“You should focus on talking to customers and making a great product” The wide availability of AI tools and APIs has changed the landscape of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. Small companies and independent programmers can now deliver more value to their customers than ever before, and solve problems that not so long ago belonged in big research labs. Rishabh Srivastava is the founder and CEO of Loki.ai - a Singapore based Data Science company. Rishabh describes himself as an...

Jesse Lee is a creative entrepreneur, building his company Waemee (www.waemee.com) from Bangkok, Thailand. Before coming to Asia, Jesse - almost accidentally - became a successful influencer. Today we discuss how in 18 months he went from looking for someone to share his passion with to being almost overwhelmingly successful on a very niche market.

Philippe Beaudoin is co-founder and head of applied research at Element AI, a company founded on the belief that humans and machines can work smarter together and that this synergy can help humans focus on the tasks that they find most meaningful. An essential challenge on that path, says Philippe, is working towards transitive trust in Artificial Intelligence - by helping humans understand how AI systems work and how these systems actually use the data we feed them to make decisions.

Hiring and retaining tech talent is a burning issue for startups and companies all over Southeast Asia. Yassine Belmamoun, Co-Founder and CTO of Manatal, shares his vision on what is broken in the classical HR process. He argues that many companies don’t spend enough time making hiring a great experience for candidates, which he sees as an essential ingredient to hiring and retaining the best tech talent. Yassine also, generously, shares his own experience hiring as a serial entrepreneur and...

Agnès Pannier-Runacher is a French politician and business executive, and the current Secretary of State for Economy and Finance. In our conversation we discuss the economic importance of inclusion and diversity, as well as some of the measures France has taken to promote gender equality in business.

This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at Found8 Singapore. Beyond co-working, Found8's spaces are home to a thriving and collaborative community with instant access to innovation networks. Find out more at https://www.found8.com/

We pick up last week's conversation about attention saturation and ask ourselves: what makes for good content marketing? Recorded on location in Singapore.

The BrownBag Sessions are episodes that aren’t structured interviews, but rather recordings of conversations with daily practitioners in certain areas of expertise. In this series on Marketing and Growth in Asia, Thibault Brière and Nikolaj Groeneweg - both seasoned in the the ways of marketing & growth for startups and large corporations -  discuss the challenges, opportunities and best strategies for marketing in Asia. We’ll discuss market trends, marketing campaigns we that we...

For this episode we flew to HongKong and sat down with Elvie Lahournère, Director of Digital and Innovation APAC at Natixis Bank. We discuss the many contrasts between Asia and the West when it comes to customer expectations, entrepreneurial mindset and the way startups and big corporations work together.

Sleep might be devalued in the “996” work culture in some parts of Asia (9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week), but one startup is looking to help people make the most of this important part of human life. Dreem – a successful Paris-based company – has developed a headband that, when combined with the resources of an app, helps people maximize this precious resource. Targeted mainly at people suffering from sleep disorders, like insomnia, it’s found applications in other settings, as well. Raphael...

Staying up to date on your skillset is critical and can be difficult, and when that skillset is tech - and you plan to use that skillset outside of your home market - it can be even harder. Paris-based global tech bootcamp company Le Wagon looks to fill that educational and training gap for workers. But come prepared to get your "hands dirty", because you won't walk out with just a paper credential. You'll have created a fully coded and functional product at the end.  Listen as French Tech...

How can we make innovation more open, more diversified and more sustainable? If the best ideas can come from anywhere, how can companies find those ideas, those solutions, if they only have access to a local ecosystem? Agorize, an Open Innovation platform that connects businesses and organizations with innovators from across the world, might be the answer. Mathieu Toulemonde, Agorize Asia CEO, shares what makes their platform so special, tells the story of their fast growth in the ASEAN...

In his second part of our conversation with Frédéric Nouel, we discuss the evolving attitudes towards entrepreneurship in Japan and the difficulties of starting and growing a company there. Like in many other countries, entrepreneurship in Japan is on the rise. But the push of traditional Japanese society towards stability and corporate careers is still strong and the change is taking time. A lot of time. Because of that, the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Japan still isn’t very easy to...

This week’s guest is Frédéric Nouel, a long-time game-developer and co-founder of "3rd Kind", a mobile game publishing company based in Tokyo, Japan. Frederic has lived in Japan for almost a decade and shared with us many interesting insights into the Japanese mobile gaming market, as well as on Japanese entrepreneurship. In this first part of our conversation, we take a deep dive into the gaming preferences of Japanese consumers, what it takes to be successful as a game publisher and the...

Soreasmey Ke Bin is the founder and managing partner of Confluences, an incubator in the kingdom of Cambodia as well as the co-president of French Tech Cambodia and the vice president of the French Chamber of Commerce. Who better to tell us about the business opportunities the kingdom has to offer to entrepreneurs? Soreasmey shares his insights into what makes Cambodia special and why the kingdom might be the perfect place for certain startups to get started in the ASEAN region. To learn...

Why has Singapore become the business-hub for the ASEAN region - attracting entrepreneurs and investors alike? What makes doing business in Singapore so easy? What are the challenges when expanding from Singapore into neighbouring markets such as Indonesia? We discuss all of these things and more with Adrien Barthel, co-founder of Sleek - a startup that makes it super easy to start and manage a company in Singapore. If you're thinking of setting up a company in Singapore, Sleek is 100 % the...

Today's guest is Marion Bernardi - Fintech engagement lead at SC Ventures, a Standard Chartered Bank business unit that promotes innovation, invests in disruptive financial technology and explores alternative business models for the financial industry. Marion tells us about the recent launch of the SCVentures Fintech Bridge - a platform that connects and matches partners from the fintech ecosystem to the Bank’s internal community. It’s not always easy for startups and banks to work together...

Yoann Fol and Thibaut Brière are the driving forces behind Singapore's French Tech For Good - a movement that aims to promote the idea that Tech not only can, but should have a positive impact on the world. In this conversation we explore what it means for a tech company to be purpose-driven and whether or not the goal of having a positive impact on the world is compatible with the pursuit of profit and growth. We also discuss Yoann's larger vision for the French Tech For Good movement: to...

Emmanuel FAUVEL is a serial entrepreneur, founder and CEO of ASTEMIS and part of French Tech Bangkok. In this conversation we explore how the Thai market has changed over the last 20 years and what the ecosystem’s current challenges and opportunities are. Emmanuel paints a picture of a Thailand that was perhaps late to the game of tech-entrepreneurship, but that has since managed to play catch-up. Thailand, he says, is much more welcoming to foreign entrepreneurs than one might think - whilst...

Gilles Langourieux is the CEO and founder of Virtuos - one of the worlds leading game development companies. Virtuos employs over 1,500 staff worldwide and as a part of their global growth, they have recently moved their headquarter from Chine to Singapore - and that’s where we met with Gilles, not long after Virtuous closed a funding round to finance its next phase of growth and international expansion. If you like video games, or movies for that matter, you’ve probably seen some of Virtuos...

David Bensadon is the founder and CEO of We Are Caring, Singapore’s smart and ethical agency for hiring foreign domestic workers. Foreign Domestic Workers, or “helpers” as they are often called, are common all across Asia Pacific. A helper is live-in maid, whose duties include cleaning, cooking and childcare. These women often leave their home country, and families, behind because of a lack of other well-paid job opportunities. The total number of domestic workers in Asia is hard to estimate,...

Nicolas Colin is a thought-provoking voice in the conversation about new institutions in the digital world. He has co-authored several works on technology, including a 2013 Report on Taxation in the Digital Economy, and his articles regularly appear publications such as Foreign Affairs, The Financial Times, and Le Monde. He has recently published his third book, Hedge, on the current shift towards what he calls the Entrepreneurial age, the instability that shift creates and the urgent need to...

Cécile Israel is the founder of EasyBachus, a startup based in Schenzen China, that makes wine easy and fun for everyone. She's also the head of the new French Tech community for the Guangdong - Hong Kong - Macau Greater Bay Area (粤港澳大湾区), as well as president of the "Entrepreneurs Group of South China" with the French Chamber of Commerce. Who better than Cécile to tell us more about the major efforts currently underway to unite the megalopolis formerly known as Pearl River Delta, consisting...

Every French person working in tech in Singapore, is already a member of French Tech Singapore - even if they might not yet realize it! Or so says Julien Condamines - ex-Googler, startuper and founder of the Singapore-based innovation boutique “Co-Creation Lab”. We sit down with Julien to talk about the value of community when running a business abroad, the power of the pay-it-forward attitude, and about the opportunities that his involvement in French Tech Singapore have generated for...