Episodes
“[Glints] We would like to still be around and building an enduring company. A big part of why many of us at Glints are building what we want is we hope that our children and grandchildren can be using Glints to grow their careers as well. So we want this to be an enduring company. Our mission is to help realize human potential. And we would like to be a company that's here to last. That's one. Two, concretely we see a lot of opportunities in the platform business and in our cross-border...
Published 01/09/24
"Money is a very interesting kind of numerical way of measuring when you're levelling up. So that's where the distinction needs to be very clear. The way that I've positioned it in the book and what the research tells us is that if we force the games on people, it's very bad. But if we look at the games that they naturally play in their free time when they were younger, it's a very good predictor in terms of the type of work that they naturally would gravitate to. So if somebody is amazing...
Published 12/19/23
"You will continue to see Western investment continuing to decline. The risk-reward calculations won't change in the next 12 months, as far as I can see. The Chinese economy is not about to take off. What you will see is the beginnings of some people who are willing to take the gamble. They are going to try different ways to exit. You're going to see more people experimenting with domestic IPOs, and onshore IPOs because you can get the money off. For example, if you're investing in LiDAR or...
Published 12/12/23
"Consumer demand will accelerate the need for security, privacy and regulation. Like zero-knowledge (ZK) where you can prove something is true without revealing all information. And of course, security infrastructure, which is very interesting and important at this current moment, even before the next bull market. For example, one of the companies we invested into Ledger, a digital asset hardware wallet. You basically have an app store interface where you can trade, you can stake. We see a...
Published 11/29/23
We've got a 330 trillion dollar industry here, which arguably a lot of it, we talk about stranded assets, CRREM pathways to stranded assets, et cetera. I talked to a lot of funds. I've talked to a lot of developers. They're getting very worried about this. And it's not just about their existing portfolios. It's about how they are going to exit portfolios. Because many buyers now actually build in the cost of retrofitting a building to bring it up to sustainability when they're looking at...
Published 11/15/23
"I think in the past, we've looked more at inclusion and access, but actually we've made so much inroads over the past years. Now again, we're talking about participation because what we're seeing is that 30% of the highest spending customers who we call high-value users (HVUs) - they make up over 70% of the digital economies' transaction value. So 30% Are leading to 70% of the digital economy. We want to make sure that we don't leave users behind and we continue to drive growth and drive...
Published 11/07/23
"And so what we do at Dow Jones, very specifically, is look at - What are the regulators demanding? What do they want you to do? What are the specific data points that you require? And which workflows do you want to use them in? And, there are very different workflows, which within, for example, a financial institution. You have the onboarding of your new customers, and in those situations, you may have a little bit more time. Obviously, there's the service level in terms of opening a bank...
Published 10/31/23
“It is useful both to internal and external, but it's also a really great litmus test. If you sit down to write your public letter and you can't explain why you're doing something, if it doesn't fit in with your overarching strategy, it goes back to that first thing we said as PMs [product managers], which is sometimes you have to say no to it. You're like, I actually can't explain to anyone why we're spending time on this particular feature. It doesn't fit any of the four themes we said...
Published 10/24/23
  Stripe isn't just payments. We actually build economic infrastructure for the global economy. And so we've got a lot more technology beyond payments. Our Stripe Tour is a cool venue where we get a chance to bring customers, partners and thought leaders together and talk about the current state of technology and future technologies - in a local Asian context. So it's been a lot of fun. And by the way, we're really enthusiastic about Asia here at Stripe. Not only because 60 per cent of the...
Published 10/17/23
"The global adoption index is something that we put out once a year and it comes strictly within the research domain and it's our attempt to really elucidate just how much activity is happening around the world. Crypto is a global asset with activity in over 150 countries around the world, but people feel like it's a black box because they don't really understand who are these crypto users. Where are they? But in reality, we don't have answers to those questions because we don't have survey...
Published 10/10/23
"But today,  the clouds are the new silos. They're like the silos in the data center, only they're public. But AWS is a bit of a data silo, as is Azure. We used to call it Hotel California - you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Right?  A big part of what Snowflake does is tear down those silos to allow customers to have the data where they want it. Because if it's on Snowflake, it doesn't matter which physical infrastructure is behind it; and to share that data easily...
Published 10/03/23
"Now the fundamental motivation is customers don't just want to buy a server, right? They want to buy an outcome. They want something to happen. They want to get business value. So, the SSG [Services & Solutions Group] is Lenovo's pivot to meet our customers where they are, and also to lead our company into the future because as they have more sophisticated requirements, they need a simple way to manage and deploy all that I T across their organizations. When they want that holistic view,...
Published 09/25/23
"Evangelism comes from a Greek term, meaning bringing the good news. So fundamentally, what an evangelist does is bring the good news.  And so with Macintosh, the good news was that this personal computer can increase your creativity and productivity. The good news with Canva was that this product, it can increase your ability to communicate by a democratizing design. That's the good news. My podcast can help you become a remarkable person because you listen to what other remarkable people...
Published 09/05/23
"It is not just cheaper, faster, better. I'm not gonna deny that. If we go forward a number of years, it's gonna cause what we've been calling economic singularity. The value of labor drops to zero and you got all kinds of problems from that. But in the immediate future, what's gonna be interesting is this is the first technology that enables us to automate relationships. Basically, the AI can interact with us the way we interact with us. This sounds very trivial,  but if you look at tech and...
Published 08/11/23
"We might not have old rundown houses or shacks that are converted into brand activations, but we have boats and we have parks, and we have so many different opportunities for organizations and brands to profile themselves during South By, in interestingly different ways. When you're putting together an event like South by Southwest, I go back to what I said before about understanding what it means to different people, what industry they're from, what does success look like for them and what...
Published 08/02/23
"Southeast Asia is a very exciting market and I think lots of folks, and probably guests have talked about it, but let's just rattle off the list; obviously you have a rising middle class, you have that openness to trade, openness to immigration, and openness to keep growing from a policy perspective. Of course, there's the urbanization and the internet technology digitalization wave. So these are all the first three slides of every VC fund and LP deck, but also the first three slides of...
Published 07/25/23
"You talked about the market opportunity. When you look at the landscape of the billionaire population today, statistics show that you expect that population to grow by about 34% in the years to come. And from that population, at least a third is going to come from Asia Pacific, and in the next five years time, we expect Asia Pacific to be growing by about 40%. So the market is large in relation to the space of wealth to be managed. And we look at the growth of family office space in...
Published 06/18/23
"With both Web3 and VR, if you thought that was interesting a year ago, it's still interesting. Nothing's really changed. Like 98% of all the nonsense has gone away. But if it was early 2022 and you thought VR headsets are going to be a device that two or 3 billion people own, well nothing's changed in the last year to change that.  If you think that we might build a billion-scale, consumer software, consumer internet service on a blockchain. Which is really what Web3 means. Yeah, ok.  If you...
Published 05/21/23
"Here in the US and to your US listeners at least, I think what maybe is lost is that despite the US's very aggressive stance against crypto, the totally opposite attitude is being adopted by governments on the other side of the world. Jin talked a little bit about Japan.  I would just highlight Hong Kong as a proxy to China, mainland China. It's very clear that China is opening up to crypto through Hong Kong. This is a total about-face from less than two years ago when China banned crypto...
Published 05/14/23
"I would say first of all Indonesia is probably one of the remaining opportunities in a huge market, that's more or less homogeneous with a population of 270 million. You have to look at the G D P per capita is around 4,000 and then the GDP (gross domestic product) growth itself: it's about 5%. So I think you are hard-pressed to find any other country that matches these three very promising criteria. I would say that secondly, on the technology side, a high level of digitization has taken...
Published 05/07/23
"But if you look at Generative AI, that is fundamentally a different way that technology came about and it required a lot of investment without knowing what was going to transpire. So I've talked to a couple of people who are affiliated with various top AI labs in China, and I asked them the same question 'Well, why didn't you guys not create this?' And the universal answer was... honestly OpenAI themselves probably had no idea what was going to happen." - Rui Ma   Fresh out of the studio,...
Published 04/30/23
"Yes a lot of the blockchain companies don't know how to make games, and a lot of the game companies don't know how to incorporate blockchain into their games properly; there's really some truth to that. And there are some companies that put together both things like Animoca Brands for example, which started also as a gaming company and then morphed into a crypto gaming company. So they're trying to put these areas of ex expertise in together." - Serkan Toto   Fresh out of the studio, Serkan...
Published 04/13/23
"So at the Asia Pacific level, this study looked at several countries. But you know, we looked at a country level because that's the information that our customers and partners are interested in - whether they're in the government sector or in the private sector. So the countries include Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and India. In the ASEAN space, the four countries I mentioned before - are Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. So in this case, the first takeaway was...
Published 04/09/23
"The first thing is that the crypto market is still quite small compared to the equity [market]. [The size of the crypto market to equity market is about] one to 120, less than 0.8%, not even 1%. So, some smaller projects are very manipulated. [It is a] tough market, and second thing is that a lot of people say the variation for crypto is Twitter driven. So when Elon Musk or CZ send out a Tweet, it can pump up the project by about 5% to 10%. Because each [crypto] project is like religion,...
Published 03/28/23
Fresh out of the studio and on the 2nd emergency podcast within the week, Cosmo Jiang from Nova River and host of the Global Coin Research Liquid podcast explained the implications of USDC depegging due to the bank run triggered by Silicon Valley Bank over the past weekend of 11 March. We dived deep into the implications of how it nearly destroyed the global web3 and crypto economy and what it means for the startups moving forward in an uncertain regulatory environment in the US. Last but not...
Published 03/16/23