BRAVE

Keywords: HealthTech Southeast Asia, Healthcare AI, AI Medical Scribe, Digital Health Innovations, Doctor Burnout, Rural Healthcare Distribution, Early Cancer Detection, Healthcare Localization, Emerging Markets Healthcare, Large Language Models (LLMs) in Medicine

Navigating Southeast Asia: Jeremy Au on Building, Investing, and Career Pivots - E720

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 08:16:47 +0800

"When it comes to angel investing, this is an Olympic-level race and not a pass-fail threshold. If you walk into a gym with 100 people working out, my job as an investor is to pick the top three. If you're number four or five, maybe this year is not your time and you need another year in the gym before you get picked. The criteria is not the magic sauce; it's the high bar at which you select." - Jeremy Au

"Building companies is really, really hard. There is a difference between building a product, building a team, and building a business. First, you have to figure out a product that people actually want to buy. Then, you build a great team and attract them to your mission and vision. Lastly, you must transition from being a founder who is selling something into a CEO who is able to strategize, prioritize, and stack rank decisions in a complex and ever-changing world." - Jeremy Au

"The story that has been told a lot is about the macroeconomic situation of Southeast Asia, like the rising middle class and trade between East and West. What is not told enough is the nuance around localization and the opportunities at a ground level. You cannot paint it with one brush; Singapore is very different from Indonesia, which is very different from Malaysia and Vietnam. An industry thesis really fundamentally has to be broken down at a country level, playing to each country's unique strengths." - Jeremy Au

Jeremy Au joined Rohit Malhotra on Life Self Mastery to talk about the moves between founder, VC, and operator, and what each seat actually teaches you. Now leading Cosmetic Physician Partners Asia after Bain, CozyKin, Monk's Hill Ventures, and Lucence, Jeremy is candid about what does not transfer between roles.

They cover the three things every founder has to get right (the product, the team, and the business), the Southeast Asia story that still is not told at ground level, why angel investing is an Olympic-level race rather than a pass-fail test, why coaching someone and investing in someone are two completely different prisms, and the two-by-two he uses to advise emerging fund managers who have deployed capital without returns.

Support the original show: Life Self Mastery with Rohit Malhotra:

00:00 Intro

01:19 Founder to VC to operator, and back again

03:10 The three things: product, team, business

07:33 Scaling a clinic group from the US into Asia

10:54 The Southeast Asia story nobody is telling

18:30 Why a regional thesis is too broad a brush

22:20 Angel investing is an Olympic race, not a pass-fail test

25:41 Coaching someone vs investing in someone

28:08 Advice for emerging VCs who have not returned capital

35:07 The thread: high-performing teams

41:59 The comfort crisis and the 2% idea

46:54 What he would tell his younger self

50:20 Why Flow Club is his favourite tool

52:37 Where to find Jeremy

Keywords: Southeast Asia Tech Ecosystem, Startup Founder Journey, Venture Capital Strategy, Angel Investing Criteria, Business Model Execution, High-Performing Teams, Market Localization in Asia, PropTech and HealthTech, CEO and Operator Roles

Introduction

Edric Poon: Edric here, producer from BRAVE. First off, if you've been following the BRAVE podcast, thank you so much for your support. And if it's your first time tuning in, please check out our latest episodes on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or simply head over to our website, bravesea.com.

Now, Jeremy was recently a guest on Rohit Malhotra's show, Life Self Mastery, to talk about the moves between founder, VC, and operator, and what he's actually learned from each seat. We thought you'd enjoy this particular episode.

So two of the points that you should be listening for in this podcast would be Rohit on why syndicate leads who haven't returned capital are now piling into OpenAI and Anthropic secondaries, and Jeremy on why angel investing is an Olympic-level race, not a pass-fail test.

They cover the three things every founder has to get right, the product, the team, and the business, the Southeast Asia story that isn't being told at ground level, why coaching someone and investing in someone are two completely different prisms, and much more.

So please support our friend Rohit. Head over to Life Self Mastery and give him a follow, and let us know what you thought about the episode in the comments. Please enjoy.

Founder to VC to Operator, and Back Again

Rohit Malhotra: Jeremy, you've had a very interesting journey. You founded CozyKin, then you became a VC at Monk's Hill, and then you went back as an operator as COO of Lucence, and now you've taken the CEO seat. So what pulled you back into the operator chair each time, and why are you back in the CEO role?

Jeremy Au: Life is really about what you build and who you do it with, and I think that's really what has always inspired me. I've always been in a builder role, whether it was at Bain in consulting, very much learning the basics and foundations, or, at that point, I was just building slide decks, I guess, and analysis models.

But since then, I've always been drawn to places where I can build, and really be surrounded by a great culture of folks. Even at Bain as a management consultant, it was an incredible calibre and team that you get to be part of. And I've been really lucky to be able to be part of so many teams in terms of startups and building culture.

For the roles that you mentioned: when I was a founder for an education tech startup that grew from pre-seed to seed to Series A; building at Lucence as the chief operating officer, growing that out; and as a VC and chief of staff for Monk's Hill Ventures, which was a Series A VC fund, helping them grow and build a lot of the internal systems and tools, but also investing as well.

All of these, from my perspective, had the opportunity and the similarity of getting to build, and to do it with great people and great culture.

The Three Things: Product, Team, Business

Rohit Malhotra: And you built CozyKin during your Harvard days, before it got acquired. So what did the founder journey teach you that an investor seat could not? What were some of the learnings back then?

Jeremy Au: I think that building companies is really hard. I think they are really, really, really, really hard.

And I think that there is a difference between building a product, building a team, and building a business. And those three things, when you fire on all cylinders on all three of those, that's when something larger than itself gets to build and compound.

So for me, zooming out and looking at all the various companies that I've been part of: obviously you start off building a product. And that's going to be about, do people want to buy it? And will people pay money for it? I think it's shocking how many companies and founders actually never really solve this issue. Because it's not just a static target, it changes. Consumer preferences change, technology changes, competition changes. And so the product market fit hunt is very real, and you can never really be static around that.

I think building a team is something that's a little bit more obvious to folks, because most of us who have worked in companies know the importance of hiring well. So the general principles of hiring people who are not bad at their jobs is, I think, a common understanding. But the part that's difficult for startups is hiring people who are really great and hungry for the jobs and willing to take the risk.

And that makes it very difficult, because when I was a starry-eyed undergraduate, I wanted to join Bain, or at that time I also wanted to join Bridgespan Group, which was at the time the world's number one nonprofit consulting group. The brand and the prestige was what drew me in. But for startups, you're very much doing the opposite side, which is that you have a big vision, but nobody knows who you are, and nobody knows your product, and nobody knows whether you're going to make it big or not, for a lot of risk and probably not industry-leading compensation either.

So that's the tricky part of building a great team: you understand the heuristics of hiring great people, but you don't have the ammunition or the brand to make that an easy search process.

And the third is building a great business, and that's where I think a lot of companies also struggle. You can have a great product and you can have a great team, but if you're not thoughtful about your strategy and business, a lot of businesses can let it go to waste.

There's a sliding spectrum. The most common one is not being strategic. And strategy is a function of the fact that the world is competitive. There are other companies going after this, other teams going after it, technology's moving. So strategy is about the things you do and the things you don't do. And as a founder, you're always thinking about all the things you can do, and the big vision and everything. The discipline to say no, and to actually put the resources, putting more wood behind fewer arrows to actually land those shots that you have to take as a business, is actually really tricky for a lot of people to navigate.

So one of the big lessons I've learned from startups is really that transition. First, figure out the product that people want to buy, then at least you're selling something. Two, build a great team and be able to attract them to the mission and vision, which is difficult, and then you can go a little bit further. And then lastly, transitioning from being a founder who's selling something into becoming a CEO or executive who's able to strategise and prioritise and stack rank your decisions in a very complex and ever-changing world.

Those are the three dynamics that are so difficult to master, and I would say that I'm still learning even today.

Scaling a Clinic Group from the US into Asia

Rohit Malhotra: You recently made a move to Cosmetic Physician Partners, and the company has scaled to 85-plus clinics across the US and Europe, and now you're building it from Singapore. So what actually transfers across borders in a clinic partnership model, and what do you have to rebuild from scratch, especially in the ASEAN region?

Jeremy Au: A lot of credit really goes to the founding teams of the US and Europe arms who have already built out a model and really iterated and built out a win-win partnership that works with clinic owners, to be able to work together, collaborate, synergise together as a group, and be stronger together rather than fragmented individual clinics.

One of the benefits for Asia, of course, is that we get the benefit of learning from their best practices. Their war stories, the things to do, the things not to do, the things to prioritise and the things that can afford to wait a little bit longer. That knowledge is really important, because it really goes to building out the fundamentals of the business. So that's highly transferable.

What has to be localised, of course, is the cultural and the healthcare regulations of every market in Asia. And this is actually true because even in America, across 50 states, there are actually 50 different regulation regimes for healthcare. And of course, in Europe there are also different regulation regimes. So localisation is really about saying that in every country there are certain healthcare codes and regulations that you have to be thoughtful about. Being thoughtful about localisation for the culture, the networks, and the regulations that you have to be compliant with is important.

Now, the benefit of being a larger group, as a global group, is that compliance is easier to work on together rather than individually. As an individual clinic owner, to be able to have legal counsel and compliance is actually a very large percentage of your costs in order to be fully compliant. But as a larger group and practice of purely medical aesthetic clinics, this compliance cost is actually shared, but more importantly, it's at scale.

So legal counsel is not just a must-do checklist item to be checked off, but actually can be a strategic advantage, because this is then a capability that's shared by everybody, has the learnings from every market, and is thoughtful about what needs to be done to have a proactive and constructive relationship with the local healthcare regulations.

And that's something that is actually not just helpful for the growth of the group, but also quite compelling for individual clinic practice owners, who may find that it's difficult to handle compliance, HR, accounting, finance, all these strategic enablers that are important and helpful at scale but don't have those economies of scale and don't have that punch when you're just a solo clinic owner.

The Southeast Asia Story Nobody Is Telling

Rohit Malhotra: You've built the BRAVE podcast into the region's number one tech podcast. So what story about the Southeast Asia tech scene is still not being told enough?

Jeremy Au: I think that the story that has been told a lot has been about the macroeconomic situation of Southeast Asia, and I think it's a function of both easiness and intuitiveness.

There's a lot of positive things. Obviously there's a rising middle class, there's a lot of trade between East and West, Southeast Asia, different countries, different cultures. But everybody has a hungry population that would love to be entrepreneurial, to be able to rise up the income ladder and provide for their families, and technology is just a tool for them to get there. Whatever way, form, or fashion it happens, whether it's in agriculture or logistics or supply chain or whatever it is, technology is seen as a way to get there. And I think that's such a wonderful reality that's there. It's also a very easy set of industry reports to do, because you pull up World Bank, you pull up the numbers, and then you kind of see the top-line numbers.

I think that the stories that are not really told, I would say, are a little bit of a barbell. On one end, I think there isn't sufficient conversation about the realities and difficulties at a ground level for companies building in Southeast Asia. And on the other hand, there's also not enough nuance around the localisation or the opportunities at a ground level as well.

I think they're both functions of not really understanding, or the time, or maybe there's not enough time to be able to do that level of analysis. But also we're all wondering whether the reader actually wants to get into that level of detail.

Ground Level: Energy Shocks and Go-to-Market

Jeremy Au: So what I mean by that is, let's talk about the difficulties. I think there are significant challenges in Southeast Asia. Go-to-market is a big part. Income levels are important to be thoughtful about. We look at it and it's like, okay, there's a billion people in this circle. But of course, when you look at India, you look at China, you have to be thoughtful about what's the size of the middle class versus the upper class, and how are you being thoughtful about how you enter the go-to-market and so forth. So there's a lot of nuance around go-to-market, and then also being thoughtful about middlemen and local power structures that you have to navigate and be part of.

And also, these countries have often sizable macroeconomic risk at the individual level. We saw in the recent energy crisis that one year ago nobody would have predicted that energy, oil and gas, would be a shortage dynamic that would impact Southeast Asia so hard.

And now you see that it's impacting some countries a lot worse than others. Singapore is doing fine, because Singapore is well developed, has a lot of reserves, is an oil refining hub, so it continues to have access to oil and gas. But on the other end of the spectrum you have the Philippines, which is an island archipelago, which is highly dependent on gas and certain refinery dynamics. And so for them, they have villages that are currently on emergency power, effectively, because they don't have the energy that they can access.

And so these macroeconomic shocks are difficult, because you can't paint it with one brush and say the whole of Southeast Asia is impacted by energy. Malaysia is doing okay because they are producing oil and gas with Petronas. Brunei obviously is an oil and gas producer, so they don't have an issue. But Vietnam has an issue.

So it's very difficult to do the analysis, because suddenly you're like, okay, this is not a clean headline. China is X, India is Y, Southeast Asia is A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6. So it gets very difficult to talk about that.

But that level of nuance needs to be there, because then you start to appreciate the challenges of those businesses. Because your agritech business that was based on fertiliser and inputs and plastics and chicken feed suddenly is viable still in one country but is no longer currently viable in another country, depending on how long this oil crisis lasts.

Ground Level: Air Conditioning and Corporate Florists

Jeremy Au: So there's a level of difficulty that's there at the ground level. On the other hand, at the ground level there's actually a lot of opportunity as well, because obviously the headlines are really about AI models, supercomputers, et cetera.

But I always tell people that if you take a step back, you know that a country like Malaysia will continue to develop for the next 10, 20 years. You know that Indonesia will continue to develop for the next 10 to 20 years. You know that Vietnam will have to develop over the next 10 to 20 years. And so there's actually a lot of opportunity, but they are going to be, at one level, more fundamental, and two, more patience is going to be required. And so does that necessarily fit into the classic Western, or I would say Silicon Valley, type of venture capital model?

And I think that's the crux of it. Because I have friends who are doing good business just servicing air conditioning. And the truth is, if you go to Malaysia, Vietnam, the one thing everybody has agreed they want to buy more of is air conditioning. Because it's hot. It's tropical.

Rohit Malhotra: True. Very true.

Jeremy Au: And so you know that in the next 10 to 20 years people are going to buy more air conditioning, and with more air conditioning there are going to be more maintenance requirements. But it's not going to be an LLM wrapper. So what kind of business do you have to build with that? What kind of financing do you have with that? What kind of teaming do you have with that? And are you comfortable doing that, when you could just work for Google or Meta or Apple as your BATNA career? I think that's a big part of it for a lot of folks.

And so I meet a lot of people in Southeast Asia who say, "Okay, I'm from X great company and I want to build this great technology company, but I realise that I can't build it, because the businesses that people want to buy are a lot more fundamental, and I feel conflicted."

And I'm like, well, isn't that an opportunity? If there's no florist that's really good in your city that can consistently deliver flowers within a certain amount of time, with personalisation, and can do it at a corporate level? In America, that's a solved problem. But it's not a solved problem in Southeast Asia, to have corporate level gift hampers. But that's a totally different business you have to build.

So those are the three pieces. People understand the macro, but people are not close enough to the difficulties at a ground level, and also not patient enough and thoughtful about the localised opportunities in Asia as well.

Why a Regional Thesis Is Too Broad a Brush

Rohit Malhotra: That makes sense. And you also earlier talked about climate tech capital flowing into the region. So is climate genuinely Southeast Asia's next big category, or is it still early? Or is there any sector where you think you'll have the next set of big startups coming?

Jeremy Au: Well, I think an industry thesis really fundamentally has to be broken down at a country level. Southeast Asia is a very difficult category, because again, Singapore is very different from Indonesia, which is very different from Malaysia, which is very different from Vietnam.

So I think writing an industry thesis at a regional level is probably too broad a brush to do. That's one.

Two, there are certain theses that are important, and another way to think about this is that they should play to the country's strengths. I wouldn't go to the North Pole and say, "Hey, I want to build a business on sand mining." Because there isn't sand mining in the North Pole. I think it would also be banned to do so. But it's just a fundamental mismatch between the geography and the business model.

And so when you look at Southeast Asia, I think you'd be quite thoughtful and say, okay, if you have Singapore, what are the strengths that Singapore has? Singapore's strengths are in maritime, middlemen, commodities trading, finance hub, security hub, biotech hub in terms of pharma, healthcare services. So being thoughtful about saying, "Okay, these are the verticals that Singapore is good at, and I'm happy to build a company that has that vertical."

So for example, one set of startups I've been quite interested in seeing has been quite a lot of the shipping and maritime dynamic. And I would say that's quite uniquely Southeast Asian, in the sense that there's a lot of trade that flows through Southeast Asia. If you go back to the Roman and the Indian and the Chinese empires, they were trading silk, tea, and everything in between, and a lot of it went through Southeast Asia. So this has been going back for thousands and thousands of years, the flow of trade through Southeast Asia.

And so there have been quite a lot of interesting approaches to that from various startups that I can think of. Some of them are doing, for example, logistics and container tracking, fast response to various crises, tracking, et cetera. That's one of them.

Others I'm interested in seeing would be the cleaning of ships, actually, which is quite interesting. Historically, barnacles would be scraped by humans, or you have to go into a dock to scrape those barnacles off. But now you can use underwater robotics to get it done. And Singapore is either the number one or number two port in the world in terms of traffic and volume. So it's a great place to build a global business on ship cleaning.

And so these are the kind of country-by-country theses that you have to be thoughtful about as well. Malaysia obviously is a great centre for semiconductors globally, in Penang, et cetera. So there's actually an interesting cluster of semiconductor startups that are emerging there as well.

Angel Investing Is an Olympic Race, Not a Pass-Fail Test

Rohit Malhotra: Got it. And you've been an investor through Orvel, and you've made more than 50-plus personal investments with 100K-plus cheques. So what's your filter at that stage? Are you focusing only on AI startups, because that's been the trade? What do you look for when you're looking to invest at early stage?

Jeremy Au: I'm not going to say anything super interesting, because for me it's really got to be a great team, great product, and great business model. I think that's the heuristic that I'm thoughtful about.

What I can say that I'm a little bit different about is being upfront that this is an Olympic-level race, and not a pass-fail threshold.

So what I mean by that is, if I told you, "Hey, Rohit, I know you're not an Olympic swimming coach, but how would you select a great swimmer for the Olympics?" You would probably say the same thing as every coach would say. Which would be, I want somebody who is good at it physically, somebody who has good perseverance and mindset about it, and thirdly, somebody who I can work with to really improve to the next level. I don't think you're going to say anything very different from most people saying that.

Rohit Malhotra: True.

Jeremy Au: What is different is that at Olympic level, you would be going to the regional meets, you'd be going to the local meets, and then you'd be looking for the diamond in the rough. The number one, number two, number three, the top folks.

And so when it comes to angel investing, as a person and an individual, I'm walking into a gym. And in this gym there's 100 people, everybody's working out, everybody's there to get stronger, get fitter, et cetera. And my job is to pick the top three out of the 100. And so if you're number four, number five, number six, well, maybe this year is not the time that it's going to be your pick. Maybe you need another one or two more years in the gym before you get picked.

So what I'm trying to say here is that the criteria are not going to be the magic sauce of it. It's really the bar at which you select.

When you go to a bodybuilding competition, you need a great upper body, a great lower body, and great charisma. You've got to have all three of them. If you have a great upper body and you have a bad lower body and you have a terrible smile, you ain't going to crack the bodybuilding championship. So if you have two out of three, you're not going to crack the bodybuilding championship. You've got to have a viable shot of winning three out of three.

Coaching Someone vs Investing in Someone

Jeremy Au: And that's where I have the investor hat. My other hat, of course, is as somebody who is a builder and somebody who also likes educating and coaching. And that's where I put on my other hat, via the podcast at bravesea.com. But there I share and say, "Hey, this is how you need to improve. This is what you want to do."

Because those are two very different prisms, and where people get mixed up a little bit is that they get muddled between both. Which is that when you're investing, you're investing in people that you want to coach. And then you're coaching people that you want to invest in. And they're actually two different things.

I always tell people, if I was an Olympic-level coach and I was like, "Hey, I want to help secondary school kids swim better because I want to give back," then you shouldn't have a threshold. You shouldn't be picking and saying, "Okay, by the way, you're a terrible swimmer and you never swam before. I don't want to teach you how to swim." That would be a terrible swim coach. Because you want everybody who never had a chance to swim to have a chance to swim, and then you coach them, and then you have a mindset that you're just coaching them.

And then if your job is to be their agent to the Olympic level, then you get to pick, but you're training them very, very stringently, because you're a high-performance coach in a very tough competition race.

And so from my perspective, I try to be clear to people and say, "Hey, if I'm coaching you, I'm just coaching you, not because I want to invest in you, but because I'm just helping you. And my job is to tell you where you're at. And if I'm investing in you, then my job is to invest in you and tell you how to get to the next level."

But those are two totally different prisms. And it can be quite confusing, because when I was a founder that division was not clear to me at all. So I would go to a coach, and then they actually want to invest in me. And so you're kind of not getting the right advice, because it's loaded with the incentives of investing. And then you go to investors and they want to coach you, but they're not really pushing you to the next level. And so that gets really muddled.

And so it's not to say that you can't have VCs who do both. But I think VCs who have that credibility and interest in being a player coach just have to be super crisp about what is an investment decision versus what is a coaching decision. And those are often related, but not always the same, especially when it comes to high-pressure situations for startups.

Advice for Emerging VCs Who Have Not Returned Capital

Rohit Malhotra: At Orvel, you don't lead rounds. But I've seen a lot of syndicate leads who haven't had any exits in the last couple of years, and they are investing into secondaries for Anthropic and OpenAI, or getting into Series B or Series C of these hot deals, because there's pressure from LPs that they haven't got the exits.

So what advice would you give to emerging VCs? This is a tough time for them to raise new VC funds or to lead those syndicates. Should you have reserve capital to double down on your winners, or should you invest into growth stage deals later on for hot startups?

Jeremy Au: I think about this like a two-by-two, for the people who are listening.

There are people who have already deployed most of their capital versus people who, on the other end of the scale, are looking to raise right now, or put together a thesis. So those are two groups. And then the other axis is high performance versus low performance.

So if you have already deployed your capital on one end and you're already high performance, then you don't need to listen to me. You're already doing well. You're going to raise your next fund. Because you already have high performance for the money you've deployed. Why are you listening to this? So that's one category, and you're off to raise the next fund.

The second category is for people who have already deployed capital and they already have low performance. And what I tell people in this category, I'm just pretty upfront and I just say, look, this job isn't for everybody. Just like being a startup founder is not a job for everybody. For me, being a consultant at Bain I thought was a job for me, but it turned out not to be a job for me. Not every job is for everybody.

And so what I'm trying to say here is, if you've already deployed most of your capital and you're not performing, you just have to be thoughtful that you have already deployed your capital. You have already deployed 80% of your capital. What you want to do is two things. One is really maximise the return for your existing portfolio, and two is don't do anything stupid.

So what I mean by that is, if you've already deployed most of your capital, then this is your time to really help out the companies, do the introductions, run the networks, do the legwork, and see how you can lift up that portfolio.

And I've seen situations where VCs basically say, "Hey, I've deployed 78% of my fund. Performance is not great, but there's one company or two that's really important." They even say, "Hey, we're not going to call the rest of the capital. I'm going to join the company, and I'm going to grow that company." Which is super crazy. But if that company really does make that phase shift, from a decent outcome to closer to a home run, then this person has done the ultimate portfolio management move.

I also say don't do anything stupid, because I've seen horror stories of people who just basically go off mandate. So they start doing funny stuff like investing in crypto, and it turns out badly, and then they lose all market credibility because they were desperate to juice returns. They thought it was a sure bet, and then it wasn't a sure bet. On crypto coins or whatever it is. And you think that's funny, but it actually has happened. I've seen people do it.

Or they go really off mandate. And the interesting part is that if it pays off, then to some extent people get forgiven for it, weirdly enough. But the problem is that in most cases, because you're acting out of desperation, it doesn't work out, and then you burn your credibility and reputation.

And then you go from being a bad VC who was not very good at deploying capital, which is doable because you can always pivot to a new job, like being an executive or founder or whatever it is, so many things to do in life, to being somebody who went off mandate, off script, or did something misleading or fraudulent. And that's where you kind of tank your whole career for the future.

So that's the two quadrants. Obviously, there's another quadrant, which is that you haven't deployed much of your capital, you're still fundraising early, and currently you're either high performance or low performance, but you don't really know.

And I think for this category, just play to your strengths. The market has room for multiple strategies. There isn't going to be one winning strategy. You just have to watch football, or basketball, any sports game: the meta changes, and there are different ways to do the approach.

But what's interesting about business is that it's not like a basketball competition, in the sense that a basketball competition is number one, number two, number three, and people only care about number one. In the land of startups, every startup goes through multiple rounds of funding, and many startups are going to become unicorns. Some become unicorns slowly, but are very capital efficient. Some companies become unicorns very fast, or more than a unicorn.

So there are multiple strategies, there are multiple slots, there are multiple bites at the pie. Some people may prefer leading, some people will be player coaches, some of them are going to be about identifying people with very deep tech approaches. Some people are going to be focused more on momentum investing. Some people are more focused on figuring out startups that fit with national priorities like defence or semiconductors or local supply chain.

So there are different approaches. I think it's just to play to the one that you're good at, and just work very, very well with all of the other VCs in the space. Because right now, globally, almost all VCs are much more collaborative. Back in the heyday of the zero interest rate era, VCs were a lot more competitive, because there was so much liquidity flowing through the system, so people didn't want to share deals. But now people are much happier to collaborate and say, "Okay, if you're good at marketing and I'm good at finance and somebody else is good at go-to-market, three VCs coming together to help this company is going to be more powerful than just one."

And so I think that's something to be thoughtful about for emerging fund managers.

The Thread: High-Performing Teams

Rohit Malhotra: Makes sense. Jeremy, when I reached out to you, I found your profile to be very interesting. You served in the army, then you were at Bain, you've been a founder, a VC, a biotech COO, and now a CEO. What's the thread connecting all of this? And what advice do you give to graduates who are graduating now, who are worried that AI will take their jobs? How have you been successful in moving from one career to another? Any advice for listeners?

Jeremy Au: That reminds me of a time when I was at Harvard doing my MBA, and I had the opportunity to hear about Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, founded by Ray Dalio.

I wasn't really looking at hedge funds. I don't think that was something I was particularly saying makes sense. But I went by to talk to a recruiter who looked at my resume at that point in time. And I was actually blown away, because this person sat down and they said, "Yeah, we like your profile, because one thing we've noticed is that you really like to join high-performing teams, and you like to build them."

And it kind of clicked, because I didn't even know that about myself at that point in time. Before that, I had a very skeptical view of Bridgewater, because I was like, "Ah, what is this team?" And then I was like, wait a moment. This recruiter for their team, because they're so focused on people and talent, took the time to really understand my resume, including my army experience and all that stuff, and just said something that was very revelatory to me.

So I was like, wow, this person is more aware of my interests than I am self-aware of myself. And I thought that was actually a really good moment for me, because that's always been my consistent theme: I like to join high-performing teams, and I like to bring people together in terms of hiring, motivating, and retaining high performers.

That's important, because one thing I sometimes tell people when I have conversations is, "Look, I'm not a coach. I'm a high-performance coach." And what I mean by that is, when it comes to work, I'm not going to be a person who says everything's great, everything's wonderful, and then behind your back says something different.

There's that very junior league soccer team where everybody gets a participation trophy and everybody's nice, and then people go back to the locker room and say, "Okay, this kid is not good at soccer." But that's what a good soccer coach is supposed to do, because everybody wants to learn soccer. And so I would not want a Manchester United soccer coach at my secondary school teaching my kids soccer, because it would be a total mismatch. I want my kids to enjoy the game of soccer, not to get shouted at and given very strong performance grades. That's not the mindset I want to have.

So I want to approach it from a very thoughtful way, which is, I always say, as somebody who joins a company: who do I want to work with? And I want to work with somebody who sees my strengths, is thoughtful about my strengths, deploys me to my strengths, and puts me in a team with other people who have superpowers, and we work together as a team, all together.

And that is actually such a rare culture to have. It's shocking that we can say this over and over again, and we can say this on every podcast, and we can say this all the time. And all of us at dinner at 8pm with friends over drinks will have some conversation where it's just like, "Wow, my boss is not nice," or whatever it is. There's some incompetent person who is destroying the whole team culture. It just keeps happening over and over again, where the professed values of our organisation do not line up with the actual lived reality of the team.

There are so many root causes and so many reasons for why that is. But for me, that's the kind of team I like to work on: I want to be part of a high-performing team that's winning together and plays to my strengths.

And I sincerely believe that when we have great people who are motivated and like one another, and are not jerks to one another, work together, they're going to make the company a better place. And when a company is in a better place, they have the profitability and the compensation needed to structure a workplace that retains coaches and retains the talent there. And so it's a positive flywheel that happens.

And bad things start happening very obviously when the company starts to underperform. Everyone's like, "Oh, the company's underperforming." Then you're like, well, obviously, because somehow the team's not performing as a group. And when a team is not performing as a group, then the company's not going to perform. We've seen that doom loop happen.

So to me, the common thread throughout all of it is that when I was in the army, I got to see what a high-performance culture looks like. I got pushed beyond my limits. I did things that I never thought I could do as a teenager, and my mind was blown. I never rappelled before. I never did road marches of 30, 40 kilometres. I never shot guns and handled high explosives before. And because I had some great commanders and instructors, and they just did it themselves, they went through the same experience, and they just knew I could do it, and they got me there. And I got there.

And I think that's really the crux of it. For every role I've been part of, it's very much saying, okay, is this a leader that I respect and admire and I want to learn from? And do I want to follow them and bring my A game to that team? And then my job in bringing the A game to the team is also helping to bring in the junior teammates who report to me, work with me, collaborate with me, and figuring out how we work together as a better team.

And a lot of that is so simple every time I say it, but I just have to say it again: the dissonance between what is claimed out there versus the lived reality is so huge that actually a good workplace that's high-performing is rare.

The Comfort Crisis: Thermostat, Not Temperature

Rohit Malhotra: No, absolutely. Jeremy, I quickly want to do the top three. What's your favourite business book?

Jeremy Au: My favourite business writing currently is Michael Easter. He's written a few books, like The Comfort Crisis. And I enjoyed the work because he talks about how most people know that taking the stairs is healthy for you, but only 2% of people actually go and take the stairs, even though they know it's healthier for them.

And so to some extent he's building a little bit on another big favourite for people, which is Atomic Habits: start small, build the habits. So there's some similarity there.

But what I found helpful was the mindset that the comfort that we desire as humans, and engineer into our own lives, is also driving a lot of the pain and suffering that we face on an everyday basis.

One way to think about it is that a lot of people struggle to get out of bed. And they struggle for all kinds of reasons. They're in bed, they're using their phones, and they're feeling demotivated, et cetera.

And to some extent, in The Comfort Crisis, this is a comfort crisis, because actually being in your bed with your phone and having food delivered to you is a very comfortable place. But that cocoon of comfort has actually generated that crisis for you. Because historically, when you woke up, you woke up hungry. And because you were hungry, you had to get out and leave your cave and go hunt for food, and run and hunt and struggle, and get some vitamin D sunlight along the way. And then you killed a small rabbit, and then you ate it, and you felt very happy. And then you went to bed.

And you would never, in prehistoric times, ever have somebody be stuck in bed for the whole day eating DoorDash or Uber Eats or GrabFood in bed.

And so it was just helpful, because it was saying that the modern work environment we've generated for ourselves is not necessarily the same thing that will make us happy. And in fact, it's not really about happiness. It's really about the pursuit of happiness, our willingness to go through difficulty and challenge and sacrifice.

It makes me always thoughtful to say, "Yeah, I'm happy right now," versus, "I'm unhappy right now," which I just take as the temperature. The temperature is 18 degrees Celsius. The temperature is 25 degrees Celsius. It's the temperature. What I find more interesting is the thermostat, which is, is this something that gives me purpose?

Because when I was in the army, there were so many times I was very, very unhappy. I can tell you that the army is full of moments that make you very unhappy, like living in a monsoon, in a jungle, having the water basically go through your body and you trying to sleep while mud is flowing around you. You're very unhappy at that point in time.

But when you have a nice sense of purpose and camaraderie and brotherhood, and you have a mission to go from point A to point B, then it's doable. It's survivable. And 20 years down the road it's a fun story that you talk about on a podcast. And you say, "Hey, that was a good time," even though at the time I can tell you I was very unhappy.

And so for me, being very thoughtful about the thermostat rather than the temperature, which is, instead of thinking about happiness and unhappiness, saying, does this bring purpose to me?

And so for me, a lot of it has to boil down to my two young children. I have two young girls, a four-year-old and a six-year-old, and they give me a lot of purpose. And there are very many unhappy moments when you're taking care as a parent. There's a lot of sacrifices you have to make. But at the end of the day, they are in bed and everything, and you're like, "Well, that was kind of worth it." And then the more the years go by, I'm like, "Wow, okay, it was super worth it."

But on a same-day basis, in that evening, you're only at, "It's kind of worth it." You need a couple more years to give you those rose-coloured glasses again to be like, "Oh yeah, it was fun doing the night shift and all that other stuff."

What He Would Tell His Younger Self

Rohit Malhotra: Correctly said. If you could go back to that time when you got into this world of startups, what is the one thing you would have focused on or done differently?

Jeremy Au: If I could travel back in time, I would tell my younger self to create and be thoughtful about my own structure.

I think growing up, for me, I'm very much a belonger and joiner, in the sense that there are institutions I like to join, or build, advance, serve, and have fellowship together. And that is a fantastic skill to have, and it still brings me a lot of joy to belong to the various communities I belong to.

The part that was a struggle for me was that I also had this creative itch of being comfortable building as well. And the tricky part about building a startup or a new entity, a new team, is that you don't get to belong to the structure of the community, because you have to build it.

And so I often think to myself of that image on the internet that shows a golden retriever, very good, loyal-looking, and he has a collar and a leash on, and then the leash is in his own mouth, and he's just walking with the leash in his own mouth.

And I always think about that image all the time. Because for me, one of my struggles was that change in my career after university and after grad school, when I started building my own career, when I had to be my own boss, when I created my own structure. You suddenly don't have a boss giving you deadlines. You don't have deadlines or structures or very clear instructions about what to do.

And in the army, when you have those very clear instructions, you just do them, you get it done, and you exceed expectations. There's a very good joy about it. But when you're the one setting those instructions and creating that dynamic, then you have this dynamic where you're setting a structure for everybody else, which is not that bad, but you've got to set a structure for yourself.

And so for me, what I've had to learn over time is that I have to set my own structures. Which is, I am going to wake up in the morning, and then I am going to play with my kids for 20 minutes and get them up for school and get it done. And then, even though I can work from home, I'm just going to travel to an office that's not my home and work there. And I will block off my own calendar. My boss, who is the yesterday version of me, blocked off these calendar times and set these deadlines for me, and then I will today do those deadlines and execute the work. Because the past me was the boss.

And so giving myself that structure, and being comfortable with that inflection point, would be the advice I would give to myself.

Why Flow Club Is His Favourite Tool

Rohit Malhotra: Totally makes sense. And what would be your favourite online tool? For example, Gmail, Slack, Zoom, ChatGPT?

Jeremy Au: I think my favourite tool is actually Flow Club.

Rohit Malhotra: Flow Club, okay.

Jeremy Au: It's a company that I tried to angel invest in and didn't get a chance to do so, but it happened during the pandemic. It's fantastic, because what they do is basically like Peloton, but for people working together online. So you basically join a video call, and everybody else has their task list, and you're supposed to get things done together for one hour, two hours, three hours.

And I think the reason why it works is because at some level we're all primates. We're all monkeys. Monkey see, monkey do. And if you're in a gym and everybody's working out, it's scientifically proven that when you're in that kind of gym environment you're going to work out harder than if you were going to work out by yourself, because you're in an environment of people, in a tribe of people who are working out hard.

Similarly in the army, when everybody was pushing themselves to 110%, it felt normal that everybody was doing it, and therefore we all did it, and we all figured out how to handle high explosives at the age of 18. Which is a crazy thing to think about. Would you trust an 18-year-old like me with tons and tons of high explosives? Now I'm like, I don't know if I would trust myself, at my midlife crisis version of myself, to handle tons of high explosives. But at 18 years old, I could do it, because people expected me to, and we all expected one another to be able to do it.

So Flow Club is interesting because if you're at home or you're travelling or you're in a hotel room, and you have to get stuff done, it's just nice to be able to dial into somewhere and basically be in a SoulCycle of work. And everybody has to go do their email or taxes, or clean their room, whatever their individual task list is. And then we check off those tasks together simultaneously over the course of that one hour.

Where to Find Jeremy

Rohit Malhotra: This is so interesting. I'm going to check this out. We're going to put that in the show notes. Jeremy, what's the best way people can reach out to you and know more about your work, and your podcast, BRAVE, as well as the VC firm that you're in, Orvel?

Jeremy Au: Just go to www.bravesea.com. It's a podcast on Southeast Asia tech. I volunteer there by podcasting and teaching, and sharing my perspective.

My big value there is, number one, just be direct and upfront. Don't sugarcoat things, because we're in a teaching environment, and so I'm not your boss, I'm not judging you or whatever it is. So it's a safe environment to learn about what I'm seeing in the ecosystem.

And then two is, it's really about bravery. Courage is really about action in the midst of fear. Because if you are not feeling scared at all, then you're not brave. You're just doing it because... Yeah, I'm not scared of eating a matcha cheesecake, so I eat it. Nobody's going to be like, "Wow, Jeremy, you're so brave in eating a matcha cheesecake." No. I wasn't fearful of it. I was looking forward to it. That's not bravery.

So bravery requires you to be scared of something. And the only requisite action for bravery is that you take action. Small step, big step, in-between step. But as long as you take action in the midst of fear, I think that's really important. And that's something that I like to discuss: bravery in the midst of technology, and in the Southeast Asia context as well.

Rohit Malhotra: We're going to put that in the show notes. Jeremy, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us. I really enjoyed my conversation with you.

Stop Chasing Unicorns - E719

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 08:09:40 +0800

"People walked away from $50 million transactions because they felt like they could go much higher, much faster. Unfortunately, almost all the stories I know of, when they walked away, they ran out of runway. It is zero. An outcome is an outcome, and founders should not look down on it."

"The ones that are doing well, the ones that are continuing to get investor interest and scale, are the ones that had the unit economics fundamentals correct from the start. A market like Southeast Asia is going to require businesses that have a good gross margin because they cannot be over-reliant on venture capital for too long."

"The proximity in Southeast Asia has, for the first time in a long time, become an asset, not a liability. In AI, you build a moat really fast, but you lose it really fast if you are doing something global and generic. The Southeast Asia opportunity allows you to build a moat very deeply in specific verticals like agriculture and waste management."

Keywords: Southeast Asia Venture Capital, Startup Unit Economics, Artificial Intelligence in SEA, Micro Private Equity, Tech Startup Exits, Tech Layoffs and AI Automation, Southeast Asia AI Moats

Introduction

Edric: Hey everyone, Edric here, producer from BRAVE. First off, if you've been following the BRAVE podcast, thank you so much for your support. If this is your first time tuning in, I hope you're going to check out our latest episodes on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, or simply head over to our website, www.bravesea.com.

Now, Jeremy was recently on an episode of The Accidental VC to unpack where Southeast Asia venture is actually heading in 2026, and we thought you'd enjoy this particular episode.

So, two of the sharpest points to listen for: Mohan on why the region's proximity has finally become an asset instead of a liability, and Jeremy on why walking away from a $50 million exit usually ends in zero. They cover the reset after the blitzscaling era, why unit economics have become non-negotiable, whether AI is coming for our jobs in Southeast Asia the same way it's hitting the US, and much, much more.

So do support our friends Milan and Mohan. Head over to The Accidental VC and give them a follow. Let us know what you thought about this episode in the comments, and please enjoy.

Welcome to The Accidental VC

Milan Reinartz: Hi, everyone. Welcome to the sixth episode of The Accidental VC, where we cover different topics around venture capital and startups, especially from the perspective of folks who have accidentally tapped into the industry of venture capital, as is the case here, I think, also with us to some extent.

Mohan Belani: Yeah.

Milan Reinartz: Today I have Mohan and Jeremy with me. And Mohan, Jeremy and I have actually run a fund for the last two years, so up front there'll be a lot of insider things here between us. We're pretty excited to have you both here. Oh, three years, yeah?

Jeremy Au: This is the fourth year.

Milan Reinartz: Really? Wow.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. Time flies. So we're here to party and talk about Southeast Asia, venture capital and technology, so let's get it rolling. What do you think 2026 looks like? What's going on in Southeast Asia?

What 2026 Looks Like in Southeast Asia

Milan Reinartz: Ooh, now I'm getting interviewed. That's nice.

Well, our business, as you know, has really pivoted from doing early-stage investing as an angel club originally, to now largely focusing on large-cap US investments. I suppose I've been a little bit out of the loop, other than the work we do together and some of the work we do with HeyMax on AI.

But one thing I noticed is that there's a sort of revival, in a way, that I see with interesting AI businesses coming out of the woodwork. And also comparing how some businesses that have been using AI, or have an AI element to their business model, that we've invested in, for example Staple and others, the differences between these businesses and also the valuation ranges. I'm starting to now see more companies coming back with those $15 million SAFE notes, which is interesting. And the question is, is that justified in a market like Southeast Asia?

But then also, in our recent investments, I think we still remain quite bullish, or I still remain quite bullish, about more physical world, real world applications that just seem to really make sense in Southeast Asia, where a lot of things still need to be built. Just basic infrastructure things like getting food to your door in more remote areas, and those kinds of things.

So yeah, it remains an interesting market. What do you guys think?

Unit Economics Were Never Optional

Mohan Belani: Yeah, I'm still excited, and that also is the reason why Orvel started, right? Businesses that can demonstrate the right and decent unit economics in this kind of market.

I think in 2022, when we hung out, we realised that a market like Southeast Asia is going to require businesses that have a good gross margin, because they cannot be over-reliant on venture capital for too long. And I think that story hasn't changed.

If we even look at our Orvel portfolio now, the ones that are doing well, the ones that are continuing to get investor interest and scale, are the ones that had the unit economics fundamentals correct from the start. So for me, any company that I see that loses track of that at the early stages is still a no for me.

Milan Reinartz: Even if it says AI in the name?

Mohan Belani: That's a nice little poke there, but we have to go back to what this region, or the reality of this region, is. And that hasn't changed in the last five years.

The End of Negative Blitzscaling

Jeremy Au: What's interesting in my head as well is the magnitude of the problems that still exist. People still struggle with having clean drinking water, safe food, and then it goes all the way to scale of being able to do marketing in English to expand into new markets, to be able to get products from point A to point B. So these problems are still sizable and still huge.

It's just that the approach and the ROI timeline has shifted, I think, over the past five years especially. Five years ago, the thesis very much was to say that these problems are still real, still large, and we're willing to burn a lot of cash with the assumption that somebody else will fund the next tranche of capital needed, and basically blitzscale.

But of course, we ended up in a situation where we saw a lot of negative blitzscaling, where you had negative unit economics and you blitzscale it, which basically means that you burn money even faster.

Milan Reinartz: Yeah.

Jeremy Au: That has turned out to be way too fragile a business model. And the past two years has really been about clearing that backlog out, both in terms of companies that have to reset their approach or close down. Founders had to reset their mindset as well, and VC funds actually had to reset their mindset and approach, and speak about this with their LPs.

So that's the tricky part. And now I think we're starting to come to a new position for 2026, which is that the problems still exist. They never went away. But now we have to be more thoughtful about our unit economics, and artificial intelligence could be one of the levers to bring the cost structure down sufficiently to make the unit economics work.

Whereas historically, having 100 people fly in from Europe, from America, and around Southeast Asia and Singapore to work on a problem in Indonesia doesn't really work anymore for the unit economics.

Big Problems, Small Wallets

Mohan Belani: Yeah. See, there are two big problems for Southeast Asia that are really against them.

One is that there are big problems, but regionally the market cannot sustain or pay for these problems. If you look at education, that's one good example. We've seen portfolio companies that look good on paper, but when you dig into the details, 80 to 90% of their revenue is funded by the government. And if the government takes away those incentives, then essentially the business collapses.

We've seen businesses in Vietnam, for example, where yes, the unit economics and the cost base is very, very low, but they are supporting a local market, and that market can't really pay very much either, and that also collapses.

Then the companies that do well are the ones that use the local cost base but target overseas companies. So in essence, they're not then solving the problems in Southeast Asia per se.

And then AI companies, the ones that I speak to quite a bit now, if you ask them what their perception of Southeast Asia is, whether it's an interesting market for them, the truth is it's not, because it's not a market that's known to be able to pay and is very forward.

So as much as there are problems and opportunities, the unfortunate truth is that a lot of these problems and opportunities are not worth solving purely from a financial standpoint.

Why a $50 Million Exit Is a Real Outcome

Milan Reinartz: Well, there's a lot to unpack there in all the things you mentioned.

For context, we started the fund together three-plus years ago, sort of spun out of our relationship in angel investing together, as investing with friends.

Mohan Belani: Yeah.

Milan Reinartz: And it's been a super fun journey, even though we're kind of heading into more of a harvesting period of our first fund.

What do you think still holds true to our assumptions back then, and what has materially changed in how you would invest, more from an angel investor's lens perhaps, for starters, and then we can talk also about what it means for founders? I think all of the factors you just described really deeply affect both the investor's mindset and the founder's mindset in how to build in Southeast Asia.

One thing that we talked about a lot was this factor of, we don't want to build a power law-based fund. And we don't believe that power law investing is a sustainable way of investing, we can call a spade a spade. But in Southeast Asia, unfortunately, they have actually... I mean, of course there have been power law outcomes like Gojek, Grab, Tokopedia, et cetera, that have made some fund vintages extremely successful. But it's not been a given across all the tier ones to be able to create power law outcomes and create DPI. And we built our fund on that thesis, and I sort of feel generally that was the right move, and we can see some of the fruits of that starting to develop.

How do you think that has changed? And has that changed with the rise of AI and new technologies?

Jeremy Au: Yeah, I agree that right-sizing the check for capital has been helpful, because it's very much a decision by both the investors and the founders about what that monetary funding transaction at that point of time represents.

And I think for us, being able to say, "Hey, a $50 million outcome, where there's an M\&A outcome for the founder, would be a tremendous outcome for the founder, life-changing for their family and their employees, but also would be an incredible return for the fund and our LPs." And that has been proven to be true, that those transactions can happen.

Milan Reinartz: We have one great example of that.

Jeremy Au: Exactly. Those transactions can happen in Southeast Asia. And one thing that we have to say is that we have to remind founders that they shouldn't look down on it. There's this weird position, I think, for many people. People walked away from $50 million transactions because they themselves, or the board, or whatever, felt like they could go much higher, much faster. And unfortunately, almost all the stories I know of, when they walked away, they ran out of runway.

Milan Reinartz: And then it's zero.

Jeremy Au: It's zero. So I think that's something for folks to be mindful of. An outcome is an outcome.

Power Law vs Micro Private Equity

Mohan Belani: So the first caveat is that it's not that power law investing doesn't work. The US is a great example of that working extremely well. The problem in Southeast Asia is that in the last 15 years it has been blown out of proportion, and every VC out there is purely looking for that billion-dollar opportunity. And that leaves a very good base of founders and entrepreneurs that are building good companies that can probably get to the 20, 30, $50 million revenue level, but just don't have the VC capital to support them. And that's the gap we were trying to fill.

3Cat is a great example. When we invested, the company was already doing a seven-figure revenue amount and I think was EBITDA positive at that point.

Milan Reinartz: Reasonable valuation.

Mohan Belani: And the business had grown more than 10x in the last couple of years, and the valuation hasn't skyrocketed based on a typical power law venture model.

Milan Reinartz: So do you think that means that a more private equity, or micro private equity, style approach to venture capital is something that's important to consider in venture investing in Southeast Asia? And have you seen that also flowing into fund strategies, you probably see more than me, into the tier ones here in the region?

Mohan Belani: There is an opportunity to invest in companies like that that was just not tapped on, because people were just blindsided by the Silicon Valley way of investing.

Milan Reinartz: Needs to be a unicorn.

Mohan Belani: Yeah. And I even recall founders that we invested in, when I asked them, "Why didn't your previous investor invest in you?" And the entire answer was, "Oh, this is not a billion-dollar opportunity." Which is a real waste, because I think this region has good potential to build a good number of $100 million valued companies.

So that's an opportunity we are tapping on. But there will always be the funds that will target the power law model, because there will always be the next wave of unicorns that will come out.

Milan Reinartz: Which is great. But if you have a $100 million fund, it's quite difficult to run a micro PE strategy without a very different mindset of operating, right? Because you have to put so much more money to work.

Jeremy Au: And I think the tricky part is that therefore all the things have to work. Obviously, companies and founders, many of them actually want to build good businesses, and on the way to a $100 million revenue company they need to get to 50 million, 10 million. So actually almost every founder will have that opportunity to make a decision and say, "Hey, I'm going to be more of a moderate growth company than trying to go for a VC-type growth curve."

So every founder will have multiple opportunities to choose, but it's really about the reconfiguration of VC funds to do so.

The first ones that we saw, obviously, were the VC funds that were more linked to family offices in Asia. Then because of their LP mandate, and that the LPs were okay with a lower rate of return for a more guaranteed return, I think they were the first to really start switching away from the home run, US-type VC approach to more of that openness to private equity or consumer brands.

Milan Reinartz: Brick and mortar.

Jeremy Au: Brick and mortar businesses. Yeah, I was going to say brick and mortar too. So they were the first to do so. But the VC funds that had more US-type LPs that were focused on that VC-type return equivalent to the US, those funds basically had a more difficult time talking to their LP base and saying, "This is what we promised you five years ago, and this is what we're seeing right now." And how do you square that circle? That's a very difficult conversation.

How Funds Are Adapting: Private Credit and Restructuring

Milan Reinartz: So how do you see what's happening in reality? Are these funds raising subsequent funds? We don't need to name names, but more as a theme, as a trend. Are the bigger funds able to raise their subsequent funding rounds? Are they delaying them?

Mohan Belani: Actually, there are a few things happening. One is that some of them are switching to private credit, looking at credit-based deals instead of just pure venture-type deals, in different shapes and forms around different stages.

Milan Reinartz: Using the existing fund's capital? Changing their mandate?

Mohan Belani: Using existing fund capital, yes. And they're doing this with the existing portfolio, because they have a familiarity with the company. They understand their financials better and the trust has been built.

The second thing that some funds are doing, and I'm an early-stage investor in some of these companies, is that the funds are going back to the companies they invested in, restructuring their portfolio, putting in some more additional capital, but ensuring that the investors have a larger role to play or take a larger chunk of equity, and doing some level of restructuring at the cap table level. So this also means returning some capital, although not that significantly, to earlier investors, just to make sure there's enough equity on the table for everyone to benefit.

Smaller Funds, Emerging Managers, Resetting Founders

Jeremy Au: Yeah. I think it's going to be interesting for all founders, all VCs, and all operators to really reset on what that means.

Some key takeaways for people are going to be, one, making sure you have the right fund size to be able to match that to the right outcomes you believe are there for the region. So there'll be smaller funds on average moving forward.

Two, I think there'll be a wave of emerging managers, because they are going to build those new funds, while existing VC GPs will continue to harvest or nurture their existing portfolios to whatever the outcome is to be.

And then thirdly, founders are starting to reset. Whether that's saying, "Hey, maybe it's not so bad to be a fractional CTO somewhere in the meantime, while I have my kids, and earn cash," for example, to figure out new approaches like search funds and roll-ups. There's going to be a whole stack.

And on the other side you also see employees do a reset, where they're much more thoughtful about what kind of company they're walking into, the risk curve. In 2021, 2022, everyone was like, "Let's join a startup no matter what," and ESOP, employee options are employee options, and it's going to make me a millionaire. And now people are starting to get a lot more sophisticated and say, "Okay, this is a risk."

Milan Reinartz: I prefer some salary.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. Cash is good. You can't get a mortgage with stock options, unfortunately.

Block's 40% Layoff and the AI Jobs Question

Mohan Belani: Look, if you saw what Block just did, most people are just happy making sure they have a job that is not going to be gone in the next few months, even though they put in effort.

Milan Reinartz: With all the layoff stuff.

Mohan Belani: Block laid off about 40% of their company. And the memo was that even though people were actually using AI, they still got laid off. It was just a function of, look, we just don't need that many people regardless of how productive you are.

And I think that wave is 100% going to come to this part of the world at some point, although we are cushioned by low salaries.

Milan Reinartz: We're cushioned by lower labour costs. Yes, correct. So that's a benefit, especially Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, et cetera. A lot of BPO in the Philippines.

Jeremy Au: Not fully. I've talked to my friends in the banks, and if you talk to their IT teams, the way it's showing up won't be in terms of layoffs, but it will show up as, "Hey, we're putting in a billion dollars of capital expenditure or investments." And then the number of jobs is actually a fraction of what historically it would have been as a ratio to capital.

So it's a nicer version of what America's going through, which is layoffs of very expensive American labour. But to some extent, what you're seeing in Singapore is that even though they're investing a lot of capital into IT, the job growth is much smaller. And so, very pleasant, doesn't go in the news, everybody doesn't look at it. But once you take a look at that ratio, then what you realise is that for the new workforce that's coming up, like your Gen Z folks, there are just fewer jobs.

Mohan Belani: All the entry-level guys, yeah.

Is Southeast Asia Facing a K-Shaped Economy?

Milan Reinartz: And does it hurt? I mean, this is like a K-shaped economy thing. I'm sure you've heard about it, read about it. Does it affect the... I mean, here we are all hoping for a rising middle class, right, like we've seen in China, India. And I think there's been some progress, but also some not so much progress. I think in Indonesia some numbers were published. Do you think that's going to get worse here, or what's your sense from what you see macroeconomically speaking? Jeremy, you're the man. You understand this stuff.

Jeremy Au: I'm the macro guy.

Milan Reinartz: He's the macro guy.

Jeremy Au: My shirt, I'm the macro guy. And you're the micro guy.

Milan Reinartz: And the guy who's led.

Jeremy Au: When we talk about a K-shaped economy, there's a common article which is talking about the change of wealth and income inequality for the upper class and the lower class in developed economies. So a lot of these articles are Substacks about America primarily, and to some extent Europe.

What's interesting is that Southeast Asia and Asia is a little different, because on the labour side, if you look at Southeast Asia, like Indonesia, Vietnam, there's still a domestic economy that wants to grow. People want more air conditioning, better food, and want to have a better life. And so there's still a domestic economy that's pulling people up into the middle class.

Milan Reinartz: And business owners too. Sorry to interrupt, but because of GPU costs, and relatively speaking lower labour costs even at the white collar level, let's say in banks, in industry, in telecommunications, where you have the bigger companies, a lot of them family-owned. It's really about the incentive, isn't it? So will they have an incentive to really enact mass layoffs at the larger scale industrial and government-owned corporation level, to really create these big job losses? Can AI and GPUs, LPUs, TPUs actually really solve things cheaper than an army of people? I think that's a big question.

Singapore's White-Collar Squeeze

Mohan Belani: But it's a very different issue in a market like the Philippines versus a market like Singapore. In a market like Singapore, where primarily it's white collar kind of work, if you look at what AI has done for the legal sector in the last few months, the same issue is going to start hitting the overall finance sector, the medical sector and so on.

So the displacement of workers in high-level white-collar jobs is going to be a much more painful impact than in a market like the Philippines. The Philippines has a significant amount of opportunities and work to be done in infrastructure, in travel, so some level of workforce movement and redistribution into other sectors is still okay.

But in a market like Singapore, I think that's going to be very, very difficult. If suddenly you see a whole bunch of doctors not having work to do, how do they keep themselves busy and occupied? I think that's the shift that we haven't fully figured out. The government was trying to put in some effort with all the AI programmes that they're launching, but that shift is the one that's going to be most complicated.

So on some level, maybe they will start to shift their work-life balance, where half the time they work and the other half of the time they do other social-centric work. That could help with things like the ageing population issue, that could help with social welfare, education, which are actually big gaps on the Singapore side that they don't have a lot of support on.

The other area would be just simple restructuring and re-understanding of what white-collar work actually means, and maybe more interest on the blue-collar side. You have a lot of Gen Zs now looking at doing repair businesses, doing air con businesses. So it could be that the blue-collar workforce in Singapore, that is primarily dominated by people from Bangladesh, India and other countries, could actually shrink and be driven by younger, more able-bodied Singaporean or local chaps to take over that whole space.

So there's really going to be a redistribution and reworking of the idea of work in this country, and it's going to be radically different in Singapore as compared to the Philippines, as compared to Indonesia.

Milan Reinartz: Makes sense.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. Basically, I don't think there would be a K-shape for Southeast Asia. I think K-shape definitely applies for the developed Western world, where middle-class jobs are getting attacked by both AI and offshoring.

But if you think about it, in Southeast Asia, AI is not going to eat a job because labour cost is low, and there's a domestic economy that's very physical.

Milan Reinartz: AI is not so cheap.

Jeremy Au: And they are pulling the job from the US still. Even today, no matter what, the iPhones and AirPods, even when they move from China, they move to India. So the net job creation is still there, and China's still going and making other things in that time, which is dancing robots.

Milan Reinartz: Yeah.

Jeremy Au: And even more driverless cars and helicopters.

Milan Reinartz: Military robots.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, exactly. So I wouldn't say there's a K-shape. And for Singapore and within Southeast Asia, of course, the tricky part is the dislocation effect, which is that people have to reset.

But Singapore is a manageable problem in the sense that it's five million residents. There are enough jobs for everybody, like you said, including blue collar. Singaporeans can work in the region. They can move and work as rotational or virtual associates, remote work. So it's still going to be painful for individuals, and the government still needs to take the lead on pushing it. I'm just saying that it would be more worrying if I was in Midwest America watching the hollowing out effect still happening. That's going to be much trickier.

Milan Reinartz: No, I can see that. It would be more like a wriggle line economy than a K-shaped economy.

Jeremy Au: Wriggle, yeah, exactly. It's like we've got to crawl our way, leopard crawl our way. Every country would. The German chancellor was on a speech saying Germans need to work harder because he came back from China.

Milan Reinartz: He did say that? Well, he's probably quite right. But I'm a pretty happy German, coming from a European, a German perspective, if you think about it.

Regulating the Human-Robot Mix

Mohan Belani: But the other thing is, there are also sectors currently in Singapore that are desperately in need of talent, very underserved, like the cybersecurity sector. They've been struggling to get a good amount of companies' interest and capital in, and I think AI will help reduce that problem.

The other massive opportunity, if you think about it, is in regulation. At some point, governments will also want to regulate how much AI is going to be involved in what sectors and what industries.

Milan Reinartz: And it goes into, like, Dario's conversation with the government and with the public. And then the bigger problem is not just AI, but it's the robotics and the manufacturing side, which is still a very big chunk of Southeast Asia's value. And Singapore probably has a role of sort of leading that discussion regionally, I suppose.

Mohan Belani: Yeah, they started with the white paper on agentic AI first. I think they've just started some blueprint work.

But if you look at Vietnam, for example, Vietnam manufactures a lot of the world's sports equipment. You know, On running shoes, Nike shoes and all that. If they start allowing all these companies to start throwing robots inside, I think there will be an uprising. And that's where again regulation will come in to say, "Hey look, a factory can only have a certain amount of AI and automation, and human balances."

Kind of like how Singapore's HDB has a certain amount of races so that you have a good amount of mingling.

Milan Reinartz: A good mix.

Mohan Belani: So the concept of intermingling between humans and robots is going to be regulated on some level.

Milan Reinartz: It's another race joining us.

Future Shock in a Waymo

Jeremy Au: I was in SF in January, and it was quite science fiction. Because there's this concept in science fiction called future shock, which is when the future arrives so fast that people are just shocked and they cannot react.

And the reason why I felt like that was because I walk into this Waymo and I'm carrying my Costco rotisserie chicken. And I walk right into this Waymo, no driver. I put my Costco chicken on the driver's seat, and then it starts driving, and then you pull up to this junction. And on the left is an Uber driver. On the right is a Lyft driver. And you're just chilling in the front seat of this driverless car. And then on the opposite side of the windshield, there are several homeless people who have no jobs.

And it's kind of crazy, because what you're thinking to yourself is, wow, this driver should have been a job. But it's no longer a job.

Milan Reinartz: It's quite a daunting image. Did they look at you? Did they give you threatening looks?

Jeremy Au: The guy eyeballed me and I was happily listening to my classical music, very loud. And if you think about it, it's the same price as the Uber and the Lyft. So what's constraining Waymo from taking all three cars? Nothing. It's just a matter of scaling.

So what's going to happen is the Uber job is going to be gone, the Lyft job is going to be gone. And how is the government going to prevent them from joining the homeless side with no job on the other side of the road, or reskill them to something else?

I think that's really the crux of it, which is kind of weird, because all the AI bros are like, "Uh-oh, this is a real problem." But it's something that is hard to even believe.

What Founders Should Focus On Now

Milan Reinartz: Maybe changing topic a little bit, but coming back to that labour side of the equation, in our context, in the venture capital context, what would your recommendation be to founders on what to pay attention to? What do you think founders should focus on these days, building here?

Maybe just a few thoughts I've been having in this context. I think there is an opportunity now with the application layer, and potentially software and hardware, to produce AI-driven or AI-enabled applications that can really become global companies.

Jeremy Au: Mm.

Milan Reinartz: I think there's potentially a higher level of trust in fully automated hardware solutions that come from Singapore or Australia. And we know this from Atlassian and Xero, that Australia and New Zealand have a history of producing very successful global SaaS solutions.

So in that context, I wonder if, with globalisation and the proliferation of access to technology, you have new opportunities on one hand. Of course, you have talent density in Silicon Valley and these kinds of things. OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI as part of SpaceX, obviously all American-built. But then you have things like Higgsfield coming out of Kazakhstan, and that's really a global business. It's a completely random factor that it just happened to be born in Kazakhstan. It could have been born anywhere. The technology could have been built anywhere.

And I sort of feel like that's one thing that founders can consider: that now, with AI, it is actually less important where you are if you're building really well, so you can build global businesses theoretically, especially in the software application layer. Whereas obviously with things like Grab and Gojek, Uber never really made it here, because they were built locally. So they built local businesses, or Lazada became very successful here.

So AI creates these business model opportunities, and we probably don't even know the half of it yet of all the things that will come that you can build for a global audience. You can build tools for a global audience, and you just happen to be here. So on one hand, that's something to think about for founders.

And another thing is using the rise of AI and the tools that are available now to build more efficiently for the Southeast Asian market. Not necessarily just displacing humans, but building tools that build more profitably from day one. Because you can start with a much lower cost, talking about people using Claude Code for building applications without a 10-person development team.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. How do you think about it for founders, and what do you see more? You see a lot of startups. I'm sure you do too, Jeremy. You interview a lot of people from the founder community. What do you guys think?

Moats in the Age of AI

Mohan Belani: So I think the complexity now is that moat building has become way more difficult. You can build a moat really fast, but you can lose that moat as fast as well. The moment Claude launches a new feature, bang, that moat is gone.

So at least for Southeast Asia founders, I think the proximity in Southeast Asia has, for the first time in a long time, become an asset, not a liability. Because there are some very unique sectors and very unique problems that are relevant in this area.

Agriculture is a huge opportunity in this market. Just things like rice farming, palm oil, those kinds of things. Drones. There are subverticals within agriculture that startups can look at that are problems that maybe might exist in some other parts of the world, but are very, very unique to this part of the world. And you won't have a Claude or an American company solving for that problem.

So moat building is going to be difficult, but when you get that moat, it will stay. I think that's one big consideration.

Milan Reinartz: So just to be very clear, you're looking at very localised industries that the big US players aren't going to build for.

Mohan Belani: Correct. In any startup, you've got to build your moat. And in the past, moat building was either through data or community. In AI, moat building conceptually is that you build that moat really fast, but you lose it really fast as well if you're doing something global and generic. But the Southeast Asia opportunity allows you to build a moat very, very deeply in some specific verticals.

Agriculture, waste management, those are some of the areas where I think you can really put AI to good use. And those are the opportunities I think Southeast Asia founders should pay attention to. Because if you don't, then you can be a great company today, but you can completely lose that business in six months.

The Asia-to-US Corridor Is Closing

Jeremy Au: Yeah. That inspires a contrarian thought of mine, which is that there historically was an Asia to US corridor, trying to sell software as a service to US customers using Asian engineering talent and so forth. And part of it was also because the concept was that engineering was cheaper to do in Asia.

But if you think about it, now an American founder who understands the American customer very well can code it much faster and have marketing agents that are much cheaper than somebody based in Vietnam or India or Singapore. And so they can themselves actually build their own software stack.

And so I wondered to myself, as a hypothesis, whether it means that the historical corridor of Asian founders travelling to America to try to sell software as a service to US customers is starting to get eaten up by lots of native American founders using AI services to code everything.

Milan Reinartz: Makes sense. And do you think building global businesses from Southeast Asia is possible? Or more or less so than it was before? I mean, there aren't a lot of great examples. There's a few, of course.

The Right to Win: Durian, Web3 and Jollibee

Jeremy Au: I think there are great ways to build global businesses. It's just that you have to understand why build them from Southeast Asia rather than somewhere else.

For me, I talk about and host the BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast because I talk about Southeast Asia. But I'm not going to talk about American technology from Southeast Asia. That'd be a crazy thing to do, because I'm not there.

And so we have to stop reading the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and thinking in the mind's eye about the Midwestern customer, and say, what is that thing that gives us the right to win to build it from Malaysia or Vietnam, et cetera?

I would love to see more durian companies, for example. The king of fruit. No other countries in the world can really do durian. It's only Malaysia, Vietnam, and barely China now.

Mohan Belani: Christopher is doing something like that, right? Using freeze-drying tech for durian transportation.

Jeremy Au: Exactly. So you could make a global durian company servicing the whole world, make it the hottest food. I mean, in America they're going crazy over sriracha chilli, which was basically just Vietnamese.

Milan Reinartz: Bird's eye peppers. Chilli sugar water.

Jeremy Au: Chilli sugar water. So they made a global chilli sauce brand. I'm just saying, founders should ask, what gives me the right to win? Because if not, then could you move to America? That's a flight ticket away. But if you want to build from Southeast Asia, then why? What makes Southeast Asia not just a home, but also an asset?

Mohan Belani: Yeah. I strongly believe, and I still do, that you can build global companies from Southeast Asia. It's just a function of which verticals you want to target, and where the expertise is.

If you look at Malaysia, a lot of web3 companies are well used globally, and all built from Penang or KL, and also with very small teams. The asset that Southeast Asia has in areas like food, we look at Jollibee. Jollibee is a global brand now. And not just Jollibee the brand, but the group, the amount of assets they own under them. Phenomenal.

To some extent, I think Southeast Asia has been distracted by the fun, shiny things that are happening in the US.

Milan Reinartz: Hmm.

Mohan Belani: And I think that's what has been wrong in the last 15 years of venture. But if you look at the next 15 years, if you want to specifically build in AI, the truth is I think going where the talent density is, which is Silicon Valley right now, and the capital density to scale really quickly, the truth is you're better off being in the US.

But there are still certain verticals, like I believe in food and consumer, where Southeast Asia can actually be a really powerful global opportunity.

Quick Fire: Biggest Wins and Fails

Milan Reinartz: Makes sense. Well, okay, I think we're getting towards the end of this, before we get kicked out here.

One last section that we started to do here is a kind of quick-fire biggest win, biggest fail in the VC ecosystem, I guess, or broader if you will. What have you seen in the last month that you thought were your biggest wins and fails in VC?

Jeremy Au: Biggest wins and fails in VC? I think the biggest win so far in the ecosystem is finally starting to prosecute founders who commit fraud. Starting to investigate them and just say, "Look, we have this set of evidence. We are going to bring this to court." And then you have a defence lawyer, we have a prosecution, and let's see where the facts are.

The fact of the matter is that integrity is important for the entire ecosystem. Otherwise everybody has to eat a risk premium. And I think that government stepping in to protect the rights of employees, investors, and people who are doing the right thing benefits the whole ecosystem.

Milan Reinartz: Completely agree. And what's a fail?

Jeremy Au: People committing fraud. Stop committing fraud.

Milan Reinartz: No, it's a good one. How were the trials? Have you seen some of the trials, how they're going in Indonesia, or which ones are you referring to?

Jeremy Au: I think there are a few of them that are going on. People are being pulled in for questioning, et cetera. That's one piece.

I think we're also starting to see investigative cases being opened up by the Singapore courts as well, to protect Singapore investors. And I think that's good for Singapore. Because the whole point of it is, you choose Singapore, like Delaware, to have good incorporation, good rule of law. And when the law is broken, then there should be appropriate consequences for people who break the law.

Milan Reinartz: Yeah, makes total sense.

Jeremy Au: Otherwise, what's the point of the law then, if it's totally toothless? If the crime happens in a separate country and then you're like, "Wait, then why are you incorporated in Singapore?" So I think that's something for people to be thoughtful about.

Milan Reinartz: Makes sense.

Mohan Belani: I think one big win I see is the fact that VCs are evolving their models. The fact that they're trying out different types of investment, private credit being one of them. The fact that they're looking at brick-and-mortar businesses, they're changing their investment thesis. I think that's a positive change. At least there's some level of tweaking and innovation in the venture space, which I think is very much wanted.

The big loss, or negative, I think is the fact that people are starting to give up on Southeast Asia.

Jeremy Au: Mm.

Mohan Belani: I think the region still has a lot of potential. Yes, it has a lot of problems. Yes, a lot of the regions have not come up with any meaningful enough outcomes. But I think the venture community and the startup community here is still nascent, is still extremely young, and I don't think we should give up on it too quickly or be too critical on the issues. Because the truth is, a lot of the issues that exist in this region really do also exist in a lot of tier one ecosystems in the world.

Milan Reinartz: Makes sense. Yeah, so starting the other way around, my biggest fail I think is that there aren't enough AI infrastructure businesses being built out here.

Jeremy Au: Mm.

Milan Reinartz: And I can call out some of our portfolio companies across our broader universe. One is Aolani, which I think is doing a great job building cloud-based inference and GPU services for the local ecosystem. And I think that's really important because, as some of the data has shown, Moonshot's Kimi K2 is delivering the results at 50% of the cost of ChatGPT or OpenAI.

And I think we need to build infrastructure that specifically serves a lower GDP per capita audience and can deliver good results at efficient costs. And I think there's not enough going on at all in that space yet, and I'm hoping there's more. And we'll give you money if you build that.

Biggest win, a call out to Yiping Goh from FORMAS.AI, also something we are proud new investors in. Building the Canva of architecture. That's pretty cool, out of Singapore.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, that's a good one. Hopefully they go very far.

Mohan Belani: They're very impressive.

Milan Reinartz: Yeah.

Jeremy Au: On that note, let's call it a day.

Outro

Jeremy Au: Thank you for listening to BRAVE. If you enjoyed this episode, please share the podcast with your friends and colleagues. We would also appreciate you leaving a rating or review.

Head over to www.bravesea.com for member content, resources, and community. Stay well and stay brave.

Navigating the Longevity Market | Dr. Sue-Anne Toh - E718

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 07:39:12 +0800

"Aging is inevitable. It is a process. It's like a moving train. You can do something to halt the moving train, but realize you have to put a little bit of an effort. We will lose, after a certain age, 3 to 5% of our muscle mass every year if we don't do anything about it. So we have to then work 3 to 5% harder every year just to keep what we have." - Dr. Sue-Anne Toh

"Perhaps in a big system like a big tanker ship, necessarily we move a lot slower, and I'm a lot more impatient. I decided maybe we try this as a little speedboat. That's high risk, but we could potentially move a lot faster, and in some ways still stay connected to the tanker ship." - Dr. Sue-Anne Toh

"Singapore is actually the only country in the world that has launched a War on Diabetes in 2016. From a biological perspective, we know that Asians tend to develop complications of having excess fat, specifically visceral fat, at lower BMI thresholds. As a result, on the outside, we may not look obese or overweight, but we hide them really well, particularly around our waistline." - Dr. Sue-Anne Toh

Dr. Sue-Anne Toh, CEO and co-founder of NOVI Health, joins Jeremy Au to discuss the critical intersection of metabolism, longevity, and health policy. They explore the "War on Diabetes" in Singapore, unpacking why Asian populations are predisposed to insulin resistance and visceral fat accumulation even at lower BMI levels. Dr. Toh shares her transition from healthcare administration at NUHS working with MOH, to launching a health-tech "speedboat" to bridge the implementation gap in preventive care. The conversation covers the 80/20 of longevity, the role of GLP-1 medications in hormonal balance, and actionable strategies for "banking" muscle mass to ensure quality of life during aging.

00:00 - Introduction: Dr. Sue-Anne Toh's background

02:14 - Choosing medicine over law: curiosity and impact

03:51 - From policy to founder: the "impatient" path to NOVI Health

10:49 - Navigating the "Snake Oil" noise in longevity

12:39 - The 80/20 of health span: sleep, steps, and nutrition

22:30 - The ROI of treats: behavior change vs. restrictions

30:02 - TOFI Phenotype: Thin Outside, Fat Inside

33:04 - The Insulin Resistance "Pancreas Factory"

37:56 - Public Health strategies: Enforce, Empower, Educate

40:35 - GLP-1s and the future of weight care

45:01 - Why muscle mass is the ultimate longevity asset

Keywords: Longevity and Healthspan, Asian Diabetes (TOFI), Preventive Healthcare Singapore, Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGM), GLP-1 Adoption Asia, Muscle Mass Preservation, Biohacking Risks

AI: State of Industry and Investment | Aravind Kandiah, Jun Wakabayashi, John Homer Alvero - E717

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 07:01:00 +0800

"If you can own a space, both ideologically and also be in all the right rooms, sure, someone else may have the right model, but they will pick you. I think brand is very, very under-indexed, and doing that work of go-to-market is so hard, especially in a low signal, high noise environment." - Jeremy Au

"We want to move fast and we want to adopt AI, but we're also concerned about our data. We want to protect our customers' data. We want to make sure that the data of our customers is not used for training the next generation of models. So we're balancing. We want to move fast, and we're also careful at the same time." - Jeremy Au

"Startups of course are pioneering the frontier here, but we're actually starting to see a lot of enterprise teams basically using tools like Cursor, Copilot, and OpenAI. If you go into an engineering bullpen now, it actually is starting to mimic what seems like a call center. Engineers are no longer typing much anymore; they're just speaking, using voice to code now." - Jeremy Au

Everyone has the same access to the same frontier models. So what's actually left to compete on?

Jeremy Au moderates a panel at the Crosscurrents Summit in Parañaque on where enterprise AI adoption really stands, with Aravind Kandiah of Bifrost, Jun Wakabayashi of AppWorks, and John Homer Alvero of Converge ICT.

Aravind Kandiah is the CTO and Co-founder of Bifrost, a robotics infrastructure company that simulates the world to evaluate robots. Bifrost's simulations power some of the world's largest robotics companies, spanning autonomous Mars exploration with NASA through to automating high-risk industrial work. He spent over five years in AI and robotics research before co-founding the company with Charles Wong, and Bifrost is backed by Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital and Airbus Ventures. On the panel, he argues enterprises split cleanly into those running pilots to hit an R\&D spend target and those facing a genuine forcing function, like Korea's birth rate leaving factories unstaffed. Only the second group ships. His view on defensibility: the moat is everything except the model.

Jun Wakabayashi is a Venture Principal at AppWorks, one of Asia's leading accelerators and VC firms. He joined as an Analyst in 2017 and rose to Principal by 2023, leading the firm's Beacon Funds arm, a fund-of-funds backing emerging venture managers across Southeast Asia and web3. Immersing himself in founder communities across the region built the network that made AppWorks a first stop for startups seeking capital. He holds a B.S. in Finance from NYU Stern and previously worked at Focus Reports and PwC. He puts engineering at 60 to 80% of enterprise token spend, describes bullpens that now sound like call centres with engineers dictating to coding agents instead of typing, and tracks the teams accidentally burning $5 million a month on tokens. His counter to Aravind: the real moat is distribution, the one thing the frontier labs lack.

John Homer Alvero is Head of AI Engineering at Converge ICT, one of the Philippines' largest fiber broadband and digital infrastructure providers. An experienced AWS architect, he has worked across e-commerce, fintech, telco and gaming, with deep expertise in cloud architecture, operations and security. He previously held cloud and service engineering roles at Voyager Innovations and was Cloud Solutions Architect at SM Investments, giving him a practitioner's view of moving enterprise AI from pilot to production. His blocker isn't the technology: governance and cybersecurity teams can't write credible guardrails until they're AI-literate themselves. His sharpest point is that with model access equalised, the only variables left are your proprietary data and your orchestration.

Crosscurrents Summit, presented by Clouted

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Keywords: Enterprise AI Adoption, AI ROI (Return on Investment), Token Spend Management, Build vs. Buy AI, AI Startups, Cybersecurity and AI Governance, Autonomous Agents, AI Distribution and Moats, Voice-to-Code Engineering

Building the World's Most-used Medical AI | Dr. Thomas Kelly of Heidi - E716

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:21:00 +0800

"If you think about a healthcare system, the choke point is a doctor's time and attention. Anything that takes that up has a direct impact on patient outcomes because it slows down bed movement, reduces the speed of different interventions, and you're actually constantly triaging your own time so you end up only seeing the sickest patients. Paperwork is stealing the capacity away from an already very tightly constrained system." - Dr. Thomas Kelly

"GPT-4 came out, and that changed the rules. We had to fire half the team, tell customers that we weren't going to fulfill our promises, tell investors that the thesis they invested behind was not correct, and that models were no longer a differentiating factor. In order for Heidi to succeed, we had to pivot to be a product company. It's pretty crazy to have gone from almost death to the most used healthcare AI tool globally." - Dr. Thomas Kelly

"Because of the model focus at Heidi, we're actually quite strong in tricky visits where it's Malay, Hokkien, English, and a bit of Singlish, and you're trying to output the note in another language. You naturally gravitate towards the markets where the foundation models don't do as well out of the box. Especially in Asia, because it's not the Latin character set, the LLMs are not as good typically at doing transcription. When we asked our users, we just found we had really amazing traction already in Singapore and Japan." - Dr. Thomas Kelly

Dr. Thomas Kelly, Founder and CEO of Heidi Health, joins Jeremy Au to discuss his journey from a vascular surgery registrar to a health-tech entrepreneur. They explore the massive administrative burden placed on doctors, which acts as a choke point in healthcare capacity and limits patient care. Dr. Kelly unpacks the early days of Heidi Health, the challenging pivot the company had to make following the release of GPT-4, and how they rebuilt to become a globally dominant AI medical scribe. The conversation also covers the regulatory landscape of Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), navigating clinical liability, and how Heidi Health is expanding into Asian markets like Singapore and Japan by mastering complex, multilingual clinical interactions.

00:00 - Introduction and Dr. Thomas Kelly’s Journey to Medicine

04:45 - From Medical Student to EdTech Founder

09:00 - The True Cost of Administrative Paperwork on Patient Care

13:40 - The Technical Challenges of Building a Reliable AI Medical Scribe

17:35 - Navigating Liability and Software as a Medical Device (SaMD)

22:00 - Heidi Health’s Future Roadmap: Evidence, Follow-ups, and Hardware

26:30 - Geographic Expansion and Product Localization in Asia

33:00 - Why Clinicians Are Driving Innovation in HealthTech

34:25 - The Crucible Pivot: How GPT-4 Forced a Complete Company Reset

37:25 - Competing with OpenAI and Foundation Models in Healthcare

Keywords: HealthTech Startups, AI Medical Scribe, AI in Healthcare, Heidi Health, Startup Pivot, Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), GPT-4 Healthcare Applications, Asian Healthcare Markets, Clinical Decision Support

Spent $1.5m On One Sperm Race and It Went Viral | Eric Zhu - E715

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 07:04:00 +0800

"How can you take a risk and gamble on a 10% chance that if you are able to successfully make it through, the upside is 100x?" - Eric Zhu

"When things go to shit, the worst thing you can do is be dishonest. The biggest thing you can do is be honest, tell everyone what is happening, but show that you are actually competent to solve these problems." - Eric Zhu

"You're at this inflection point where you essentially have this very interesting technology, which is artificial intelligence. You don't need a team of engineers; you just need one or two engineers with agent workflows." - Eric Zhu

In this episode, Eric Zhu, Co-Founder and CEO of Sperm Racing, joins Jeremy Au to share his highly unconventional journey into the startup world, beginning with running a private equity data company out of his high school bathroom in Indiana. After getting expelled and moving to San Francisco, he experienced the extreme highs and lows of building a tech company, learning crucial lessons about product development, hiring, and maintaining a bold vision. Eric eventually pivoted to an entirely new industry by launching a biomarker sports company focused on sperm racing. He discusses the technical and logistical chaos of hosting their first massive race in Los Angeles, the correlation between lifestyle habits and fertility, and his broader vision for automating commerce using artificial intelligence and agent workflows.

00:00 The High School Bathroom Startup

03:02 - Moving to San Francisco

04:20 - Building a Data Engine

08:14 - Lessons in Leadership

09:13 - The Genesis of Sperm Racing

10:09 - Production Chaos in LA

14:02 - The Business of Biomarker Sports

21:35 - Hiring Gen Z Talent

23:44 - The Reality of Silicon Valley

26:39 - AI and The Future of Work

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, AI Agents, Silicon Valley Culture, Startup, Founder Journey, Biomarker Sports, Sperm Racing, San Francisco Tech Scene, Gen Z Founders, E-commerce Automation, Venture Capital

Zombie Unicorns: Southeast Asia's Structural VC Problem | Kristie Neo - E714

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:48:00 +0800

"In smaller markets like Southeast Asia, we don't have the liquid capital and talent rotation of Silicon Valley or China. We end up having this situation where companies stay alive much longer than they should. I'm afraid we may have a whole generation of zombie companies that were once very sexy and relevant, but may eventually fade into irrelevance." - Kristie Neo

"If you put intellectual property and research at a university level, but it is not monetized, it goes to waste. The compensation scheme for a tech licensing office should be based on the opportunity cost of the IP and the depreciating asset value of knowledge. If you don't license it quickly, someone else in another market will figure it out, and that value goes to zero." - Kristie Neo

"A couple of things are driving the lift in the Singapore Stock Exchange. First is the investment by government policymakers and the simplification of rules, like enabling dual listings with NASDAQ. Next is a massive flow of capital into Singapore as a source of stability and diversification from the Middle East, China, and across Southeast Asia.” - Kristie Neo

Kristie Neo, Asia Editor at PitchBook, joins Jeremy Au to unpack the current macroeconomic realities of Southeast Asia’s tech and venture capital ecosystem. They explore the recent revitalization of the Singapore Stock Exchange (SGX) fueled by government stimulus and safe-haven capital inflows, contrasting it with a prolonged funding winter for early and growth-stage startups.

Together, they discuss the looming crisis of "zombie companies" in the region and argue why regional startups need to embrace mergers and acquisitions (M\&A) instead of holding out for unicorn valuations. The conversation also dives into the structural failures of commercializing university intellectual property (IP) in Singapore, comparing it to models in China and Europe. Finally, Jeremy outlines actionable policy recommendations, including implementing tax incentives for angel investors and supporting syndicate leaders, to effectively bridge the funding gap and unlock capital from family offices.

00:00 - SGX Revitalization & Safe-Haven Capital Inflows into Singapore

07:44 - Startup Valuations & The Crisis of Zombie Companies

18:35 - Why M\&A is the Necessary Next Step for Regional Tech

23:55 - The Structural Struggles of Commercializing University IP

30:08 - Rethinking Incentives for University Tech Licensing Offices

35:21 - Navigating the Boom-and-Bust Cycle of VC Funds

45:03 - The Case for Angel Investor Tax Incentives in Singapore

48:50 - Bridging the $1M to $5M Seed Funding Gap

52:43 - Why Family Offices Need Startup Research Analysts to Deploy Capital

Keywords: Southeast Asia Startups, Singapore Venture Capital, Singapore Stock Exchange (SGX) IPOs, Tech Mergers & Acquisitions (M\&A), Startup Funding Winter, Angel Investing Tax Incentives, Family Offices in Singapore, University IP Commercialization, Venture Capital Macroeconomics, Zombie Companies

Climbing the Wrong Mountain: Why I Walked Away from Big Law and PE | Daniel Suh - E713

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:02:00 +0800

"The feeling was akin to climbing a mountain for ten years. And you get to the summit. And then you realize you climbed the wrong mountain the whole time. The pursuit of prestige, money, title, stability, that wasn't my dream. That was my parents' dream for me. And when I checked that box, I realized I feel so hollow and so empty." - Daniel Suh

"I think seeing that and so many other ways that the Asian community was discriminated against made me realize our generation carries almost like a duty to protect and uplift our parents, the previous generation, our generation, and the next generation. We are the global majority. We are leading at the frontier and at the edges of technology, culture, media, academics. We have so much power, but now it's time for us to unleash it." - Daniel Suh

"If you look at any other industry, Asians are underrepresented severely at the topmost executive levels, but in venture, it's a rare exception where we are just completely dominating the category. Gold House has our special power, and our edge is we bring the power of the Asian community behind you. And so it makes sense for us to invest in Asian founders." - Daniel Suh

Daniel Suh spent a decade optimizing for prestige. Korean immigrant parents who left careers behind to start a small business in the US, a childhood spent moving apartments through bankruptcy, UCSD, five years in consulting to put his brother and mother through school, then an accelerated JD-MBA at Northwestern. He landed the big law summer and a private equity offer, the American dream on paper. He was elated for about ten minutes.

"It felt like climbing a mountain for ten years. You get to the summit, and then you realize you climbed the wrong mountain the whole time."

Today he is General Partner at Gold House Ventures, the cultural capital fund backing founders at the intersection of AI and creativity.

In this conversation with Jeremy Au, Daniel breaks down the second-generation guilt that pushes immigrant kids into careers they never chose, the high school demand letter that won back his family's security deposit in 24 hours, and why Gold House evolved from an Asian founder fund into something broader.

He gets specific about what "cultural capital" actually buys a founder that money and introductions cannot, and why the backlash against AI is a narrative problem rather than a technology one. If nobody trusts the model, adoption stalls no matter how good the model is. Culture, not capability, is what moves people.

A conversation for founders, VCs and operators across Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand and Malaysia who are quietly wondering whether they are climbing someone else's mountain.

00:00 - From San Francisco to Manila

01:31 - Korean immigrant parents, bankruptcy and growing up in poverty

03:56 - Three prisms: parent expectations, family money and your own dreams

07:38 - Five years in consulting to put the family through school

09:45 - The Northwestern JD-MBA: decent at law, miserable doing it

13:39 - The big law and private equity offer and climbing the wrong mountain

17:04 - Finding Gold House on LinkedIn and getting emotional over a website

19:46 - The security deposit fight that made empowerment personal

24:42 - Building the "Asian YC" and the fund thesis

27:26 - The Fund II rebrand: cultural capital

32:12 - The AI backlash: jobs, deepfakes and paying creators

34:45 - Bravery, optionality and choosing yourself by telling the truth

39:22 - "A winner is a loser who tried one more time"

Keywords: Asian American Founders, Cultural Capital, Venture Capital Investing, Immigrant Expectations, AI and Culture, Career Pivots, Startup Empowerment, Media and Entertainment, Entrepreneurship Journey

The Career Advice Harvard Never Taught: Burnout, Fear & Flow | Pooja Venkatraman - E712

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:35:00 +0800

"The biggest misconception about burnout is that it comes from the number of hours you're working, or how demanding the work is. The causal factor to burnout is what you are thinking and feeling during those hours." - Pooja Venkatraman

"What you're seeing on the outside is just the wrapping paper on the outside of the box, and that tells only a fraction of the story. Your brain will want to construct a narrative, but when you actually open the box and look at what's going on inside, the experiences and motivations could not be more different. Life is lived 99% inside the box." - Pooja Venkatraman

"I've been to some of the best institutions and schools in the world, and nobody taught me this dead simple problem-solving framework. I realized there was a white space in the market for this style of coaching because I think it is appealing to an analytical, consulting, and Ivy League type of thinker." - Pooja Venkatraman

Pooja Venkatraman, an executive coach for Ivy League graduates and high achievers, joins Jeremy Au to discuss her non-linear career journey. She shares how she continuously tested career hypotheses, pivoting from screenwriting to corporate strategy at Capital One, consulting at BCG, and collaborating with Clay Christensen at Harvard Business School. Pooja breaks down the real causes of professional burnout, differentiating between high-intensity imposter syndrome and the low-intensity friction of feeling misaligned with your path. Finally, she highlights the value of using rigorous problem-solving frameworks to navigate career transitions, manage internal conflicts, and calm the fear-based brain, which ultimately led to her transition into executive coaching.

00:00:00 - Introduction & HBS Reunion

00:03:00 - From Screenwriter to Corporate Strategy

00:06:27 - Disproving Career Hypotheses

00:10:28 - Harvard Business School & Consulting Path

00:13:12 - Working with Clay Christensen

00:17:44 - Testing New Hypotheses at Capital One

00:23:08 - The "Wrapping Paper" of Career Trajectories

00:27:36 - The Transition to Executive Coaching

00:35:17 - Redefining Professional Burnout

00:38:45 - Navigating Internal Career Conflicts

Keywords: Executive Coaching, Career Transitions, Burnout, Hypothesis Testing, Harvard Business School, Management Consulting, BCG, Capital One, Problem-Solving Frameworks, Imposter Syndrome

AI, Zeitgeist and Algorithmic Warfare | Justin Banusing - E711

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:49:00 +0800

"The CEO, the artist, the brand manager, they're ultimately craftspeople at the end of the day, who are the stewards of their brand. And their biggest challenge isn't necessarily doing the thing, because if you are a great builder or craftsperson, you already have something great. Nowadays, the biggest problem is getting it seen and getting it spread across the world." - Justin Banusing

"I like to think that my heart is best sustained by love and sustained by care for people. And I think that's why the first version of Clouted, well, we did go viral. We raised a couple of rounds. It just didn't really feel right compared to what we're doing now." - Justin Banusing

"And now we just raised our seed round and operate across Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Manila. And we're figuring things out, but I think we're getting there." - Justin Banusing

Justin Banusing, Co-founder and CEO of Clouted, joins Jeremy Au to discuss his founder journey from collegiate esports to building an AI virality engine. Justin shares how his first startup experience in the gaming space led to burnout and a period of self-reflection traveling the world, exploring venture capital, and DJing. He explains the pivot of Clouted from an AI gaming companion to a platform solving the distribution problem for creators and brands in the era of algorithmic warfare. They also discuss the challenges of sharecropping on other platforms' intellectual property, the importance of founder passion, and the economics behind AI startups.

00:00:00 The Algorithmic Warfare Era: A brief introduction to the difficulties of content distribution today.

00:00:45 Justin's Introduction and Clouted Overview: Justin introduces himself as the CEO and co-founder of Clouted, an AI virality engine.

00:01:13 The Collegiate Esports Journey and Lessons: Reflecting on his first startup, The Gathering, and the shifting paradigms of college gaming.

00:07:16 Sharecropping on Gaming Publisher IP: The risks of building enterprise value on top of another company's media property or platform.

00:10:58 A Sabbatical for Self-Reflection and DJing: Justin discusses traveling the world, DJing, and becoming a more complete adult after a messy startup exit.

00:17:58 Clouted V1 - The AI Gaming Companion: Launching an AI companion for gamers, achieving early virality, and raising funds.

00:23:59 Economics and Pulling the Plug on V1: Realizing the unit economics of an always-on AI companion were unviable and making the difficult decision to pivot.

00:28:48 Pivoting to Music and Event Marketing: Discovering the distribution problem while marketing an electronic music event.

00:32:03 Solving Distribution for Creators: Exploring algorithmic warfare and how Clouted functions as an AI media buyer pooling clip farms.

00:37:25 The Bravery to Reset and Pivot: Overcoming signaling risks and having the courage to shut down a product to find true product-market fit.

Keywords: AI Virality Engine, Creator Economy, Algorithmic Warfare, Startup Pivot, Esports and Gaming, Founder Journey, Media Buying, Clouted, Product-Market Fit

The End of Peak SaaS & How to Build Outcome-Based Software | Andres Klaric - E710

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0800

"Current SaaS pricing doesn't have accountability. We are entering an era in which software can actually produce outcomes, and by definition, that means accountability. If I'm telling you I'm going to get you from A to B, that's an outcome. The operating system should not necessarily be the profit pool as it is today; the real profit pools should actually be in those accountability outcomes. As an industry, we need to have the courage to reflect that in our pricing." - Andres Klaric

"When we first started, the original idea was refinancing auto loans. We were originating loans on behalf of banks and credit unions, but we kept getting the same repetitive question from the lenders we were selling to: 'Who built your system?' We eventually realized that they didn't even care about the loans; they wanted to buy the secret sauce. And that was the system. That's when we decided to pivot and become a B2B software-as-a-service." - Andres Klaric

"I saw bravery in its maximum expression in my parents. They packed up and left Bolivia to give us a better future, basically sacrificing their entire lives and spending the last 30 years working to provide us with something better. They decided to let their kids go figure it out, have bigger dreams than they had, and build new lives. That was the transformational process that catapulted us into where we are today." - Andres Klaric

Andres Klaric, a Bolivian-born entrepreneur and Harvard Business School graduate, joins Jeremy Au to discuss his transition from a demanding decade-long career in private equity to building a high-growth B2B SaaS startup. Andres shares the genesis of his company, which began as a consumer auto-refinancing platform before customer demand led them to pivot into a B2B Loan Origination System (LOS). They dive deep into the challenges of modernizing legacy financial software, the courage required to shift from traditional SaaS consumption pricing to outcome-based accountability models, and how the pandemic acted as a catalyst for his entrepreneurial leap. Finally, Andres reflects on the ultimate expression of bravery: his parents' sacrifice in immigrating from Bolivia to secure a better future, and how that inspires his approach to being a present father while scaling a startup.

00:00 - Catching Up & The Traditional Finance to MBA Pipeline

03:25 - Leaving Private Equity & The Pandemic as a Catalyst

06:39 - The Original Startup Idea: Auto Loan Refinancing

08:33 - The Pivot: From Selling Loans to Selling the "Secret Sauce"

10:50 - Navigating a Company Pivot & Reorganizing the Team

13:40 - Disrupting Legacy FinTech & Loan Origination Systems (LOS)

19:55 - The Future of SaaS: Outcome-Based Accountability Pricing

29:20 - The Enduring Importance of In-Person Enterprise Sales

35:00 - The Bravery of Immigration: Leaving Bolivia for a Better Future

39:20 - Balancing Startup Leadership with Fatherhood

Keywords: B2B SaaS, FinTech, Loan Origination System (LOS), Startup Pivot, Outcome-Based Pricing, Private Equity to Entrepreneurship, Harvard Business School (HBS), Immigration Journey, Bolivia, Founder Fatherhood

The Science of Inspiration: Why Leaders Inspire or Infuriate | Adam Galinsky - E709

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 14:00:00 +0800

"Leaders have no choice in whether they impact others. An offhand compliment by a leader becomes glorious praise, but an offhand insult becomes humiliating criticism. Because we don't have a choice of whether to impact others, we will either inspire or we will infuriate." - Adam Galinsky

"I see inspiring and infuriating on a universal continuum made up of three factors. The three factors really are how we see the world, which is being visionary; how we are in the world, which is being an exemplar; and how we interact in the world, which is being a mentor. The reason why these are the three universal factors of inspiring others is because each one solves a fundamental human need." - Adam Galinsky

"I think that in more independent cultures like America, we want our leaders to be brave and courageous in how they present themselves. One thing that comes up a little bit more in Asia is this idea of hypocrisy—the idea that it's really important for someone to act consistently with the words that they espouse, partly based on this idea of collectivism versus independence." - Adam Galinsky

Adam Galinsky, Professor at Columbia Business School and visiting faculty at INSEAD Singapore, joins Jeremy Au to dive into the deep psychological science behind what makes leaders truly inspiring. Drawing from his extensive research and bestselling books, Adam unpacks how power and status alter our brains and behaviors, introducing concepts like the "low-power double bind" and the "leader amplification effect."

Adam shares actionable frameworks for becoming an "inspiring architect" by mastering three universal pillars: being a Visionary, an Exemplar, and a Mentor. Jeremy and Adam also discuss the unforeseen dangers of outsourcing our cognitive functions to Artificial Intelligence, which Adam describes as a "sycophantic butler" that can stunt learning and development. Finally, they explore the nuances of cross-cultural leadership, contrasting Western expectations of courage with Asian values of consistency and collectivism, before closing with a powerful personal story about moral bravery, perspective-taking, and empathy.

Get Adam's book, Inspire: The Universal Path for Leading Yourself and Others: https://adamgalinsky.com

00:00:00 - Introduction and the Science of Inspiration

00:01:32 - Navigating Negotiations, Power, and the Low-Power Double Bind

00:04:46 - The Leader Amplification Effect: Inspiring vs. Infuriating

00:06:25 - The Transformative Power of Reflection and State of Mind

00:15:02 - The Dangers of AI as a Sycophantic Butler

00:17:30 - The Three Pillars of Inspiration: Visionary, Exemplar, and Mentor

00:28:47 - The Importance of Perspective-Taking in Business and Politics

00:35:36 - Leaders vs. Managers: Structuring Vision and Empathy

00:37:42 - Cultural Nuances in Global Leadership: East vs. West

00:40:01 - A Personal Story of Moral Courage and Stewardship

Keywords: Leadership Development, Organizational Psychology, Science of Inspiration, Cross-Cultural Leadership, Power and Status, Columbia Business School, INSEAD Singapore, Perspective-Taking, AI and Learning

Nickel, Chinese EVs and a Senate Chase in the Philippines | Franco Varona - E708

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 14:00:00 +0800

"In times of crisis, Filipinos really show you where they want to go and what businesses our fund can invest in. This happened during COVID with the rapid digitization of the country. Now, this recent energy crisis has led to an EV boom and really pushed the drive for renewable energy in the Philippines." - Franco Varona

"We're one of the largest nickel producers in the world, which is critical for batteries, but right now we literally just mine it out of the earth and export it raw. The real value comes when you process these minerals. Initiatives like Pax Silica aim to create onshore processing, allowing us to export much higher-value materials." - Franco Varona

"The EV shift in the Philippines is real. What's crazy is that this rapid adoption is happening despite the fact that our local infrastructure for electric vehicles is still developing. It shows how quickly consumers can adapt, pushing the entire country toward renewable energy and solar solutions." - Franco Varona

In this episode, Jeremy Au and Franco Varona discuss the rapid economic and technological shifts in the Philippines driven by recent global energy dynamics. They explore the unexpected 300% surge in local electric vehicle (EV) sales, the rise of solar panel adoption among everyday consumers, and the structural challenges facing the Philippine power grid. Franco also breaks down recent dramatic political shifts in the Philippine Senate and explains what they mean for the local startup ecosystem. Finally, they analyze the strategic implications of the newly signed "Pax Silica" agreement and the Luzon Economic Corridor, highlighting the massive opportunity for the Philippines to move up the value chain in semiconductor manufacturing and rare earth mineral processing.

00:00 - Introduction & Manila's Infrastructure Development

03:45 - The Global Energy Crisis & The Philippine EV Boom

09:00 - The Rise of Chinese EV Brands in Southeast Asia

13:30 - Comparing EV Adoption: The Philippines vs. Malaysia

16:20 - Summer Heatwaves & Power Grid Challenges in Manila

19:30 - The Consumer Shift Towards Solar Energy

20:50 - Navigating Wild Political Shifts in the Philippine Senate

25:20 - Leadership Changes & The Innovative Startup Act

27:25 - Unpacking "Pax Silica" & The Luzon Economic Corridor

31:30 - Moving Up the Semiconductor & Mineral Processing Value Chain

Keywords: Philippines Startup Ecosystem, Electric Vehicles (EV) Southeast Asia, Pax Silica Philippines, Semiconductor Manufacturing Asia, Renewable Energy Philippines, Luzon Economic Corridor, Philippine Senate Politics, Rare Earth Mineral Processing, BYD Asia Adoption, Foxmont Capital Partners

Stablecoins And The Agent Economy Will Rewire How Money Moves | Dušan Stojanović - E707

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:00:00 +0800

"In 10 years, money will definitely be a complete commodity. What is going to be a true differentiator is what that VC can bring to the table other than money—in terms of support and having their own agentic AI support that can be tapped into the portfolio company's fleet of AI." - Dušan Stojanović

"Payments has always been the first mover when it comes to financial services innovation. If you look at payments today and the agentic AI economy, you're potentially looking at having an agent doing things for you and then paying for it. You want it to prepare the payment and look for what you want, but you still want to have the human in the loop to authorize that payment." - Dušan Stojanović

"Animoca Brands has actually received its stablecoin license in Hong Kong, which is linked to the Hong Kong dollar. That is a first mover for a regulated, licensed stablecoin in Asia, which makes it unique. The focus is really on regional trade, having stablecoins replacing or being a complementary solution to the big trade flows, not only in the Asian region but also globally." - Dušan Stojanović

Dušan Stojanović, founder of True Global Ventures (TGV), joins Jeremy Au to discuss the massive convergence of AI, stablecoins, and the future of venture capital. Dušan shares his incredible journey from building one of the world's first internet banks (Monabanq) in the early 2000s to achieving three exits in ten days as an angel investor.

He breaks down the significance of Animoca Brands securing a regulated stablecoin license in Hong Kong and how this will revolutionize regional B2B trade flows. Dušan also outlines his vision for the "agentic AI economy," predicting that AI-driven transactions will soon capture a massive share of global payments. Finally, they explore how AI agents are already disrupting software development and due diligence, and why venture capital money will become a pure commodity within the next decade.

00:00:00 - Introduction & Dušan’s Entrepreneurial Journey

00:05:15 - The Transition from Founder to Angel Investor

00:07:25 - The 25-75 Rule: How VCs Should Actually Add Value

00:10:00 - Navigating Startup Struggles and Internal M\&A

00:13:10 - Animoca Brands & Hong Kong’s Stablecoin License

00:16:45 - The Intersection of Blockchain and AI Payments

00:22:15 - The Rapid Rise of the Agentic AI Economy

00:24:50 - AI's Impact on Open Source Coding & Developer Productivity

00:28:15 - How AI Agents Will Disrupt Venture Capital Decision-Making

00:34:10 - A Personal Story of Bravery and Overambitious Visions