 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Okay, we're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech. More specifically, this is Think Tech Asia. And we have the honor of Andrew Anderson today. Andrew Anderson is an entrepreneur in the fullest sense of the word. I went to Punahoa and then Puget Sound University. And then he became an entrepreneur. He's all over the place. And we want to focus today on Andrew's experiences and adventures, I call it, two years at the entrepreneurial mass in Asia where he was in business there. Ooh, it just ended now. So let's talk about, well, welcome to the show, Andrew. Yeah, thank you. Good to be back. I have full disclosure. Andrew was our first staffer here at Think Tech. He was younger then, but not shorter. Yeah, I think that was seven or eight years ago now. Yeah. When we were in the basement here at Pioneer Plaza, just setting up our initial studio and Pioneer Plaza, Andrew was here. When we moved into that basement. He moved into that basement, which was quite a move. We came from the Davies building at that time. Anyway, great to see you. Great to have you back. I know you're here only for a few days, but I'm so happy that we can talk to you now. Absolutely. Yeah, so I just moved back actually from Asia a few months ago. As you mentioned, I was there for about two years. We were working on a software platform out there, and it had some success. I had some struggles, as most startups do, but fantastic experience. Yeah, well, let's unpack that. What kind of software platform are you working on? So we were connecting international travelers to boutique adventure operators, providing a platform where people could book, where the operators could manage their bookings and payment gateway. So this was taking an offline market and trying to bring it online. So we had packages anywhere from whitewater rafting for a day in Bali to- Whitewater rafting in Bali, wow. Yeah, to Everest Base Camp type experience. Everest Base Camp, oh my God. Everything in between that, so. I saw an article in the paper recently that 5,000 people have actually achieved the summit since, I forget his name, the guy who did it originally. Hillary. Yeah, Edmund Hillary. So Edmund Hillary's, Sherpa was actually a guy named Tenzing Norrguy, and we had Tenzing Norrguy's son as one of our operators. Small world. This is pretty interesting stuff though. You're offering really unusual, adventurous tours. Yeah, I think, so the big thing was there are so many opportunities out there, but right now it's just such a pain to find the right ones and to be able to actually book securely and have everything safe when you're going to a more undeveloped area in the world. Yeah, so let's talk about that as the challenge. Was part of your thing to find the tours, to find the Everest thing, to find the Whitewater Rafting thing, so you start out one morning and say, my name is Andrew Anderson. I'm going to find an adventure tour today in the backwoods of Asia. How do you do that? Yeah, so that was just through a lot of networks, reaching out to different people. Most of these companies are on trip advisors, so it's not this one guy who's in the jungles of Sumatra, but rather it's a company with maybe 10 people. So they do have a little digital marketing guy who manages their trip advisor page, responds to emails. But still, those smaller companies would ask for either a wire transfer beforehand or pay when you get there, and they're not even sure if you're going to show up, so they could lose out on that. This really catches catch can. Yeah, and this was years ago that we were doing this. The company's no longer existent, so I'm not plugging this at all. But Airbnb has different experience-type bookings now, not so much in these more underdeveloped areas, but they are kind of trending towards that. And there are a few other companies out there that are doing a similar thing with a little bit of a different strategy. So let me just grab onto this thing. You found them on the net because they would have somebody who was running some kind of website, and you could look them up on the net and get a handle on what they were doing. Yeah, so it was a combination of a few things. We had account managers in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia. There's a local people who live there. Yeah, speak local dialect. So we had them kind of do initial screens and reach out to these people, make sure they had the right government registrations. And then we kind of took it a step further to look at all their reviews, see how they were based on their customer responses. So you would look at customers who'd been through that particular adventure tour. We did our due diligence on everyone because as you go into the more adventurous market, safety becomes such a big issue. Oh, yeah. Especially since the type of people who we were targeting weren't the backpacking crew. It was more of the hiring travelers. I'm not gonna say luxury travelers, but travelers with more disposable income. So we had another... And lawyers. And lawyers. And lawyers back home, lawyers, yeah. We, yeah, we did have a few. But yeah, so we really were looking for quality over quantity on that. And a lot of people came in through referrals. So for instance, we had a operator in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, who had about 60 employees and was running various treks throughout Borneo. And he was able to refer me to the dive company that he partners with. Diving too? Yep. Of course. We had a ton of different sports. So we wanted to be this one stop shop for the adventure traveler. If you wanna go to this country, this specific region, what can you do there? And then you can look through things. Book, immediately, see reviews. Or if you wanna sort by sport. So say you're living in Singapore, where our company was based, and you wanna travel from Singapore, and you want to go skydiving, but you don't know where you wanna go. You can also search for that function. So great experience. Living in Singapore was... You like Singapore. Singapore is a fantastic city. Singapore is an expensive place, no? For four years in a row, it's rated the most expensive city in the world. But those studies assume that you buy a car, which you don't need. Yeah, cars are really expensive. They add so they double the price with some kind of tariff, no? They have a 200% import tax. On top of that, you need what's called a CLE, which is essentially a permit to use the car for a 10-year period. And they do that through an auction system. So that can range from, I think one year it was only like $3,000. Another year it was $150,000. This is the right to use it. This is the, yeah, a permit to use that specific car for 10 years. So... And the reason is they don't want old cars on the highway, right? They don't want old cars and they wanna limit the traffic. So for all our Wahoo-based listeners, Singapore is half the size of a Wahoo landmass with five and a half million people and no traffic whatsoever. So if you ever wanna solution to public transport, put a $200,000 tax on every car. Not a bad idea. Hey, it'd be a tough pitch. You're a tough pitch because people in Hawaii love their cars. They love their fossil fuel cars, I might add. So what about housing? How does you deal with housing in Singapore? Housing's expensive too. I was there with my now fiance and we were staying in a two-bedroom, fairly modest. We were paying about $3,000 a month. I had friends who were paying $10,000. Wow. Young people. Young entrepreneurs like yourself? He was a managing director for UBS and investment banking, so he had UBS bank. It helps to work for a bank. I'm sorry, non-descript bank. Yeah, well, you know, I know people too. They do very well in Singapore, working for large banks. Yeah, most expats in Singapore are actually from either the UK or from Australia. There are relatively few Americans with the exception of people from Hawaii. So we... There's a lot of Hawaii people there. There's a lot of Hawaii people. Isn't that interesting? We had a high school reunion in Singapore and we had, I want to say, 45 people show up from my high school alone. That's pretty good from your class? No, no. From Punahou in general, okay. So people did come from like Myanmar. They came from Hong Kong. Yeah, for a large event. But yeah, there's a pretty strong Hawaii contingency. Isn't that something? It's great, yeah. So the quality of life every day, I mean, with the things there that you wanted, the restaurants, movies, whatever else, the arts, the culture, was it all there for you? In Singapore, you get all the Western amenities you could ever imagine. It's probably the most developed city I've ever been to. But you have access to all of Southeast Asia, which is, in my opinion, a little bit more interesting. So restaurants are great, expensive, but great. There's a ton of nightlife. They integrate their parks really well, so you can go to an area where you have monkeys running around in the middle of the city. That's what you like? If that's what you like. Not many people do, but they have them. So Singapore, the entire country is 50 years old, we're like 52 now. They were able to master plan their entire country because they're so new. And also because they're smart. Because they're smart. Everything they do seems to me to be really smart. Yeah, absolutely. And they were able to have the vision through their founder, Lee Kuan Yew, who was more or less a benevolent dictator who had complete control over the country in 20 years for a 20... He made it what it is today for sure. Absolutely. We had a show about him from two people who knew him. Every died. And that's one of the most popular shows we ever did. It's been seen all over the world. People want to know more about Lee Kuan Yew. He's worshipped as a god in Singapore. But yeah, Singapore, fantastic place to live. It's extremely strategic to the utter chaos and population. I want to talk to you about after the break. I want to discuss how you range out like the hub and the spokes to all of Southeast Asia from Singapore, which you did. Okay, we'll be right back. We're going to find out about the hub and the spokes. And Andrew Anderson, right after we come back, you'll see. Aloha Kakao. I am Andrea. I am from Italy. And I've been studying and working here in Hawaii for more than three years for my PhD. Hawaii is home to a truly fantastic community of middle and high school students. And did you know some of them are currently out there right now using their free time to invent new quantum computers? And did you know some of them are exploring cyber security and the new frontiers of robotics? I am just always amazed as I talk to them at science fairs. Oh, but there's more. Did you know that these students are coming here on Fintech, Hawaii to share their story with us? Come and join the new young talents making way show and discover how these students are shaping our future. Starting on February the sixth every Tuesday at 11 a.m. Only here at Fintech, Hawaii. Mahalo. Okay, we're back. We're live with Andrew Anderson. We're reminiscing about two years before the entrepreneurial mass, so to say, in Singapore. And one of the things about Singapore is it's got access, quick access to a number of places in Southeast Asia. So if you're in Singapore, it's like the capital in business sense anyway, to all these places. Can you talk about how that works? Yeah, so our company, for instance, I had 12 staff in Manila. And I would go there every three weeks, which was, I want to say, a three hour flight from Singapore. But you are a half an hour drive from Malaysia, the Malaysian border. You're a 45 minute flight to Indonesia if you go to the closest city. Jakarta is maybe an hour and 15, hour and a half. These are successful economies now, so these are worthy places to visit. Guess how many people live in Indonesia? 100 million, 200 million, a billion. Down. I want to say it's 280 million right now, so almost the size of the US, given per capita, spending is a lot lower than the US. But you have these huge markets that are still in the stage that they're essentially going from zero to one. And Singapore is located strategically in the middle of all of these as a very stable hub for capital. So it's gone through a few different iterations of being a strategic port city, having a stable government where capital could come into and then further expand from. And they built up a fairly successful manufacturing industry before it became really expensive. That's now being moved to Malaysia, China, Vietnam, et cetera. But the government has just been very efficient at choosing what industries and what ways to focus their entire economy, which is helpful when your entire country is half the size of Oahu. Yeah, and you're remote. Yeah. I mean, from the Western world anyway. Yeah. Not remote from Asia though. Yeah, so there's a lot of companies that actually choose Singapore as their APAC headquarters over say Australia. My fiance works for Microsoft. Their APAC headquarters are in Singapore, not Sydney. So yeah, it's definitely a strategic hub where you can be invested elsewhere but focus your headquarters in Singapore. Yeah, yeah, but you ever go to, it's just a digressionary thought. I do have them. You ever go to Santosa Island there? Santosa? Santosa, yeah. Santosa, yeah. Yeah, with the gambling, right? Huge. Yeah, so Santosa is a completely man-made island off of Singapore, which is known as more of a party spot. There's a lot of beach clubs on this man-made beach and they have these, the beaches are corraled into these pools but you can't go in the water because there's so much oil from the ship sitting right outside of Singapore. So if you wade into the water you'll come out with black spotches. Oh gosh. But yeah, I've been there. It's a beautiful area. If you wanna drink and have a good time. Singapore's not without fun. I was there once a long time ago. So the thing about it is, people I know, young people live in Singapore, they move around there every weekend. It's almost like Hawaii way back when where you got your igloo together and put your lunch in it and then off you went to exotic places like the neighbor islands. But people do that don't they in Singapore? You fly off to any number of other capitals in Asia just for a short time to say hi. So again for work I was probably traveling every three weeks to a different country and we were traveling probably every two weeks for either work or pleasure. I think a big portion of that is you have a temporary population of expats there who know that they're gonna be there for a limited amount of time or at least think they will when they move there. So they make the most of it while they're living there. On top of that you have a high level of disposable income. So you're able to kind of hop around and when you do travel it's really cheap when you get to that location. Yeah, yeah. So there's a kind of saying in Singapore that it's cheaper to go to Bali for a weekend, rent a villa and have a great weekend in Bali than it is to go out for one weekend in Singapore. I accept that. So what about Manila? You spent some time in Manila as part of the business but what did you find there? Manila or the Philippines? Okay. I have very different experiences on both. I've spent some time there I would not consider myself an expert on the Philippines whatsoever. But it's a city of about 10 million people. It has a lot of problems with traffic and other issues that I don't think we should get into. Oh yeah, okay. We've covered that, you know. I'm sure you have. One of the things that we've covered not only with respect to Philippines but Michael Davis is sort of a scholar in Asia. He's in various schools now teaching all over the place including Jindal in India, if you know about that one. But he was teaching at Hong Kong University and he's a lawyer, a legal scholar if you will and he was talking on this chair just a few days ago about the constitutional process and its decline in Asia. You would think that all the economic success these countries have had would lead to better constitutional respect if you will and development but it isn't really so these days. There's a move the other way and toward dictatorship if you will. Right, yeah. Did you see that? Did you feel that? Were you involved? Did you observe what was going on? I, yeah, I wasn't politically involved at all. I think there's a huge concentration of wealth and power and I think that- Disparity. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's probably a fuel for kind of these more at least on the spectrum going towards the dictatorship side. But yeah, it's outside of those political realms. They're a bunch of great individuals just trying to make a living and get through life. Yeah, yeah. Well, the other thing you touched on very briefly at the outset of our conversation is about trying to protect tourists and adventure tourists and keep them safe. I mean, what are the challenges? What kind of lack of safety were you worried about? Yeah, so for that side it was as far as how people or operators would approach new products that they were putting out. So if they're going to a new location, I went on a track that was a 5D track with one of our operators in Indonesia where I just kind of saw how him and his team were assessing different threat levels on bridge crossings on okay, we can't take any, they had like school trips that occasionally came from the UK. They can't take any school trips of people who are under the age of 16 on these tracks. And just kind of seeing what systems they have in place if something does happen when you're in a remote area or when you're under a stressful situation, what's the immediate protocol and how well have employees been trained to deal with that? If they have Red Cross certifications or other applicable safety guidelines to go by. And of course, what locations they're going into. Yeah. Well, were you worried about guerrilla fighters and terrorism? No, we weren't going to Southern Mindanao or any really extremist areas. So that luckily that wasn't really a situation for us. So this is a cakewalk. Yeah. And you had the benefit of going on these tourings, check them out. Oh yeah. Check out these adventure tours. So you took them all, didn't you? Not all. Yeah, exactly. So I got to travel to some of the most beautiful places, but I was traveling for meetings. So I'd go to these wonderful locations and I'd be stuck in an office. Sorry to hear that. But yeah, it's fascinating just seeing so many different sides of each country. So what led to your departure in two years? Maybe everybody goes for a fine period of time, come back, you alluded to that. But why did you finish there and come back? Yeah, I think I ended up leaving that company. And at that point, I started to miss a lot of things back in the US. There's something to be said about being in your home country where you don't have to go through additional red tape. You don't have to take additional steps to do things. That should be simple. I remember opening our bank accounts in Indonesia was an utter nightmare. We had to go to the Indonesian embassy in Singapore probably eight or nine times to finish forms just to open a checking account. And then I had to fly to Jakarta for the final. Gee whiz, that's not efficient at all. Yeah, so Indonesia was a lot harder. That was the extreme example. The Philippines was much easier. The three directors of our company all were Filipino businessmen. So they helped that process along. Or else. Philippines. But yeah, it was fascinating. Yeah, well, I mean, would you recommend it to someone else? I always tell young people that before they get rooted in any particular thing in the US, sort of the gap year, go to Asia, see what's going on, learn about the world, learn about Asia. Yeah, so before going, I worked for an investment bank for about two years. And that helped kind of build a foundation to go off of. I wouldn't recommend going there without any experience whatsoever. Employment passes are becoming a lot harder to come by. And at least in Singapore, you have to prove that you can fulfill a job that no Singaporean can do. That could be hard sometimes. It's extremely tough for a lot of people. You had to go through that. I had to go through that. Why did you tell them? It's your banking experience distinguished you? It was a combination of that. I had an entrepreneurial project before banking experience. But this guy's the right fit for the job. He has this unique skill set of the company I was with before also did kind of more adventure work. So that with the business banking experience, it kind of all merged together. And you word your story to kind of get around that. And your boss helps you. Exactly. And it's different if you are going in as an entrepreneur than as an employee. Most expats who do go into Singapore are going in with the larger corporations. So again, my fiance went with Microsoft. I have a lot of friends who are with UBS, Morgan Stanley, Dwight Schabank, the finance industry. The reunion crowd over there, right? Exactly, exactly. And there's other large from HP. I have a friend who went over with HP. See, this sounds really exciting. It's worth making the effort to get a job, to go there and play the game at least for a while. Now, these other people call it the reunion crowd. They're going to stay there a long time. Are they going to do the same revolving door that you did? I think there's kind of a cutoff where if you don't leave after five-ish years, you stay. I mean, that's just a de facto of the way it works. What people do is they go to Singapore and say, I'm going to stay there a year. They end up staying three years. They say, I'm going to stay there three years. They end up staying five years. If you say, I am going to stay there five years, you're staying for life. Isn't that something? Yeah, over generalization, of course, but, yeah, I would recommend if you ever get the opportunity to work abroad in a somewhat professional standpoint. It's an awesome opportunity for anyone who's young and wants international experience. Yeah, sure. An international experience should never help you, hurt you. And English, you could get along on English. You didn't have to learn any other language to get along, eh? No, no. I think that's becoming easier and easier as time goes on, but English is the primary language in Singapore. I did look, pick up a little bit of Tagalog and learn elementary, Bahasa, Indonesia, but... Say hello to me. Say hello to me. Selamat pagi, that's good morning. Apagabar, how are you? Wow, I'm impressed. While I was in Manila, I actually used to just introduce myself and let taxi drivers talk to me back in Tagalog, assuming that I actually spoke conversationally. I don't, whatsoever. But I would smile a nod and see how long I could get them talking to me. Great challenge. So what's your advice to somebody who wants to be a tourist, for example, and go to the same area, not as an entrepreneur, but just to enjoy the floor of the fun and the food? Yeah, I think it really depends what you're looking for. So if you want to go to a place just to relax, go to a place that's famous with institutions in that location and infrastructure so you can get a beautiful villa, beautiful five-star hotel in Bali, and you will have an awesome stay. If you're looking to experience a little bit more of the culture and get something that's a little bit more of a unique experience, I would dig a little bit deeper and go to maybe some of the more newer and expanding tourism markets. I went to Myanmar four years ago. Before the trouble? Before the recent trouble. It was the real year ago, yeah. Yeah, but it was happening. It just wasn't on an international scale, or at least the media wasn't picking up on it as much. But that was pretty soon after they ended martial law over there. So a lot of capital was flowing into Myanmar at the time. I don't think that's the case right now, though. Yeah, you never know. You never know, it would be under quietly. So one last thing, we're running out of time, but one last thing is, you take a trip like this, you go to a completely different culture. You find the strength, the courage, the acumen to deal with it, not only in a tourist sense, but in a business sense, it's a pretty demanding experience whether you realize it or not. And it has to change you, Andrew. So here you are, you're back. And my last question is, how did this all change you? I think the big thing that I learned is that the world is connected, and you can't unconnect that. So just to be able to have our management in Singapore and have an office of a dozen people in the Philippines and have clients all throughout Southeast Asia and be able to roll this out in just a few months was huge. And being in the US, you should be able to do the same thing if you're willing to take the risks to do so. Yeah. So... It's about learning the territory and then taking the risk on it. Yeah, yeah, I think taking the risk is the big part that a lot of people in the US Okay, we're gonna take a risk now. We're gonna close this down because we're out of time. Thank you, Andrew. It's been great to talk to you. Thank you. Homecoming of sorts. Nice to see you, Matt. Absolutely.