| SE Asian here. Some things I've noticed: * Talent is extremely rare. The ratio is about maybe a tenth as much in good areas vs somewhere like NYC. Put it this way - our interview process for senior engineers involves asking them to build a linked list, and it involves a lot of hints. * The unicorns of the region are app+logistics, things like Grab, Lazada, ofo. * Or things that cut through heavy bureaucracy - alipay, iMoney, iPay88, WeChat. Stripe and similar companies have tried but it's hard to pierce the bureaucratic layer. * Scaling is a very different game. You simply can't hire a hundred of the best people. You can get maybe 2-3 excellent people, and the rest will have to be trained from scratch. This makes moving fast difficult. * However, living costs are low... founders in SEA except Singapore can live off $10k/year. So from all these points, it's extremely dangerous to move fast. A lot of local startups overextend into multiple countries then run out of money or can't manage. The SE Asian game is similar to the Vietnam War. One has to move slowly and carefully. Higher tech may not defeat a well entrenched local, and companies like Uber have bled trying. I think the startup game in SE Asia and China is moderate tech. You won't have Google or Apple, but you'll have Tencent, LTE, and Huawei. The biggest tech companies in SEA are things like telcos and job listing sites. Asians are not sharks but bottom feeders - they can survive at lower depths, under more extreme conditions. Ideally startups in SEA would be more like MailChimp, Reddit, Postman, Runcloud. Where it's not a race, but the unit economics matter. |