The Asia Tech Podcast had the opportunity to speak with Rishi Ramchandani, the Founder of Cafe Cash Flow and its Chief Financial Coach.  Rishi was born and raised in Hong Kong, was educated at the university level in the United States and got a job at Merrill Lynch upon graduation in 2007…right before the explosion […]

Asia Tech Podcast

Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 59 – Rishi Ramchandani – Cafe Cash Flow – Like a Personal Trainer for Your Money

Anthony Moorhouse, a co-Founder of EarthTech Ventures, started his career in the Special Forces of the Australian Army as a counter-terrorism commando.  A frequent traveler, Anthony found himself at an airport and picked up a book by Richard Branson that talked about entrepreneurship…a word with which Anthony was unfamiliar at the time. Anthony became obsessed […]

Social Innovation Podcast – Episode 19 – Anthony Moorhouse – co-Founder EarthTech Ventures – Creating Pathways to Scale Up Those Ideas

Michael Waitze spoke to Matas Danielevicius, a co-Founder of Gaorai, a Partner at WhatNot Innovation Studio, and a marketing manager at the KX Knowledge Exchange.  Matas has a very interesting background, part of the high caliber Lithuanian team that founded and runs WhatNot.  (There is a good story in the first third of this episode as to how they came up with the name…Matas tells the story better than I ever could.)  After high school Matas took a traditional path, studying business development and management in Lithuania, but he soon realized that he longed for more. He picked himself up, went to the UK and studied acting, graduating with a degree in drama…something I wish I had done.  I forgot to mention that in his spare time (How could he possibly have spare time?!), Matas is also an actor.  He is currently working with the Culture Collective Studio on a production of “A Streetcar Named Desire”.  We had a fascinating conversation on how show production, acting and getting in and out of character is more related to startup and venture building than one might imagine. Matas combines these things rather seamlessly. I was curious to find out why three Lithuanian venture building partners ended up in Thailand…and frankly, it was really straightforward.  They were traveling through Bangkok on their way to Sri Lanka (Just imagine what might have been.) and intended to stay for only a couple of days.  A big project on which they were working became more urgent and they had to stay in Bangkok to finish it.  The rest, as they say, is history. Finally, we talked about Gaorai, “Gaorai is an agri-tech platform connecting farmers to freelance agri-drone pilots. We are improving precision application and sustainability of crop protection products in Thailand and the region. Our goal is to turn Gaorai to a day-to-day farm service, e-commerce, distribution and intelligence platform.”

Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 58 – Matas Danielevicius – co-Founder Gaorai – You Have WhatNot In Your Pocket

I have yet to meet Colin Hodge in person, but after a few conversations spanning the globe, I feel like I have. I think it says more about him than it does about me. He was very generous with his time and thoughts and we had a really interesting conversation. Colin has learned a ton […]

Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 57 – Colin Hodge – The Global Growth Expert – I’ve Been on Quite the Journey

I had the opportunity to speak with Nick Kengmana in the studio at True Digital Park.  Nick is a co-Founder of Go Beyond and is committed to building a community of purpose-driven entrepreneurs and helping them change the world. We had a pretty amazing conversation ranging from the impact of mechanized farming on society to the evolution of capitalism, with a bit of religion sprinkled in.  We also discussed how technology companies employ strategies to encourage dopamine hits and the differences between it and serotonin, which is sometimes called the ‘happy chemical’. We touched on the topic of the ‘scarcity mindset’ and how Nick believes that this is part of the root of many of society’s problems.  Nick believes that, “Humanity, as a species, now has the capability to provide all the resources necessary for every human on earth to have a high quality of life. Scarcity has been a key driver of progress for the human species, but we’ve reached a point where there no longer is true scarcity in our ability to provide enough for every human to have food, shelter, education, healthcare, opportunity, safety, etc. Now scarcity and a scarcity mindset are no longer necessary and detrimental to the species, holding us collectively back and causing suffering around the world."

Social Innovation Podcast – Episode 18 – Nick Kengmana – Go Beyond – Infinite Growth In a Finite World is Unsustainable

The Asia Tech Podcast recently had the pleasure to speak with Damien Kerneis in the studio at True Digital Park.  Damien is the Founder and CEO of SiamCarDeal.  Damien is decidedly not new to Thailand.  He was originally sent to Bangkok 15 years ago by the company that employed him in Paris.  His job when he arrived in Thailand was to provide supply chain and logistics services to clients in the automotive space.  Damien was helping his clients make and take deliveries to the auto dealers and this ended up being a proper segue into his new business. Damien was always on the lookout for an avenue to start his own business.  While still working at the logistics and supply-chain company, Damien needed to buy a car.  He noted that the experience of trying to buy a car was horrible.  He started doing some research on what the car buying process was like in more mature markets like France, the United States, and Australia.  What he found during his research was that in the more mature markets, there were robust and sophisticated platforms that made the process so much easier for both consumers and the dealerships that sold them.  So…in his words, “I just decided to launch it."  This was the beginning of SiamCarDeal, back at the end of 2015. The original idea was to build a marketplace that was essentially a business to consumer platform…e-commerce for cars.  The SiamCarDeal team quickly realized that there was also a need for the manufacturers and dealers to manage the prospects and leads from the marketplace platforms that SiamCarDeal and others had built.  They, therefore, started building a suite of software tools that could help the dealers do just that.  This was the beginning of their B2B business.  Building these tools ends up being a quite complex endeavor.  This move into the enterprise space took a lot of time and created a whole host of new learnings for the team.  Integration issues, understanding the proper user experience at a myriad of dealerships and selling to businesses that were not used to the digital marketing arena created its own challenges as well.

Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 56 – Damien Kerneis – co-Founder SiamCarDeal – Click a Button and Say “Poof”

I had the complete pleasure of sitting down with Kastytis Kemezys at the recording studio at True Digital Park.  Kas, originally from Lithuania, is a Principal and co-Founder at Whatnot Innovation Studio.  Whatnot is a Startup Studio that provides corporate venturing tools to organizations across Southeast Asia to enable innovation.  Together with these large organizations, Whatnot invests in and builds the next generation of startups. Kas has always been an entrepreneur and venture builder.  He tried ‘corporate life’ for a very short period of time, but realized when he was 19 years old that he just had to build something for himself.  Frankly, he was not even sure at first what that was going to be, but he knew he wanted to build his own businesses.  So he and a friend started a business called ‘My Drink Beverages’ which they ran for 6 years.  It was an incredible learning experience across the board, including learning how to manage teams and how to get an idea to reality.  This was venture building for the food space.  When I asked Kas if he had any experience in the food business prior to starting this he said, “Well, I used to eat…".  Clearly a guy with a great sense of humor.  You have to listen to Kas tell his story about importing a drink into Lithuania from Las Vegas called ‘Cocaine Energy Drink‘.  You can only begin to imagine the hilarity of trying to import this and get it through customs… We had a very interesting conversation about the culture of innovation and the stress that surrounds it.  Kas was never good at dealing with authority.  He always wanted to do things his way first and then learn.  Operating this way made it really necessary to get used to the stress of failure, which more often than not is the outcome of trying to build something from scratch.  We both agreed that you have to be a bit weird and crazy to enter the world of innovation because you are constantly submitting yourself to failure.  There is so much more in this episode.  Listen and enjoy!

Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 55 – Kastytis Kemezys – Whatnot Innovation Studio – You Need to Be a Bit Weird and Crazy

This was a special episode of the Asia Tech Podcast.  We brought together three gentlemen that have decades of combined experience living and working in Japan.  Specifically, I was joined by Maurizio Raffone – Founder and CEO at Finetiq Limited, Jeff Wentworth – co-Founder of Curvegrid, and Lars Schouw – Cheif Data Officer at SBI […]

Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 54 – Maurizio Raffone, Jeff Wentworth and Lars Schouw – Japan RoundTable – That’s Just the Game You Need to Be In

I caught up with Akemi Tsunagawa, the Founder and CEO of Bespoke, a real-time engagement platform for tourists and the tourism industry.  When we last spoke in September 2018, the team had no intention of expanding to the United States.  However, after being introduced to Gabe Klein, now and advisor to Bespoke, all of that changed.  Notably, Gabe has been the Director of the District of Columbia Department of Transportation and the Commissioner of Transportation for the City of Chicago.  These roles, along with myriad other experiences, gives him connectivity to United States based clients that would not have been possible previously. Making further progress and seeing strong interest from US potentials, led Bespoke to open an office in San Francisco and set up a proper entity to operate in the United States.  Akemi had been following the career of Tobias Wessels for a while now.  She noted jokingly that she had been ‘cyber-stalking’ him since they met at a conference almost three years ago…and when the timing was finally right, she offered him the role of running Bespoke’s international business and Akemi was happy when he accepted.  Tobias also came with a great client list which is helping to accelerate the growth of Bespoke’s business. Akemi noted that even just a year ago, it was difficult to explain what a chatbot was.  Fast forward a year and the world has caught up to the notion of what a chatbot is and how they can be useful.  One of the places where the Japanese government is working with Bespoke is during crisis management.  This is a place where this type of engagement platform can be super useful. Bespoke’s growth has clearly entered a new phase, which means that the staff make-up has to change as well.  Akemi and I talked about how this growth requires a different mindset and skillset from her management team.  This is one of the new challenges that Akemi is encountering.

Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 53 – Akemi Tsunagawa – CEO of Bespoke – Now It’s About Scaling and Processes

I had a super conversation with Asheesh Chanda, the CEO and Founder of Kristal.AI. Asheesh has more than 15 years of experience in the financial industry, including 8 years at JP Morgan Chase heading South and South-East Asia. Prior to founding Kristal.AI, Asheesh was a portfolio manager at KrisCapital, a global macro hedge fund.  As he noted to me, a resume perfectly crafted to get into FinTech. I asked Asheesh what the most important trends were in the FinTech space in Southeast Asia.  Asheesh was very quick to answer.  In the last year, both Hong Kong and Singapore have allowed and approved applications for virtual banks.  During Asheesh’s career in the hedge fund world, there was the realization that the traditional financial sector catered to the already rich and helped them get richer.  He wanted to have a more significant impact on the financial lives of those that are not yet wealthy.  He was looking for a problem to solve and the idea of providing advice and an investment platform to the underserved using technology made the most sense. You have to listen to this entire conversation to understand how committed Ashes and his team are to the democratization of investing and financial services as a whole.  He is clear about the necessity to help those without a network, the knowledge or the bandwidth to grow their wealth by allowing them to use the platform for free.  He notes that if we can not solve this problem using technology, then what is the point?  Very powerful stuff… Asheesh also noted that the partnership of Apple with Goldman Sachs and the issuance of the Apple (credit) Card was significant.  I was not sure why this was so important until we came back to this at the end of our conversation.  The real competition is not between startup FinTechs and big, established financial institutions.  The real competition is between big tech companies and the incumbent financial services companies.  Fascinating…

Asian FinTech Podcast – Episode 10 – Asheesh Chanda – Founder & CEO Kristal.AI – The Markets and the World Has to Decide

Michael Waitze had a much-needed catch-up conversation with the CEO and Founder of Playbasis, Robert Zepeda.  The last time we spoke with Rob was more than a year and a half ago and a lot has changed since then.  One of the interesting things that Rob noted was that no two years are the same.  This means that last year’s revenues and growth may bear little resemblance to next year…and extrapolating forward is always hard to do. Rob founded Playbasis at the end of 2012 and back then it was a uniquely B2C business.  Back then, as well, the whole concept of gamification was essentially unknown in Southeast Asia.  I went back to one of Playbasis’ old pitch deck’s and found this, PlayBasis was a “gamification company that endeavored to ‘help large companies increase user engagement, retention and loyalty through data-driven game mechanics and behavioral triggers."  I asked him about this and his answer was insightful and filled with useful details, including connecting brands to gamers through meaningful rewards and turbo-charging the platform as a Games as a Service offering. Rob believes that business models must always be evolving.  While the core of the company is still gamification, his recent experience as a cohort in Plug and Play’s Batch 5 in Jakarta, Indonesia was eye-opening.  He was invited to participate because some of the Indonesian corporates were interested in learning more about Playbasis and potentially using gamification for employee engagement as well.  The entire experience, even for a guy that has been running his own company for more than six years, was more than worth it.  There was so much to unpack from this conversation about the Indonesian tech landscape, how corporates interact with startups there and the speed with which digitalization is occurring.

Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 52 – Robert Zepeda – CEO at Playbasis – Work Will Increasingly Look Like Games

I had a great conversation with Adrian Tan and Greg Tan Tze Kai to start SG Assist.  These are two guys that quit good-paying jobs to build SG Assist in response to a family medical problem that Adian Tan experience.  Greg comes from an Oil and Gas background while Adrian is a supply chain expert.  Although neither of them had any medical experience, after long chats in the canteen while they were performing reserve military service in Singapore, they realized that the problems that Adrian was experiencing were likely pervasive. If you listen to the two talk, they are passionate about helping people help each other, their families and their communities…and by employing technology to do so.  SG Assist’s vision “is to help save lives and build a culture of “kampong spirit" like the good ol’ days, when everyone in the community looked out for one another. Via our mobile app, we aim to provide you with peace of mind through our swift assistance with community volunteers. Without prompt and proper medical aid, your loved ones may be at a greater risk during a medical emergency. With our mobile app, we will help you locate a trained Kampong Hero to attend to your loved ones in your absence." This is a worthwhile vision, indeed.

Social Innovation Podcast – Episode 17 – Adrian Tan and Greg Tan Tze Kai – co-Founders SG Assist – It’s All About Keeping Calm

I spoke with Jed Ng, the Founder and Business Head of Rakuten RapidAPI.  Jed has had a very interesting career.  He has built a philosophy and methodology for effecting corporate entrepreneurship. This essentially means figuring out how to build and grow a significant new business line inside a well-resourced organization.  This not just zero to one stuff.  It requires a very interesting set of skills.  There are internal politics involved, storytelling to senior executives and Jed points out that selling to internal management can be very different than selling to external investors.  He had some very interesting insights on this topic. The meat of our conversation was on the development of the API ecosystem and the marketplace that is getting built around it.  Jed went back and discussed the founding of Twilio and added SendGrid and Stripe as other relevant data points.  Based on the cumulative valuation of these companies alone, one can make the case that the API ecosystem is huge.  Jed noted that a company called ProgrammableWeb had already created a phone book for APIs. The idea behind creating an API marketplace was multilayered.  Through our discussion, Jed established that APIs are valuable but that mere aggregation was not good enough.  Jed posits that potential purchasers of APIs need a place to test the services prior to buying and a central place to manage all of the associated admin. Listen to this entire episode to get a much better understanding of what is happening in the API market space.

Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 51 – Jed Ng – Founder Rakuten RapidAPI – The Really Exciting Stuff Exists Where Nobody Is Looking

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