Southeast Asia Unicorns VS. China’s Time Machine, Golden Age Thesis & Fragmented Markets - E625
episode
BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)
18 min
1 speaker
3 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
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If any of you have ever played a game civilization, there's something called the technology tree. You need to have wheel, unlock wheels, and horse, therefore, to make a chariot. There's this concept that technology requires certain things to unlock, right? And that progression of technology is important because when Japan was forced to open up because the British sailed a ship with an American sailing the ship with all those guns, Japan was at a certain technology tree where they had samurai, the Western Have guns and steam power and all this other stuff, right? So that technology stack is important. Welcome to Brave. Learn from Southeast Asia's best tech leaders. Build the future, learn from our past, and stay human in between.
No BS unsuccess. I'm Jeremy O, Venture Capitalist, Sarah founder, Harvard MBA, science fiction nerd, and dad of two daughters. Every week, we debate startup news, interview change makers, answer listener questions, and share personal insights. Join our movement of over 40,000 members and get transcripts, resources, and community at www.bravesa.com. Stay well and stay brave. The next chapter we were talking about is startups, some of the definitions about unicorns. But now taking a little bit more of a Southeast Asia lens and apply that for unicorns because the kind of the question that we had earlier was very much about why are VCs hunting for unicorns? And in general. Reason why we're teaching about unicorns is that VCs must hunt unicorns in order to become vegetable capital successful funds.
And so let's take that lens on the Southeast Asian lens. So I think this is a decent count. There's actually a more up to date, but I think this is useful because what it shows is that this is the number of unicorns by country, right? And what we see here is that United States is number one in the world unicorns. But you see that China obviously is 120 plus. And then the UK and India about 20 plus. And then obviously Europe. But what's interesting is that if you look at Indonesia and Singapore, I think Southeast Asia, uh, I think you see about uh ten unicorns. And actually I think if you look at the latest count as even more, um, because we actually see A lot of Chinese companies actually relocating the headquarters to Singapore and getting counted as Singapore unicorns.
So a little bit of debate whether you'll count them as that, but the crux of it is that um, you know, the there's a little bit of uh power law itself for the amount of unicorn value in terms of number of accounts. And that roughly corresponds as well to the value of these unicorns, right? Because these unicorns all have a certain amount of market cap. And so United States and China actually Are the top two countries in terms of numbers of unicorns, uh, followed by India. So I think it's interesting because when we think about Southeast Asia and these ecosystems, you have to think about The fact that Singapore is not just account for the countries, but also we tend to be the Dormasal Unicorn destination for Southeast Asia.
And also for Chinese companies. So uh this is an interesting report by Asia Partners, and Asia Partners basically has made a thesis. I think that's something for us to think about, but their thesis is that Southeast Asia is entering a golden age. So what this chart is showing is on the y-axis, it shows again the GDP per capita in dollars. On the x-axis, it shows obviously the time horizon of a history. And what they've done is that they've shown and plotted debt GDP per capita for USA, Australia, Japan, South Korea, China, Southeast Asia, and India. And their thesis is that as these uh economies grow in terms of the wealth, then technology companies tend to emerge out of those markets. And so I think basically saying that India started out with the basic stuff in terms of you know kind of like flip card, make my trip so it's like travel and logistics.
Uh and then Southeast Asia is ahead. East Asia, grab, go to Bucala Park, travel local. Sum SEI which is in Thailand. And then obviously China has, you know, Tensan, Alibaba, Meitwan, Bite Dance.
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Chapters
3 chaptersSpeakers
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