From running a small fisheries SME to founding a startup to enable an entire US$14 billion+ industry. From enabling B2B cold chain transactions to building the operating software for Indonesian fisheries. From working in an industry facing the threats of supply chain and labor sustainability to leading the way for a powerful industry of value and job creation to emerge. Join us on our call with FishLog CEO and co-founder Bayu Anggara as he talks about all these and more. Check out open roles in Fishlog here.

Timestamps

(00:57) Paulo introduces Bayu;

(01:37) Diving into Indonesia’s Fisheries: From Building an SME to Enabling SMEs;

(06:10) Indonesia’s Fisheries Industry 101; 

(10:07) From B2B Cold Chain Platform to OS for Fisheries;

(17:39) Long-term food sustainability and labor sustainability for fisheries;

(23:23) Rapid Fire Round;

About our guest

Bayu Anggara is the CEO and co-founder of Indonesian B2B fisheries cold chain platform FishLog. Prior to FishLog, he was in the seafood products and trading food business and has had years of experience in the local fisheries industry. He graduated from Bogor Agricultural University with a Bachelors' in Fisheries and Marine Technology.

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The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.

Quick commerce. E-groceries. Sectors that saw investors pouring millions in 2021, but for Ivan Darmawan and his team at Radius Groceries (YC W22), building quick commerce for rural Indonesia amidst the pandemic is about more than just riding on a bandwagon. It’s about solving long-standing economic development gaps in second-tier and third-tier cities worsened by the pandemic. The CEO and co-founder of Radius goes on call with us to talk about balancing sustainability and hypergrowth, Radius’s Y Combinator experience, and more.

Transcript

Timestamps

(00:43) Paulo introduces Ivan;

(01:20) Long-Standing Pain Points Leading to Radius’s Quick Commerce Opportunity (Meeting co-founder Stephanie, meeting Insignia, and what makes Indonesia rural quick commerce different);

(05:02) Y Combinator Afterthoughts;

(06:36) Balancing Hypergrowth and Sustainability (Learnings from Grab and Traveloka, Building Radius’s Leadership);

(10:52) Beyond Convenience: Long-Term Impact of Quick Commerce;

(13:53) Rapid Fire Round;

About our guest

Ivan Darmawan is the CEO and co-founder of Radius (YC W22). Before he co-founded Radius, he was previously an operations and business development leader with well-established unicorns in Indonesia and Southeast Asia. He was country business manager at Traveloka and business development strategy at Grab. He received his Bachelors in Industrial Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California.

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The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.

What does bringing Indonesian ecommerce logistics to Amazon-level efficiency look like from the tech perspective? How do tech leaders think about investing in engineering talent? What does it mean to leverage software and data to level the playing field for SME digitalization? We answer these questions on our latest call with Shipper CTO Marvinus Kokoh Arif and VP of Engineering Agus Daud, leaders behind the tech stack and engineering teams powering the fast-growing logistics-first ecommerce enabler in Indonesia. Join Marvin and Agus in Shipper in various tech roles here. 

Transcript

Timestamps

(00:47) Paulo introducing Marvin and Agus;

(01:58) Boarding Shipper with Tech Leaders Marvin and Agus;

(09:00) Tech Perspective on Building the OS for Indonesian logistics;

(13:32) People Behind the Code Behind Shipper;

(18:11) Future of Shipper in a Globalizing Workforce and Indonesia’s Maturing Ecommerce Logistics Industry; 

(21:43) Rapid Fire Round;

About our guests

Marvinus Kokoh Arif or Marvin is the CTO of Shipper. He has built his career and expertise in leading engineering and tech teams across various industries from ecommerce logistics to fisheries and workspaces, in companies including Tokopedia and EV Hive. He received his Bachelors in Mechatronics Engineering from the Swiss-German University.

Agus Daud is Shipper’s VP of Engineering and Product. He began and built his more than a decade career in engineering in Australia then moved to Seattle where he worked at Amazon on their external payment system before returning to Indonesia and joining Shipper. He received his Bachelor's and Masters in Computer Science from UNSW.

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The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.

Learning. That's the keyword and theme of this new episode in partnership with Insignia Ventures Academy. We went on call with Cohort 1 alumnus and angel investor Hester Spiegel-van den Steenhoven. Hester gives us a sneak peek into the Edtech in Singapore and Southeast Asia report she put together commissioned by the Dutch Embassy of Singapore, shares her story going from consultant in the UK to edtech entrepreneur in Germany to angel investor in Singapore, and her Insignia Ventures Academy journey. 

Timestamps

(00:21) Paulo introduces Hester;

(03:16) Learning to Learn: From consultant in the UK to edtech entrepreneur in Germany to angel investor in Singapore;

(10:53) Learnings on Learning in Singapore and Southeast Asia;

(19:55) Learning to Invest (and helping other women to do the same);

(23:22) Learning from Founders;

(27:08) Rapid Fire Round;

(29:17) Bonus: Learning to Work;

About our guest

Hester Spiegel-van den Steenhoven is a Dutch management consultant-turned-education-entrepreneur-turned-investor living in Singapore. She is a venture partner at Kaizenvest and co-founder of Asia's largest female-owned angel network Epic Angels. After a 15+ year international career at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and then as Director at Deutsche Bank as Director in Amsterdam, London and Frankfurt, she became Germany’s first country manager for modern education system and coding school “42”, raising funding from Volkswagen and the foundation of Lidl-founder Dieter Schwarz to launch two campuses. Since moving to Singapore in 2020, she continues to work with and invest in founders in the EdTech and Future of Learning and Work space in Southeast Asia. She is the mother of two young boys and a speaker in both Europe and Southeast Asia on the topics of Future of Learning, Start-ups and Investing, Career Pivots, and Education Technology. She is also an alumnus of Insignia Ventures Academy Cohort 1. 

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The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.

No-code platforms. DAOs. Malaysia's startup ecosystem. Just some of the topics we cover in this call with Jason Chew, founder of Southeast Asia no-code accelerator Codeless, on this Insignia Ventures Academy episode, as the Cohort 2 alumnus shares the intersections of his work in these areas as a startup founder and operator. Check out Jason's latest (ad)ventures in Web3 as Founder of KopiDAO on Twitter.

Transcript

Timestamps

(00:48) Paulo introduces Jason Chew;

(02:36) No-Code Perspective on Driving Web3 Adoption;

(09:16) Democratizing Digital Creation through No Code;

(13:21) Implications of No Code for End-Users and Investors;

(19:25) Increasing Visibility into Malaysia’s Startup Ecosystem;

(24:16) Out of the Comfort Zone with Insignia Ventures Academy;

(26:51) Rapid Fire Round;

About our guest

Jason Chew is a serial entrepreneur and he is the founder of Codeless, a Southeast Asia-focused no-code accelerator. With extensive experience as a startup ecosystem builder, he is building no-code and Web3 communities that are focused on creating opportunities for founders. Jason’s latest venture is KopiDAO, a learning community DAO accelerating Web3 adoption.

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The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.

What happens when you take the chicken out of the egg? Find out on this call with Vinita Choolani, CEO and founder of Float Foods, the Singapore-based foodtech company that just commercially launched this Earth Day the OnlyEg brand, Asia’s first, award-winning, plant-based whole egg (white + yolk) and the brand’s first product: OnlyEg Shreds. We talk about unlocking the unmatched ecosystem support in Singapore, what makes OnlyEg the “egg for all”, going global, and leadership at a fast-growing deep tech startup.

Transcript

Timestamps

(01:20) Paulo introduces Vinita;

(02:00) Genesis of Float Foods;

(04:39) 2020 Plant-Based Landscape in Singapore and Float Food’s opportunity;

(06:09) Leveraging Singapore’s unmatched resources;

(07:51) How Vinita met Yinglan;

(08:58) What is it about OnlyEg?;

(10:03) Optimizing the experimentation process;

(11:29) Biggest misconception about plant-based consumer adoption;

(12:34) The importance of reaching price parity for eggs;

(13:22) Navigating global supply chain challenges to scale;

(14:35) Branding OnlyEg as the “egg for all”;

(15:40) Teambuilding at Float Foods; 

(17:10) Leadership learnings from scaling a biotech company to seven markets in two years;

(18:00) OnlyEg white winning global awards;

(19:29) Rise of plug-and-play set-ups for foodtech startups;

(21:07) Profitability in foodtech; 

(22:48) Float Foods in the next five years;

(23:25) Rapid Fire Round;

Vinita Choolani is the Founder and CEO of Float Foods. She is also the Director of FINEX Holdings, a majority shareholder in INEX Innovate, a leading women's healthcare company based in Singapore. Vinita helped build INEX Innovate from the ground up to become one of Asia's leading women's innovation healthcare companies. Vinita has had more than a decade experience and specializes in establishing distribution networks and commercialization for products across, not just Asia, but globally as well. Vinita is also the co-founder and board member of Project Smile, which is a not-for-profit initiative offering financial assistance to women in Singapore.

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The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.

In a startup landscape where AI is often hyped up as a product moat, it pays to have the ability to “AI-bend” or not only innovate how it’s used but the very technology itself to make the end-products more developer-friendly, scalable, and applicable to a wide range of applications.

That’s what Indonesian all-in-one verification platform Verihubs CTO and co-founder Williem Williem brings to the table. He talks about that and more in this call, along with (1) his approach to building tech teams, (2) his PhD research that unlocked Verihubs’ liveness detection advantage, and (3) how AI is driving not only Verihubs’ product, but also the company’s scale and profitability trajectory.

Join Williem at Verihubs 

Transcript

Timestamps

(01:30) Paulo introduces Williem Williem;

(01:48) Mindset shift from academe to startup; 

(02:54) Applying PhD research into scalable startup products;

(04:13) Verihubs’ origins from Williem’s perspective;

(05:29) From improving technology to making it useful;

(06:41) Focusing on simplicity for client user and developer experience;

(07:51) The role of AI in product-market fit, scale and profitability for Verihubs;

(10:39) Building generic solutions that still meet a diverse array of use cases;

(12:43) Williem’s Key Learning from Y Combinator;

(14:06) Williem’s Approach to Hiring and Retaining Tech Talent in indonesia;

(16:47) Biggest gap in Indonesia’s tech talent capabilities;

(18:06) Future of Verification Tech in the next five years; 

(19:43) Rapid Fire Round;

About our guest

Williem Williem is the CTO and co-founder of Verihubs. Prior to Verihubs, he was an artificial intelligence and computer vision researcher. He received his PhD focused on Information and Communication Engineering from Inha University, where his research topics covered computer vision, computational photography, and image processing. He has been published in top journals and conferences in computer vision, and has done several industry projects including mobile augmented reality for SKT Telecom, image quality enhancement for smartphones and parallel processing for linear algebra algorithms at Samsung Electronics.

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The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.

Indonesia's fashion industry has one of the strongest manufacturing hubs in the world with a long history, but an opaque and fragmented supply chain has disconnected the booming upstream from the local downstream merchants and brands. On this call, Indonesia's pioneering B2B textile trading platform Wifkain co-founder and CEO Sara Sofyan shares how her team is weaving this disjointed supply chain together. She also talks about her experience as one of the alumni of the inaugural cohort of Insignia Ventures Academy. 

Join the Wifkain team

Transcript

Timestamps

(00:14) Paulo introduces Sara;

(02:02) Transitioning from HSBC to entrepreneur and Wifkain’s origins in B2C;

(05:25) Indonesia’s textile and fashion industry 101; 

(06:56) Finding their CTO co-founder and their approach to digitalization;

(09:12) Where is Wifkain now;

(09:48) Why does the textile industry need its own digital enablers like Wifkain; 

(11:50) Supporting textile merchants’ business and access to credit;

(13:38) Building Wifkain’s company culture and learnings on leadership from HSBC;

(15:39) Why an ex-banker and serial entrepreneur joined Insignia Ventures Academy (IVA);

(17:10) The highlight of Sara’s IVA experience; 

(18:11) Advice for current and future IVA venture fellows;

(18:50) Data-first Playbook to Drive Digitalization in Indonesia’s Fashion Industry;

(21:24) Looking to Baidu for What’s Beyond Textiles; 

(22:32) Rapid Fire Round;

About our guest

Sara Sofyan is the CEO and co-founder of Wifkain, a pioneering Indonesian B2B marketplace platform for the country’s fashion supply chain. Prior to Wifkain, she was a B2C fashion entrepreneur through which she found the inefficiencies in Indonesia’s textile supply chain. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Sara spent nearly five years at HSBC where she became AVP for Global Banking and Markets. She received her Bachelors in Business Management from King’s College London.

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The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.

Meet some of these leaders in this special episode compiling the first four features of our spinoff, social media series "A Leader A Minute."

Transcript

About our guests

See openings: Sourabh Gupta is VP of Product Management at Flip. With more than 14 years supporting the growth of very large organizations and bootstrapped startups across Product Management, Consulting, and Engineering roles, he brings to Flip his expertise in leading cross-functional teams consisting of product managers, analysts, and engineers across India and Southeast Asia as he leads Flip’s product and design functions. He was previously Head of Product International Expansion and then VP of Payments Platform at Gojek before joining Flip. (Full Interview)

See openings: Lius Widjaja is a business leader with more than a decade of experience spanning growth marketing, business development, venture capital, country management and operations. Prior to joining Brankas, he had co-founded and grew several pioneering ventures from lifestyle and tourism companies to B2B tech solutions and the Indonesian Blockchain Network. (Full Interview)

See openings: Eelen Lim is a financial services professional with more than a decade of experience. She grew her career at OCBC leading teams in various functions before transitioning to the world of fintech at Aspire where she now leads partnerships.(Full Interview)

See openings: Oliver Suendermann is a UK-trained Clinical Psychologist, Cognitive Behavioural Therapist, educator, supervisor and researcher. He was a Scientific Advisor to Intellect before joining full-time as Clinical Director. Prior to joining Intellect, he was Deputy Director of the NUS Masters Program in Psychology. (Full Interview)

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The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.

Insignia Ventures Academy (IVA) kicked off its third Cohort this month, and on the podcast, we're also kicking off this season's special episodes with alumni and mentors from Asia's first venture capital accelerator. First up is Cohort 2 alumnus, angel investor, and current Gojek head of the business merchants, Hoang-Ky Vu, who shares stories of accidentally ending up in Indonesia, how friends got him into angel investing, leading a post-merger integration completely remotely, winning Demo Day on IVA, and more.

Transcript

Timestamps

(00:39) Paulo introduces Hoang Ky Vu;

(01:43) What excites Ky about Southeast Asia as an angel investor;

(02:40) Joining Rocket Internet;

(03:55) The Move to Indonesia and Acclimatizing to the Country;

(06:32) Lessons from Driving SME Digitalization in Indonesia;

(10:30) Behind the scenes of an acquisition;

(13:17) Becoming an angel;

(15:04) Value-add as an operator angel;

(18:17) Most common piece of advice given to founders;

(19:20) Getting the Pitch from IVA;

(20:09) Making the Most out of IVA;

(21:49) How IVA impacted Ky’s angel investing; 

(22:35) Biggest gaps in Indonesia’s tech ecosystem today;

(23:45) Advice for operators looking to foray into angel investing;

(25:15) Rapid Fire Round;

About our guest

Hoang-Ky Vu is an alumnus from Cohort 2 of Insignia Ventures Academy, and a mentor for Cohort 3. Currently, he's head of business merchants at Gojek. Prior to that, he held leadership positions at several startups, including Moka, which was acquired by Gojek. He was also an early member of Rocket Internet as well, coming from Germany apart from being in Go-Jek. He's also a pretty active angel investor, focusing especially on SaaS, commerce, and fintech in Southeast Asia.

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The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund.