In this week’s Asia Tech Podcast, we share what we’ve learned from a year of getting out there and traveling around Asia talking to startup founders and investors. How effective are startup events really? Do we really need more demo days and speed dating to grow the Ecosystem or should we focus more on substantive conversations that help Founders and Angels connect the dots in Asia? In this episode, we also share our plans for 2018 and our inaugural podcast round tables which we’ll be bringing to a city near you soon.

Marcus Ellison is consumed with learning and innovating. He is not bound by existing rules nor others’ perceptions of what is and is not possible. Marcus believes that life is a system that needs to be figured out an approaches things in terms of experiments. He comes from a family of entrepreneurs and even went so far as to design his own major while he was in college. His first business, started while still in college, was an internet radio station that played Jazz music. He also built a successful real estate investment company literally from scratch that succeeded on his ability to hustle, learn the things he did not know and create trust and credibility along the way. Marcus is very talented and driven. He has now focused his energy on building VentureMark. After moving to Vietnam, he noticed that the Angel investment scene was not only very fragmented, but quite immature. He has set out to change all of that with VentureMark.

Jason Goldberg builds things…and he generally builds them bigger than you would have expected. Jason worked on Bill Clinton’s campaign and then in the Clinton White House, not because he was well connected to them, but because he reached out himself and asked. An early lesson learned was that you don’t get things you don’t ask for. Seeing opportunities is relatively easy, seizing them is the definition of success…and great entrepreneurs are great at seizing great opportunities. In his current business, SimpleToken, Jason Goldberg believes he is seizing a very large and transformational opportunity. The success of SimpleToken augurs a secular change in the way communities are built, given incentives to produce and compensated. Simple Token aims to be the platform that enables “Cryptocurrency to Power Digital Communities”.

Caspar Bo Jensen understands the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. He has seen them both…more than once. After building successful e-commerce companies in Denmark from scratch, the global financial crisis finally caught up to him and he had to shut down his businesses. Caspar Bo does not give up, however, and he learned a lot from those experiences at home and decided to join some friends in Thailand and try to do it all over again…both bigger and better. Founding Chilindo in October 2013, it was challenging from the start. Nobody had built a shopping experience like Chilindo in the region before and if it meant going to source products in Chinatown at 4AM, Caspar Bo was going to do it. Caspar tells a very interesting story of how consumers like to buy, near failure and how doing things differently can lead to sustainable success.

Rajesh Sehgal is a seasoned and well rounded investor, spending over 17 years working at Franklin Templeton India. Working with Dr. Mark Mobius since 1999, who managed the Emerging Markets Group at Franklin Templeton, helped shape his investment philosophy and inculcated a sense of rigorous investment discipline and deep portfolio optimization knowledge. Applying this to his angel investments for the last decade has given him an edge that other Angel investors would love to emulate. Mr. Sehgal’s newest entity, Equanimity Investments, continues to invests in startups and early stage businesses across sectors and geographies.

Podcast highlights:

What is Artificial Intelligence and what is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)?

What are the challenges and frustrations that AI could fix for a coder or developer?

Can you write code that eventually writes itself with AGI?

Podcast notes:

Joining Asia Tech Podcast AI today is Frederique Mittelstaedt, the founder of Automorph - a platform that aims to bring the problem solving skills of Artificial General Intelligence to the wider public. Automorph is a program that can write programs (sound a little meta?) Well, this could be the future of any app development or SaaS startup. Fred has already pioneered his own AGI programming language along with well thought out ideas about what constitutes intelligence as well as what makes many of those "fuzzy" skills that we love about being human (like creativity, art and music) something that we could ultimately teach machines.

Podcast highlights:

13:45 What's EventHub? The CEO and Co-Founder explains how her company is helping attendees of different events to network and to connect.

21:30 Discussing TechCrunch Tokyo – the 2nd biggest event to use EventHub technology.

28:45 Differences in networking culture pose a new challenge – what are the main differences in networking culture between Japan and North America?

Podcast notes:

00:00 Introducing Rie Yamamoto – the CEO & Co-Founder at EventHub

05:30 Rie Yamamoto discusses studying at Brown University. How did the curriculum help her in her future career?

09:30 Interning at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley – how did she end up in Finance?

13:45 What's EventHub? The CEO and Co-Founder explains how her company is helping attendees of different events to network and to connect.

17:00 Kicking it off! Rie Yamamoto and Michael Waitze discuss event-related tech and startups.

21:30 Discussing TechCrunch Tokyo – the 2nd biggest event to use EventHub technology.

24:00 What can you do with EventHub? Search options and features that can help CEOs, investors, entrepreneurs and more.

28:45 Differences in networking culture pose a new challenge – what are the main differences in networking culture between Japan and North America?

33:00 EventHub as a bridge between two cultures. What kind of businesses could we build around the huge amount of data available on portals like EventHub?

39:00 Not only did she have to learn a completely new language, she had to attend two schools at the same time. Regular school in English from Monday to Friday and Japanese school on Saturdays.

41:30 Michael Waitze and Rie Yamamoto discuss the Startup City of Fukuoka

43:15 What if we told you that soon you will be able to order a shower of shooting stars? Discussing a company that does just that.

47:45 How is EventHub funded and how can the startup help not only attendees but organizers as well?

51:50 Thanks for tuning in! Connect with Rie Yamamoto and her team on [email protected] or [email protected]

In this week's Asia Tech Podcast, Graham and Michael discuss why Asia matters. They talk about how attitudes are shifting from a "lack of visibility" in Asia, to pioneering VCs on the West Coast turning to the Pacific for their latest deal flow. Asia tech investment stood at $19.3 billion as of mid 2017, compared to Silicon Valley $16.5 billion. Sure, SV is a fraction of Asia's population and land mass, but times are changing. The conversation covers the latest investment data on Asia, key headline figures for demographics and the role of the "Unicorn Creators" (of which Tencent has already invested in 19 Unicorns alone).

Nicola Jones Crossley is humble, yet determined. She is filled with energy and somehow appears constantly calm and in control. Nicola is also charismatic and deeply committed to her passion of celebrating and supporting women in all aspects of their lives. She has purposefully and determinedly built Akin Asia into a multi-faceted platform that allows her and like minded supporters to "create a space to connect people, share ideas, inspire and educate." The high caliber of the participants and featured speakers at Akin Asia's 'Bangkok Breakfast Network' is a testament to Nicola's ability to attract a diverse group of the best and the brightest.

Podcast highlights:

How can we use AI to power prediction?

Prediction is an extremely valuable skill but it's also very fuzzy. How do you quantify and code a skill that may involve thousands or millions of fuzzy algorithms?

How can you apply AI powered prediction modelling to world events or market movements?

Podcast notes:

We place too much faith in experts, especially when it come to predicting the future. Experts, of course, failed to predict key world events like the Trump election, Brexit and so on. Justin Wang wants to change that.

Scry is an AI powered startup that helps predictors connect with people who want the predictions. There's a whole market out there for these services. Traders can make billions by being right only 51% of the time. Businesses can lose billions by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Scry is a bold attempt at helping us all be on the right side of the future.