BRAVE

https://youtu.be/jaeEyRF3doA

Keywords: Bain & Company, Management Consulting, Indonesia Business, Career Transitions, Stakeholder Management, INSEAD MBA, Leadership Development, Work-Life Balance

EdTech: The Future of Learning & K-12 Disruption - E733

Thu, 24 Sep 2026 07:57:53 +0800

"Your brain is most receptive to absorbing educational knowledge as a young person, as a teenager. If you don't impart the right skills at that age group, it is difficult to course correct. It is never too late, but your best ROI you'll ever have is from getting K-12 education right. Getting K-12 right is the single most important thing that an education system can do." - Henry Motte de la Motte

"One of the consistent trends is that increase in screen time and increase in use of gadgets in schools has not improved, but made educational outcomes worse for the students over time. For the first time in global history, we see students' academic outcomes decreasing, not increasing." - Adam Huh Dam

"I built an education tech company in the US, and I'm choosing to raise my kids in Singapore. You had to build education tech in America because the public and private system, and the gaps in between were so bonkers that private market solutions were really the only solution for many people. As somebody who has the ability to access the Singapore education system, it felt like a no-brainer both on the value in terms of outcomes coupled with the safety and stability component, coupled with a tremendously low cost." - Jeremy Au

Get the basics right in school and everything else builds on it. Miss that window, and it is very hard to course correct.

In this compilation from the BRAVE archive, Adam Huh Dam of Stick 'Em, Adriel Yong of Clouted, Henry Motte-de la Motte of Edge Tutor and host Jeremy Au break down what actually improves learning outcomes, and why so much of edtech does not.

Why authenticity and real traction can beat a polished pitch, from the team that won the 2025 Hult Prize (Adam Huh Dam)

Why more screens and gadgets in schools have made outcomes worse, and where AI can genuinely help students (Adam Huh Dam)

How the US and Singapore education systems differ, and how gaps in public schooling create private markets like college counseling (Jeremy Au and Adriel Yong)

Why time abroad and cross-border relationships matter more for young people as AI takes over routine work (Adriel Yong)

Why selling into public school systems takes so long, from multi-stakeholder buying to risk aversion (Henry Motte-de la Motte)

Why K-12 is the highest-ROI investment a government can make, and what the Asian Tiger economies got right (Henry Motte-de la Motte)

Watch the full episodes:

Adam Huh Dam, Co-Founder of Stick 'Em

How To Win A $1M Prize And Fixing The Global Education Crisis | Adam Huh Dam of Stick ‘Em - EP682

Adriel Yong, Co-Founder & COO of Clouted

AI Has Changed The Way We Create, Consume And Value Content | Adriel Yong - E730

https://youtu.be/qqrkSe95nmY

Henry Motte-de la Motte, Founder & CEO of Edge Tutor

Henry Motte-de la Motte: Education Tech Challenges - E372

https://youtu.be/oENqetfds_4

00:00 Intro

00:40 Adam Huh Dam: going to London knowing we wouldn't win

03:48 Why Stick 'Em won the Hult Prize

04:50 AI in classrooms: the low-hanging fruit

06:07 More screens, worse outcomes

07:36 Jeremy Au & Adriel Yong: Singapore versus America

09:57 College counseling and pay to play admissions

11:51 The moonshot: six months abroad for every student

13:22 Henry Motte-de la Motte: education's long sales cycles

14:23 The window closes at 18

15:04 What the Asian Tigers got right

15:50 Outro

Keywords: EdTech, Southeast Asia Education, K-12 Education, AI in Education, Singapore Public Schools, B2G Sales, Government Procurement, Hult Prize, Startup Founders, Screen Time Outcomes

Singapore Buys Fintech. Thailand Builds Data Centers. | Wing Vasiksiri - E732

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 07:48:00 +0800

"For future M&A transactions in Southeast Asia, global or regional acquirers worried about management risk, regulatory complexity, or market volatility will structure deal mechanisms to align long-term incentives. Whether through staged buyouts like Grab's 60% upfront acquisition of Atome or all-equity transactions like Circle's acquisition of Tazapay, structuring payouts around future performance aligns management teams and mitigates tail risk while scaling into new geographies." - Jeremy Au

"Southeast Asia's tech story has largely been defined by the super app strategy: start with high-friction pain points like transportation, expand into daily verticals like food and groceries, offer a better payment solution, and ultimately dominate consumer financial services. With basic infrastructure now built, the remaining underserved demand lies in credit and lending, which makes large-scale fintech acquisitions like Grab's purchase of Atome so strategic." - Wing Vasiksiri

"We are finally seeing large-scale tech M&A transactions emerge from Southeast Asia, from Grab acquiring Atome Financial for $1.5 billion to Circle acquiring Tazapay for $400 million. These deals demonstrate that financial services platforms built across Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines have achieved the scale, cross-border regulatory licensing, and transaction volume needed to become high-value targets for global acquirers and public tech giants." - Wing Vasiksiri

Wing Vasiksiri, investor and ecosystem builder, returns to unpack two of the largest Southeast Asian tech M&A deals in years, both announced within a week of each other: Grab acquiring 60% of Atome Financial from Advance Intelligence Group for $1.5B with a two-year earnout on the remaining 40%, and Circle's roughly $400M all-stock acquisition of Singapore-founded Tazapay. Wing and Jeremy Au dig into why the deal structures matter more than the headline numbers (earnouts and equity are how global and regional acquirers are pricing in the tail risk of Southeast Asian management teams), and why Grab is deploying cash that US retail investors aren't fully valuing into new growth stories rather than dividends. They also cover Singapore's $200M+ countercyclical fintech fund push, the e-commerce growth still coming out of Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia, why Thailand and Malaysia are winning the data center boom while Singapore has structurally sat it out, and how OpenAI and the neolabs are landing in the region.

00:00 SEA tech M&A takes off: Grab announces a $1.5B deal for Atome Financial while Circle acquires B2B payments firm Tazapay for $400M.

03:14 Grab and Atome synergies: Combining offline BNPL retail networks with food delivery to build an orthogonal vector against Sea Group.

04:38 Unique deal structures in regional tech: How staged buyouts and performance-linked mechanisms de-risk acquirers and align management teams.

06:36 Underwriting as a competitive moat: Grab taps into Atome's multi-country credit track record, institutional debt lines, and portfolio scale.

11:08 Strategic cash deployment: Grab utilizes balance sheet cash for high-growth strategic acquisitions rather than traditional public market buybacks.

12:51 Circle acquires Tazapay: Cross-border regulatory licenses and global payment infrastructure unlock a 6x payout for early VC backers.

18:02 Singapore's $200M+ fintech initiative: Public funding steps in during a VC deployment winter to support proven regional exit pathways.

19:50 E-commerce surge across SEA: Double-digit growth in app installs in Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia creates secondary startup opportunities.

26:02 Frontier AI labs expand to APAC: OpenAI and neolabs establish Singapore headquarters and launch accelerator programs in Thailand.

27:18 The Thailand and Malaysia data center boom: Abundant power, cheap land, and a "bring-your-own-chip" model drive Chinese hyperscaler investments.

Keywords: Southeast Asia Tech, M&A, Grab, Atome, Circle, Tazapay, Fintech Acquisitions, Singapore Fintech, Thailand Data Centers, BNPL, Cross-Border Payments, Super App Strategy, Venture Capital Southeast Asia

Introduction

Jeremy Au: Hey, Wing. Good to see you.

Jeremy Au: How is life for you?

Wing Vasiksiri: Same. Yeah, moved to Singapore for almost a year now, so feel pretty settled in to everything happening here, and excited to hop back on again.

Wing Vasiksiri: I think this is the second time we're talking since I moved out here, so excited to hop back on and catch up.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, last one was in person, so now we're doing one remotely because you are traveling for work, but it's good to see you. So I think one thing we wanna talk about is what's the latest news, and I thought it was quite exciting recently that we saw a couple of M&A transactions happen.

Two Fintech Exits in One Week

Jeremy Au: I thought we saw that Grab just bought 60% of Atome, which is a buy now, pay later group under the Advance Intelligence Group. And I think you were the one who mentioned to me and brought to my attention that Circle Internet Group, the USDC stablecoin, recently acquired Tazapay, which is a B2B transaction, payments company, which was about a $400 million deal as well, so quite an interesting time right now.

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah, I think super exciting. I think with the Atome news that literally broke last night, right? So Grab announced that they're buying 60% of Atome Financial for 1.5 billion. So that's pretty, pretty sizable, like very sizable acquisition for the region, and I think the deal was that the remaining 40% will be bought in the next two years after the first tranche closes.

Wing Vasiksiri: But super exciting. I think this, along with the Circle and Tazapay news last week, a lot of the questions that investors have been asking around liquidity, exits — we're finally seeing these large-scale M&As happen out of the region. I don't know if it's a coincidence that they're announced a week pretty much after each other, but really hope that this is the start of more good news to come and more liquidity exits that we're seeing in Singapore, across Southeast Asia.

Wing Vasiksiri: I think the interesting thing here is that both these companies have similar characteristics, right? Fintech companies and also primarily serving Southeast Asia. So it does seem like we're getting to that point where companies building in the financial services have a large enough market, served enough customers such that they've become interesting exit and acquisition targets for some of the larger companies, and yeah, hopefully this just continues to snowball.

Grab and Atome Synergies Against Sea Group

Jeremy Au: Awesome. And I think I wanna talk about it as well, like what the paper synergies are, right, in terms of how and why the deal makes sense as well. I think that from Grab's perspective, it makes sense. They have a huge, obviously, consumer base, right? Everybody's taking rides. They also have the drivers, and they have a lot of small businesses that they have. Whereas Atome, they obviously have buy now, pay later, which is a form of lending, and I think they have a lot of merchants as well. So I think on paper there's a lot of cross-selling synergy. What I found quite interesting was that, beyond doubling the size of the loan book based on the LinkedIn post that they had, I thought it was interesting that they were buying 60% of the company, which I thought was a bit interesting because normally you see them buy 100% of the company, right?

Jeremy Au: That's the classic technology M&A. So choosing to buy 60% upfront and having and tying the remaining 40% to be some kind of performance-oriented framework, I think it's quite an interesting mechanism because you don't see that in Silicon Valley. I can't think of many transactions where they've done that.

Jeremy Au: I think it's because in my head it prevents you from overpaying, right? You're buying 60% now, then you see if Atome shrinks — then it's a natural lever on the transaction price for the remaining 40%. But if Atome grows more, then you pay more, right?

Jeremy Au: So it works out for both sides. I thought it was an interesting transaction structure, actually.

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah, you're right. We don't see this very often actually, and maybe it goes to show that acquirers still have market leverage, right? You probably wouldn't see something like this if there were more, many acquirers competing to buy up the same asset.

The Super App Strategy and Underserved Verticals

Wing Vasiksiri: But yeah, I think the question you asked in terms of where the synergies are is a great one as well and something we should talk about a little bit, right? I think if we zoom out, Southeast Asia for the most part has been… the tech story here has been about the super app strategy, right?

Wing Vasiksiri: In emerging markets, users typically only care about two things, which is price and convenience. And so a super app strategy helps offer more services in one place, resulting in a better customer experience. And I think you can generalize the Grab/Gojek approach as something like this where, number one, you start with a very high pain point, right?

Wing Vasiksiri: Which is transportation in some of the most congested cities in the world. You expand to other vertical pain points, groceries, pharmacy, food. You offer a better way to pay, 10x way to pay, GrabPay, GoPay, and then you finally expand and dominate across all of consumer financial transactions, right? And I think this is where we see the lending, the BNPL approach come into play.

Wing Vasiksiri: And I think the super app strategy works because when these apps started, there was a lack of basic infrastructure that allowed for a lot of verticalized solutions to develop, right? I think there was a time, and probably still, where things like payments, fraud prevention — Grab and Gojek probably had the best in-class technology for a lot of this, right?

Wing Vasiksiri: So they built that infrastructure and then scaled horizontally. And now if you zoom out and look, it's like where is there growth and demand that is still underserved? I think it's basic industries like healthcare, education, logistics, and credit specifically, which makes this acquisition of Atome super interesting.

Underwriting as the Real Moat

Jeremy Au: I think what's core, if you think about it, is not just the reach as well, but also it's Atome's underwriting. That's not an easy skill set to have in Southeast Asia. I've looked at many financial tech companies in Southeast Asia, and I think the number of teams that just say that underwriting is important and then not deliver on good underwriting because of maybe it's the market, maybe it's how they choose to underwrite it, maybe it's even the structure of how and what they're lending, and the resulting implosions that have happened over the past five years has really been quite an interesting learning experience. And I think that's what Grab is buying Atome for — is having that capability.

Jeremy Au: But also, I think to some extent maybe even the debt lines from the banks that trust Atome to do the underwriting to this date as well. It's not just about underwriting, right, but it's also the track record of underwriting that lets you have a big loan book.

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah, they're definitely operating at scale, right? Exactly what you said. I'm pulling up some of the numbers here. 2025 annualized net revenue over $500 million on $6 billion annualized GMV portfolio across Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand. 25 million cumulative transacted users.

Wing Vasiksiri: So they're at scale, and honestly, it seems like a great fit for Grab and what they're trying to do with their expansion, right? I think Grab obviously had some challenges in the public markets, and I think an acquisition like this is very synergistic to them, perfect for their scale.

Atome's Unusual Fundraising Path

Wing Vasiksiri: I think maybe the other interesting thing to talk about a little bit is that Atome wasn't the typical startup that you see in the region, right? It's not like the typical seed, Series A, Series B story. They were actually a business line that got spun up inside a larger group. So it wasn't a standalone company, right?

Wing Vasiksiri: I think the founder, Jeff Chen, founded this group Advance Intelligence Group in 2016. And then he started a bunch of different solutions within that group, Atome being one of them. And if you look at their fundraising history, they didn't have to raise the typical seed Series A, Series B.

Wing Vasiksiri: I see here they raised a large Series C in 2019 and then a large $400 million Series D from SoftBank, Warburg Pincus, Vision Plus Capital, EDBI is in there, Northstar. So it does look more like the PE-backed type of growth company as opposed to the high-growth tech startup raising capital from the typical VCs that you and I maybe hear and talk about.

Wing Vasiksiri: Still super interesting, but yeah, it is very interesting to see a different shape of business get to this scale and do really well.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, it must have been one heck of a negotiation between these two conglomerates that both had the ability to keep growing across. Grab already had its own fintech solution as well as a digital bank partnership with GXS.

Jeremy Au: Whereas, like you said, Advance Intelligence Group has its own conglomerate as well. So it must have been an interesting negotiation there. I think some other parts about the transaction that I wanna think about is a good outcome for the shareholders. And I would say yes, because from my recollection was that Advance Intelligence Group was valued about 2 billion, right? I think in 2021. So if you're selling basically 60% of one business unit for effectively $2 billion as well, then you're having that decision point actually — what is the remaining 40% gonna look like, right? Is it gonna be another $2 billion?

Jeremy Au: Is it going to go all the way up to $4 billion if they perform well? So those are all opportunities to grow the business. And I'm sure that Advance Intelligence Group is making some decision there to say, "Hey, this is the best price rather than going alone with Atome."

Jeremy Au: That's an interesting choice for Advance Intelligence Group, and I'm also wondering how it flows. Does it flow into reinvesting into more parts of the business of Advance Intelligence Group, or would it be used to pay back early shareholders in their own business? So that's actually quite an interesting experience.

Grab as an Active Acquirer

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah, for sure. They made the decision, right? They got the liquidity, and it's very meaningful for the parent company as well, right? It's a massive acquisition. So it seems like it's a huge win, I'm sure, for early shareholders, management, employees. I think the other sub-story here is Grab has been on a roll recently with these acquisitions, right?

Wing Vasiksiri: I think this is their third acquisition this year. They bought Stash earlier for $425 million. And then Foodpanda Taiwan at 600 million. So Grab seems to really be investing and trying to grow, probably get to profitability, and maybe it's like the competition that they're seeing from GoTo and GoPay in Indonesia that's fueling some of this.

Wing Vasiksiri: But yeah, either way, I think it's a great time to be a founder in the region, be an investor in the region, and see some of these super exciting developments.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, I think it's interesting for Grab because some of the things that we talked about in our past conversation was that Southeast Asia needed more of an M&A exit approach, right, for startups that don't need to go all the way to IPO.

Jeremy Au: But now Grab is acting as an active acquirer. I think if you look at Grab from a US retail investor perspective where they're publicly listed, it was quite interesting to see that. They're still, I think from my perspective, a little bit underweighted, because from a US retail investor perspective, they don't really use Grab or feel Grab.

Jeremy Au: And so if you look at what Grab is from a public company, they have… spitting out quite a bunch of cash. And I think these transactions are quite smart because basically you're taking the cash that you have that's not being fully valued by retail investors and using that to do acquisitions for new business lines that are a new growth story for retail investors.

Jeremy Au: I think it's probably the best use of the cash. Versus, I'm just giving you an example, would be oil and gas giving dividends back to shareholders to get the stock price up would be another approach, right, if you had all that cash. So I thought it was just a really interesting approach as well.

Circle Acquires Tazapay for $400M

Jeremy Au: Another one that was interesting as well was the Tazapay from my perspective. I thought that was a much cleaner M&A story as well. They were founded in 2020. I think they raised about $60 million across seed and their Series A so far from Peak XV and Saison Capital, and PayPal, and then they got acquired for $400 million.

Jeremy Au: So yeah, that's about a 6X markup, which is a good outcome. And I think I would say it's a great outcome if you think about it because in six years, you got a 6X markup, and a transaction closed. Yeah, it was pretty good.

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah, no, 100%. I think that was the exciting news last week, and it's great that we have a succession of exciting exits and acquisitions here.

Wing Vasiksiri: But yeah, they're a relatively young company. I remember seeing their seed round during COVID times where I think Peak XV led it, right? I think the founder, Rahul, was a known founder, right? He was at PayPal for 10 years. Led Stripe's revenue growth in APAC, so really deep payments background.

Wing Vasiksiri: Obviously identified a problem, knew how to execute in order to solve that problem, and did that really, really well. I think the interesting thing here is that they started in Singapore, right? I believe that they started serving local regional markets, but they grew pretty large.

Wing Vasiksiri: I read that they had payout rails in over 100 markets. They were licensed by the MAS, but also FINTRAC in Canada, AUSTRAC in Australia, FinCEN in the United States. So it really was a global business that was built out of this region, and Circle was actually the one who led their Series B, I wanna say.

Wing Vasiksiri: And then ended up coming in and buying the company. I'm sure it's a great exit for founders and early investors. They raised 60 million, so we don't know what the valuation in the later rounds is, but this is very meaningful. We don't see acquisitions of this size out of this region within this time span very often, and so I think it's great for everyone involved.

Wing Vasiksiri: It's clearly beneficial to Circle and their plans, right? I'm sure Circle, it's a public listed company in the US, maybe feeling a bit of pressure from Stripe and what they're doing with the open USC with Visa, MasterCard, a bunch of other payment companies. But USDC is still, I believe, only second to USDT.

Wing Vasiksiri: Buying Tazapay, they get a plug directly into the financial plumbing and rails that the team has built. And so, yeah, congrats to everyone involved here. I think this is awesome.

Aligning Incentives With All-Stock and Earnouts

Jeremy Au: Yeah, I think there's a lot of actually interesting synergies, and this is something I'm less familiar with. Between Wing and myself, I think Wing is much more competent with Bitcoin and crypto than I am. I'm much more on the real-world businesses perspective. But I think one interesting thing is that, like I said, for Circle, it makes sense — this is a geographic expansion, right?

Jeremy Au: It's covering a lot of countries they don't already cover. It's a good, interesting story. I think what's interesting to me as well is that it was, I believe, an all-stock deal as well. So to some extent, that's also a bit different of a flavor, I would say, in Southeast Asia versus in the US.

Jeremy Au: In the US, you have acquisitions in cash, right? Maybe half cash, half equity, or a good chunk in cash as well. So I think this is another unique Southeast Asia flavor where it was an all-stock deal. I think what's in common, and is underappreciated I would say between this Tazapay acquisition and the Atome acquisition, is that I get a sense that their transactions were structured for performance of the management team.

Jeremy Au: So when you have an all-equity transaction in Circle, you're still incentivized to keep growing the business. You don't want the Circle stock to go down, et cetera. Obviously, how much impact you're gonna have in Circle as Tazapay is another question altogether.

Jeremy Au: But equity is a way to align incentives for long-term growth, and vice versa for the Atome acquisition by Grab as well. That's also — the fact that you buy 60% and saying we'll buy 40% in the next few years based on how the performance goes is also a performance alignment push, right?

Jeremy Au: So I think my key takeaway is that for future M&A transactions, the shape of those transactions is that a global or regional acquirer that's worried about the inherent risk of the management teams and maybe even the regulatory risk or market risk of a Southeast Asian company will structure their mechanisms accordingly to align those incentives and de-risk the tail risk, right? Or cliff risk of the management team thus peacing out and not really helping them push the new geography.

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think what that shows is that both these acquirers think highly of the existing management team. They want them to continue working, growing out.

Wing Vasiksiri: And it's not uncommon in the US where it's like four-year vesting golden handcuffs that you serve out. I think it's both great acquisitions for both these companies, so it's, yeah, super exciting to see.

Singapore's $200M+ Fintech Push

Jeremy Au: Yeah. I think, zooming out a bit, this goes back to Singapore continuing to be a financial tech hub. I think it's interesting as well that, while we continue to have a VC winter in terms of deployments, the Singapore government is actually putting together like a $200 million plus funding into early-stage tech and fintech funds through its various ministries and organizations.

Jeremy Au: So I think it's interesting to see Singapore step in to inject liquidity into the early-stage fintech sector, which I think is a good choice because there's demonstrated exits now. There's demonstrated interest and also a great ecosystem with Singapore being a fintech hub, so there's a lot of synergy with the finance hub strategy for Singapore.

Wing Vasiksiri: So I think it's quite a good move by Singapore to push this while there's a VC fund winter.

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah, I think the government has been pretty good about thinking through what areas of investment is strategic and is prioritized for the country. Obviously, fintech being one of them, and it's really doubling down on all this time Singapore spent really cementing itself as one of the go-to fintech hubs globally, right?

Wing Vasiksiri: You have the MAS licensing, you have the Fintech Sandbox that allows people to experiment. You have proximity to all these other large markets. And so when a fintech's building out of Singapore, very quickly they're usually expanding to Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia. That requires building out all of these connectivity, bank integrations from scratch in every country you go to.

Wing Vasiksiri: So you actually end up building a lot of the skills and a lot of the infrastructure that's required to do that. I've seen a lot of initiatives around advanced manufacturing, robotics, so I really think that it's an interesting time to be investing out here.

E-Commerce Growth and the Next Consumer Wave

Wing Vasiksiri: The other stat I saw that was quite interesting was around e-commerce growth in Southeast Asia. There's an analytics company called Adjust that released a new report on e-commerce app usage and downloads, and Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia were the top three. So really, really interesting — we think that we're at scale with a lot of these basic services like e-commerce, but you see that there's still a lot of growth.

Wing Vasiksiri: Like Vietnam installs up 42%, sessions up 21%. Indonesia, 36% and 62%. Malaysia, 14%, 38%. And this is all from John Russell's Asia Tech Review newsletter, so shout out to him. But yeah, I think there's a lot of more downstream implications of this, right? The thing I think about is how early-stage startups necessarily can act on this because the obvious benefactor of this growth are the large conglomerates, the Lazada, Shopee, Sea Limiteds of the world, right?

Wing Vasiksiri: These are the guys who are clearly in pole position across the region. But I think having consumers download these apps, shop online, spend more time online, there are probably some second-order consequences for other new consumer breakouts to happen. We haven't seen that in a while, right? We haven't seen a lot of great new consumer companies been built out of this region for a long time.

Wing Vasiksiri: We've seen a lot of B2B enterprise focus, but it'll be cool to see if this tailwind ends up creating a lot of consumer businesses out here as well.

Attacking Incumbents Head-On Rarely Works

Jeremy Au: I think that's actually a good reminder about a couple of things in my head. But I think the first one is that Grab plus Atome is a competitor with Shopee and the Sea Group, right?

Jeremy Au: Because Atome was working a lot with their offline retail, right? For the buy now, pay later shops, and then Grab historically was more obviously on food and delivery. And so when you combine food and delivery plus the retail, obviously all the Grab riders are picking up food from retail shops.

Jeremy Au: So it's actually quite an interesting orthogonal vector against Sea Group, which is primarily all online, right? Of a lot of e-commerce. So I think I'll be interested to see what Sea Group's countermove will be, right? Because Sea Group does also have their own buy now, pay later solution within their app as well, which I've seen. So I think it'll be interesting to see how that friendly, or at least competition, is gonna shape up to be.

Jeremy Au: I think the other part is that it's a good reminder that some verticals get saturated over time, right? And they end up with several market leaders, the first mover, second mover. If you look at ride-hailing in America, it's just Uber and Lyft, right? That's existing. You look at Southeast Asia is Grab and, arguably, Gojek as well. And I think once the market grows and hits a scale leader, it's just hard to build another app.

Jeremy Au: And I just remember somebody was complaining recently about how they were in Malaysia and like 15 ride-hailing companies had launched over the past couple of years as well, and everybody was like, "Why do we even have more ride-hailing apps coming into existence now? Isn't this market already saturated?"

Jeremy Au: So that's something that I think founders have to be thoughtful about — once a vertical has been saturated, you really have to approach it maybe from an orthogonal way. For Uber and Lyft in America, their competitor now that they worry about is really Cybercab, right? Which is Tesla opening up a new vertical into driverless taxis. Another one, of course, is they're worried about Waymo, right? Because both of these are 100% autonomous vehicles, no humans, versus Uber and Lyft have a human workforce, right? So I think early-stage startups really should be quite thoughtful about whether they can attack or push back against Grab-Atome and Shopee from a head-on basis.

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah, for sure. It's been very challenging, right? These players are at scale, they're moving very fast, so I think going head-on is probably not the strategy. It's almost like you have to find your own niche and build specialization from there and scale out, right? We haven't seen that many verticalized consumer marketplaces.

Wing Vasiksiri: I think a couple years ago a lot of investors had a thesis that this would emerge. There's a few out there, but none of them have really gotten to scale, and so I think there's still some of the foundations that need to be built before we see some of those emerge, right?

Jeremy Au: Are you talking about like a Wayfair? Are you talking about — there was a pet food company in the US that I can't recall right now, which is also a verticalized consumer marketplace.

Wing Vasiksiri: Yes.

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah, exactly. Stuff like that, and also like the brand.com direct to consumer. People are still buying primarily off of these marketplaces, right? So the consumer brand.com, there's a few that are out there, but they all have to use the offline retail strategy primarily as well to drive growth, and you need a really strong founder to be able to navigate that, so.

Building on Top of the Rails

Jeremy Au: Right. I think one interesting thing that you reminded me of is that founders really have to build on top of these rails. That's the other approach — rather than trying to attack or try to do another consumer play, I really like Asia Partners' technology report, which looks at China's wave by wave of infrastructure growth, right?

Jeremy Au: And they basically said technology progression is a linear thing where, if you don't have digital payments, it's hard to have consumer marketplaces because how else would a consumer buy something remotely, right, if they don't have a way to pay for it?

Jeremy Au: And then based on that consumer paid, eventually they build B2B transactions as well. So I thought it was just an interesting thing — what's something they can build on top, right, of Shopee's platform, on top of Grab's platform as well?

OpenAI and the Neolabs Land in Singapore

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah, no, I think those are all the right questions. I think the other trend that I'm starting to see, which is quite interesting, is all these not just large labs like the OpenAIs of the world setting up shop in Singapore, but also the smaller neolabs, right? Like the Sierras, Cognition, Runway, Harvey, Legora — all opening up, setting up shop in Singapore as their APAC headquarters and starting to hire more people on the ground.

Wing Vasiksiri: I think it's super exciting because what we're seeing these guys do is, at least OpenAI, they're also getting very involved in supporting local startups, right? They have people on the ground building partnerships with VC startups, giving out credits. And maybe to tie it back to some of the stuff we talked about with Thailand last time — OpenAI announced, this was maybe two weeks ago, that they launched an initiative to support Thailand's next generation of AI startups.

Wing Vasiksiri: So it's a collaboration between OpenAI and Thailand's Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation, and they basically have an eight-week accelerator program where I believe you get OpenAI credits, and there's a couple of companies that are in this first cohort, which I think is really exciting.

Wing Vasiksiri: So yeah, OpenAI is giving each team some API credits, technical guidance, access to the frontier models, and yeah, hopefully we see more of this. I think it's quite exciting to see this come out of Thailand.

The Thailand and Malaysia Data Center Boom

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah. No, let's talk about Thailand.

Jeremy Au: As well because it's interesting because there's a lot of data centers being built out in Thailand, which was I think initially surprising to me because if you think about data centers, you always read about them being built in America, being built in the Middle East, right? Where there's cheap energy, lots of land. So I was surprised to hear about Thailand's data center boom as well. What are you thinking is the drivers of that?

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah, power is relatively cheap in Thailand compared to the region. It's also reliable, right? So you're able to get access to steady power.

Wing Vasiksiri: There's a lot of land, a lot of space out there. So a lot of the larger corporates that I've spoken to are now building out the power, land, rack, rental activity in order to build out all these data centers. My understanding is that most of these data centers are still serving Chinese hyperscalers.

Wing Vasiksiri: Thailand doesn't have many NVIDIA cloud partners, right? So I think access to the CPUs and GPUs from NVIDIA is actually the bottleneck here. So most of what's happening is like a bring-your-own-chip model, right? Where a lot of these data center developers, they'll get access to the land, they'll give you access to the power, they'll set up the infrastructure on that, but you have to bring your own chips, and usually that means it's a Chinese hyperscaler that has access to those chips and are the primary customers.

Wing Vasiksiri: I believe there's only one NVIDIA cloud partner, which is Siam.AI right now. I think those guys, as of today, are the only ones who have access to the NVIDIA chips. So yeah, we'll see how it develops, but I think it's really interesting to see a lot of investment go into that area, a lot of this being built out there.

Why Singapore Chose to Sit It Out

Jeremy Au: Yeah. I think it's really interesting because it's like an all-time high for technology export booms, right, in Singapore, in Penang Malaysia, and Thailand. In a lot of technology exports on the Singapore side, it's a semiconductor boom, the data center boom, integrated circuits, and then a lot of factories work across these three countries, right?

Jeremy Au: Singapore, Penang, Thailand, and they ship stuff around, and then they assemble from there as well. But it's interesting because from my perspective, obviously Singapore struggles to build data centers. We're just a small country, doesn't have a lot of space for data centers. I think that's one.

Jeremy Au: And two, of course, even though it's a refining and energy hub, it doesn't have an oil field of its own, right? Unlike Malaysia and Thailand, right? So the cheap energy is not something that we have. I think Singapore is a price taker of global energy markets, which means it always has reliable energy even in this energy crisis that we have globally.

Jeremy Au: But it would never really be cheap, right? Compared to pumping up in your own backyard. So I think that's a really interesting dynamic that the Singapore government has actually chosen to sit out from not participating in the data center building boom. I remember talking to a civil servant as well, and I think from their perspective was they felt like there were jobs that were being built by data centers, but they felt like it was not necessarily the jobs that Singapore felt like they were well-equipped to build because it's a lot of blue-collar jobs like electricians, plumbing, building.

Jeremy Au: And these are jobs that in Singapore, a lot of it is foreign labor, right? Because under employment passes and S passes, which are local visas. And so for their perspective, this is not creating local jobs, right? Which is something they're thinking about the political dimensions as well.

Jeremy Au: So I think data centers would not be an upcoming approach for the Singapore government because using up lots of land, using up lots of power, and using up lots of foreign worker quota for the blue-collar jobs would be quite difficult to sell politically in Singapore, which is, I think, a natural dynamic.

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah. I think it's Thailand and Malaysia that have been at the forefront, at least in this region, with a lot of these data center buildouts. So yeah, we'll see how that plays out.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. I think it's also to do with the political stability as well, I would say relatively, if Malaysia and Thailand within Southeast Asia as well.

Jeremy Au: I think it's interesting to see here about the hyperscalers as well. I didn't notice that, but I think once you said it out loud, it became quite true, which is that I think it's a lot of the Chinese building out the hyperscalers. When you say that, yeah, it kind of clicks for them.

Jeremy Au: It's nearby for them, it's easy for them to travel to, and it's politically neutral for them to be able to build those data centers as well, whereas they can't really build in America, obviously because of geopolitical tension. I do know that they're trying to build a little bit in the Middle East as well, but it's also not a straightforward path for them as well.

Wing Vasiksiri: Yeah, so I think we're seeing a lot of boom from the Chinese hyperscalers. Almost all the buildout in Malaysia I think has been to serve them, right? We'll see the US labs end up taking some of these buildouts as well, yeah.

Jeremy Au: On that note, I think it's a good time to wrap up, and I'll see you next time.

Wing Vasiksiri: Awesome. Thanks Jeremy for having me on.

Selling My Company Taught Me More Than Building It | Ajay Bulusu - E731

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 05:26:11 +0800

"Trust me, it is not easy to sell a company. The number of things I have learned selling my company is more than building my company, actually, because there are so many things and 99% it will fail. The odds are heavily stacked against you in M&A. But if you're stuck in that thing that, 'Oh, I've not even made personally 5 million, why should I sell my company?' Then you will never sell your company." - Ajay Bulusu

"The way we explain it... is genetics is hardware. You cannot change it. Epigenetic is software, like where you live, what you breathe, what you eat. Do you exercise or not? That's the changeable factor. Biomarkers are changeable, but you cannot change the fact that you have a predisposition condition to obesity as an example." - Ajay Bulusu

"In India, the quality of supplementation is not like Singapore. Ingredient quality is not really transparent... Anything Singapore is trustworthy. That's the reason why we built all this in Singapore. We have not built any of this outside. It is made in Kaki Bukit here." - Ajay Bulusu

Ajay Bulusu sold NextBillion.ai after a two-year process, and his verdict on cross-border M&A is blunt: 99% of attempts fail, and the founders who never sell are usually stopped by greed rather than by the market. He tells Jeremy Au why 2021 SaaS valuations stopped being fundable the moment ChatGPT arrived, why he picked a number before he started and walked the day he hit it, and why age not coming back mattered more than the last dollar. Then he explains why he started again immediately. After losing his father to a side effect of his cancer treatment, and his mother to a stage four diagnosis a colonoscopy would have caught, he spent eighteen months on his own money building what became 150, a precision health company that reads epigenetics, gut and blood to tell you how each of your organs is ageing.

Ajay Bulusu is a technologist, entrepreneur, and founder building at the intersection of artificial intelligence, data, and human health. He is the Co-founder of 150, a next-generation human health and longevity company building an intelligence layer for health — bringing together diagnostics, biomarkers, wearable data, nutrition, and AI to help people predict, prevent, and optimize their health over a lifetime.

Prior to 150, Ajay was the Founder and CEO of NextBillion.ai, a Singapore-based deep-tech company pioneering AI-powered mapping, spatial data, and routing infrastructure for global enterprises. The company was acquired by Velocitor Solutions in 2025. Earlier, Ajay was a founding leader of the Geo organization at Grab and held leadership roles at Google, Indeed, and American Express. Having built technology and companies across Asia, Europe, and North America, Ajay brings a global perspective to building ambitious, category-defining businesses and applying technology to some of the world's most complex problems.

Ajay’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajaybulusu

150: https://150.fit

00:00 Introduction

01:13 From Hyderabad to Google, Grab and NextBillion.ai

03:20 Deciding to sell: the SaaS peak and ChatGPT

04:42 Why 99% of M&A fails

06:44 Losing his father, and his mother's diagnosis

09:12 Why the company is called 150

10:45 Doctor 3.0 and the WhatsApp agent

12:39 Precision medicine, not longevity

16:59 Who buys preventive health, and does insurance pay

22:38 The real barrier is the mind, not the money

28:52 Five doctors per patient, and India's specialist gap

32:15 Supplements and the anti-anxiety band

38:48 Men, women, hormones and taboos

40:48 What being brave means

Keywords: Precision Medicine, Startup Acquisition, Southeast Asia Startups, Preventive Healthcare, Hyper-personalized Medicine, AI in Healthcare, Genomics and Epigenetics, Wearable Health Tech

AI Has Changed The Way We Create, Consume And Value Content | Adriel Yong - E730

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:43:31 +0800

"Just like how Netflix once said that their biggest competitor is sleep, I think the biggest competitor to content is real life." - Jeremy Au

"AI content will accelerate purchases of things and places, but not people. Search engines effectively did the same thing—made finding places, flights, and websites so much faster—but finding people still relies heavily on social networks and word of mouth." - Jeremy Au

"When you look at the feeds of ChatGPT or Claude, the whole SEO/GEO market is booming now because everyone is trying to figure out how to make their brand and name come up in AI engine searches and capture a large share of voice." - Adriel Yong

Adriel Yong is the Co-Founder and COO of Clouted, the AI-native clipping and distribution company that turns long-form content into short video and routes it to the right platform and audience. Clouted has raised a $7M seed led by Slow Ventures, following a $4.45M round backed by a16z SPEEDRUN and AppWorks under its former name, Clout Kitchen. The team also produces &FRIENDS, one of the largest dance and pop-culture festivals in the Philippines.

Adriel joined Jeremy Au to work through what AI has done to media. Five or six years ago, making this podcast meant cutting every "um" by hand and building cover art from scratch, and Adriel's estimate is that roughly 80% of that work no longer exists. What moved into the space are faceless pages and fully synthetic creators, plus a third feed inside the AI apps competing for the ten hours a day. Social was meant to be the escape from bought media and is now entirely paid, and the answer engines are going the same way: people used to shape human perception, now they shape the model's. Which leaves the question of what still competes, and Jeremy's answer is not sleep, the way Netflix once put it, but real life. They work through the evidence and the strategy underneath it, from the K-shaped cinema rebound to Costco's private-label discipline mapped onto AI marketplaces, and close on the framework that AI shortens the route to purchase for things and places, but not for people.

00:00 Introduction

00:55 How AI collapsed the production workflow

03:28 Faceless creators and AI-generated creators

05:16 The ChatGPT feed vs the Instagram feed

07:12 Social is now paid social, and the GEO scramble

09:25 Content's biggest competitor is real life

10:37 IRL experiences as a go-to-market motion

12:09 The K-shaped cinema economy: IMAX, the Sphere, F1

14:15 Do you need more AI tools than ChatGPT?

15:17 The atom of work AI actually replaces

16:22 Free time, the senses, and omnichannel shopping

18:33 Costco, Kirkland, and AI marketplaces

19:59 A24's barbell versus the blockbuster bet

22:19 Fandom, IP, and imaginary characters

24:27 Know the real estate you are standing on

25:39 How media consumption habits changed

27:31 Why podcasts survive: edutainment and opinion

30:14 What we consumed in the last 24 hours

32:14 The insurance arbitrage AI found

34:08 Toilets, Wirecutter, and shopping with AI

36:02 Things and places, yes. People, no.

38:55 Word of mouth is still the filter for people

40:44 The Comfort Crisis and rethinking the cinema

Keywords: AI Content Creation, Generative AI Media, SEO and GEO Strategies, IRL Experiences, AI E-commerce, Podcast Automation, Future of Cinemas, Southeast Asia Tech

What 500 Harvard Case Studies Actually Do To Your Brain - E729

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 05:00:06 +0800

"A great business leader is somebody who knows where to go, is able to prioritize and prune away the things not to do, and inspires people and capital to make things happen." - Jeremy Au

"You don't need a Harvard MBA to succeed in leadership or business because you can unbundle it and construct it yourself. You can ask your pocket AI, like Gemini or Claude, and get an on-demand, Harvard MBA-level professor teaching you at any time." - Jeremy Au

"There are different levels of trust, and so your style of leadership is totally different. When your GDP per capita is at $100,000 per person, like in Singapore, those norms are very different from emerging economies like the Philippines and Indonesia, where it is around $5,000 to $25,000, and what works is family, tribes, and villages." - Jeremy Au

Jeremy Au takes the hot seat in a reverse interview hosted by Edric Poon to unpack the true value of a Harvard MBA and the fundamental principles of business leadership. Jeremy unbundles the prestigious degree into three core components: practical utility and learning, building a long-term global network, and acquiring a costly social credential. He shares actionable frameworks for effective leadership, emphasizing the necessity of decisive strategy, ruthless prioritization, and the ability to mobilize resources and capital. The conversation also explores the psychology behind the Harvard case study method, how pattern-matching helps leaders spot corporate fraud, and the harsh, irreversible realities of founder burnout. Finally, Jeremy contrasts Western and Asian leadership styles, explaining how regional GDP per capita and Wall Street’s shareholder supremacy dictate corporate culture across the globe.

0:00 500 case studies, and what they're actually for

0:52 Introduction: Jeremy in the hot seat

1:43 What a Harvard MBA is actually for

5:01 The half-million-dollar signal

6:38 How to unbundle all three yourself

9:17 Decide, prune, mobilise

10:43 Atari, Nokia, and BlackBerry's own prototype

14:24 Manager versus leader

16:15 The campfire, and who walks into the dark

21:00 Authenticity is not permission to be your worst self

22:59 The case method and the supercomputer brain

26:21 Enron, and pattern matching fraud

29:59 The mistake Jeremy made twice

35:27 Two bad nights of sleep is two drinks

37:34 So what is Asian leadership?

39:12 GDP per capita, and where trust lives

44:49 Wall Street versus everybody else

50:52 Community over the individual

54:08 The MBA in your pocket

Keywords: Harvard MBA, Business Leadership, Asian Leadership, Corporate Strategy, Founder Burnout, Case Study Method, Southeast Asia Business

Join Now

The Truth About China's Competitive Advantage - E728

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 08:06:59 +0800

"If you bring the whole set of playbooks in from China here, it will not work, because that's gonna frustrate you, that's gonna frustrate your local employees and your local partners, and that's not gonna get anywhere. ... When you come to this country, do not try to change how things are done here. Try to change yourself." - Jianggan Li

"The engineering capabilities of the hardware, dexterous hands and so on, they have far outpaced software. ... So when you are innovating on hardware and the software is not catching up, that gap actually causes a lot of anxiety." - Jianggan Li

"People tend to look at the simplistic view: Chinese brands are coming, Chinese products are coming. But only when you are on the ground, when you talk to people in industries, when you see those facilities, you see the tremendous amount of competition amongst these players. For most industries, they're just competing against each other. You just happen to be brought into that war." - Jianggan Li

Jeremy Au and Jianggan Li returns for a China read: Europe's run on Chinese air conditioners, the humanoid robot games, Shein's discounted Hong Kong listing, and what breaks when Chinese firms go abroad. One thread runs through all four. China's advantage is not invention. Midea did not build a better aircon, it read Europe's building codes and engineered to them. Robot hardware raced ahead because engineers ground at it for a year while the software did not. Temu went from someone suggesting a Super Bowl ad to the ad being made in thirty days. The moat is iteration, and Chinese firms are mostly competing with each other, not with you. Also: why the robots still need a human holding a remote, why humanoids substitute for cheap labour instead of complementing it, and the advice one operator gives about expanding abroad, which is to stop trying to change how things are done there and change yourself instead.

00:00 Introduction

01:45 Europe's aircon panic, and the 12-hour drive

03:08 Designed to the regulation, not to be better

05:07 It's not China vs you. It's China vs China.

05:55 The World Humanoid Robot Games

06:52 Why the robots still need a human with a remote

08:20 Hardware outpaced software, and the data problem

11:19 Unitree's IPO, and a founder who wasn't smiling

11:53 Humanoid robots vs cheap human labour

15:02 Complement or substitute: where humanoids land first

16:43 Shein: $100B to $26B

19:25 Temu, de minimis, and the marketplace squeeze

20:43 The Super Bowl ad built in 30 days

23:12 Nobody writes the story of iterative engineering

25:41 Going global, and the driving seat problem

28:49 What to watch: the Xi-Trump meeting

Keywords: Cross-border E-commerce, Chinese Manufacturing Innovation, Humanoid Robotics AI, Global Supply Chain Strategy, Localizing Business Operations, Shein IPO, Temu Marketing Execution, Midea Air Conditioners, De Minimis Tax Regulations, Iterative Engineering, Tech Expansion

Join Now

Itamar Novick: Where AI Replaces People, and Where It Does Not - E727

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 05:00:11 +0800

"Once in your life, you gotta swing for the fences. You gotta go all in. And if it works, you've obviously completely changed your life, and everybody around you. And if it doesn't, you're gonna regret for the rest of your life that you didn't take that big swing." - Itamar Novick, Founder and General Partner of Recursive Ventures

"Your AI is only as good as the underlying data that was used to train it. We built a thesis around moat through data and how application layer AI companies are not gonna be commoditized because they have defensibility built from a data moat." - Itamar Novick, Founder and General Partner of Recursive Ventures

"Instead of competing with them, we decided to focus on being the first and best inception check in AI companies in Silicon Valley. It's best to be one of the best in what you do than try to lag behind the best in something that you're not gonna be able to win in." - Itamar Novick, Founder and General Partner of Recursive Ventures

"How are you going to stay ahead of the competition in a world where two kids can vibe code a clone of your product over a weekend?"

Itamar Novick is a solo capitalist and the founder of Recursive Ventures, a pre-seed fund focused on AI and emerging tech startups. He has supported over 50 successful startups, including Deel, Honeybook, Placer, Credible (IPO), MileIQ (acquired by Microsoft), Automatic Labs (acquired by SiriusXM), Tile (acquired by Life360), SafeGraph, and Armory. He's been recognized by Business Insider as a Top 100 global seed investor (#17 in 2021, #29 in 2022). As an operator, he helped take Life360 from Seed to IPO, scaling the business to over $250m in revenue.

Itamar joined Jeremy Au to talk about what still counts as a moat in AI, why proprietary data is only the starting point, and where AI actually replaces people instead of augmenting them. He also looks back on twelve years at Life360, joining as VP of Product and leaving as the CFO who took the company public, and why he now writes the first check at pre-seed.

Itamar’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamarnovick/

Recursive Ventures: https://www.recursiveventures.com/

00:00 Introduction

02:01 Coding at 11, and the army cybercrime unit

04:12 Product management before Agile

06:00 Gigya, and meeting Zuckerberg in 2008

07:27 Morgenthaler Ventures and the first inning of SaaS

08:37 Twelve years at Life360, VP Product to CFO

11:36 "Kids are never gonna have smartphones"

13:53 Raising $500M and 11 corporate VCs

16:31 The VC story problem, and which VCs got it

22:26 Going full time into venture, and why pre-seed

27:48 How Itamar picks: team, TAM, and moat

30:06 Data as the moat, and the customer data flywheel

35:48 Where AI can and can't replace humans

40:33 Taking the one big swing

Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Pre-Seed Venture Capital, Silicon Valley Startups, Data Moats, Generative AI, Startup Fundraising, Product Management, Founder Advice

$70,000 Per Child: What Singapore's New Family Package Actually Changes - E726

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 08:29:47 +0800

"$70,000 for somebody who is of high income is a nice bonus or sweetener. But I think for somebody who earns $$70,000 or maybe less, this is equivalent to one year's compensation, or two years, or even three years' compensation. And I think it's really quite game changing as a source of relief." - Jeremy Au

"I would say that the founder quality is on average at an all-time high because obviously those who are still plugging along are still committed, still pushing. The AI wave has really superpowered our ability to be creative and to also execute, and the problems that are in Southeast Asia... are still there. It's just a great time to attack those problems, but the funding to support them is really at an all-time low." - Jeremy Au

"I'm sort of of the mind that I think Singapore and Southeast Asia would be better off with 50 companies that were worth $50 million each instead of trying to swing and miss to have one unicorn." - Shiyan Koh

Jeremy Au and Shiyan Koh take apart Singapore's new SG Child Support Package: almost $70,000 per Singaporean child paid out over 17 years, more childcare leave, and preschool fees heading towards $150 a month.

Jeremy on why the number only means anything relative to income. Shiyan on why the preschool change matters most. Whether the extra leave actually gets taken, or quietly costs you at work. And the change nobody articulated: every Singapore Citizen child now qualifies regardless of their parents' marital status.

Plus nuclear, transhipment, and their wishlist for the next budget.

00:00 Introduction

01:33 The $70,000 package, explained

03:26 Why preschool is the biggest piece

06:26 Cash today, or shares that compound to 18

09:03 Sweeping unused payouts into a nest egg

12:15 A voucher society, or a shareholder society

13:38 The pushback: SMEs and the colleagues covering

16:49 Reservist, and the cost of stepping away

21:38 Who qualifies: citizen children, foreign parents

25:34 What about single parents?

29:45 Nuclear: island mergers and a China pact

32:41 Vietnam, transhipment, Dockware and Portcast

36:20 Wishlist for the next budget

39:24 Fifty $50M companies beat one unicorn

43:10 Outro

Keywords: Singapore budget, total fertility rate, parental leave, startup ecosystem, NRF 2.0, venture capital, early-stage funding, Southeast Asia tech, AI startups, supply chain logistics, nuclear energy Singapore,

The Next 3 Years Will Deliver 30 Years of Innovation | John Lin

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 04:27:17 +0800

"I read a stat recently that said only 1 in 5 to 1 in 7 companies actually reach that Series A mark from the seed round. The expectation is that instead of reaching $800,000 in revenue, you're now going to be reaching $3 million in revenue within the first year or two. It's quite a hard area to hit. There is a really big bifurcation in venture capital right now." - John Lin, Founder of Linea Ventures

"The toughest thing about AI is the pace at which things are changing; companies are developing so fast that there is not as much defensibility as there once was. You have to be really careful about where you invest and make sure that you are constantly innovating to create some level of customer lock-in or data generation that establishes long-term moats." - John Lin, Founder of Linea Ventures

"In the last four to five years, more money has shifted towards the pre-IPO market, and today, companies worth over $1 billion make up about two-thirds of the funding rounds. However, if you are a normal founder who wants to go and raise $1 billion, it is actually quite difficult. You need to be one of the top AI researchers or AI founders in the space in order to go and raise such a round." - John Lin, Founder of Linea Ventures

The next three years should deliver what the last thirty did. That is John Lin's argument, and it is why he thinks the ground under founders has shifted.

John Lin is the Founding Partner of Linea Ventures. Previously, he helped start F-Prime Capital's west coast tech practice and was also a Principal at Trinity Ventures. He has invested in 50+ companies, including Numeral, Squire, Branch, Side, Weights & Biases, Triumph and You.com. Prior to that he led Product and Engineering at Roomi and worked at McKinsey and Yelp. John graduated with degrees in Business and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.

He joined Jeremy Au on why AI coding has made good engineers five to ten times more effective, why everything in AI is both overhyped and undervalued at once, and where value still accrues now that a model costing billions to train can be built for tens of millions.

Then the part most founders have not priced in. A Series A used to mean $800K in revenue and a $40M round. Today it is closer to $3M and $70M, and by John's reading only 1 in 5 to 1 in 7 companies make the jump. Round to round survival has fallen from about half to somewhere between a third and a sixth.

Plus how he picks: a $1B market, a path to 25x, companies between $1M and $10M in revenue, and the one question every founder has to answer.

John’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-lin-39a18921/

Linea Ventures: https://lineavc.com/

00:00 Introduction
00:43 From Berkeley to Trinity, F-Prime, and Linea Ventures
02:59 Is AI huge, or overhyped?
04:34 AI coding, and 30 years of innovation in 3
07:44 Where the economic value of AI will accrue
11:26 Overhyped, undervalued, and no longer defensible
13:10 How John picks: market, founder, inflection point
15:12 Case study: Numeral and US sales tax filing
18:08 Red flags, and how to validate an AI idea fast
20:26 Are billion dollar seed rounds the new normal?
24:41 A tale of two cities in startup funding
26:50 Only 1 in 5 to 1 in 7 reach Series A
30:04 Personal investing versus investing out of a fund
35:56 What a decade of reps teaches you

Keywords: AI Investing, Venture Capital, Seed Funding, Series A Crunch, AI Infrastructure, Startup Defensibility, Angel Investing, Silicon Valley Tech, Founder Advice, SaaS and Fintech

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU1-wIvarVk

The Innovation Playbook of 3 Southeast Asian Founders - E724

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:24:14 +0800

"One thing that Peter Thiel said which shook me a bit was that he mentioned that Asia doesn't need innovation, Asia just needs execution because it's so far behind. Which is annoying, but factually accurate in 2014. There was a lot of room to catch up, so following the whole motivation of trying to do something for Southeast Asia and pay back, we thought, 'Okay, let's see what can we do for the region.' We looked at the most innovative companies in the US... and we used that as a starting base and modified it for Southeast Asia."

"If you bought a regular smart lock that is Wi-Fi connected, a lot of times when you want to set a temporary code for a guest to check in, the Wi-Fi might not hit the lock. It might not work. In our initial first couple of hundred of locks that we shipped out to Airbnb hosts, honestly, more than half of them didn't work just because of Wi-Fi problems. So what we needed to do was to then go back to the drawing board and say, 'How do we make a non-connected smart lock for this market?'"

"Starting a startup here is hard. The Philippines, for the average small to medium-sized business... it's just, in general, not an easy place to do business. Getting business permits is multiple windows and lines of paperwork, and there's a significant trust factor gap here in the Philippines. You gotta be committed and be there regardless of the money that you make from someone. That's where trust is built. I'm gonna help you, Mr. and Mrs. Business Owner, regardless of the amount of money, I am so committed to solving your problem and goal that I'm gonna help you until the end."

Where does innovation in Southeast Asia actually start?

Not in a lab. In this compilation from the BRAVE archive: a lock that took eleven hours to install, a Peter Thiel put-down at Harvard, and customers using a real estate website to sell food.

Anthony Chow built Igloo's first smart lock from parts bought in China, watched the first shipments fail, then invented an offline PIN lock (Google Authenticator, but for doors) because vacation rentals have no Wi-Fi. That invention won the Airbnb partnership and now runs more than half of Australia's tennis courts, fully unmanned.

Kelvin Teo heard Peter Thiel tell a Harvard room that Asia doesn't need innovation, just execution ("annoying, but factually accurate") and turned it into the method behind Funding Societies, which underwrites SMEs by asking for more documents than the banks, because its real competitor is the money lender charging 48% a year.

Dennis Velasco burned $150K on a broken real estate market before his users showed him the pivot, launched Prosperna three months before the 2020 lockdown, and argues that none of it counts until small businesses trust you to stay.

Watch the full episodes:

E676 Anthony Chow, Co-Founder & CEO of Igloo

E678 Kelvin Teo, Co-Founder & Group CEO of Funding Societies | Modalku

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob9Wq9DMpko

E692 Dennis Velasco, Founder & CEO of Prosperna

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVw0B8m3eN4

Keywords: Southeast Asia Startups, SME Lending Southeast Asia, E-commerce Philippines, Fintech Innovation, Proptech and Real Estate Tech, Hardware Startups

https://youtu.be/MhVfGQ8iI7I

Leadership Lessons From Best-Selling Authors - E723

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 09:10:21 +0800

"The value, the assets that these companies create, are not just dollars and products and customers and employees and contracts. There's also something else. I call it trustworthiness. It's the most underrated asset in the world today."

"Leaders have no choice in whether they impact others, but they have a huge choice in whether the impact is positive or negative. We will either inspire or we will infuriate."

"One thing that comes up a little bit more in Asia is this idea of hypocrisy. This idea that it's really important for someone to act consistently with the words that they espouse. One of the most powerful things that we can do as leaders is present ourselves as actually consistent with our vision."

An offhand compliment from a leader becomes praise. An offhand insult becomes a verdict. Nobody in a leadership role gets to opt out of that.

Three conversations from the BRAVE archive with three best-selling authors, and one thing they share: all three went and checked what everybody already assumes about leadership, and found the data pointing the other way.

Adam Galinsky is a professor at Columbia Business School, currently spending a year at NUS Business School in Singapore, and the author of Inspire. He explains the leader amplification effect, why the people we call great are characterised on two dimensions and excused on the third, and what he found after asking people on every continent to describe an inspiring leader and an infuriating one. The answers were the same everywhere, with one variation: hypocrisy comes up more in Asia.

Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup. Fifteen years on, he went back to the founders who used it and found many of them miserable, and many of them no longer recognising the company they had built. His argument: we taught people how to build and never how to protect it, trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in business, and since 2008 the companies rated bad on governance have outperformed the ones rated good.

Nir Eyal has written three books on why we do what we do. He starts with the most uncomfortable pattern in his own office hours, which is people waiting months for a call to report that the step they never did didn't work. Then the mechanism: what stands between us and what we want is not information, motivation is a triangle of behaviour, benefit and belief, and we quit because we have never separated pain from suffering.

People, then institutions, then yourself.

Watch the full episodes:

E709 Adam Galinsky, Professor at Columbia Business School

E700 Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup

https://youtu.be/8wihh7uYpRo

E706 Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked, Indistractable and Beyond Belief

https://youtu.be/4eM2OOMyruA

00:00 Three findings that contradict what you believe

00:41 Adam Galinsky: you don't get to choose your impact

03:01 The Steve Jobs defence, and Mother Teresa

05:10 The captain of Flight 1380

07:07 Inspiring vs infuriating, and what Asia judges differently

08:57 Eric Ries: they built the companies and ended up miserable

12:09 Since 2008, bad governance has beaten good

16:31 Costco, Sol Price, and the locks that were changed

20:19 Nir Eyal: they read the book, they didn't do the book

23:48 Why visualising success backfires

26:52 Pain is not suffering

30:35 The thing nobody checked

Keywords: Startup leadership myths, Trustworthiness in business, Mental contrasting, Southeast Asia tech founders

The New Architecture Of Tech: Seat Pricing, Orbital Rings & Superstar Employees - E722

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 05:00:00 +0800

"We need to think about what the job is, what outcome we want, and how to achieve that outcome using AI to the maximum. Then, we redesign the job towards that instead of just filling traditional headcount. Ultimately, if you're not efficient, the market is going to punish you." - Ori Sasson - Jeremy Au

"Current SaaS pricing lacks accountability. We are entering an era where software actually produces outcomes. If we're asking people to automate real jobs, we as executives should have the courage to reflect that in our pricing and charge per outcome." - Andres Klaric - Jeremy Au

"When you look at the Philippines and Indonesia, there are 10,000 to 15,000 islands. Today, telcos are building undersea cables to every island, which is very expensive. With our orbital laser network, every single island in Southeast Asia can have internet as fast as Singapore at a fraction of the cost." - Rohit Jha - Jeremy Au

Software has been sold by the seat for twenty years. Nobody has ever had to promise it worked.

Three conversations from the BRAVE archive, on what changes when software starts getting paid for outcomes instead of access, and what has to be rebuilt underneath it.

Andres Klaric spent a decade in private equity watching SaaS scale before co-founding Fuse, an enterprise lending platform. His argument: current pricing has no accountability in it, and the profit pool should sit in the outcome rather than the operating system. Rohit Jha co-founded Transcelestial in Singapore to move data over laser links. When the profitable telco side of the business was going well and his own board told him to drop space, he and his co-founder quietly moved capital into it anyway. Ori Sasson, Founder of S2T.AI, on the barbell splitting the tech workforce, and why employers now have to design jobs around outcomes rather than hours.

Watch the full episodes:

E710 Andres Klaric, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Fuse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aHsI3gj1c0

E698 Rohit Jha, Co-Founder & CEO of Transcelestial

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoQXHJnLV04

E702 Ori Sasson, Founder of S2T.AI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axxDAQvqtF0

00:00 The "what" of AI, and the "how"

00:26 Andres Klaric: "We're at peak SaaS"

04:03 What an outcome actually means in lending

09:57 Rohit Jha: the backbone outcomes need

12:09 A ring of satellites to replace undersea cables

16:43 The space pivot the board said no to

18:03 Ori Sasson: redesign the job around the outcome

20:15 The Hollywoodization of the workplace

23:51 The barbell: superstars and everyone else

27:25 The new architecture of tech

Keywords: Southeast Asia Tech, AI Productivity, Future of Work, Outcome-Based SaaS, SpaceTech Startups, Internet Infrastructure, SaaS Pricing Models, Orbital Lasers, Venture Capital

AI in Healthcare: Will it work for you? - E721

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:02:10 +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 forces doctors to constantly triage their own time."

"There's this phenomenon called 'pajama time.' It's doctors having to catch up on administrative work at home in their pajamas because it's just too much. It takes up about 40% of their time, leading to burnout and causing some doctors to consider leaving the practice."

"Because of our model focus at Heidi, we are actually quite strong in tricky visits involving Malay, Hokkien, English, and a bit of Singlish. We naturally gravitate towards markets in Asia where out-of-the-box LLMs do not perform as well due to non-Latin character sets."

What is technology actually doing to healthcare, and what can it still not touch?

Four conversations from the BRAVE archive, on the gap between what medicine can do and what a doctor actually has time to do.

Dr. Thomas Kelly walked away from vascular surgery to build Heidi, an AI scribe and care partner now used by clinicians in more than 100 countries. He argues a doctor's paperwork is a patient safety problem, not an inconvenience. Jay Fajardo started over as a solo founder at 58 to attack "pajama time," the 40% of a doctor's day that disappears into admin. Ed Booty spent two years learning that a pure-play tech platform will not reach a rural village, and rebuilt reach52 around community health workers instead. Joshua Wang works upstream, on why we keep catching cancer too late to treat it well. And Dr. Tom closes on what it actually takes to make medical AI work across Malay, Hokkien, English and Singlish.

Watch the full episodes:

E716 Dr. Thomas Kelly, Co-Founder & CEO of Heidi Health

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA5jzWf4V\_Y

E694 Jay Fajardo, Founder & CEO of BetterClinic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIOCY\_LtObM

E502 Edward Booty, Founder & CEO of reach52

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pE0LFpCp\_Q

E628 Joshua Wang, Founder & CEO of Verimmune

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roXPyXASiRk

00:00 Intro

00:40 Dr. Thomas Kelly: paperwork is stealing clinical capacity

04:47 Jay Fajardo: pajama time and the 40% problem

09:59 Edward Booty: why pure-play tech doesn't reach rural patients

14:32 Joshua Wang: we catch cancer far too late

19:53 Dr. Thomas Kelly: Malay, Hokkien and Singlish, and the cost of localisation

25:19 Outro

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