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© 2022 Ventures in the East
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Asia is home to the world’s most competitive and vibrant business environment. Discover the companies that are forging a path to global leadership and how their strategies can make you a better investor and operator.
19 Episodes
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Our guests for this episode are Sungpah, co-founder and co-CEO, and Joo, Head of Global & Tutor at Ringle, a Korean edtech start-up. In this episode, Sungpah and Joo share how the team balances the needs of tutors and students and how Ringle weaves AI into its product and service roadmap.Ringle is offering a special promotion for listeners. Apply the referral code "global" for a $42 discount that can be used towards purchases over $169.
Our guest for this episode is Eddy Chan, a founding partner at Intudo Ventures, a hyper-local Indonesia-only venture capital firm. Prior to co-founding Intudo, Eddy worked in investment banking, practiced corporate / M&A law, made venture investments (PayPal, Palantir, Affirm) and also founded a startup.In this episode, Eddy shares why investors shouldn't lump Southeast Asia into one market, what kinds of competitive moats gets him excited to invest, and his advice for talent interested in joining and founding startups in Indonesia.
Our guest for this episode is Hiro Yamada, former solution engineer at Asana, and current student at Harvard Business School. Hiro joined Asana in 2016 in their San Francisco office, and later moved to Tokyo as Asana Japan's first employee and helped the company open their office in Japan. Asana is an organizational management software that helps teams manage projects and tasks in one tool. In this episode, Hiro talks about his experience bringing Asana to the Japanese market when project management software adoption was still light, in addition to his thoughts on how Japanese entrepreneurs can better integrate themselves in markets outside of Japan.
Our guest for this episode is Ajay Bulusu, co-Founder of NextBillion.AI. The Singapore based startup provides decentralized mapping solutions for customers using AI and has raised $13M to date from funds like M12, Lightspeed India, and Falcon Edge Capital . NextBillion.AI's mapping solutions allow companies to create tailor-made solutions for specific business needs. In our episode, Ajay discussed his career path and how his experiences at Grab working on their mapping team led to his decision to start NextBillion.AI.
Our guest for this episode is Sean Kim, Head of Strategy at Jandi. Headquartered in Korea, Jandi is a workplace collaboration focused enterprise software platform that has expanded across Asia.In our episode, we discuss how Jandi's go-to-market strategy has evolved, why product localization is so important and how Jandi prioritizes which markets to enter.
Our guest for this episode is Yoko Christina Makiguchi, CEO of Revolut Japan. Revolut is a FinTech super app startup headquartered in the UK and has been revolutionizing consumer banking. In this episode, we discuss Yoko’s pivot from an investment bank to Revolut and how Revolut is accelerating its growth in Japan’s FinTech industry. We also welcome Yoko as our first female guest of the podcast and discuss her leadership and efforts to break the glass ceiling.
Our guest for this episode is Abhi Kumar, partner at M12, where he leads investments, market development and portfolio management in Asia. M12 is a single LP fund with Microsoft as its sole LP. In our episode, Abhi shares how he brings insight and value to portfolio companies and founders by leveraging expertise from both the M12 team and Microsoft’s global network.
Our guest for this episode is Joe Huang, partner at Headline Asia, who oversees investments in Asia. Joe shares how he landed in venture investing by leveraging his operational background in the US, Taiwan, and Latin America, and how he has sometimes stepped into his portfolio companies like 17Live to help them scale at breakneck speed.
Our guest for this episode is Samir Chaibi, an investor focused on fintech and SaaS at Insignia, an early stage venture fund investing in Southeast Asian tech startups. We discuss his wide breadth of experience, fintech ecosystem in Southeast Asia and implications from other regions, and ever-changing industry trends including regulations and niche verticals.
Our guest for this episode is Duncan Turner, a general partner at SOSV, one of the most active seed investors in the world and the first accelerator to generate unicorns in Asia. Duncan manages HAX, the world's first and largest VC backed program for hardware.We discuss how Duncan evaluates hard tech start-ups that are early in their research and development process and why hard tech companies should monetize through software.
Our guest for this episode is William Bao Bean, a general partner at SOSV, one of the most active seed investors in the world. He manages Chinaccelerator, a global Internet accelerator focused on helping B2B start-ups enter China and Chinese start-ups expand overseas, and MOX, a mobile online accelerator. We discuss why William decided to ditch equity research for venture capital, mistakes B2B start-ups make when entering China, and Chinaccelerator and MOX's unique approach to helping start-ups find customers quick and cheap.
Our guest for this episode is Ayumu Endo, COO of Anker Japan, a leading manufacturer of affordable, high quality household hardware products. We cover how Anker has become so good at building quality products at cheaper prices than competitors and its unconventional decisions such as focusing on Amazon Marketplace for its primary distribution channel and spending almost nothing on marketing until its brands hit $100 million in sales.
Our guest for this episode is Koichi Tsunoda, CFO of Yappli, a B2B SaaS platform that enables Japanese companies to develop, manage and analyze apps without writing any code themselves. We discuss how Koichi decided to ditch investment banking for start-ups, how Yappli is easing the shortage of IT talent in Japan and why he courted long-term foreign investors for Yappli's IPO.
In part two of our conversation with John Woonghee Lee, founder and CEO of H2O Hospitality, we dive into the pain points H2O overcame as it grew from offering just housekeeping to all types of backend hospitality management services. We also discuss how H2O adapted as it entered the Japanese market by hiring Japanese management who had local know-how to cultivate crucial B2B relationships and H2O’s product road map and plans for geographic expansion throughout Asia.
Our guest for this episode is John Woonghee Lee, the founder and CEO of H2O Hospitality. John shares his journey from the Cornell School of Hotel Administration to investment banking in Hong Kong to starting the largest tech-based hospitality management company in Japan and Korea. We discuss how H2O has capitalized on the exponential growth of inbound tourism to Japan and how it has expanded from housecleaning for Airbnbs to offering revenue and customer service management systems for all types of hospitality venues.
Our guest for this episode is Satoshi Yamada of 10x, a start-up that enables e-grocery services in Japan. Satoshi shares what drove him to move from Carlyle to 10x and what he has to learn and unlearn to succeed at his new role as CFO and head of business development of 10x. He also discusses 10x's culture of going for moonshots like signing the largest retailer in Japan as their first customer and the team's long-term ambition to expand into online pharmacy and payment services.
Our guest for this episode is Alex Shin, angel investor, former head of Global Operations at Blind, and co-founder at Hashed – a crypto venture capital fund. From Korean Air nut-rage to Travis Kalanick’s sudden resignation from Uber, Alex shares his story launching the US operations of Blind, a Korean start-up that operates the leading anonymous community app for the workplace.We discussed how the South Korean venture capital landscape has been evolving and drawing lessons from Silicon Valley amidst recent success of South Korean unicorns such as Toss and Coupang.
Our guest for this episode is Jongho Joo of Woowa Brothers, the largest food delivery marketplace in Korea. We discuss the growth of the Korean market, what areas of the value chain he is most excited about, and differences in customer behavior across Asian markets.
Our guest for this episode is Akira Kurabayashi of DNX Ventures, who has backed some of Japan’s most successful SaaS start-ups. We discussed how Japanese SaaS businesses are meeting the demands of Japan's unique business culture, shifting from a mindset of profit to growth, and finally getting recognition from global investors.
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