 Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for joining today's session on global expansion, especially in Southeast Asia. My name is Takya. I'm working for an education company called Quipper. So today we only have 20 minutes, so we don't have much time. So we can start by quickly introducing ourselves. So maybe Maxi can start. Okay. Hi. My name is Max from Stock Graders. What we are doing, we do the stock trading platform, and now we just move into the cryptocurrency. We just do ICO called Carbonium. We are the team behind more than 5 million users, mainly based in Thailand, and we start to expand to Indonesia and Singapore. Thank you. Alright. So I'm Richard Pan. Most people know me by name. I started Thailand's first co-working space, Haba. It's going to be in five locations based in Bangkok. But regionally, I'm also one of the co-founders, TechSauce. We are a tech media and conference company that covers both Thailand and Southeast Asia. We also do roadshow and events to over 20 cities across the world. We cover almost all cities in Southeast Asia and are very active and have talked to all the ecosystem builders in every country and learned about all their challenges and the great opportunities in the region. Alright. Thank you. I prepared my slides, so bear with me. Okay. So KIPPA was founded in 2010 in the UK, and then we currently have five offices in London, Tokyo, Manila, Mexico City, and Jakarta. We have about 800 members, and we got acquired by recruit in 2015. A little bit about myself. I went to Todai, and then I dropped out and went to UCL, and then joined KIPPA as a founding member in 2011, and now leading Indonesia's operation with more than 500 members. And I'm doing angel investment and also advising local VCs in the region. KIPPA is providing two services, one is StudySupply in Japan, and then KIPPA in other countries. We have more than 700,000 paying customers all over the world with StudySupply and then KIPPA Combine, using more than thousands of schools. And these are happy students and teachers. Our mission is to solve the education gap of learning opportunities to lots of students and maximize the power of technologies to innovate education. Okay. So very quick introduction. With the short hands, who is currently doing business in Southeast Asia or who is thinking about doing business in Southeast Asia in the audience? Can you raise your hand if you are doing something already in Southeast Asia? Okay. Great. All right. So today we want to talk about the interesting trends happening in Southeast Asia. We believe Southeast Asia is going to be the next China in five years. It's a very, very big and then promising market. And also some of the challenges that we are facing as a local player as well as players coming from outside of Southeast Asia. Okay. So maybe we can start by asking some of the interesting trends happening in Southeast Asia. Sure. So from my read through Arocha and TechSauce, is that the region, despite all the hype around being 600 million people and one of the fastest-growing region in the world, it is still, even until this day, six years into the tech space, a very local game. It's still fragmented in terms of different cultures and languages, ways of doing businesses. And the whole Pond Southeast Asian dream of deregulating and making it easy to conduct business across the region is still in progress. It is not quite there yet. So that is, I think, one of the biggest challenges that we still see. One of the biggest opportunities and trends that we're seeing is that in the past all of our startups in Southeast Asia were very focused in their own home market. Now what we're seeing is not only companies trying to scale out of their home markets, especially into Indonesia, but also many companies from across the world, you name it, the biggest tech companies, are trying to get into the region. In the past they would have ignored it as a very painful problem, trying to conquer 10 countries and go very slow. Now the opportunity is big enough to say that that is a problem worth solving or that is a problem worth tackling because the economics make sense. Right. Max, you're based in Thailand. Do you have any views from Thailand? For Thailand itself, culture is a bit different from other countries. Southeast Asia itself is very fragmented, as Em said, and language-wise, religious, and even the application that we use. For Thai people we use a lot of lines, just like in Japan. I think there is only three major countries for lines in the whole world. So whenever we do some approach to the customer, we always need a channel that local use. For example, for us, what we have done with stock readers and also the ICO that we are doing, we just do the KYC online for the first time in the world that we use KYC online. Why don't we just use it on the web? Because online is a lot easier, it's a lot faster for people. Just get into the live official account, got the rich menu and just touch and upload some folder. Which is, if I want to do exactly the same thing in, for example, Malaysia, I may not able to do because they don't use line. So you may need to tackle a bit different for every single country in the Southeast Asia. And of course, the way that you approach them is also very different. For example, for the Thai culture, we are more likely to be very open and playful. Like all those ticker, all those smiling character, brown, corny, all those stuff. But it may not work in other countries, even in the Southeast Asia. So if compared with other regions, Southeast Asia is considered a lot more fragmented. I think behind the stage, we were talking about one of the other major trends in terms of corporate startup partnerships. And what we're seeing is that some of the biggest companies in the region that we thought were dinosaurs are unsexy and cool. I'm starting to realize that with the disruption that's happening with technologies, they're actually moving very fast and now have come up with corporate venture arms and BCs and all that. And one of the great things in the region is these are the largest families and largest companies in their country with all the networks, all the TV channels and the property conglomerates and the distribution and marketing. And through strategic startup partnerships, many of our tech companies in our country have grown way faster than many have imagined of raising private capital and going the whole Silicon Valley out. So that's been an interesting trend. And from a data point perspective in Thailand, we're expecting 60 of the largest 100 companies in Thailand to be involved in corporate startup partnership this year. That's coming from 20 companies that we've tracked about last year. Right. So let me talk a little bit about Indonesia. We went to Indonesia in 2015 and then at the time when we say Indonesia or Southeast Asia is going to be the next China, no one believed it. But now a lot of capital is flowing into, especially Indonesia, there are already maybe four unicorns in the country. One, Gojek is a local taxi-hailing company which raised more than 1.2 billion. And then Traveloka Travel Company is really making a lot of money. And then Tokopedia raised a lot of money from Alibaba. So a lot of China money is coming to Southeast Asia, making quite a lot of companies, unicorn companies. And I think there are more unicorns in Southeast Asia or Asia than in Japan now. And that's really exciting. And then another trend is we see that the startup ecosystem has been growing really quickly as well. Now there are many more exit opportunities, M&As and then I'm not too sure about IPO but there are many exit opportunities for startups. So a lot of people want to join a startup business. I see many previously working at consulting companies now joining startups because startups are very very exciting. Now a lot of people are now quitting the previous jobs to start a company. So this ecosystem, of course, investors coming from not only from the region but of course from Japan and then from the US, from Europe, many investment is happening in Southeast Asia as well. And this change has happened I think in the last two, three years. So I see a lot of opportunities now in Southeast Asia and it's very very exciting. Agreed, agreed. I mean if I just move to Indonesia I think my valuation will go up three times. So I'm very very keen to go there one day. Right, okay. So let me ask you questions about the challenges that you're facing or the companies in the region are facing right now. Working with government or you know like how to be successful in the region? For me, I work in the FinTech area. So FinTech always like the field that you need to work a lot more with the government, with the regulator, especially when we do ICO right now it seems like crazy. I would say like all those regulations keep moving all the time and a lot of rumors, a lot of all those like expectation from outside. So currently we need to check on each country where whether is it allowed or not for the cryptocurrency FinTech stuff but the good part of on the new field like this is there is no battery anymore. Most of people are just back from Hong Kong. Hong Kong people also most of time we talking about we should incorporate in Hong Kong or Singapore but for themselves they also talking about SFC try to ban some ICO company. So now they all go to KMN. So it's kind of it's no matter anymore where we are but our market is everywhere so we can have the customer from everywhere but of course it's to side of the coins. If you got the customer from everywhere you also got the competitor from everywhere too. So this is something that we we need to make sure that we improve ourselves enough and try to basically co- about with their competition and also understand the market and understand the culture and then try to approach the people by just try to suit their unwilling need that they don't even know yet that they need that kind of product or services by just study them more. Yeah so one of the best advice I was given about which country should you start in Southeast Asia it's all very exciting and beautiful and everyone is unique is trying to find where you have an unfair advantage and one of the unfair advantage that's not often talk about is where can you recruit better faster and and be more cost effective and that actually is the challenge of Southeast Asia because the lack of talent or the extreme competition for high quality talent so high because you have 20 banks in Thailand for example and everybody's going through digital disruption all at the same time and you have global companies you have you know the the famgas you know the Facebook and Google's then you have the regional companies the travel locas the agoda the grab and the local hot startups that have raised series A series B and then a bunch of other folks that want to strike it out in their own so with a very short talent pool of computer science and engineering graduates and a very small pool of that that actually are usable in all of our countries maybe due to the lack of updated curriculum or education quality and you have a very tiny tiny group of people that are in so high demand so one of the challenge and opportunities for people expanding the region is you need to find a unique pipeline that you can secure your talent whether it's through partnerships with a local partner a corporate or a co-working space or community builder working with universities working with different platforms a quipper the idea is you can build a great company that grows really fast without great talent yeah I completely agree about the lack of talents especially the engineering computer science graduates a lot of big startups in Indonesia are developing from India actually yeah they cannot find enough number of talents in the country go jack and yeah so I think that's something that we need to solve as soon as possible and another point is I think you mentioned is Southeast Asia is very fragmented so we tend to put you know all the countries together but each country is very different and then I don't see many examples of you know companies being successful in multiple countries in Southeast Asia do you see any examples I guess the best way to answer is most of our ecosystems are very new everyone's a first-time founder nobody's scaled their companies abroad very few of the petrars have actually done it so because of that lack of depth like nobody has IPOed or gone to NASDAQ then it's progressively taking us more time but you're seeing the case of Gorina C IPO in NASDAQ you're seeing many cases that are inspiring and also teaching the next generation the lessons and mean the examples so that's I think it's a process that all of us are going through and just stay tuned because I think you're gonna see more of that in the future you may want to share more about crap and Uber case for Southeast Asia sure I guess in my working with the grab team since the day they launched in Thailand and perpetually being pinged on LinkedIn by recruiters at Uber so I've seen the difference in the way that both have have approached it and think what you've seen is you know a small scrappy company in Southeast Asia beating a global giant that had more funding as you know how ubiquitous branding that everybody has heard of and then use and tried and being able to conquer and dominate and create a moat competitive moat around their the region I think one of the things that they did really well and you know this is really the hack is grab is a Malaysian company reincorporated and then based in Singapore but you know sorry by a Malaysian guy but when they came into Thailand everybody thought was a Thai company and the reason for that is they didn't just hired any country manager any country head who was just you know the sort of folks that would love love to get that branding love to be that boss but didn't actually do anything they actually hired people that had the right networks that were established as entrepreneurs underground and that they were able to not just represent the brand but actually recruit a strong caliber and the quality of a team to assemble the initial grab taxi team and conjure to her credit has created such a great foundation that most people considered grab to be very local and very tight despite that obviously it is not so yeah grab over example is a very interesting one exactly to for local players beating global players do you think it's gonna happen in other areas as well like global players would they be able to be successful in the region or with local players always win in the market I think there there is a lot more case maybe not in startup itself but you may find that in many country Starbucks is not that good when compared with local coffee shop I think it is the same thing because it's just a matter of you if you understand people better all the business that we are doing here is all approached to people not only from inside but for the customer wise our team and everyone everyone just need to be treat well as they expected and in each culture we totally have a lot of different belief for example like in Thailand we have with this right so we believe in karma so a bit more loyalty into into the company it may be not sounds like relate to the startup world but actually it's the root of everything so whenever you like try to learn more about the people there in each country so you treat them better and everything will be like a bit more sustained and of course when when talking about people not only about talent but customer partner and everyone insider insider ecosystem in Asia we still believe that all the value from the relationship is a lot more important for people around it's not like from the western side of the world that more on the result base right so sometime it more on understanding the culture is more on like touching with people has and that that is I think the main key of success for service Asia yeah I think my my comment on that and expanding on that note Bruce Lee said it right you know it's you know empty your cup when you come into the region a lot of global brands regional brands maybe even companies here from from Japan feel that they're the biggest in the market of a ton of funding they're very well known globally and they come into the region and they believe that because they are the unicorns in the biggest of the world they're just going to do the same thing that they did in Silicon Valley they did in Japan and guess what a lot of those things might not follow regulation a lot of those things might upset a lot of local very influential players and then that's when you run into problems so you've seen the case here with Airbnb and even they have to take a very local approach and importantly it is talking to regulators if you're just keeping talking to lawyers what what do lawyers do they keep love to keep talking to you because they get paid to talk to you by the hour or by the minute now love regulators are very approachable they want tech and startups and innovation and jobs in their country and they're happy to understand what you're trying to do only if you follow the right protocol be respectful to your host country and be creating value for them and if if so then you will actually know you know all that you need to know about regulation and then tax and all that and save a ton of time and a ton of money down the line I think the other part is as Max mentioned earlier localization on the essence of understanding customer development in each market is so important that is why when you go to Southeast Asia and and the app like grab or you know line they totally understand how Thai consumers thinks and Indonesian consumers think they will do offer things that nobody think is useful say for an example a buying airline tickets we love to go and pay them at the convenience store and counter service being able to offer that kind of checkout experience that Thai consumers like they they're used to it has has made a world of difference one of the biggest pain points that between grab and uber that I got was with uber there's nobody to yell at when you have a problem you only have to do that by email that experience for most Southeast Asian is very weird to do customer complaints on text they just want to pick up the phone say something's wrong my ride I need to talk to somebody right thank you so maybe the last point we want to talk about the tips on how to be successful in Southeast Asia but we don't have much time so let me share from outside as view about how we can be successful in Southeast Asia one as everyone mentioned is localization is really the key you know we don't have a universal Southeast Asia strategy you know in each country we have to have different people we have to have different strategies we have to talk to different people we have to really differentiate our strategies based on the country so localization is really the key and the second part as you mentioned is the still the digital economy is not really big enough it's super mature so for example the payment system only 5% of the people have credit cards so they cannot pay you know for stuff on using credit cards or so everyone has to go to a convenience store or do the bank transfer so we need to be really patient for a little while to you know to wait for the digital economy to grow a little bit more and then but before this happens face to face interactions face to face communications or like you know having a good customer support these kind of a more human you know approach would be very very necessary and then I think that's pretty important in Southeast Asia I guess we already run out of time so after this we're gonna have a Q&A session in the cafe so please join if you are still interested again thank you very much Max and Emma for very exciting talks and then thank you very much audience for joining today's session all right thank you thank you