Nick: You're listening to the Growth Islands Podcast, a show about what it takes for businesses to truly seize the opportunities that exist in diverse and exciting Southeast Asia, or SEA, as we like to call it. My name is Nick Nash. I'm one of the co-founders of Asia Partners, a growth equity firm focused on tech and tech-enabled businesses here in Southeast Asia.
Rovik: And I am Rovik from the Singapore Economic Development Board, also known as the EDB, the lead government agency responsible for strategies that enhance Singapore's position as the global centre for business innovation and talents. In each episode, we have the unique opportunity to talk to a business leader in a fast-growing startup to understand how they are scaling their businesses in the region. We get to the heart of the issue and hear first-hand real stories that we hope will inspire you to similarly take the journey to capture growth in SEA.
Nick: Do give us a follow on whichever podcast platform you're listening on and feel free to reach out to either the EDB or Asia Partners to find out more.
Rovik: Today, we're going to talk about the growing pool of tech leadership talent in Southeast Asia, emerging from the family trees of some of the region's giants, such as Grab, Sea and GoTo. With approximately 50% of new startups today spinning off from post-Series-C startups, talent is begetting talent across the ecosystem.
What will this wave of expertise, leadership and capital mean for Southeast Asia, and how can businesses navigate the talent family trees of the region to identify leaders and partners for their team?
Nick: Today, we have with us one of my oldest friends in business – Brooks Entwistle.
Brooks is a legend in the Southeast Asia tech ecosystem. His most recent role is Head of Asia, as well as the Middle-East and North Africa for Ripple, which is one of the most interesting providers of enterprise-grade blockchain and crypto technology for payments on a cross-border basis.
But that's not all Brooks has done.
Brooks was the Chief Business Officer and Head of International for Uber, where he was running around the entire world, growing Uber on a global basis.
Before that, he was Chairman of Goldman Sachs for Southeast Asia. He's had an incredibly interesting career, and also has a great heart. He's done amazing volunteer work in places as diverse as Cambodia, if my memory serves, and around the world.
So Brooks it's really fun to have you here.
Brooks: Great to be with you guys. Thanks for having me on the show. Excited.
[02’13”] - Climbing Mountains
Rovik: We were just talking about the fact that besides your experience in business, you also have a lot of experience climbing mountains in this part of the world.
Nick: Like actual mountains!
(chuckles)
Brooks: Yeah, absolutely. I'm originally from Colorado in the US and grew up climbing…
Nick: [Chuckling] A very flat state.
Brooks: Very flat state, exactly, but grew up climbing and skiing big mountains with my dad and little brother. So it was a fun thing growing up.
And I actually washed up in Asia, over 30 years ago, as an analyst at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong in 1991, and obviously, this was a pursuit that I wanted to continue, and there are some great places to climb and ski around the world, and some of them are in Asia. And as I continue to do this, obviously some of the biggest objectives in the world are just north and west of us here in the Himalayas and was able to have some terrific experiences on mountains like Cho Oyu and Mount Everest, over the course of the last several years while living and training in Singapore. Turns out Singapore is one of the hidden secrets for Singapore – it’s one of the great places in the world to train for 8000m peaks.
Nick: Is that right?
Brooks: You could actually now through a technology that's portable – which means you can actually take this technology and this machine out in the back alleys of Chinatown behind your UFIT gym, put a mask on and your body thinks it's training at 4,000 metres.
And when you're in 90-degree heat and 90% humidity and… so, I actually think Singapore, above and beyond just a place to train for big mountain objectives, is also just becoming an emergent [training location].
Maybe one of these things that's under-rated about Singapore as a place to be and live is – that it's a fantastic outdoor fitness and wellness environment.
And I think for young folks that work at these companies, coming into Singapore, working at tech companies, it's a big draw; it's one of these things I'd like to see Singapore pump up even more. This is a fitness city.
Rovik: It's definitely the first time I've heard this. And I appreciate that.
Nick: That is such a cool thing to say.
Rovik: Yeah, it's a very different angle.
Nick: But you just let it slip in there for a second – super casual. You climbed Mount Everest! I mean, that's not like climbing something small, you literally, were at the very top of Mount Everest! And I know you hoisted an Uber flag when you got to the top of it?
Brooks: It was super exciting. I mean, I loved my experience there and company. The flag that I took to the top at the time had the 600 plus cities where Uber was actually operating, and the goal that we set – and this was a great team that I had met on previous expeditions – was to get out of Singapore and back to Singapore in exactly one month.
So 30 days, door-to-door and climb Everest. I had reason to get back because my middle daughter was graduating from middle school at the Singapore American school. So I had to be back.
But it's a Friday night in Singapore. Okay, visualise this. We have been told we've been out of touch, other than satellite phones until we got to this Camp Three on the Everest northside, which is the highest camp in the world. You can sleep in those mountains. It's higher than the South Col and the Nepal side.
And sure enough, all of our phones lit up with China Telecom because they have a repeater that hits the Northeast Ridge now...
Nick: Oh that's so great.
Brooks: And, as I'm in my tent, you're just there for a couple of hours, rehydrating, putting down some really grim food, trying to survive before leaving for the summit at 10:00 PM, I get the world's highest Uber Eats notification…
Nick: Oh, I love it.
Brooks: …Hits my phone.
Nick: Is your food a bit late or is it on time?
Brooks: Get this. It is not only on time, it's a Relish burger from Wild Rocket – that was the restaurant – and it was burgers going to my daughter's in Singapore on Friday night.
Nick: I love it!
Brooks: … And I’m meanwhile on this just unbelievable god-forsaken moon, shoving down some freeze-dried stuff that was pretty dank.
But to this day, I'm sure now you've been able to hit and you can now tweet from the top and because of that repeater. But both those experiences of climbing it faster and getting an Uber Eats notice at that height tell you the technology changing things.
Rovik: I love that! That’s such a great story.
[05’47”] - Brooks’ Beginnings in Asia
Rovik: You alluded to your experience, right? The fact that you've been here for so long, across Goldman Sachs, across Uber and now at Ripple.
Brooks: Absolutely, and for me, it has been a journey which is tied together very nicely from building financial services when I first got to Asia with Goldman in 1991 – there were 35 people in the Hong Kong office, which was the Asia headquarters that time.
And we were the same kind of people that thought we were coming here for two years and stayed for 10, and staying on for even longer because it's such a great place to raise a family; and, importantly to this conversation, build businesses.
And really when you think about the transition to tech, I'd been a tech banker, as Nick knows, and so I always vowed that I would follow Nick's lead and go in-house at a company at some point and did that with Uber on the operating side.
So, when I entered the tech business, I took the entry-level drug way of going into business development. And so my first role was the Chief Business Officer for Asia, which was the deal side of the business at Uber, both in partnerships and also on the Corp Dev side.
And for me, that was reasonably natural as far as relationship building and figuring out deals that would enhance the business.
But my moment came about three months in, when the opportunity arose over just a few day periods to take on a second hat, which was the Regional General Manager role – which was the operations role, the P&L role, running this dynamic at the time in a super competitive region for Uber.
And I kept those double hats, because you think about running businesses and building businesses, making sure you understand each of the functions is super important. But I think this notion of building and scaling on the Ops side is super fun.
[07’18”] - Origins of the SEA Tech Mafia
Rovik: So, a lot of people think about the PayPal mafia. You have people like Musk, who's gone on to start Tesla, who are some other people from the mafia?
Nick: Peter Thiel, the YouTube founders, the list goes on.
Rovik: Exactly. And so what we've been hearing is that in Southeast Asia you're seeing something similar happen, and that's an exciting opportunity for a lot of tech companies that are looking to tap on to excellent talent in this region. So maybe you could just give us an overview of your observations in this part of the world.
Brooks: You know, I go back to, and I will take the audience back to just circa 1999/2000 – the first internet boom in Asia, I was a tech banker running the Asia Technology group. Those were big companies.
And out here, when I was sent out to start the tech group for Goldman and I came from what was a reasonably small group in the US at the time for Asia Tour No. 2, for me, it was all about finding models that were both the same that we'd seen in the US or that were new and evolving here.
There was a brief fleeting moment in late 99 / early 2000, where I mean Hong Kong – and Singapore, to a lesser extent at that time, and I think that's changed by the way, which we'll get to – was just a place where you had waves of the first kind of VCs showing up here. You had a tech banking ecosystem; you had the Chinese portals; the first kind of NASDAQ deals coming out.
And honestly, that didn't last for very long as we know, given what happened in 2000, 2001. Now clearly a lot of those folks that we used to gather at I & I – it was this Internet & Information gathering, which is a weekly gathering among kind of the tech crowd, the internet crowd. And I remember flying down to Singapore and speaking at one of those events, at the Swissotel down right on the river, and do our chapters growing around the region.
And then it went pretty quiet, as we all know, but what was happening below the scenes, of course, people were fanning out as they always do from these first moves into it.
And so I think the lesson I took away is from that first experience was you kind of want to put yourself in the way of just movements of people where you can get together and brainstorm around ideas.
In fact, I was an investor, as many other people in the tech space were, in a very quick flawed attempt at a bar in Hong Kong that was going to mimic Buck’s in Woodside. But this bar was going to be a place where a little bit later in the day, you'd come together for drinks. Now that bar also went the way of the Internet crash and didn't survive.
And I know we'll talk about Grab, Go-Jek, competitors I knew very well and then partners down the road after we sold the business to Anthony, the Sea story which Nick can talk about in just such great detail.
And so important to this was all these family trees that have started to percolate through town, but I do think that some of these same things need to be in place and are in place here to make it happen.
Where do you gather? How do you find capital? How do you exchange ideas? How do you support people that may want to take a risk and step out? Where do they go? How does the angel network… all these sorts of things.
But man, one thing that has happened with Singapore since we've been here in this last decade is – it's all happening here.
And this is a regional headquarters for both, at the time, Uber, and certainly for Ripple; and Ripple, by the way, it's not just a regional headquarters. It is one of our biggest offices and also we look after Dubai to Japan, south to Australia from here. So it's a pan-regional headquarters out of Singapore.
[10’26”] - How does Singapore keep it exciting for talent to come and stay
Nick: Brooks, you mentioned that you've lived here for 10 years and the beautiful thing about being in Singapore in our forties is that you get to be 41 ten years in a row. You sort of feel that way sometimes. You don't feel like you're getting older as much as you're just experiencing the region expanding as we live here.
This isn't part of our official sort of topics for the day, but I'm just really curious to ask you – what has Singapore done so right and so well to simultaneously create opportunities for kids who grew up here and were born here, but, at the same time, be so inviting to entrepreneurs like you, that happened to be from Colorado, or entrepreneurs like Forrest from China, or from everywhere in the world?
Brooks: I think it's a secret sauce that's been created over the last 10 years, maybe a little bit longer. It was probably being seeded at the time. And we're now just beginning to be able to taste what this is, it gets very real… I'll give you a couple of observations.
Like, when you lived in Hong Kong in the 90s, you thought that Hong Kong was the place to be, was the most energetic place, and Singapore was Asia for beginners and all these kinds of crazy things that were out there.
Rovik: And there was a slogan, isn’t it?
Brooks: Yeah, and I think back on that now and I can't imagine a more dynamic place to come, and we just happened, I think, very fortunately on our own family tour to go from Hong Kong to India for almost six years, and then down to Singapore for that loop, which was perfect because we hit it at a time where – I'll give you a few things.
Number one, the schooling here was fantastic. We've stayed in many ways because we wanted our girls to grow up here, after having been at elementary school in Mumbai, to come here and finish out schooling in this wonderful city and dynamic environment and great schools.
The second one, it was just… it became a gathering place of really interesting people that went from living in Mumbai, or living in Hong Kong, or Beijing, or Jakarta, that because Singapore's created an environment where you can actually build a career, build a business, build a family and do so in a safe, dynamic, wonderful environment, I love the way that's emerged.
It's gone from the tagline, which was misplaced in the first place to kind of “Asia for Beginners” 25 years ago, to being Asia for the place that if you want to stay in Asia for a long time, there's no better place to be.
[12’27”] - What differentiates Singapore as a startup ecosystem
Rovik: You know, what's coming to mind here is that Singapore has had heritage sort of a meeting place, and really where people have been making not just deals, but exchanging ideas and getting inspired by one another.
And basically, today's success is built onto that. It's a big reason why people like you are here and why so many other people have come to Singapore to start their businesses.
So what do you think have been some of those key things that have been built since the early days to really make Singapore a place for founders, investors, and ecosystem players to really just wanna be here and exchange ideas and build stuff?
Brooks: I'll give you my a-ha moment with this as well, and it didn't happen more than about a month after coming to Singapore, down from Mumbai at this time with Goldman.
And I got a call from the MAS, and Ravi had just taken the seats, and they were forming and reconstituting a capital markets committee and asked me to serve on that for two years.
And first of all, it was a great honour to be able to serve in Singapore. I think that's a super important part of this equation – to be here long term, to be a PR, you need to serve.
But what I took away from that two-year experience, in addition to meeting so many great people who were on that committee from these different financial institutions and the team at the MAS, was that there was real intentionality around what can we do and do well here.
And, at the time, the topics were things like infrastructure finance, the wealth management business, and really, how do you create ecosystems where Singapore can lead in those for the region and ultimately globally.
And so that was my a-ha moment. The regulator here reached out and wanted to put people on committees and talk about how to do things in a differentiated way here.
I was like, this is magical. And, by the way, that has continued for both Uber and certainly now for Ripple to be a reason why this is such an important ecosystem and place to base a company, as we think that we are in an environment, where we have a regulator that is forward-thinking, super thorough, is going to get this right and wants to hear from the community, which is big.
[14’24”] - Assessing Startup Ecosystems around Curiosity, Humility, Trust, Speed
Nick: I think one of the things – maybe the two of us have so many shared bonds – one of which is, having been inside tech companies here, we can sort of compare and contrast a little bit to the vibe and the culture and the tonality in other ecosystems.
So, if I think about four attributes, you've got the attribute of curiosity. Are we really interested in what's happening in the rest of the world, bringing those lessons in?
There's the attribute of personal humility. Are we a bit super mindful of the fact that we don't know everything yet?
There's the attribute of trust. Are we comfortable relying on other people, trusting them? Or are we, on the other extreme, super secretive about things?
And then the final attribute about just innovativeness and speed to market.
Now, if I look at other parts of Asia and I won't name them by name, there's a lot of innovativeness, [but] there's a very low level of trust in some ways. I look at Silicon Valley, there's a reasonable degree of trust, but probably less humility. And I think Silicon Valley indexes really low on curiosity about other ecosystems. If anything, there's such a flow of visitors coming to Silicon Valley, seeking the wisdom from those there, they start to believe they're the experts.
Where do you rank Singapore in those dimensions of humility, curiosity, speed, and all the other things we talked about?
Brooks: Yeah absolutely. I think it goes back to this kind of crossroads, which is historic as it relates to... And I think Singapore has ultimately benefited from this on each of those dimensions, all of which are super important.
Let's come to curiosity last, because I think that's an interesting one to talk about, but I do think there's a trust element. You know, if you're setting up a business or building a business here, you have a good sense that you're going to be able to hire good people. You're gonna be able to onboard them, train them, get them out and be productive. You're not going to have a lot of red tape in your way of doing this and especially, I think, that's important as you build these tech companies in the region. So I like that. I think there's trust in the ecosystem.
I do think Singapore has been able to grab that mantle as well, where it's the land of opportunity – you can get here and figure out a place to live, a place to work, a place to enjoy your early life and a place to build your life. And I think I've watched that come full circle.
And then there is this curiosity point, which is, I think, really key to this because that's the beauty of what regional hubs or centres have, is if you really do this right, you will take advantage on any given weekend… and I realised there's travel friction now, but what I've always loved in Asia, being based here, is to go to a dinner party on a Friday night – and this has been true for the whole time I've been in the region, no matter where I've lived – and get around that table, people that have been in Jakarta that week, or they've just come back from the valley or they were in the Middle-East and had a view on capital kind of the middle….
But what they're all doing is they're coming back to Singapore. And they are exchanging ideas and cross-fertilising. Now they may by definition of their job scope head out on the road again – and that's the beauty of having a great airport and the world's best airline here – that will happen again and it's starting to happen again, but I've always loved that.
And what that does is it breeds and puts a value on curiosity. So when you sit around that table, you may have had an incredibly cool a-ha moment when you were in Mumbai for the week, and you come back, you realise, wow, this guy just showed up and he’s been – we mentioned Chengdu, you know, he was in a city I hadn't thought a lot about, and all of a sudden there's stuff happening.
I think anything we can do in Singapore is things, open back up to facilitate that unique curiosity that is fed by the flow of people through here. Powerful.
[17’55”] - How to get access to the vibrancy of ecosystems beyond Singapore’s borders
Rovik: I love that point on vibrancy because when you think of other tech ecosystems, you don't really think of that porosity across borders.
And I think in Singapore, it's sort of inevitable because it's an island city and so you have to have people come through, in order to really capture the insights of the world.
And that's super exciting because then, as a result of that, you don't just have the ecosystem within the city, but you tap onto the ecosystems around the region.
Nick: I think you are absolutely right. My personal view, guys, is a Golden Age that happens in a country with a large heartland is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, you're going to have these incredible TAM/market share stories where you go from A to a million times A, in a period of four or five years.
But the problem is those businesses, they've got so much to chomp on in terms of their domestic market that they very quickly lose curiosity about what's happening outside of their borders.
And you keep seeing this happening in Asia and Latin America. I would even hazard to say, as an American, there are many American businesses that fail to realise how interesting Southeast Asia is, where Singapore with 5 or 6 million people structurally will never lose that curiosity about what's happening right next door.
[19’07”] - The Ecosystem Hotspots for Startup Players - Coffeeshops, Bars, Clubhouses.
Rovik: Yeah. So why don't you spill the secret for our audience, right? Where are people hanging out, exchanging ideas, what's happening?
Nick: At Brooks’s house, of course! That's a leading question.
Brooks: I happened to have my amazing wife who is a great hostess, and throws great dinners. We thought about this a lot over time, getting the right people around the table.
So we love doing this at home. Of course, now, things have been a little more limited given constraints on people. But I do think even a more serious answer to your question, I think there's a... Let me start with a funny one. It's gotta be a great coffee shop scene here.
So one thing that Singapore has really cranked it up on in the last 10 years is the coffee scene. I think about the guys over at Alchemist at international Plaza. They fueled Uber and then Grab in Guoco Tower out of a small little shop. And so, as long as you have great coffee being brewed and that sort of a scene, that'll be naturally a place to meet, especially if people are working hybrid.
Nick: That's such an insight, Brooks. You are so right. You are so right about that.
Brooks: You need it, right? It's not a hundred per cent. Starbucks is an important part of that ecosystem, but it goes next-gen into local roasters that have found a cooler place that's a little bit off piece where you can go and, you know, meet someone, discuss a business plan or a funding opportunity and have a world-class roasted bean. I'm a bit of a coffee snob, I'll admit over time.
Then there's the network element. Nick, we've seen these, you and I first met at one of these events in New York in the late 2000-odds, when you organised a private equity event around India and got people together in New York across functions and I flew out from Mumbai from that effort.
And I think these associations, whether or not it's the blockchain association or if it's a young entrepreneurs club, or it's a VC – it could take all kinds of different forms, but having those grow and be able to convene, and if they can't convene in big numbers – which is obviously a challenge sometimes right now – they convene very effectively across social channels. And so that's important.
And the last kind, I spend a lot of time, you know, at 1880 – Nick and I have had meals there – it happens to be a place where we do a lot of stuff.
Rovik: Yeah, I’m a Mandala [Club] member.
Brooks: Yeah, so these clubs that have popped up are also at another level a place to go, but somewhere you can't have people isolated, wondering what's going on out there. And I think Singapore, as they continue to do this right, ways to make it easy for people to get here, to find jobs here and to stay here.
So it is – as you graduate, you're a hot computer sci grad, or whatever your major is, somewhere around the world, you think, you know what, Where should I go stake an early claim? And you've met someone who spun out of Go-Jek and they've started a company and they want to get you here. That's the kind of person we want.
[21’39”] - Why Talent Stay in the SEA ecosystem and Launch New Startups
Rovik: Would you say that's what happened to you too? Because after Uber, you stayed on and now you're at Ripple, which is a really exciting thing.
What do you think is encouraging the start of a wave of like second and third wave sort of founders and entrepreneurs, or people who just wanna be early stage tech companies?
Brooks: First of all, I do think it's addictive. Having gone through an experience, maybe seeing one of these grow and scale, and maybe in, you know, in the case of Uber, you sell off portions of it in the region and go work elsewhere in the world.
Ripple is an opportunity to kind of build something out of here in Singapore and out of the region. It is by the way APAC and the Middle-East together – by far, the busiest corridors on Ripple nets; we’re the most on-demand liquidity. You know, adaptation is common where you actually put crypto on these lines between countries and between sender and receiver.
So I think, when you come out of one of these crazy, wonderful experiences like Uber was, you naturally want to look for the next thing to take those same skills…. and the biggest question you have, I think, and everybody does this a bit differently and you've seen this – and Nick you invest in so many of these great entrepreneurs that are coming out – is where do you choose to go put your next stake?
For me, it's very simple. I've found a sweet spot of coming into something that's pre-IPO, pre-liquidity and later round, that is scaling, is putting in processes, is growing quickly.
Other people – they want to be a founder and they come out and first thing they want to do is go… and what you need is you need people across that spectrum that are out there to feed into these companies.
So you may follow someone out the door – that has left Grab or Go-Jek and they've gone to found a company – you may choose to wait a year, because your best value-add is a year into one of these.
And that's a huge marketplace – two-sided marketplace, just cars and drivers and riders. It’s the talent that's coming out of these companies out of these family trees and where it gets mashed with? And do you have the most optimal match to have that person have a very successful second move?
Not everybody has successful second move and that's okay. You can go and try something out for three months and it's not great. You realise quickly it's not a fit. You may move on, but you need to have an environment around where you've got super smart, well connected VCs that are giving you a nudge saying, you know what, there's an operator needed there, or they actually could really use that skill-set.
[23’56”] - Staircase Model of Startup Waves
Nick: One of the canonical sorts of pillars of how we try to think about Southeast Asia is we look at the roadmap that was built up in North Asia, which is sort of like an elder brother to Southeast Asia.
And over about 25 years, there's just been this wonderful pitter-patter of IPOs and great businesses built. And we think of it sometimes as the love child of Dmitri Mendeleev (the periodic table) and Abraham Maslow (the hierarchy of needs). And I'm not quite sure how that works chromosomally, but leaving aside the IVF considerations, if you combine those two wonderful schools of thought, what you found in China was that they were really four staircase waves of IPOs.
[First] there were all the telcoms that, of course, Brooks knows so well.
Then there was that first generation of web, which was very much anchored around advertising models, video games, and travel.
Then you started to see the classifieds and e-commerce models.
And then finally you saw models like Uber, which were really mobile-centric and relished on the fact that people weren't sitting behind a desk anymore; they were taking a radio device into the field.
And so what we think about in Southeast Asia is thinking about that progression, which 80% of which will mimic itself here, just in a 5 to 10 year delayed manner, and looking for all of the rows on that chart, which don't yet have a public company.
And then we'll love to find our people, like Brooks has been describing, that are first-generation alumni of a Grab, or Go-Jek, or a Sea, or what not, and have this wonderful thing that they want to build, which fits into a broader narrative, a broader story arc, so to speak.
[25’22”] - Opportunities Available from the Vibrant Singapore and SEA Ecosystem
Rovik: What are you excited about as a result of this wave of talent that's coming out of these companies?
Nick: One thing we're very excited about is the growth of enterprise software here in Southeast Asia. We have a saying within our firm, that enterprise software is more about selling the product than making it.
Almost every software company begins with a techie computer scientist, founder, and you know what? 95% of the time, the first internal promote as the next CEO is a 6ft2 athletic, golf-playing executive, because it's about selling the stuff! You’ve got to go network and meet customers and get the stuff out there.
Now, if it's about selling this stuff, it sure helps to be where the customers are. So about a couple of months ago, we went on LinkedIn (and we love doing this), we found everybody on earth that's on LinkedIn, which admittedly isn't everybody on Earth, but it's something useful; about 10% of humans are on LinkedIn.
And we said, do you have Asia-Pacific, Asia, or APAC the acronym, in your job title. So, [for example] Brooks Entwistle, CEO (Asia) Ripple.
It turns out 25% of the humans on Earth with one of those three keywords or multiple live and work in Singapore.
So that one observation as well - that's great for EDB, it's a great success story - but the implication for us commercially is – this is the world's best place to sell people software.
Because Asia is going to be the only part of the world large enough to have its own software stack for a company, as distinct from the global choice they make. They're gonna run SAP globally, but they'll probably have an expense management module for Asia. The decision-makers are here.
And like they say about military matters, war is too important to be left to the generals, software is too important to be just left to the CIO anymore. The decision makers are here. We feel very strongly about software.
Brooks: Let me add one onto that, we do think that there is beginning to be a very… there's always an interesting FinTech ecosystem here. There's just a ton of FinTech innovation here in this city.
And if you think about the excitement around crypto, I think Singapore has a place – which is why I'm so interested in as a company we're so supportive of waiting and watching, as the regulator here takes their time as they hand out licences – is listening to the community. In some parts of the world, you can't even get near the regulator building without kind of getting in trouble.
Here, you actually go to a panel – you know, I was on a panel at DBS early on in September of last year, one of the first live events I went to and sure enough on that panel was MasterCard, Ripple, Temasek and the MAS. And I love that. I love the regulator that's on a panel in a room debating.
And so I do think that crypto, as it's regulated globally and done the right way, this is not a regional leader opportunity for Singapore. This is a global leadership opportunity that I think is happening here.
[28’03”] - Advice on Leveraging the Talent from Startup Family Trees in SEA
Rovik: So we're coming up to time. I want to ask one final question.
Thinking about all these companies that are looking at Singapore and Southeast Asia, right? Maybe they are early-stage and they are looking at where do I want to grow? Where do I want to capture my growth ? They're looking at Southeast Asia, and they're looking at the family trees that are here, the talent that's here.
What advice would you give to them on how to truly maximise this pool of talent that's in the region? How do you find these people and how do you work with them the best, in order to capture growth for your company?
Brooks: It's a great question. It's a great one to kind of wrap a lot of these thoughts together.
You know, we've talked about Singapore in the middle of this incredibly dynamic region, and I think one of the things that is also been bred at these companies as far as talent that's come through the system is – and this was true even at Goldman looking after Southeast Asia, and Nick knows this kind of cold cause it's what he does every day – this region never fires on every cylinder full-blast at any time.
It's a series of … you may have one country moving a little faster than the other, or there may be a political development in another one.
What you do know is you're never going to wake up and know that the entire region is absolutely on the same page.
And one of the things I think is interesting is that around the region, you've also got people that have come through the – you know, the teams at Grab and Uber, Philippines were fabulous people, that have now gone on their own ecosystem to figure out how to operate in the Philippines.
So, while we're talking about Singapore is the centre of all this – and it certainly is – even out in each of these country levels, and it's certainly true in Indo given how many of these companies are actually based there, have operated out of there, but I would encourage people that come to the region, there's no question where you base yourself. And we've been talking about that for the last many minutes here – in Singapore.
And as you go out and think about how you operate and set up in some of these other Southeast Asian markets, looking for that same mafia, if you will, I think it is equally as important because they too have figured out the local version of what we're talking about.
Rovik: There is so much to give over there.
Nick: That's very well put, Brooks.
Rovik: Wow, we've come full circle. That’s a really good story. Brooks, thank you so much for coming on our show. We really appreciate all those insights.
Brooks: I love it. What a great way to spend a morning with you all. So thanks so much for having me.
Rovik: Thank you.
Thanks again for tuning into growth islands for more great content and resources on expanding your team in Southeast Asia, check out a growth islands micro-site and the podcast description link.
We'll see you in the next episode.
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