 So today at Entrepreneur APAC, we are joined by David girl, who is the founder and CEO of symphony communications. And he's been doing some fantastic work in terms of disrupting and building communication systems, messaging systems. He's worked with various organizations like Microsoft, Reuters, Skype, and then he went on to find his startup called Verso, which was acquired by symphony communications. And now at symphony, he is building a global organization and especially growing fast in Asia. He's actually based in Hong Kong currently and he's going to tell us today about how symphony communications is evolving its business and its business model along the way as it grows and grows faster in these markets. So welcome David, it's wonderful to have you here on Entrepreneur APAC today. And we're going to love to know more about the kind of work that you're doing in symphony communications and you know building the global organization. So I understand that you know the starting point of symphony communications was that it disrupted the Bloomberg terminal business as a starting. So what plus features does symphony sort of have in its as an organization and what kind of value for money are you giving to the users in the financial market that they are moving to the symphony communication, financial messaging, communication systems? Sorry to first of all, thanks for having me. It's such a nice introduction. You know, we've founded symphony as part of the acquisition story that you mentioned to be an industry collaboration platform. Financial services is very B2B, B2C centric. It's kind of the hub of a massive bill which is the world's economy and without that that bill cannot turn around. And as such, pretty much every financial institution has to interact with each other and also with other organizations that compose the whole industry that we live in. And in that context, over time, especially in the last five to 10 years, electronic communications and digital transformation have been key pillars of innovation, efficiency, cost savings that many of the organizations have been obviously keen on to improve. And so symphony came as an entity that none of the individual companies can solve on their own. So they can have an enterprise collaboration tool, but they cannot have a collaboration tool that everybody agrees on to use as kind of a defacto standard to exchange structured and structured information. So that's what symphony is. Symphony has built that consensus from which we built the platform kind of in highway infrastructure, very secure, very complex. We'll talk about it later on and to which our customers can exchange any form of data for their own organization or with their customers. And they can do this with full confidence. And Bloomberg is a very, very different value proposition going back to what you were talking about early on, where they are an information terminal. They have a communication component inside for Bloomberg messaging. And unlike us, they provide a relatively close package and only for front of this users. While symphony is an open platform, I would say more or less exclusively focused on the collaboration infrastructure. So we build the highways, but we don't build the trucks or the cars that ride on this highway is what our customers do. And so that are the main differences between the two body propositions. And that's how we take our solution to market. I mean, sounds really interesting. But I also understand that it's symphony. You're not planning to sort of limit yourself to financial messaging only, financial sector only. You're planning to go across sectors in terms of providing communication solutions to pretty much every other sector. So particularly what is it and how are you extending yourself both in USA and how are you planning to do it in Asia as well? Very good questions. Secure messaging is not the commodity. May institutions will use a vehicle to convey their intent with each other and within their organizations. But very rarely they think about, oh, I need something really, really secure to exchange this confidential information. That's what the governments do, of course, in the defense industry, in the beauty industry, those are the important things that you care about. And so not every organization in the world, I would say, think of security first. They think convenience first. And so we target all those organizations who care about security first and foremost. And then how do we develop our market? So first of all, from a vertical point of view, beyond financial services, you have the big, you know, you have the defense industry, you have the governments who are all very key on solutions that symphony provides. And then because we are not, this is how we ended up in Asia very soon in our journey for a young startup, it was obvious that Asia is part of the global financial ecosystem. It's obvious that Asia plays actually much bigger weight than it did in the past. And it will continue to grow faster than any other region. And so developing in Asia, in all parts of Asia, North, South, East, West is absolutely essential for our customers, for our community. And that's the reason why actually I settled in Singapore first and now in Hong Kong in order to grow the market there and we've grown over 100% over the last three years. You know, now with work from home, becoming a culture, I mean, it's becoming like almost an acceptable attribute of work. I mean, you know, probably you and me, we've been so used to traveling earlier, but now we're sort of working across the screen. And this may just become the way we work. I mean, even when things are okay and not so prohibitive, we might want to actually carry on this way for most of our work because it's more convenient if one gets more done in less amount of time. And I know that Symphony has often been compared with productivity tools like Slack and you know, others. So are you sort of thinking of newer opportunities within Symphony because of this new culture that is now coming to happen? Yes, actually, us and our customers do at the same time. And you know, as they look into what the future reality is going to be, you know, the experiment that started with remote working is now becoming a habit. And it looks like it is going to have a significant effect post COVID-19. And given that it's going to take 12 to 18 months before we can talk about post COVID-19, we are really talking about, you know, serious ingrained habits there. And so with that, the expectations of our customers and their employees is that I want to work wherever I can and wherever I want. And I don't want to be constrained to live in that city and commute and obviously have all the inconvenience coming from that. And so from there, one of the obvious asks has been, you know, can we do voice video and screen sharing capabilities on Symphony? And can we do so into an encrypted format so that it helps obviously to protect the confidentiality and the privacy of the information that's been exchanged? And that's one area that we are really focused on. And believe it or not, this is not easy to find in the market. You know, you can see in the movies in which you have secure communications. But if you were to look for a secure video communication today, and it is truly secure, it's actually almost, you know, a big treasure hunt. And so we are going in that, in the avenue, and that's something that we already announced a few weeks ago. And we've tackled more of those capabilities as we embark on the next phase of COVID-19. You just mentioned that, you know, security is going to become a huge concern. On one side, you know, you have companies are moving their entire data to cloud. And then of course, video conferencing is becoming the way forward. Have you already been seen how platforms are getting hacked and things have been changing? So just to sort of avoid a situation which could get really nasty later on, what kind of cyber security measures are you taking today in order to be the customer with more secure on your platform? Oh, well, that is really our, the foundation, I would say, the core part of our DNA. You know, we assume a world in which there is an utmost threat around confidentiality and privacy issues. And another world where nobody can be trusted. And when you combine these two, you realize that there aren't that many solutions that you can build in order to ensure the best in-class security. And pretty much everything boils down to what we call Antoine Lancashire. So what does it mean? And that's what we have been doing is that when the data is going to leave your computer, which considered to be trustworthy, because at that time, you have authenticated yourself, you know, in that computer as the person who you are. And then your company has always secured access to this computer in order to trust what the data resides on. And that's the only thing we trust. And after that, anything that happens in between all the way to the recipient of that packet that is received is never, never processed within the symphony world. So we do not decrypt the message, to process the message, whether to display a video, whether to download a file, nothing of sort happens on our infrastructure. And so because you never know who has access to your infrastructure, especially when you rely on the public cloud. And I would say that there are many false realities about the fact that the cloud is more secure and that you have obviously big vectors of attacks going against those institutions. The problem is that as long as the data is accessible and you have access to encryption keys and the data is processed in the cloud one day or another, something will have access to it period. And so that's the reason why we have never taken that approach. We just simply don't trust it. And we've taken this Antoine encryption approach in which the customer owns their encryption keys. It's like you go to your house and you have your own key to your house, you're not going to trust some random building manager to have access to your apartment or to your house. Well, it's exactly the same story in the digital world and that's what we've been focused on. So you know, on another level, I mean, I would want to understand that particularly at symphony communications, how are you thinking about growth in Asia? I mean, are you looking to go and it's a long haul? I mean, you've come from such a long way back from 2014 to 2020 with almost a unicorn status that you've acquired. But I mean, how are you now planning to fast or sort of speed up or scale faster in Asia? So are you going to be inorganic in some way? Are you going to make some acquisitions from of Asian startups just to sort of help you build inroads faster into the market? Have you identified some startups that you might want to collaborate with and work with them to sort of be able to build your user base much faster? And what kind of industries is it that you're targeting in Asia? So the growth, so it seems interesting. It's a big question, which I think will take a full board meeting to talk about. But if I can condense it a few points into your very good question, by the way. Number one is the growth is very much depending on type of the market you are and each market has its own growth characteristics. So we sell an enterprise solution as a cloud solution, but it is still an enterprise solution. So customers will take sometimes two years before they can validate a solution that's coming from symphony. And then another year before it gets to full scale deployment. And so it's very hard to growth hack and say, oh, I'm suddenly going to go and achieve a non-linear, acoustic type growth if that's possible. It's just interesting. It only happened thanks to COVID-19. There it was before March and after March, and we certainly have seen bound like this. But I do not want the other COVID-19 to happen to have the next one because I think that's not the right way to go. Having said that, for us growing Asia in financial services, especially, is going to be very much around private wealth management. There is a huge rise of middle class across all Asia. The numbers are staggering. It's bigger than Europe and U.S. combined. We are talking about several hundred million of people. And all those people need access to specific financial services. And we want to empower our financial institutions to serve this user base as the world in Asia builds on wealth. And so that is going to be pretty much where we're going to focus on. Now, in terms of inorganic versus organic growth, we are considering acquisitions. We are the point in which it really makes sense for us to grow by acquiring organizations who are excellent in their domain and who've done amazing things with their technology and or their revenue and customers. And so hopefully you see some announcements coming from that before the end of the year. We're going to be relatively aggressive and go after a range of institutions and organizations who are best in class. Whether it's in Asia or elsewhere, it is really not as important for us as long as they fit into our culture and obviously into our strategy. Singapore and Hong Kong are great fintech markets. There's been a great upsurge of fintech, particularly if I look at these two markets. So I mean, good financial services figure big up for you in these markets. Yeah, I agree with your observation. Hong Kong and Singapore have massively invested. And I like the competition between the two cities as a matter of fact, where you can certainly see the effort being brought up by both governments. And while they have done a lot, they are really struggling to gain scale. I think it's important to realize that while you can help smaller organizations to rise and to arrive to a degree of product maturity, it's a much different game to gain global scale. And so it is not impossible. Of course it's possible. But there is still some work to do, I think, from the governments and then how they found such initiatives. I think one of the challenges that you see in actually not only in Asia but also in Europe, because I'm really involved also in the European investment universe, it's super hard to find growth funds who are willing to invest in regional players to the same scale as they invest in American players. And the reason for that is really due to the fact that the local markets are relatively small. And if you validate a product in the local market, that doesn't mean it works in an international market. And so while in the American market, the market is already around a million people. And it's standardized across a range of countries. So if you achieve a lot of success there, the chance to be successful as there is also a higher probability. And so there is still some work that Asia needs to do. And it's interesting. Asia is Asia, but Asia is not the only universe. And it has to think really globally. And globally you have to think very quickly on international. So just to sort of add to what you just mentioned, and I'm going to take it one dimension differently where you say, so I understand that one of the reasons why startups probably don't get as much funding as they do in the US in Silicon Valley startups get it. Because I mean primarily these markets are very small. Hong Kong is very small. Singapore is really small. So from day one, everybody has to think that they are wanting to go to different markets. I mean global is like the first day of the startup of where they're thinking how soon are we going to get out of Singapore or Hong Kong and service other customers. So you know, I mean, given the fact, I mean, this is something that you can tell me as an advice to entrepreneurs, but do you think it's important today for startups to think global very early in their business? And how did you plan for it? At what point of time did Symphony think that, you know, we're ready to move out of US and we're now going to go to Asia or some other markets. So how did the thought come to you about going global? Day one. Day one. And it's very easy, trust me, to be national. In other words, just to stay in the local country that you are. Because that's who you know, that's what you know, that's where the market is. And going global, going international to begin with presents many, many challenges. But if you ask my advice, I would say that, especially if you are in Singapore or Hong Kong, so in a relatively small market, you have an unfair advantage that you need to take advantage of. And the fair advantage is that the cost of doing business, the cost of running a business in those cities is far, far cheaper than doing the equivalent in Palo Alto. And I can tell you, I founded my company in Palo Alto, two of them. And the cost of running a company in there and here is 1 to 3. I mean, that's what we are talking about. And so when you consider that and you think about this as, okay, I can produce the same amount as what somebody produces in US at one third of the cost. And if I can actually, to begin with, already market my product in a global scale, not in a regional, in a global scale, then I have a competitive edge against anybody who's trying to do the same thing I'm trying to do in the US. And then getting the attention of the US capital investors, VCs, private equity firms, it would be much, much easier because they all care about profitability eventually. They want growth, but they want to make sure that the organization is not burning their cash at an exponential rate as the growth occurs. And so that is, I think, an asset and that needs to be thought very carefully and very early on and invested up adequately. And I mean, you know, what were the challenges you faced while going global? And particularly, I mean, you told me that the curve went up very sharply during the pandemic. But I mean, you know, the whole emphasis on going global has become difficult for both the funds as well as the startups during this time. I mean, you know, I know that a lot of startups who are planning to sort of go global during this time, their plans got stalled because nobody could travel, nobody could go and interact with people in other markets. So I mean, did you face any such issues when you were trying to grow your business in Asia in these last few months? Not in the last few months, I'll be very much here too. I mean, yes, a little bit. And some of our customers said, you know what, if you have a solution one, two, three, you know, I'm not interested in the third solution because that's not core to what I need right now. So I want, I just don't want all the best and misses. I just want this. And so our customers have kind of contracted to what I call the essential. And so we've seen the essential success really go up. And while what I would call what they consider an essential success actually pretty much steady. So I've seen that. But you asked me about challenges of growing global. I think there are two things to mention. Number one is attention, focus, intense execution. So it is not because you say so that it is going to happen so. Especially if you have a particular team, which is located in one area, it's super hard for them to understand the needs, the culture, the difference of the other area. And the reason I base myself in Asia is because I can force, you know, due to my role in the company, a very different bias than what the company would have had if I was and all the management team was exclusively based in a different place. And without that, we will not pay attention to the specific needs of, first of all, our colleagues. Second, to our customers. Third, the competition you face here. And that has paid off so well that you have no idea. If I were to think about, forget the growth, which is a result of great execution. But really paid off well is the innovation that came from Asia. Because Asia craves for attention. Asia wants to be in the international scene and to come across as you guys are not the only country or the region where innovation happens. We also lead the way. And that's the second, I would say, thing to think about is if you can find those entities, those organizations, those governments, we thought about how it comes to the poor. And kind of marry the interests of yours and theirs. Then you can actually create a virtuous circle that accelerates your investment and therefore your growth. It is a long game. There is no, you are not winning by saying, oh, I'm going to go back three times or four times a year in Asia and do a two week trip. That's not going to cut it. I agree with you on that one. But you mentioned why you were telling me about the challenges is that how difficult remote working is for a lot of organizations today. And I see that you have a thousand chat bots that you use more than that probably at Symphony Communications. So remote working has the purpose or has the communication of the bots changed for you, the usefulness or are you repurposing them in some way to help people in remote working? Oh, it's a long topic as well. First of all, it's interesting. We've switched to remote working already generally without any hiccups. It just was natural. We had a communications company and we used our powers extensively. And so it was really straightforward for us to make that leap forward. Honestly, I've never worked as hard in my life as the last six months. And what I mean by that, me too, isn't because I work long hours, which I always do, because I had no downtime. But I call this down social professional time, it's gone. And I think that is a big issue that people either don't see or see and they don't talk about. You can't just have meetings after meetings and not have a substitute for what happens when this meeting ends and I close the conference room, I walk with you to my office and you say, David, by the way, you remember the thing we discussed the other day? Well, I just thought about that. Well, that thing doesn't exist anymore in this remote work environment. And because we are like moving from task to task, and that obviously is efficient when we talk about what we talk about. But there is a lot of things that are not scheduled, that are not planned, that is part of the way our intellect works, that part of the way our emotions are built. And those are not being replaced in this remote working environment. And I think it cannot be. I mean, unless we leave the video open all the time and it's always not practical. And I just don't see a way in which we can find the equilibrium. So for me, I think that human nature is going to prevail. And even though the convenience of working from home here and there is obviously useful, productive, and cheaper, and less time consuming, people will still crave for that moment in which they can get together and have the social professional life that helps them also to realize their fulfillment and full service potential. I think it's a matter of time before people are working remotely and going to stand up and say that, okay, enough. We're not going to have more sleep. Yeah, I mean, you know, for somebody who has been on video, I mean, I turned my video off now, 1990s. I mean, you know, if you're doing a regular meeting, you don't really need it to be on. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, if we are around one-on-one together, so it really makes sense. But, you know, when I have 19 people in a video call, it's actually a very distracting to have that. And so, you know, I think the world is going to realize more of these things and other things and we'll establish a new hygiene and use the habits as we interact with each other remotely and then obviously in person. Let me ask you about this one final dimension. You know, I know that you've been diluted as a unicorn and, you know, Silicon Valley just seems to produce there with quite a bit of quantity. But, you know, when you're in an environment where there's so many unicorns around you and you have obviously then a board and investors whom you're answerable pretty much to every move that you make. Now, being a unicorn, has it made life easier for you or has it sort of challenged you a lot more? Has it brought more trustability in your products and services or has it sort of now put everything that you do underline like, you know, therefore you have to be all the more careful and all the more, you know, even if it is like me would probably come back and, you know, count you for every little thing that you do. So, how do you think it has helped you or challenged you with something? You know, like everything in left is a yin and yang. So, it has helped us to build trust in the market because it's kind of a mark of success and it helps customers to realize that even though you are a young company, you have potential. And then, I think the biggest benefit is actually on recruiting the right talent. And obviously, you know, if you are a great person and looking to fulfill your provisional ambitions, you know, you are obviously going to be attracted or with organizations that are on the rise. And being one of them is certainly a very important catalyst to higher great talent. And that's all we depend on. You know, without great talent, we are no one. And so, in these areas, it's been very helpful. But the downside of that is expectations are there. And so, the pressure, the stress that comes from what you need to do to perform and outperform because performing is not sufficient anymore. It's not like you can say, hey, look, I've been doing a pretty okay job. That's not okay at all. If you are doing what you've done last year, that's not okay. And so, it is always a race forward. And that creates, I would say, lots of stress. And if you don't have the right personality to deal with it, then it's really, really hard. It works for me because I am like the eternal and satisfied and happy person. There is nothing that keeps me happy in life. In other words, anything that we have and we accomplished, I wouldn't forget about it the time it's done. I already look for the next accomplishment that we haven't yet done. And so, it works really well with my personality. I stand for everyone. In these times, that's only going to help us, you know, being constantly trying to challenge ourselves and trying to find our way. I mean, you know, I remember attending the biggest technology conference in Hong Kong and then today we are like sitting here, they're doing it in front of the screen and you know, there you see presentations and lots of other things happening. So, thank you so much for talking to us, David. I think this was a great conversation and I wish you all the best as you extend symphony communications in Asia and probably in Africa at some point in time going forward. And I think with the kind of tools that you will build, the entire, you know, startup organizations as well as larger organizations will only get to benefit both from the security point of view as well as from efficiency point of view in their organizations. Thank you for making time and speaking to entrepreneurship back here today. Appreciate it. It's been a great conversation. Thank you for having me today. Thank you, David.