Franco Varona

speaker

1,024 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Nov 2025 last heard 1 Apr

Franco Varona’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English) · Franco Varona: Philippines’ Startup Boom, Global Diaspora Power & Why First Movers Win – E641 · 5 Nov 2025 podcast

That played out, I think, exactly the way that we thought it was going to play out.

Whereas, you know, where I would say

You know, we started the pandemic and I might have shared this in the previous podcast, but we started the pandemic with, you know, less than thirty percent of our of our population having a a digital wallet.

Whereas today it's it's almost like ninety nine percent of the adult population has a digital wallet, right?

So we had this whole digitization of this country that happened in a very short period of time, like four or five years, right.

And I now you mix that with things like you

know, having one of the youngest actually the youngest population in Southeast Asia, having a v a rising middle class of a quickly rising middle class, right?

I mean by World Bank standards, just to give you an idea of this, by World Bank standards, the upper middle class has defined as somebody that's the GDP per capita at about forty three hundred dollars.

Um per year.

And the Philippines is at something like four thousand two hundred and ninety-five dollars.

I mean, it's like super close, right?

Which means by World Bank standards, we are actually entering the upper middle class.

Um globally.

Right.

So you have this upper middle class, you have a middle class, growing middle class, you have this young population, you have a digitized population.

And of course, you know, seventy, eighty percent of our uh domestic uh sorry, our GDP is domestic consumption.

So you have a lot of spending power in this country.

All of a sudden it starts making a lot of sense as to why it would be a very interesting place to

Two to look at.

And we've seen this, right?

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