Kelvin Teo

speaker

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 · last 12 months

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

Initiative, so very brave mobile for him as well.

And Sequoia honored the deal and continued investing in us.

And then fast forward, you have the whole COVID-19 time when the writing was on a wall that revenue growth is expected to be like this and cost structure was structured like that.

But we know that revenue will be much less, right?

So with that cost structure, that's gonna not gonna be sustainable, right?

So at that point, we were among the first to conduct a layoff, which was quite unheard of in the industry, right?

Because to us is that

writing was in order, this has to happen.

Yeah.

And if we are to take care of our team, we should do it early so that they can find jobs before any of the other companies did, right?

And that it was a very painful moment because despite in our view doing the right thing, and turns out that all the team members did get great jobs from Grab and Amazon and Facebook and blah blah blah and so forth, but we were destroyed in social media in news and whatnot.

As if we were the as if we are the only company that screwed up.

That's why we're being laid off or laid off or so right.

But later on when it became a common practice also, n no one would speak in gratitude that, hey, thankfully that we did a layoff early such that everyone get very good jobs also, right?

But I think that it's also a lesson for us that for us the focus is really on making sure that we are doing the right thing based on values, based on facts, not necessarily based on popularity, right?

I think.

Because I think that it's just nature of what leadership should be.

And we've also gone through moments where by expanding to new countries, some of them are very volatile and

the board may not actually be agreeable with it.

Because I think going regional is quite a contrarian view from a US conventional wisdom perspective, right?

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