Talent Gaps, AI Adoption & Southeast Asia’s Startup Winter, China Subsidies & Sequoia’s Split - E626
"Private equity versus venture capital, venture capital grew out of the private equity class. When you think about it, there's public equities, there's private equity, and private equity is private vehicles funding private companies. Venture capital is a specialized subset of private equity. From a media perspective, coverage tends to focus on venture capital because private equity buys stable, mature businesses that have already been built, whereas venture capital is more exciting to write about. You have heroic founders who go out there telling you that everybody's going to get married to AI soon. Don't worry about it, enjoy it, it's good for you. There are also many spicy startup failure stories for 19 out of 20 startups, which are far more interesting compared to some private equity fund buying Toys R Us and maximizing profitability from it. I think there's a different media exposure component to it." - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast
"India and Southeast Asia are still struggling because we have different languages. English is not the same as Thai, Vietnamese, or Filipino. It's disaggregated—different languages, disaggregated materials, disaggregated market sizes and applications, and disaggregated GDP per capita. This makes it very hard to train AI every day. Chinese AI is being trained by a billion plus people in China, and Americans, all 300 million of them, are training the American AI along with Western-educated folks. So it's actually hard to build a pure play AI company out of Singapore structurally." - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast
Jeremy Au explored how talent, policy, and capital flows shape startup ecosystems across Southeast Asia, India, and China. The discussion covered talent strengths and weaknesses across countries, the role of industrial policy and government subsidies, the challenges of building large language models outside the US and China, and the impact of US China geopolitical tensions on venture capital flows.