Kelvin Teo

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586 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 15 Mar

Kelvin Teo’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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

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BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English) · How Kelvin Teo Built Southeast Asia’s Largest SME FinTech Empire - E678 · 15 Mar 2026 podcast

So that you know what is the new org to draw, right?

Because but before knowing and building trust and relationships.

And aligning values beforehand and then you just recklessly integrate uh merge the orc structure.

It's a recipe for losing good people, and chances are you'll be drawing an orc chart based on some random arbitrary ideas or so or so-called best practice that doesn't fit Southeast Asia, right?

So I think we're very fortunate that the core group uh stayed with us and integrate with Funding Society's team very well and now it has become an integral part of our business.

I think hey there have been many episodes, right, that right after our graduation MES came out with the regulations that we need to be licensed also and the wording of regulations wasn't as clear.

So a lot of industry players decided that hey, it means that we can still run and while we apply a license, right?

We took the choice of clarifying MES and MES said that hey, you need to pause.

Sequoia gave us a term sheet, but they have not closed around because they were doing their financial and legal due diligence.

And we had

to tell them that hey, ninety percent of business are not legal now and we had two months of runway and a bank account and we just graduated, right?

And uh so basically we'll be on track to the first group of hardest citizens to lose their job upon graduation.

And at that time I was uh I was getting married, so uh like I was a bit it was an interesting time to tell my parents in law that hey, your son in law is gonna be out of job very soon or so.

So I think what we did was that we actually complied.

We used the two months runway to hire good lawyers to apply for a license to guide us and read to change the whole business model from crop peer to business lending to unbalance sheet lending and convinced the only institutional lender who gave us a bit of money on a platform to actually go into balance sheet and

Was very fortunate that despite not knowing when we'll get a license, because the first time that ever there's that license, we submitted our application.

Uh the numbers did not drop that month.

We actually converted into balance sheet lending quickly and we continue to grow.

We confessed to Sequoia and said that this is what's happening, this is what we're gonna do about it, and this is what we think moving forward, and we'll try to grow the Indonesian business, which was just 10% at that point in time.

I was very, very grateful that Sequoia Legalhead was really supportive of us, which is quite counter-intuitive.

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