Analyse Asia With Bernard Leong

"So one way to think about crypto is a group of people come together and they have a vision of the future, and they're betting on that fork of the future through collective capital. So some folks think it's going to be L2’s that are going to scale. Some people think it's Solana. Whatever it is, you get to bet on the version of the future that you want with your rest of your community. That's chaotic, it's a zoo of people collectively trying to decide what the future's going to look like. But the good news is at least if the past cycles are anything to go by, almost all reasonable forks of the future get funded, and then it actually goes extreme where. Where crypto dick butts are also getting funded and pictures of like the 18th dog token is getting funded. And so, if anything, those who have been in crypto long enough seem to have benefited; because I have certainly have not – I’m much newer to this industry. But they seemed to have benefited from holding tight on what they believe about the world to be true

"Mapping the world is really an infinite exercise. We're on this journey to create this digital representation of the physical world - buildings, places, things, everything. This is going to be very critical. And that extra precision, that greater resolution as we support businesses to comply with all sorts of things - be it even new regulations ... And then of course, the other key trend is the ongoing rise of AI and automation. And as you have better insights and location, that will support better optimization of supply chains and those smart cities and all sort of stuff that will lean on location technology." - Jason Jameson   Fresh out of the studio, Jason Jameson, general manager, and senior vice president for Asia Pacific in HERE Technologies discussed the company's focus to broaden the location intelligence across the Asia Pacific and talked about the key trends in the digital map-making space. We start off with Jason's background from IBM to HERE Technologies and then dive deep into the current develo

"I think there are three main things. The first is the continuation of the strategic investments that we are making across the regions in the markets that we serve. The second one is an acceleration of our ecosystem, because our partners play such an important part in the success of our customers and also themselves and us as well, and the third one is really innovation. The constant innovation on our platform is critical and there is no sign of that slowing down as we look forward to 2023 and beyond." - Brigid Archibald   Fresh out of the studio, Brigid Archibald, managing director in Asia Pacific and Japan, Qualtrics, joined us in a discussion on the business footprint of the experience management company and the key trends in the region. We started with Brigid's background and her experience in B2B sales and then proceed into how Qualtrics is working with companies to improve their customer experience. Last but not least, she discuss the key trends in the experience management space & advised what the

”I think great looks like a combination of a few things. We always talk about how a startup hits product market fit and then essentially gets a flywheel going in terms of value and everything. So I think 'great' at True Global Ventures from my point of view is us finding that company, that team of serial entrepreneurs and an idea that can essentially change the industry, convincing them that we as a fund can help them to grow exponentially, globally. And us actually helping them to not only close a round with us, but also to grow, and also to close the next round of funding and all subsequent rounds of funding till the ultimate exit. And having that kind of chemistry that maybe after many years later when they come back and look at us they say, 'Hey, thanks for the ride.' We really treasure what you do. And in my new startup, say for example (Because these are serial entrepreneurs that cannot usually sit still, right?) I would love for you True Global Ventures to be our investor again." - Kelly Choo   Fresh o

"So there's a tremendous amount of friction that exists there because I think we're still at the point where we're. We're using traditional insurance products that have been invented in the 1970s and trying to add this digital layer on top of it. So where InsureTech has struggled, I would say, is unless there is a significant amount of product innovation. It's very hard to really optimize the product. So, becoming a full stack was one of the hypotheses that the InsureTechs pursued, and we've seen those take off quite well in states in China, and now India is another market that's really progressing very well." - George Kesselman   Fresh of the studio, George Kesselman, the president & founder of Insurtech Asia Association, joined us to discuss the intersection of insurance and technology in the Asia Pacific. We began with George's work in the insurtech industry from a start-up co-founder to a corporate executive in a leading Chinese firm within the Asia Pacific region. Then he dived deeper into the challe

"The vision is to future proof global real estate. Now why real estate? One thinks that it's just one industry, right? Well, it's 300 trillion dollars. There is no asset class, no industry that is remotely as valuable. Not all the treasury bonds in the world, not all the stock exchanges in the world, and not all the real GDP of the economies of the world add up to the value of global land and property assets: 300 trillion dollars. Now, what will any of it be worth tomorrow, one year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now in different places in the world? We used to have a pretty stable answer to these questions. The truth is the valuation model is broken because it's very antiquated, and not only is the appraisal or valuation model broken, it's even more broken because it never took climate change into consideration." - Parag Khanna   Fresh out of the studio, Parag Khanna, founder and CEO of Climate Alpha unveils the story of his new company which leverages artificial intelligence to decipher how re

"Yes FTX was a very large institutional player, Genesis whatever happens out there was a very large institutional player and so it'll take a lot of time for the fallout to fully play out. But just taking a step back and looking at the big picture, none of this has any impact on crypto's multi-year arc towards enabling innovation. Ethereum as a trustless, decentralized digital asset set on one layer is groundbreaking that nothing will change. Tokens as a form of capital creation is a paradigm shift for business formation. Nothing's gonna change that. And talented builders are still continuing to come into the system and soon their work and their labour will bear fruit." - Cosmo Jiang Fresh out of the studio, Cosmo Jiang, founder of Nova River and host of Liquid - Web3 investing podcast with Global Coin Research, joined us to break down the consequences of FTX's collapse and how it triggered the crisis for Digital Currency Group (DCG) with the potential insolvency of Genesis and its crown jewel, Grayscale. Cosm

"If you look at over 30 years, China equities have returned zero, basically gone up and gone back down to where it was 30 years ago.  It was shocking. So the other thing that is hard to believe, I think we're entering a period of even greater uncertainty now than where we were six months to a year ago. Opening up is a huge gamble. the markets are rallying right now -- 'yay China is opening!' -- but at what cost?" - Shai Oster   Fresh out of the studio, Shai Oster, Asia Bureau Chief from The Information, returned for the 5th time in a row for his annual review of China for the year 2022. Shai started the grading of his predictions last year and dive deeper into Sequoia China's current status, and potential tech IPOs of Chinese companies: Bytedance, Ant Financial and Didi. He examined how Apple and Tesla will navigate China in the midst of tensions between China and the United States. Last but not least, he gave his predictions on China tech for the year 2023.   Podcast Information: The show is hosted and produ

"What we did instead is we did not. The market rallied. We were just clouded in our judgment and we were not scaling the firm the way we should have. So that was probably one big one. The other one was after the liquidation I should have just had blinders on to the media and focused on creditors only and probably just had a round table and said these are what I think the options are. What do you think the options are? And if that were the case I think we probably wouldn't be in bankruptcy. We would've found one of the solutions that I just mentioned." - Kyle Davies   Fresh out of the studio, Kyle Davies, co-founder of 3 Arrows Capital aka 3AC, joined us in a discussion to discuss their firm's demise in June 2022 and its aftermath after filing Chapter 15 bankruptcy. He explained why and how the firm's thesis on the crypto super cycle failed with the Luna-Terra collapse and offered his thoughts on the current meltdown of the crypto markets amid the ongoing meltdown. Last but not least, he offered his responses

"For me, it's only about daily active users. I feel in the next five years, especially for the whole ecosystem. I'm not talking about Polygon first - let's say for the whole blockchain ecosystem… In [the] next five years, if we don't reach somewhere between 50 to 100 million users, I think we would've failed very badly. So all apps. I'm talking about all apps in all ecosystems, layer one, layer two, all the apps - payments, Bitcoin, everything included. We should have 50 to 100 million daily active users. Obviously, for Polygon, we want to capture as much market share out of that: 50 to 100 million. If Polygon remains the number one adopted amongst those daily active users, it will be a great scenario for Polygon." - Sandeep Nailwal   Fresh out of the studio, Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon joined us to discuss the origin story of the Polygon blockchain and its evolution as a layer-2 chain for builders out there. Sandeep started with his backstory and how it led to the creation of the polygon blockchai

"Because of the pandemic, we all became patients. We all became aware of diagnostic tools [and] therapeutic interventions.  The level of awareness that exists now around this specific topic is very high, but it also translates into us being more aware of why it's important to be preventative. The mask is preventative, exercise in the post-pandemic world is preventative for heart conditions, and there's a much larger appetite now to start looking at how we can work together in partnership to identify those things that allow us to intervene early in order to prevent or to slow down any types of conditions that could happen to individuals and shift the narrative around how we approach healthcare in Asia. This is absolutely necessary because of the challenges that we face and it will be totally enabled by data and technology. So the tools for that exist. The biggest question really is how we start to implement them." - Ahmed Elhusseiny   Fresh out of the studio, Ahmed Elhusseiny, the area head of the Asia Pacific

"If you think about a modern digital business, what does that mean? Well, it translates to personalized, proactive service and support. At a minimum, it's also the ability to deliver and provide access to self-service. It's about eliminating all of the mundane and repetitive tasks that are required to drive great engagement and customer loyalty and where a process or a workflow is required to be executed. A digital business is about automating and optimizing that request across the enterprise delivered to the right person with the right skills, maybe the right spare parts, the right geographical location, the right availability to deliver on that customer or employee request." - Mitch Young   Fresh out of the studio, Mitch Young, president of Asia Pacific & Japan from ServiceNow, joined us in a conversation to discuss their business activity and focus and explore the rise of digital-native companies in the Asia Pacific. Mitch began with the story of ServiceNow and the interesting customer stories across t

"Because you can learn the hard skills, but if you don't know what holds you back, you don't know who you are, you don't know what your triggers are, you don't know what motivates you, what upsets you. How do you bring the best version of yourself every single day to what you do and get better? ... We need to pay attention to that because the whole idea is you cannot anticipate change ahead of you, but you gotta learn how to ride the waves of change ahead of you more gracefully. So you don't want the waves to come slamming at you, but you need to turn around and ensure that when they come, you can manoeuvre, you can ride the waves to change." - Haresh Khoobchandani   Fresh out of the studio, Haresh Khoobchandani, vice president of Autodesk Asia Pacific joined us to discuss the business footprint of Autodesk in Asia Pacific and his new book "Growth by Choice". The conversation sets off with Haresh discussing his career trajectory and the inspiration behind writing his book "Growth by Choice" and providing stra

"My version of success here is to build the most valuable data set in web3. Hopefully, if we do our jobs right, it'll probably be just one of the most valuable data sets in the world, period. When we look at Google Street View, this is an ecosystem, a platform, where there is probably so much low-hanging fruit - gems that can be extracted to build really great businesses, unlock new experiences, to advance the human condition. When it comes to computing, I fundamentally believe it has not been innovated even close to that first inning in terms of like, the baseball,  I want to create that data set. I want to then generate the Metaverse maps of the world from it, and then I wanna be able to push them into different use cases that just make new things possible." - Alex Chung   Fresh out of the studio, Alex Chung, founder and CEO of Reality Platforms joined us in a conversation and share the backstory of his company and his perspectives on decentralized mapping in the metaverse. Alex dived deep into the weeds in

"So, because I think the way I've always been thinking about this podcast is (as) a brand, I think we talked about it just now, the quality of the guests we curate is now a challenge for everyone who wants to get onto the show as well. And I've been very methodical about the selection of guests. I would rather have no episodes, but the quality of the guests must be there. And I'm very mindful of that and the topics I want to go for (are) very deep." - Bernard Leong   Fresh out of the studio and we hit our 400th episode, both hosts of Analyse Asia: Carol Yin and Bernard Leong sat down to reflect on China and how the podcast has evolved over the past two years and reached this important milestone. We start with Carol's current work in China, the status of entrepreneurship there and what it is like living in China in the era of dynamic COVID-zero policy. Following on, Bernard and Carol discuss the state of Analyse Asia and outline the challenges ahead for the podcast specifically in the selection of guests, mone

"And so we see the private market as a very interesting space because as I said, if everybody had 20% of their portfolio in private markets, we're moving from almost zero in a mass affluent hand to 20%. That's a lot of wealth, but that wealth requires a lot of thinking, a lot of platforms, a lot of technology innovation to solve. Because private markets are very complex. If you think about simple things like cryptocurrencies or stocks, the way that it trades, the post asset servicing is quite simple." - Choo Oi-Yee Fresh out of the studio, Choo Oi-Yee, CEO of ADDX, joined us in a conversation to discuss the company's platform to serve the private markets and reviewed the state of private markets in the Asia Pacific. She began the conversation with the market opportunity of the private markets and how ADDX facilitates the interactions between the accredited investors and the entrepreneurs seeking funds through their products and services on the platform. Last but not least, she shared her perspectives on how c

"It's impossible today for any country to do it all on their own. And even if you looked at the United States, which is still the biggest player in the supply chain by far, it's still the case that the US can't do it all on its own. As you mentioned, it imports lithography equipment from the Netherlands. It imports chemicals and materials from Japan. And then the most advanced fabrication of processor chips is in Taiwan. So, no country can do it alone. And really no country is even close." - Chris Miller   Fresh out of the studio, Chris Miller, associate professor of international history from Tufts University joined us in a conversation to discuss his new book "Chip War". Starting from the birth of Silicon Valley and the inability of the Soviet Union to develop its semiconductor ecosystem, Chris chronicled the story of semiconductors that brought forth the rise of Asia in the past few decades and how Japan, Korea and Taiwan built their expertise within the chip supply chain along with other key players. He b

"First forecasted back in 2016, we had anticipated the 200 billion by 2025. It also stands out to us that the digital economy grew 20% year on year. And the reason that stands out is that we expected things to slow down somewhat as we came out of the pandemic because we saw incredible acceleration over the last two to three years, and to see that people have returned to so-called normalcy, at least in terms of going out shopping, visiting, retail spaces. And in fact, that mobility has returned to pre-pandemic levels and often times exceeded it, but yet you still see the digital economy growing 20%. So those are real standouts for us." - Stephanie Davis   Fresh out of the studio, Stephanie Davis from Google and Florian Hoppe from Bain & Company joined us to break down the key findings from the e-Conomy SEA Report 2022. Stephanie and Florian shared their perspectives on the different digital trends in various sectors from e-commerce to web3 and what important trendlines they are looking forward to in the ne

"So people don't mind going back to the office. But in Asia, the people who wanna go to the office the least are the people who are working in Northeast Asia. So in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, those are ones that have more of a tough environment to work in, more of a bullying culture, the strict 9-9-6 in China (which I know is going away) but people are still expected to work a lot. ... They don't have that type of a great work life balance, and they don't wanna go back in. So it's really a difficult thing. There's dozens of different types of dependencies you would need to look at. We need to start this process because this isn't gonna go away. We're gonna keep transitioning to it, so we might as well put in a better plan to make sure that our return-to-work and hybrid models are successful." - Charles Anderson   Fresh out of the studio, Charles Anderson, chief strategy officer of Eight Inc joined us to share his perspectives on the future of work. He shared how companies are struggling to cope w

"I'm actually not a believer of the web 2.0 turning into web 3. So these days a lot of companies are basically turning non-profitable web 2.0 companies and adding token elements into that and turning it into a web 3 company - and think issuing a token can flip the whole picture differently. I'm not a believer in that, the reason is that the user is coming on board with a different purpose. These people from the web 2.0, they don't care about whether they have tokens, they don't care about whether they're owning the assets." - Jessica Liu   Fresh out of the studio, Jessica Liu, the partner from AppWorks Ventures joined us in a discussion to probe deep into what it is like to invest in the Web3 space. We began with her backstory of how she transitioned from fintech into crypto as a venture capitalist. From there, she offered her perspectives on how the web3 space is evolving and why the web2 paradigm cannot be translated into the new mission of web3 in onboarding the next billion. Last but not least, Jessica re