Analyse Asia With Bernard Leong

"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

"I think one of the things that TSMC does is that they tend to hit their targets. When they say they're gonna build something, they're gonna do something, they do it. I think that when you contrast that with other companies in the industry like for example, a particular company in America that says and sets a certain deadline and misses it repeatedly, that affects your credibility. TSMC has always said that they're gonna hit a certain number. It's like a pretty good chance that they'll hit it." - Jon Y   Fresh out of the studio, Jon Y, the founder of Asianometry joined us to discuss TSMC and the global chip shortage happening across the world. Jon Y began the conversation with an overview of the semiconductors industry with the different key players in the space from SMIC in China to Samsung in Korea. Then he dived deep into TSMC and explained why it is hard to replicate the semiconductor foundry to other parts of the world and their competitive advantage in the market. Last but not least, he examined the end

"China's vision is basically to use the big data that it's harvested to enable its government to be just more nimble and more reactive to the demands of its citizens. So China's idea is, you know, if we collect enough data, we can spot problems and nip them in the bud even before they occur. Or we can spot, for example, a national security threat and nip that in the bud even before a terrorist is able to do anything." - Liza Lin   Fresh out of the studio, Liza Lin, senior correspondent at the Wall Street Journal, discuss the key themes of her new book, Surveillance State, co-authored with Josh Chin. We began the conversation on the motivation and inspiration behind the book and dived deep into the key stories of how AI and digital tools are adopted to maintain social control in China. Last but not least, Liza shares how these technologies developed by China are now exported across the world, foreshadowing the war between different political ideologies. Podcast Information: The show is hosted and produced by

"More generally, this air of crisis is just going to force companies to look again at the wisdom of supply chains, which crisscross Asia in a way that didn't take account of geopolitical boundaries. You already see a move by many companies to try and create more robust and resilient supply chains to geopolitical shocks,  and so that might mean companies like TSMC or Global Foundries building semiconductor plants in Arizona or in Singapore, it might mean companies that have previously sourced from China to create products that will ultimately be sold in the US will now source from Vietnam or from India instead." - James Crabtree   Fresh out of the studio, James Crabtree, executive director from International Institute of Strategic Studies Asia, joined us in a conversation on the current flashpoints in Asia Pacific from the China and Taiwan issue to India and what these tensions will mean for businesses and the global supply chain. James dived into the current dynamics of the region specifically the semiconduct

"Strategy wise. This is the path that we went through. We started looking at options because we wanted to possibly buy options to hedge our balance sheet. But when we looked at it, we were like: this kind of volatility, very difficult to buy. If it's very difficult to buy means selling is good. So in this case, I think low control leverage volume selling tends to be a very good strategy because of the high carry." - Darius Sit   Fresh out of the studio, Darius Sit, founder of QCP Capital, joined us in a discussion on the crypto hedge fund and an overview of the crypto derivatives space in the Asia Pacific. Starting with his background in derivatives training, Darius shared how he entered into the crypto space and explained the key concepts behind crypto derivatives trading. He dived deep into the digital assets segment specifically in the DeFi space. Last but not least, he offered his perspectives on how he approached venture investing into web3 & crypto startups.   Podcast Information:The show is hosted

"Without nodes, there's no blockchain. Without blockchain, there's no cryptocurrencies. Without cryptocurrencies, there's no web3. So nodes are the key core fundamental architecture and infrastructure for this ecosystem. Whether you are a persona just trading around the tokens, you need nodes to be performing. So that when you do a trade, read-write transactions happen, you verify how many tokens are in your wallet." -Andrew Vranjes   Fresh out of the studio, Andrew Vranjes, VP of sales & general manager of Blockdaemon Asia Pacific, joined us in a conversation to discuss the business footprint of the company and break down everything on proof of stake. Andrew started from his background and discuss how he invests into web3 companies as an angel. Next, he discuss the importance of nodes and how Blockdaemon is able to ensure an institutional grade infrastructure for blockchain protocols and provide staking for different stakeholders within the web3 ecosystem. Last but not least, he discuss his thoughts on t

"So these three things, continue the digital transformation, the business networks and the supply chain resilience, both of those underpinning solving for scope three [carbon emissions], circular process and a more sustainable future for Asia. The opportunity we have ahead of us, to solve for what I think, are really profound problems that the planet needs to obviously solve." - Paul Marriott   Fresh out of the studio, Paul Marriott, the President, SAP in the Asia Pacific and Japan, joined us to discuss the footprint of the business in the region, sustainability and the future of work. Paul explained how the SAP platform is incorporating sustainability, specifically in tackling scope three carbon emissions with the network applications. Last but not least, he offered fresh perspectives on the future of work and the key things to watch out for as we transition into a hybrid work environment. Our podcast is sponsored by Esevel, which helps your in-house team by taking cumbersome tasks off their hands and giving

"China is doing exactly what you said, it is trying to basically have backups for choke point technologies, so that in the case of sanctions, it is not left not being able to do anything. Because that's a very real risk for China right now. Whether or not, it needs to have a complete supply chain. Well, it actually has a lot of the more lower value add components than in the really more advanced pieces. As you pointed out that it does not have a solution and it's actually pretty far behind, I think, anywhere from ten, or some people even think it's 20 years behind because there are so many pieces that go into these more sophisticated machines or processes." - Rui Ma   Fresh out of the studio, Rui Ma, creator & tech analyst from Techbuzz China joined us to discuss one of the most important questions at present: can we invest into tech startups in China? We dived deep into different aspects of the China tech ecosystem from the decrease in VC funding to the stringent regulation placed by the Chinese governme

"Look, I think this is a long game. A lot of times you don't see the results until you're a few years out. At the same time, the fundraising game is a very short game, which means you want the short results very quickly. So the LP sees that you are ahead of the pack in fundamentally what is a very long game. So there's a huge disconnect there. and I think the pressure has always been there to show short term results in the long term game." - Lim Kuo-Yi   Fresh out of the studio, Lim Kuo-Yi, co-founder & managing partner of Monk's Hill Ventures, discuss the next evolution of the venture firm and dived into his perspectives on investing into an uncertain time across Southeast Asia. We dived deep into Kuo-Yi's background as a venture capitalist from public sector to the private sector and hear his mental model in how he indexes founders and startup teams and valuation of companies. Last but not least, Kuo-Yi reflects on how the startup ecosystem in Southeast Asia is changing after the key exits in the last d