Founders Tribe

Featuring: Yinglan Tan

Yinglan Tan  is the CEO and Founding Managing Partner at Insignia Ventures Partners.

Prior to this, he was Venture Partner at Sequoia Capital where he was the first hire in Southeast Asia. Yinglan sourced multiple investment opportunities for Sequoia India including Tokopedia, Go-jek, Carousell, Appier, Dailyhotel , Pinkoi and 99.co.

Yinglan has written several books, namely, The Way Of the VC: Having Top Venture Capitalists On Your Board.(Wiley, 2009), Chinnovation – How Chinese Innovators are Changing the World (Wiley 2010) and textbook New Venture Creation – Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century – An Asian Perspective (Mcgraw Hill 2011).

His latest work,  Navigating ASEANnovation, is a compilation of essays and write ups of different views and insights of  what it takes to build a company, a tech company in South East Asia, anything about it or about the market or the  company itself.

He also hosts a podcast called "On Call with Insignia Ventures" where he dial in calls with the region's innovators and investors.

Featuring: Giacomo Ficari

Let's Scale up with Patience and Product Market Fit today.

Get inspiration and be mesmerized by Lifepal's main man, Giacomo Ficari in his episode on Founders Tribe.

As a backgrounder, Giacomo has been working in the internet industry in Southeast Asia building startups in several countries in Asia. He joined Rocket Internet to become one of Lazada’s pioneer employees. He also  participated in the Y Combinator program in W18.

Giacomo is a passionate water polo player and played professionally and in the national team during his college.

Fast forward to 2019,  he launched Lifepal, an online marketplace for health and life insurances to help customers in choosing and using the right policy fit for their needs.

Here are the key topics you’ll learn in this episode:

✅ Sport as pillar for motivation and drive

Featuring: Viktor Kyosev 

He started working within the hospitality industry in several countries located on two continents. He has about seven years of experience within international hotel brands and a few restaurants.

He decided to do a full 180-degree turn and move to a more dynamic field – entrepreneurship.

Ever since  he has built from the ground up – start-ups ranging from event planning to education, social entrepreneurship, photography, hospitality, and real estate.

Featuring: Jakob Rost

Jakob moved to Indonesia from Berlin more than 7 years ago to become Managing Director of Lazada. Jakob built Lazada’s Marketplace from zero to 70% of GTV and managed geographical expansion for the group. Before that Jakob was a management consultant for The Boston Consulting Group with projects in Banking and Financial Services.

After Lazada’s acquisition by Alibaba Jakob founded Ayoconnect together with his two co-founders, where he remains as CEO until today. He and his Indonesian wife have one daughter and live full time in Jakarta.

Featuring: Ravid Chowdhury

Born and raised in the US, Ravid Chowhury made a decision to go back to Bangladesh to work and to just experience living there.

A well- travelled man, he has built connections and bonds with a lot of people and companies around the globe. Seeing his track record and list of achievements, he has definitely proven his credibility in a very short period of time.

Being known to be the CFO of Pathao and now one of the founders of Truck Lagbe, he had created undeniable impact in emerging markets in Bangladesh.

Ravid Chowdhury sees how the country can be at par to other countries if we talk about technological and internet shift.

Featuring: Shaan Coelho

A true digital marketing specialist, Shaan Coelho had conquered three continents with his ten plus years of experience in the industry.

Being one of the first employees of VaynerMedia, which is known to be under Gary V,  they  built an empire that expanded all over the world in a short period of time.  He literally grew with the company, he was honed and learned a lot because of the opportunities presented to him.

This year, he was set to launch The Greatest Adventure on Earth,  a three year, three continent scavenger hunt to find the  hidden $1 million somewhere on the planet but because of the situation we are in it was postponed to a later date.

In today's podcast, topics mentioned are equity crowdfunding, the difference between the goals of investors and founders, the importance of listening and how one can weave a narrative that people can connect to at an emotional level. Plotting the road map through his Paint the Canvas Exercise, trusting your team to show up and deliver the work,  incremental progress, self awareness and willingness are the other key points raised in the episode. 

Featuring: Ilya Kratskov 

Straight from the founder of Pouchnation, a company that specializes in events management and cashless payments, Ilya Kratskov  considers this Covid Era the “largest event of our lifetime”.  This pandemic has taken its toll to a  lot of companies, but a lot also are reinventing  themselves. They took it as an opportunity to bounce back and be relevant today.  He also made mention that when you want to reinvent  and innovate, you need to go back in understanding your company’s core competencies. Research and give it a shot!

Featuring Leonardo Koesmanto

“We are not a startup that is looking for evaluation. It's a bit different. (We are a) start-up within a bank and our own startup is our own product. So we are looking at how we scale at the same time and how we can make money.”

As an industrial engineer, he didn't have experience in digital banking but DBS believed that he had the components and so what he had to do was put it into action. The bank betted on him and success happened. His main objective is to not just to be scalable but to grow with profit. And that's what happened…

Fast forward to the present, he shared how he managed to keep his people engaged and productive while working remotely at home.

Featuring Andrew Senduk

“I really came in Indonesia with idea of building like a multi multi-million dollar company. I don't know how,  I don't know what golden path there is to do that, but I really had that idea  that I would be doing that and you know, eventually,  we went from 2 to 4million USD a month, ”

Going from a six - digit paycheck as a banker in the Netherlands to zero is  definitely a fearless move to make, a risk nobody is willing to take, right?  However,  having a vision is a definite game-changer.

Things are created twice,  one is in your mind and the other one is in reality.   It is  planting certain seeds in your mind that eventually will create a certain belief system from which  you take certain actions to arrive at a result. This also means that  there's a proper direction of where you want to go in life or any endeavor you want to venture in.

Straight from the man behind the “CEO Blueprint”, Andrew Senduk shared in this podcast the importance of having a specific vision in life, the importance of knowing your fears and conquering them in the process.  He also made mention of his take on   the key elements that CEOs need to look at  while they're building a company without sacrificing their relationship with their family.

Featuring David Abraham

“Well I think opening up a business is in a foreign country can be considered a dumb idea. If you say hey most businesses fail. Let me try to go to another country where I don't speak the language. I don't know the culture so well. Finances are different, banking is completely different. I'm not sure of how to do anything regulatory.Let me go there. Let me see if I can start up a business.”

Do what you can do, and do not overthink.  Sometimes life puts us to places we never thought we’ll end up with. From working in the White House, to exploring Wall Street and literally the world.  Our  Outpost Guy who won 2nd place in the dunk contest is set to build a community  of  living space and workspace. It supports the lifestyle of the younger generation who are working and living whether for weeks or months or years.

Given the crisis we are facing today, the majority of the world is  anxious about facing the new normal. What’s the recovery plan? What will happen this? What will be the work setup in the new normal? In this podcast, topics on how the media plays a crucial role is also tackled.