journey to hear about your panic, but also how you managed to pivot and find the right customer and be eventually be able to go on dates with your now wife.

Secondly, thanks so much for sharing about, why you decided to leave Amazon in order to build Nika dot eco. I think it was fun to hear about, your product, your product market fit, why you think it makes it better for people who want a climate model, but also make it more accessible.

Lastly, thanks for sharing about your perspective on climate. it was. Interesting to hear why you're passionate about climate as a cause from both a personal perspective, but also why you think it's important and the fact that you're optimistic for the future, for people to still have kids and bring up their kids in a world where the climate will hopefully get better.

On that note, thank you so much Johann for sharing your journey.

(22:52) Johann Wah:

Thank you Jeremy, for having me. I really appreciate it. It was so fun.