 many, many different times on what we think is required. From my personal experience, just to share a bit more, Jason suggested we talk a bit more about our personal experiences as well. My name is Huiling, I'm co-founder of Grab. The way to describe Grab used to be worded, you know, Uber Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, that description no longer holds earlier this year. We were in a fortunate position where we could actually acquire their assets in Southeast Asia. So right now, they're a shareholder and partner of Grab. And moving forward, we're building what we think is Southeast Asia's super app, everyday super app, and we've moved into things like food deliveries, payments, healthcare, financial services, and more to come with all the partners that we have. So about six plus years ago, I was in a position of, you know, have a great idea. Should we start it? Should we launch it with my co-founder, Anthony? At that point in time, we were less concerned about, hey, is this something that it's likely going to succeed or not yet because we were still focusing the problem, trying to see whether it had legs on its own before we actually went out and tested and iterated. So we went test, iterate, innovate, change. Test, iterate, innovate, change. And it started as early as access to other VCs, other ex-entrepreneurs, getting their thoughts and insights into our business plan. So from that perspective, I would say, it's a huge part of the, it depends. Do you know what it takes to actually launch this business? Do you have good people to actually debate and discuss it with? You know, whether it's partners, you know, co-founders, because that's where you make all the mistakes that you try and make as soon as possible before you actually need to go out there and build a team and invest and build a product and actually spend real money. Because if you can do that as much as possible beforehand, that will be ideal. But what if, I mean, really the lens around here is what is distinctive about this region around ASEA as compared to other regions? So everything else being equal. If I was in the US or if I was in China or another ecosystem, are there distinctive things here that would make you optimistic or pessimistic? I would say six years ago, I would be very pessimistic. To be frank and honest, because there were no real big existing startup names that had been successful, that were able to do things at a scale of Southeast Asia or the region that became household names that others could look up to. Folks have said that Grab hopefully is helping to lead that way with many other great startups and leaders as well. So I am more optimistic now, but again, it still depends. Very good. I would also say that Southeast Asia is the land of opportunity. Because there was no historical ecosystem of existing successful entrepreneurs and startups and businesses, everywhere you look around right now, I see opportunities. I see inefficiencies. I see opportunities. To me, they're two sides of the same coin. Thank you. Simon? So you might kind of look at me and think, what the hell is he known? The old guy from Europe who's only been here six months working, running public policy as well for Facebook. Well, I guess I've got two observations to bring to the great question, Jason, is I do work for a company that was founded by a 19-year-old in Mark Zuckerberg, famously dropped out of college and found their Facebook, which became the company that I work for. And Facebook, like every company, was a startup once. I think it's fair to say that Facebook really could have only started in the US 14 years ago. There was really nowhere else in the world where they had an ecosystem to enable a startup, a digital startup like Facebook to grow in the way that it did in the early years and obviously what we're achieving now. So that's one observation. But what I'd say in terms of the 19-year-old now or the school or the university graduate is there's never been a better time to be trying to follow that dream. You've got a brilliant idea. There are so many opportunities in Southeast Asia for you to be able to grow that idea into a business. And we're gonna hear from others on the panel who've got more expertise about where you're gonna get some money to really get that idea off the ground. And then when you see a platform like Facebook, you've got an incredible opportunity to market your product, often spending really very small amounts of money initially to grow it locally and then in time to grow it across this incredibly open, diverse region and a place where people are eager for the new. So I think it's an amazing time to be able to do that. But of course, there's so much depends then on how good idea is it really. And then whether other people will buy into it and I'm sure others have got something to say about that. Thanks, Ray. Yeah, maybe I'll share a little bit about Snapcard as well as a company and I'll share with you two reasons why I would first be pessimistic on that hypothetical question. So first is Snapcard is a company we collect offline data and we aim to be the reliable offline data solution. So we work a lot with global companies like Procter & Gamble, Unilever, L'Oreal as our clients. And the reason why I'm pessimistic is because in order for us to engage with these clients then we need to create credibility. And when we talk with, for example, a marketing director of Nestle and saying that, hey, we have a solution to answer your offline data gap, then if I'm a newly graduate from, let's say, Harvard then that credibility would be much less compared to, let's say, if I work for Procter & Gamble for nine years. So that's one reason. Now, the second reason is because one of the sectors that we're disrupting is the market research sector. And as we know, market research as a sector has not been disrupted for close to 100 years. So this is a sector that is very traditional when it comes to looking at statistics, sample sizing, looking at the data in a robust manner. And what we have is a solution that is going from the angle that is totally different because we're leveraging technology to ensure that there's a strong robust data from the offline side. And to be honest, if we start this 10 years ago, then SNAPR wouldn't work because the infrastructure was not ready. So then the depends question is related to whether the idea is ready in that time whether there's a readiness of infrastructure itself. But then coming from an ASEAN local person, I see that people who are disrupting the ASEAN market has a much better advantage compared to people coming from outside of ASEAN because there are certain local knowledge that you need to have to really make the startup works. And one of the examples that I would like to share is we are collecting receipts as one form of our offline data collection. And to be honest, Indonesia and Vietnam in particular are the two countries are the worst country in terms of receipt structure, right? It's not as structured as if you go to the US or if you go to UK. There's so many things that we need to crack barriers on and you do need to have local knowledge on that part. Thanks, Ray. Eddie? Yeah, if you asked me when I first visited Vietnam in 2001 I would have been incredibly pessimistic about tech startups but you could already see back then the regional opportunities. More than a decade later I moved back to Vietnam full time joined 500 startups three years ago. 500 startups is a global VC firm based in San Francisco. I run one of the funds focused on Vietnam. And so in the span of several years I went from being pessimistic, seeing a non-existent startup ecosystem in Southeast Asia to dedicating my career to it, to joining a firm that has now has been the most active VC firm in Southeast Asia. And that's incredible and it's driven by a lot of things that we didn't put our finger on and some of the things that we tried to help out with obviously like access to capital. One obvious thing are the macros, the rapid macroeconomic growth, the conversion of now a majority of people in ASEAN internet access which happened at a very fast rate compared to certain other regions in the world. Investing in early stage startup like Grab and seeing proving that founders in Southeast Asia could be just as good or better than founders in other places that also helped build the foundations of an ecosystem whereas before as was mentioned there weren't previously examples, founders who could be looked up to who could be mentors for the new founders. And finally, this nuance that is different across different ASEAN countries is the kind of environment that you're in. So on your hypothetical question, if you're a young person in Western Myanmar I would say very pessimistic right now about setting up a startup. But if for example you're a fresh graduate out of a university in Vietnam where tech entrepreneurship is now a national passion and the government talks about turning Vietnam into a startup nation and it's now acceptable to parents to let their kids go into startups rather than work in corporate jobs. That's all much more encouraging. Now of course starting a startup even under those circumstances is really hard, most will fail but definitely a lot easier, a lot more possible now than years ago. Well I guess you guys, I mean a way to put it is you guys are all testimony to the optimistic because you're here. You could be in other places where you're here doing your startups. So Landro what's your view on this? First it's an honor to be here. Thank you for having me. I worked at Sequoia Capital now for 12 plus years in India and Southeast Asia and we've been investing in startups in this region. I think we are on a journey. As a Southeast Asia region or India we're on a journey. I think it's very very clear that every passing year is significantly better than the prior year. So the good news is the access to capital, the access to opportunity is significantly increasing. Now that being said I actually believe I've always told founders whenever they've said hey capital is not available etc. I've always told them to believe that it is. There's no, at least in the vocabulary we possess when we think of startups and innovation there's no word called pessimism in it. So that word doesn't exist in our vocabulary and we think founders do magical things from nothing and they have the hustle, the tenacity, the perseverance to make incredible things happen. Even when the world around them might think that there's no hope. And case in point I'll narrate a very short story. I think most people in the room may have heard of a company called Tokopedia. It started many years ago in Indonesia and the founder did not come from a pedigreed background or from Harvard Business School or what have you. When he went to raise seed capital, he diluted a majority of the stake of his company. He diluted more than 50% for $100,000 in that day and age. And case in point today Tokopedia has worth several billion dollars and is a market leader in Indonesia in e-commerce. And if William could have that incredible run and go on to build a highly successful business in those types of circumstances. I think every founder today should feel thrilled and delighted and fortunate that the market is so much more positive and there's much more institutional capital in a better environment and so on and so forth. So I think our view is founders don't look for excuses. Founders look for the slightest. They need only one ray of light to believe that there's a sun on the other side of the door. And that's why they're founders. And I always remind founders when they're going through their moments of feeling like, hey, there's not enough capital, not enough believers. I always remind them, hey, why did you become a founder? You did not become a founder to have things easy. So at least we are very optimistic. We keep on encouraging as many young people as we can, no matter how young or old, including trying to support students and others to turn founders and entrepreneurs. And we think today more than ever before, anywhere in the world you are, the ability to build something with open source tools with very little capital, the ability to distribute it on play stores and other mediums, again, with very little capital, and the ability to see success overnight is unprecedented. At any time in history, you couldn't say that as much as you can say today. And I think the future will be even better. So maybe I'm very optimistic. For your venture capitalist, you're meant to be optimistic by nature, right? Sorry? You're a venture capitalist, you're meant to be optimistic by nature, right? You're optimistic by nature. Yes. Yeah. All right. I think we're going to come back to this, the mentality of founders in a second. But I'd like to drill down more on the nature of this market. So we've heard some comments saying that this is an incredibly diverse market. And I guess if you take ASEAN as a whole, it's 600 million people. But that's as a whole, right? That's assuming that you can put the different markets together. I'm interested in the panel's views is, is this really one market, can you think, as founders, as platforms, as investors, do you think of this as one market? Or do you think of it as an aggregation of very distinct different markets? And how do you navigate that in a startup journey and in an investment journey? Who wants to have a go at this? Looks like an it. I think just to frame this, right? And the reason why it's so important that we think about this in different time spans in a journey around the last five, six, 10 years, things have changed dramatically. At Grab, my co-founder and I have always strongly believed that ASEAN is stronger as a whole than any individual country. We've seen it in the financial crisis. We sink together, we swim together, we fly together. And only if we could bring the region together in a commercial viable entity, would we then be able to build it to a world-class state. And that has always been our belief. It's the reason why we focus on ASEAN and we have to date still only operate in ASEAN countries. So eight countries, 234 cities right now. But we have and truly respect the fact that they are very different countries and cities. A lot of similarities, but tremendous differences as well. Forget about language currency. Just think about how people purchase things, what they value, what the customers want and don't want. Tremendously different. At the same time, there are also a lot of similarities. We all want value for money, we love our food and we want to get from A to B and don't mind jumping into a bike for that, right? So knowing all of that, what do you need to do to bring it together? Because again, as individual entities, there is growth or individual countries, there is growth potential, but it's significantly capped and it will never be able to reach, I guess what we call world-class status. What we did was we ended up building a global infrastructure and talented technology bench. So right now we have six R&D centers globally. Three of them are in Southeast Asia, Singapore, Vietnam and Indonesia. And three of them are actually from where we think most of the talent usually comes from. China, India and the States. We did this not because we thought it would be fun to operate across different time zones, but we knew we needed to, considering that there was no ready pull of engineering and technology talent available in Southeast Asia at the scale and seniority and expertise that we needed. So that was something that we knew we had to invest as a platform and think about it as foundations to a house. Beyond that, then think of different rooms in the house and each one of these we tailored and we interior designed to whatever the local teams and cities and countries wanted. Here we got the best local talent and I see some faces in the room from the GRAP team, right? We found the best local leaders who were equally passionate about what we cared about and we empowered them as much as possible with this technology, with resourcing, with know-how across the region to go localize, hyper-localize, understand your customers, figure out what products would work and select from that many of products that we have now developed to say, hey, you know, food works in this city, it doesn't. Even in this city, a concierge model works or a fully integrated model works. They are all details, but once you really understand what it means, it has a tremendous impact on the customers. Does this fly from, so as investors, right? If a founder came to you and said, right, we're going to tackle the whole region, we're going to do every country at once, simultaneous execution. What do you guys think of this? In terms of the sequencing of things. Right, so the general idea in startups is to start small and fail fast and then once you sort things out, then you move to the next thing. So I think starting simultaneously across multiple markets, multiple products, multiple whatever is probably not the best idea, but I do like founders coming to me and saying that they have a big vision that goes well beyond their city or their country. And I do think that there are a number of teams who have that opportunity. Obviously, Grab and Snapkart are two of them, but they're not the only two. There are many of them that have this kind of regional, even global ambition. I like your analogy of the different rooms in the house, not just from localization to serving a local market, but in terms of grabbing different resources from different parts of ASEAN. So yeah, an economically integrated ASEAN would be easier for business expansion, but then at the same time a somewhat fragmented ASEAN gives rise to the ability for different countries to start to develop different strengths. And if a founder can like Grab pull the strengths from each country they're operating in, then they can be even stronger than if there was a more homogenous market. Indonesia's obviously a large and fast growing market. Thailand has great designers. Vietnam is going to be according to IBM number three, but a number of engineers in the world in five years. Every country in Southeast Asia is a heavy user of Facebook and YouTube and so on. So the commonalities on the Facebook and Google side give rise to commonalities in consumer behavior, but then the differences in education and values and interests give rise to the talent differences, for example, and companies that can get across the region are able to scale beyond it and are probably in my opinion, stronger than their counterparts in certain other markets like the US because they've already experienced the pains of going across borders. Sequoia and 500 are investors and a couple of shared companies that have demonstrated this. We'll keep the names under the radar for now, I guess. To be clear, we started small. Malaysia has a great company, but we have visions for more. I just wanted to pick up on one of the things that Eddie said around that Facebook kind of ubiquitous across the region. And we certainly see many different startups that are able to use our platform to grow their businesses, and particularly when they want to go international. So when they want to go to another country, we can help them find an audience or a customer base which is like the one that they've found in their local market and those products work very well. But what also Facebook can do is recognize that countries are different. The way that ties use Facebook is quite different from the way that Vietnamese people use Facebook. Some much prefer video to others, and we can help small businesses understand that and startups understand that as they're navigating how to use a platform like ours. And you know, I'm still learning the region, right? So I don't want to, I'm certainly no expert, but what I see frankly a little bit like Europe really is there's a lot of similarities. I mean, Europe is like their food as well. They, some of them really like drink quite a lot, but they really love food, they would say. But there's also a great variety. What's very different here, of course, is you haven't got a kind of forcing mechanism to the European Union to try to really bring, harmonize legal frameworks. And it doesn't seem to me that you need it in this region. There's enough cooperation going on. The only worry is if you start to see countries, not because of their concerns about starters, but more concerns about other issues, that they start to try to make it, they actually make it harder. So I think that's something, we may want to come back to that, but I certainly see here there's enough kind of shared enthusiasm for the digital economy, for startups, for ASEAN not to need the kind of superstructure that the EU has developed in order to enable the benefits of a huge regional market to be there for all to play for. Please. So I just want to emphasize the importance of local knowledge in bringing ASEAN together as one. And let me share with you a little bit of a story that I had 12 years ago because I was part of a team that is a pioneer in my previous company where we're trying to actually create a go-to market organization that is ASEAN as one. So it was 12 years ago. And we had tremendous challenges. It's not just about the fact that there's an Indonesian base in Bangkok handling a Vietnamese business, but it's also because there are things that are very localized that we didn't understand at that time. Even one of the things will be regulation. So imagine that if we want to sell a bottle of shampoo, then you need to print all of the different languages in the same part that's backed off the shampoo and we need to market to all the countries. And apparently it's hazardous because you need to have five, six different legal guys to look into the same bottle and it's a lot of mistakes that were done at the time. So fast forward to today, and I can say that it failed miserably. So it was disintegrated into different countries again right now, but fast forward to today, what I've seen is if you are able to actually attract the right talents leading the local markets, that would be the key success to create ASEAN as one. For example, SNAPCART, we have a CEO who's Indonesian, we have a Chief Data Officer who's Filipino, we have a Chief Finance Officer who's from Thailand, and we have a Chief Strategy Officer from Singapore and a Revenue Officer from Malaysia. Was that done by design? No. It was pure luck, but it really drives the thinking and knowledge that we have about ASEAN as one and that's what makes us quite successful today. Thank you. Can I return to this distinctiveness of this region and ask about what are the problems, what are the big problems that startups in the region are solving now? What are the distinctive business models? I mean, are they largely derivative sort of business models of US companies or Chinese companies or are we really seeing a regional distinctiveness come up? Do you think so, Andrew? Yeah, we had a little bit of a pre-panel chat, so this is an easy question for me to answer because we had a discussion already about it. Dude, you gave it away. Thank you. So, I will... We have this framework where we... Often local startups are criticized in India, Southeast Asia as being clones of something in China or clone of something in the US. And at least I've been espousing for a while that we think of startups as clones, mutants, and new species. And clones solve a known problem in a very sort of known manner and they're trying to blindly copy what happened. The much more interesting startups are the mutants where the problem is known, but the solution is highly localized and so they're actually doing new things and often mutating very fast. I think Grab and Gojek are great examples of mutants where I was personally involved in the Gojek journey early on and within weeks of launch, within first four, five weeks of launch of their transport product, they launched their food delivery product. And within a few extra months, they launched their payments product. And to this day, I don't think... The way they have and Grab has prioritized payments in financial services, I don't think companies in other markets have. So, I think sometimes we make simplistic comparisons between models, but actually what we find is that the models mutate a fair bit and actually makes them very much more powerful than just simple clones. So, we find in Southeast Asia, it's true of India, it's true of China, that models are mutating quite fast. And at least in our opinion, what's happening is there are no longer thin layers of technology. They're trying to transform very large industries in what we call is a much more of a full stack manner. So, you know, companies are effectively trying to disrupt retailers, you know, transportation, banks, etc., in a much more of a holistic fashion than just provide a layer of technology, which is what you might have found, you know, five or 10 years ago. And I often ask the question, hey, is we work a technology company or is it a full stack hybrid company? Similarly, we have a company called Oil Rooms. Is that really just a thin layer of technology or it's full stack and we think it's the latter? And what that does is the addressable market for these companies becomes humongous. So, our view is that the tech startups of today are going off to very large markets and have a shot at disrupting by essentially tweaking business models and mutating to new and more interesting models. And I think we see that a lot in China, Southeast Asia, and India. Anybody else have a view on that one? I mean, on capital, I mean, the other thing around derivatives is around capital as well. So, it's not just the startups. Are there distinctive regional indigenous angels, venture capitalists, funders of startups that are purely regional and they're not derivative of, sorry to pick on you, but not derivative of big US venture capital firms or big Chinese financing firms? What are we seeing in the funding community? Yeah, I think others can chip in and Eddie, you should add as well. But, you know, I think there will definitely be long term two distinctive flavors. There will be folks who do only regional investing and then there'll be firms like ourselves who will do regional and global investing. So, and I think that's a good thing for there to be a mix of both kinds. And I think it's the same as true of China, the same as true of India. I think there's need for both effectively in the market for there to be very focused regional pools of capital as well as global pools of capital. Yeah, I would agree there's already quite an amount of diversity from local angels all the way through VC firms, buyout firms, corporate venture, that sort of thing. Depending on who you ask, there is somewhere between a half billion to a few billion dollars of dry gunpowder. You see lots more deals these days than you did, you know, six years ago when Grab was just getting started. But I think there's still a way to go for the capital market in Southeast Asia to develop. I think a lot of it has to do with the investors, correct me if you disagree. There are a lot of new investors in the region who are perhaps more risk averse than their counterparts in Silicon Valley, obviously, but even China, they may be less familiar with the ways that traditional tech investors look at companies and support companies after. They may be more traditional in how they structure the deals, which from their perspective, based on the industries and expertise as they come into it with, makes sense, but from a venture game perspective, from a long-term tech startup game perspective can be pretty debilitating if they're not too careful. So some of our work, besides actually going and investing and supporting companies, is actually helping to get the region's investors on the same page about all of these factors. And I gotta say, things are a lot better than they were. I think there's still work to be done. Things are definitely better now than they ever were before. It's funny still today when I go meet certain, let's say American or European investors, it's funny to realize that they really don't know much about Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia, each country, its city is so complex and different that sometimes the only way to get them to understand is to bring them on a plane and put them in the middle of Manila or Ho Chi Minh City, and then say, hey, now you can rest in Singapore for a bit, right? And it's that understanding, that true visual and internal understanding that was lacking before. And again, much progress has been made. We have much thanks for 500 startups and even Sequoia. You guys have been helping a lot in building the region and we have much more to do. So from that perspective, as a company, we've actually realized that we also have a part to play on this. A few months ago, we've launched our Grad Ventures program and recently we announced that we've dedicated a pool of 250 million US dollars, specifically just for Indonesia to help more local startups and entrepreneurs figure out how to get from different stages, especially within the growth stage, just because we know we understand their challenges and it's more difficult for them to have to go out and convince someone else who has less local know-how. And more important than that, I think it's not just the money. It's really the understanding of, hey, you have a problem right now that is super nuanced and localized to whatever customer segment in whichever city, in whichever country you're serving in Southeast Asia. Guess what? We know what you're talking about. Here's how we thought about it, right? Here are the mistakes we've made and here's how we can hope to work together to help you avoid them. Now we can't guarantee what we've done was the only thing to do or the best thing to do. In fact, we continue to make many, many mistakes but what we're hoping to do is reduce those ratios and improve the hit rate for them so that we as an ecosystem can grow. Because I wasn't kidding. When I first started this conversation, I shared Southeast Asia is a land of opportunity for me. And for us, what we care about is growing it as a region and we want to have as many partners as possible and we're bringing in US, Chinese, local resources to do that and the best global and local partners for that as well. This is a good segue into this question of capability as well. I imagine some of it is cyclical, right? You have a lot of funders, venture capitalists who are successful founders of Exit that they're businesses, it's a cycle that turns. So presumably as there are more successful Exits and more successful companies built, there'll be more funding that goes into the ecosystem. When we talk about capability here, I mean, let me ask the panel, is there a culture? People talk about this culture of entrepreneurship, you know, acceptance of failure, risk-taking. Is there a culture of entrepreneurship in ASEAN and is it consistent across the different countries and jurisdictions? Hmm, I guess it's good. Maybe I'll start, yeah. I think it's a little more experience of the region than me. And I think I'll divide the culture of entrepreneurship into two parts. One, who are truly entrepreneurs. Second, will be the ones that follow the entrepreneurs because that's actually a culture of entrepreneurship as well. And the way I see it is it seems that the culture of entrepreneurship in ASEAN is very rich. Example would be if you go to Indonesia, you'll see more than three million mom and pop stores that is really a traditional market that is basically run by entrepreneurs, right? The same thing if you go to the Philippines, you'll see a lot of the Saudi Saudi stores that are run by local entrepreneurs. And the way I see it is that it basically culminates not from the culture itself, but also the infrastructure on how you drive entrepreneurship. And honestly speaking, I think I'm quite blessed to be part of an Indonesian founder team where the government is really helping us to get to that next stage, right? And the government really sees that, okay, apparently in Indonesia, there's a big gap when it comes to funding. So in the early stage, seems that there's quite abundance of investors that are interested, but then when it goes to series B, series C, then there will be a challenge. So then the government initiated a very strong program called NaxiKorn, which is short for Nax Indonesian Unicorns, where the government really provide a roadshow to different countries where they basically really focus on bringing on that later stage startups that they see will be prominent enough to bring to those countries. And also there are some leeways that are given to the startups where when I started the company three years ago, there were quite a lot of hurdles when it comes to even creating the company, the legal entity. But now it's becoming very, very easy. And that is driven by the fact that the government supports that entrepreneurship culture that we want to bring. Yeah. Thank you. Let's, I'm just conscious of time. We're gonna start opening it up to the audience here. So anybody would like to ask the panel a question. I can't see you very well from here because first of all, my eyes are bad. And secondly, it's quite dark. But if you could raise your hands if you have a question for the panel, please do so. In the meantime, just to get on this capability thing, gender participation and startups across the region it's on this panel where you're the only woman on this panel. Can you talk to us a little bit about the participation of women and entrepreneurship or innovation is empowering for women and what are some of the initiatives? What are some of the optimistic things you're seeing around that? I think I'm gonna broaden this to diversity as a whole. I think it's a super important topic that Ray alluded to in his earlier comments as well. Knowing that Southeast Asia is in itself so colorful and diverse. The only way we could truly develop the best continue to develop the best solutions for our customers is to make sure we have a diverse team as well. And like Ray, we were in a very fortunate position where we ended up with an extremely diverse team. We have more than 40 plus nationalities in grab right now. For context, we're six years old and if I'm not mistaken, there's about 45 nationalities. Our male to female generation were more than 40% female and I get to be one of those few co-founders that say 50% of our founding team was female. Nevertheless, Anthony and I never went out and said, hey, we need to hire the most nationalities ever. We need to keep an eye on the number of females that we're bringing into the pipe and hiring and whatnot because to us, all that mattered was we brought in the best people, the best leaders, the best grabbers for the specific role that we're hiring for. And when you take away the lens of, hey, do they have the right skin color, the right gender, the right age profile, the right hairstyle, it really becomes a much easier problem to solve for. But it is much easier said than done because the funnel itself is highly influenced by the pool that's available. So especially for engineering talent, the number of available female engineers is much less than let's say any other function that we could hire for. So we are at the same time trying to change that at grab. We have amazing leaders, whether it's women at grab, we're working together with universities, with other companies, with NGOs, to help shape the future of what we think the employment landscape needs to look like to provide the best opportunities for all. Actually, I'd say this is an issue in which it feels to me that this region is actually leading the world, certainly for our company. So we have a program called She Means Business, obviously SMB, that started here. It started here in this region, led by a colleague of mine, Claire Devi, that some of you may know. And it's She Means Business, which is a program of encouraging and enabling and training women to be entrepreneurs or to support them in their entrepreneurial journey using Facebook's platform. That started here in this region. It's now something that we run globally and we support tens of thousands of women every month to grow what can be, as you put it, a mom and pop business, so it could be a technology business and to use our platform for that purpose. So, and I've worked in other parts of the world. I used to be responsible for the Middle East. That's not a great place to be a female entrepreneur, but it's getting better. It's getting better, but compared to here, I think that there's much more equality and opportunity here that I've seen in my limited time here, but also talking with my colleagues who've led that work. But on diversity, I mean, I guess, to be honest here, we all come from very privileged backgrounds here. So if you overlay a gender issue with, say, a poverty issue as well, I mean, really entrepreneurs who are coming up, female entrepreneurs or any entrepreneurs in the Harvard Business School, excellent educations. What is the ecosystem really like for the vast majority of the population in Asia? Yeah, I mean, addressing that question and also going back to the prior comments as well, agree that Southeast Asia appears to be better than at least the US if you look at percentage of large company CEOs who are women. If you look at percentage of funded companies, at least in the purview that I have, that have a female founder, we do as well or better here than we do in other parts of the world. But there is still a gap on gender. There's a gap in other things, like the socioeconomic status as well, and it comes down partially to that, even though we're doing better here, and even though we try to say things like, let's just hire the best people we can hire, irrespective of where they come from, or let's just invest in the best founders we can, there are implicit biases, there are structural biases that result in the excuse and numbers. I think nowhere is it more stark than the poverty question. Partially, it's sensible, it's hard to be a tech founder if you come from a family where you didn't use the computer when you were growing up. And that is something that really has to be systemically addressed, not addressed by governments in terms of getting internet penetration out to rural areas, addressed by governments or private sector education in terms of digital literacy, more work on the private sector in terms of plugging those folks into the broader networks like we're lucky enough to have here at the forum. And there's a lot of work to do. It's on a day-to-day basis when we're looking at investments, we try to be both, look at it from two angles, one being blind to background and the other being very cognizant about background and trying to understand whether we'd come to the same decision and if not, why not? And it's become very clear when you look at our portfolio of companies here in Vietnam that there's still work to be done all around, including with us. Many of our founders have had experience overseas, have studied or worked abroad or have come from abroad and moved back to the country. It gives them benefits like international business knowledge and maybe critical thinking and so on, but the optimal situation is in the long run that you don't have to have left the country to get that same ability. And that's something that I think about every day. Questions from the audience? Luceni, I think I see a hand over there and then one here. Hi. Hello, yeah, hi. Very good afternoon. Thanks for the very insightful, informative discussion from the panel. My name is Lisa. I'm from Asiata Group and Asiata Digital. I know that the topic is startups, but there's also a conversation around the government and how partnership with other that needs to happen as well within the startup community. That's number one. Number two, the perception that startups is cool, lenient, cowboy-ish kind of thing. How does that actually relate to the processes or quote-unquote governance? Do you guys embrace that at all in your organization? And if you guys do, what triggers it to be implemented? Because I know as a beginning, you may not have a proper processes or plans in place, but is it a trigger by a number of customers? Is it triggers by a number of employees, the size of your organization? Thanks. Well, I suggest why don't we group a few of these? So we can tackle them together. So there was a question over here and there was a question at the back. Why don't we group these in threes? Hi, good afternoon. My name is Miranda Johnson. I write for The Economist magazine. I've got two questions. I'll try to be quick. And they both, I suppose, come under the category of dealing with governments in Asia. The first, perhaps, more towards grabs experiences of scaling in the region. Obviously, there have been difficulties with regulatory authorities, competition law in many countries in the region is nascent. And I was wondering if we could hear a little bit about grabs experiences from the more positive, given the recent approval in the Philippines of its services versus the greater difficulties in Singapore. The second question for Simon, if I may. Simon, obviously, Facebook has come under fire for its response to events in Myanmar. And I wondered if you could talk about the difficulties of managing such crises and how they're communicated on your platform. Thank you. Thank you. And one last, just in this group, there was a hand up the back there quite early. We've got a microphone to that person. Hello, hello. Yes, we can hear you. My name is Mayan Villalba, I'm from the Philippines. And I feel sad that there's no Filipino in the panel. I teach entrepreneurship. But in my classes, I find that those who graduate to become entrepreneurs are what we call the COO, Children of Owners. And those with lesser assets and experience usually become their employees. So my question is, what would be the, we can see now that assets resources is one factor. But what would be the other facilitating factors for young people like you? Very inspiring, to take the path of entrepreneurship. And the second question would be, what would you tell governments and our government in particular? Thank you. Creating a policy environment that supports entrepreneurship, especially among the young people. Thank you. Thank you very much. Quite a lot of questions here. What I propose, why don't we move down the panel from this side, starting from you, Shalandra. Which question would you like? So whatever you want to tackle. So we had three groups around the importance of partnerships and governance was the first set. The second set was a grab related and a Facebook related question. And the last one was around, the children of founders, how do we facilitate more young people into entrepreneurship and the role of government? Yeah, I can start with the last one. It's something we are passionate about, about how to encourage more young people and also women in entrepreneurship and so on. And this is an area we are pretty passionate about at our firm and always want to encourage people to take risks and to be able to dream. And I think I don't know the exact circumstances in the Philippines and why the COO concept exists. But I have a suspicion that it has something to do with financial assets, but it also has something to do with context. So perhaps the kids who have come from business families have seen this context of entrepreneurship in their families and have grown up around it. And therefore for them it's natural and for other people it's not. And I find that the presence of role models is a very big stimulant in new markets for people to become entrepreneurs. And so I really feel, I've had a chance to see how India entrepreneurship market evolved over the last 12 years. And I think once a few role models got established, a lot of young people started believing that they could do it too. And so I really feel like the presence of role models in each of these markets is going to facilitate many more to turn entrepreneurs. So I think we are at a point in time when in a way that's already happening. So the success of Grab or Gojek or Tokopedia or other companies or Shopee is I think already creating a much bigger wave of entrepreneurship today than it was in the past. Also many of these platforms are enabling others to become entrepreneurs on top of them. So Tokopedia has many people who will become entrepreneurs on Tokopedia. Let's say they'll launch their own brand or their shop or whatever. Similarly, many people will become entrepreneurs off of Grab and Gojek and so on and so forth. So I think this wave is going on, but perhaps I think a lot more can be done. So we are trying to, for example, support non-profit institutions that encourage, we just agreed to sponsor just a few days ago, an institution in Indonesia that's called Generation Girl. And it's a non-profit design to help bring more women into engineering careers so that women can become engineers. Because there's the stereotype that most of the time that more men are found in engineering roles. And we found a wonderful set of volunteers from Indonesia who wanted to stop this. And we were immediately attracted to their vision and said, hey, we'd love to support and let's make this big. I think similarly this past weekend, some of our team members were volunteering in Singapore to actually coach and mentor student founders who are in their teens. And they came back blown away saying, today's teenagers will make us all feel like we were nowhere at their level when we were that young. And so I think the younger generation is definitely sort of moving in that direction. And I think we all should sign up to do a lot more for enabling this. Thanks, Eddie. I'll focus on the partnerships question around building an ecosystem. And I would say that there are stakeholders across any city or country that need to be involved to really optimize. I'll touch on a few points because this could be a whole another panel topic. But I do think the government has a huge role to play in terms of rolling out internet penetration, getting digital literacy on board, and also with upgrading the education. I'll use Vietnam as an example. Vietnam is fantastic with math and science. That's why there can be so many engineers coming out of here. The education system lacks, for example, in critical thinking, creativity, and so on. And that's something that we need the government to do, to get involved with, to kind of help overhaul. Besides government, it's obviously families. Families getting their heads around the transformations that are happening and getting more used to the idea that math family members should be allowed to try and fail. We see that in pockets here in Vietnam. That's how Vietnam rose out of poverty over the last 30 years. But it's still, there's still a certain fear of failure. And then finally, in terms of the corporates, just because we're running short on time here, but of course there are a lot of traditional businesses in all these countries in ASEAN. They need to be very clear about the importance of digitizing and the role that young entrepreneurs can play in helping them digitize or else they might be competed out by these young entrepreneurs in the next few years. Thanks, Eddie. Great. I'm just conscious of time. So these are almost gonna be sort of like last words here. So, right? Yeah, I just want to answer the remark about startup being cowboyish. So, and I do hope that I represent a lot of startups in ASEAN. We are taking risks when it comes to trying to crack that business model. But when it comes to people, we don't. We do want to actually focus on what is the right culture and foundation on processes. And a lot of startups that I talk to are really focusing on that from day one. That includes SnapGuard. And the way we see it is when you focus on processes, a lot of the issues, even when it comes to diversity, for example, and I echo Willing's comment where if you actually focus on the skill sets, then you don't really need diversity initiatives. When you focus on a very objective process, then the diversity will come by itself. And that's why SnapGuard has 40% female employees and 50% of our co-founders are female. Yeah, so. Thanks, Ray. So, I'd love to talk about startups in Myanmar. I don't think it's a company we've really yet earned the right to be able to do that. We've said very publicly, right, to the top of the company, we were too slow to address abuses of our service in Myanmar. But we are making big strides. We've still got a long way to go. I really hope that in due course it would be wonderful to have a Myanmar person here representing that country. And there are digital startups there, but it's very nascent. And I'd love in the future for us to be able to be in a position where people want to hear from Facebook about entrepreneurship in Myanmar, rather than other issues. I'll cover two quick topics. To grab specific question and the COO question. I think we approach government relationships like we do with every other partnership, right? With our customers, with our corporate partners, as well as our government partners. We see it as a relationship, a journey together, and not a task to go do or not do in one meeting. And it's because of that continued approach over the last six years, we've had the fortune of going through, what I would say, the typical ups and downs of any relationship, right? Some conversations go well, some conversations don't. But as long as we mutually keep our eyes on the same end goal, we'll ultimately get there together. As long as we're both willing to listen and adjust our practices accordingly for the greater good of the people that we're ultimately serving, we will get there, right? Second one, just to end on a joke. On the COO, I'll use myself as a case example. I am both a COO and not a COO. I'm Chief Operating Officer for Grab and I am not the child of an owner. So hopefully that gives you an example to share with your students. That's wonderful, thank you. Everyone, we're out of time, unfortunately. Apologies to those who had questions and we didn't have the time to address them. But thank you to the audience. Would you all join me in thanking the panel today? Thank you. I think just as final words, the things that I found really distinctive about this was just the distinctiveness of this region, that it is not a derivative of any other ecosystem out there that really ASEAN is developing its own ecosystem and that we should really look forward and strive for the day when there is any young person who comes from a poor family can equally participate in this ecosystem and create something as successful as some of the entrepreneurs here have created. So thank you very much. Thank you.