Ventures in the East

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.