As Thailand positions itself to becoming a tech hub of the future, Startup Nation brings together the country’s hottest startups and more!

The National Innovation Agency (NIA), a government agency of Thailand with the mission of supporting and developing Thailand’s innovation system, reintroduces Startup Nation this year as Southeast Asia’s biggest tech conference — gathering the nation’s hottest startups, along with entrepreneurs, speakers, and investors from all around the globe. Placing Thailand well and truly on the startup map, NIA unveils Bangkok as a tech hub of the future.

NIA seeks to support and develop Thailand’s innovation system by virtue of improvements and initiations — all to promote economic restructuring and competitive enhancement. NIA functions as the vehicle for Thailand’s national innovation through co-creation, networking, fostering, and partnering with different organizations from various spaces including academic, technology, industry, finance, and investment.

With this, NIA’s launching of Startup Nation comes as no surprise as the 5-day event happening on 23 – 27 July 2019 works congruently with the agency’s vision for a future Thailand.

Also read: Thailand’s innovation agency launches cyber tech district for local, international startups

At the Startup Nation, around 500 startups hailing from 25 countries will be showcasing their latest innovations, meanwhile the programme will exhibit key insights to be discussed by 300 tech gurus and speakers sharing the space alongside those startups—making Startup Nation one of the biggest tech events in Southeast Asia.

The event also features pitching opportunities for participating startups, market insights from Asia and Europe, 2019 highlights that will identify global trends in deep tech, as well as MAR (music, art, recreation) tech with a special AR/VR music festival—essentially a hodgepodge of all the things that startup founders love and the things startup founders need.

A total of 9 government agencies, private sectors, and universities will also be hosting these respective events in 9 different venues, namely: NIA, Siam Innovation, The Knowledge Exchange (KX), AIS Design Center, Hanger by DTAC Accelerate, Glowfish, Naplab, Thailand Creative & Design Center (TCDC), and True Digital Park.

All nine venues are located on the BTS and MRT lines, making it very convenient for participants to go to each venue during the 5-day Startup Thailand event.

Southeast Asia Startup Assembly: an initiative co-created by NIA

With Southeast Asia being comprised of ten countries, collectively encompassing a total population size of about 650 million people, Southeast Asia has become one of the fastest growing region when it comes to technology adoption globally.

The main problem faced by the region is how fragmented it is despite the strong regional and cultural ties that tethers Southeast Asian countries together. Members of the region are separated by differing currencies, languages, and business environments.

Because of this recent boom in the tech and startup scene, however, certain key players and institutions recognize the need to accelerate the formation of new and improved government policies and programmes within the region.

Thus, the Southeast Asia Startup Assembly (SEASA) was forged and is to be inaugurated through the SEASA forum that aims to start the first discussion on market access programmes available to the growth of startups in building their various businesses across the region.

SEASA was formed primarily when the idea was mooted by Dr. Pun-Arj Chairatana of NIA and Thaddeus Koh of e27. The goal is to form a semi-government bloc that aims to create a continual discussion of e27 hosted grassroots issues accompanied by proposed solutions.

As such, the inaugural SEASA will be hosted by Thailand on 24 July 2019 at the Avani Sukhumvit Bangkok, from 8:00 to 8:30, under the theme “Advancing Partnership for Sustainability.”

This inaugural theme is consistent to NIA’s mission to bridge further the different countries of Southeast Asia to achieve common goals, reestablishing concerted efforts from the government agency to push for Thailand as a global startup hub of the future—efforts such as Startup Thailand’s 5-day event, and many others.

Deep Tech in Startup Thailand

What can participants expect in Startup Thailand, exactly? Well, for starters, Startup Thailand will be putting the spotlight on certain key topics, namely: agritech, foodtech, healthtech, MARtech, hackathons, and whatnot. The event will have ample time for participants to meander through the different venues on the different dates to be able to explore the diverse topics and trends featured in the 5-day event.

One of its key issues this year that’s already making a lot of noise in the startup ecosystem is the topic of deep tech. On July 24^th at the KX Knowledge Exchange, Startup Nation will be highlighting trends surrounding AI & robotics, energy, the restaurant of the future, medtech, as well as technology commercialization.

When we talk about deep tech, we talk about technology that’s based on tangible engineering innovation or scientific advances and discoveries. Deep tech is often set apart by its profound enabling power, the differentiation it can create, and its potential to be a catalyst for change—all important factors being looked at by today’s tech spectrum, especially ones that seek to impact the world in truly life-changing ways.

Some of the key players who will be taking the stage to talk about deep tech are Philipp Kristian Diekhöner, a global keynote speaker on innovation, Thomas Chrometzka of Enapter, and Thanyathat Angsuphisit, Managing Director of Technimal, among many others.

Want to be part of Startup Thailand?

The real value of Startup Nation in Thailand is to help you shift your mindset, mode of business, and future, all by joining the event that can revolutionise the nation. New graduates, budding entrepreneurs, and potential investors are all welcome to join and help shake up the nation.

If you’re interested in being part of history and immersing yourself not only in a sea of some of the hottest innovations spicing up the global tech spectrum today, but also to learn from the hotbed of ideas and insights being exchanged by some of the best and the brightest in the world of tech, then Startup Nation 2019 is for you.

You can register as either an attendee or a startup booth by clicking here. Check out the link for more information on Startup Nation 2019.

 

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image credit: 123rf.com / ID 24528780

 

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Businesses that don’t disrupt themselves risk getting left in the dust by their competitors

Business transformation can vary from companies to companies. Some may view it as a major disruption to the business while others think that this is a passing phase that the business needs to go through. Whatever it takes, business transformation is often complex and requires a lot effort for it to succeed.

It is my privilege to share some of my insights on business transformation. I am a business and technical strategist armed with more than 15 years of experience in helping businesses to propel to a greater height. Being a serial entrepreneur and investor myself, I usually dissect a challenge into pieces and formulate solutions in various perspectives in order to help my clients to achieve desired results.

Below are my views on business transformation.

Transforming business to stay competitive

Businesses will have to evolve as the world is continually changing with various needs and requirements.

I view business transformation as changing the business to be more efficient and effective than ever to fulfill the increasing demands in a competitive environment.

By doing so, it should help companies to bring on board better systems, people, products, processes and technologies to enable fulfillment.

It’s all about digital, solution, and data

Business transformation should revolve around digital, solutions and data. These three core elements can be often adopted independently, but many companies deploy all three elements to increase value.

Applying new technologies can improve the customer experience. There must have deep understandings on what the modern customers want, and what technology to adopt to modernise the business models.

Also Read: Customer experience: The opportunity that growing businesses are failing to see

As for the solution, companies will need to focus on solving the customers’ challenges holistically and realign the parts around what the customers really desire. Companies can increase revenue by providing a comprehensive solution that serves the long-term needs of the customer.

Lastly, data can change the way companies make decisions. This allows companies to gain better information on customer experience and areas of improvement. Companies should create a data culture that relies on business intelligence rather than internal or anecdotal opinions to test what the customers want.

Personal challenges in transforming my business

The common challenges I faced when transforming my own businesses are often categorised into people and processes.

Many people that I have known are accustomed to the traditional ways of how things run. Their resistance to changes is high and they are not willing to unlearn processes that they are used to. This can be detrimental as it closes the door to many opportunities and new ways to improve the overall business.

Also, by taking risks to undo the processes or introduce new methods, this may disrupt the flow of delivering consistent results. This can be worrisome as the results may not be guaranteed and many stakeholders can be affected along the way.

Taking small steps

I usually recommend my clients try to make changes in different phases to get the buy-in from the management as well as the other levels of employees. Baby steps should be made and feedback must be gathered to allow the transition to be as seamless as possible.

It will also be viable for the company to employ the right people to inculcate the right mindset within the organisational culture. This promotes innovation which is essential for the transformation. More options can be explored to further modernise the whole business.

Also Read: 10 reasons why businesses need to get involved with their communities2019

Business transformation may look different for every company but it is inevitable. The company must understand the current situations and adopt appropriate transformation strategies. This involves improving the processes, changing mindsets of personnel, managing data and incorporating technology to align and deliver the real value to the customers. Furthermore, the company can identify and leverage the strength to overcome the challenges ahead.

At BlackStorm Consulting, we guide our clients through their business transformation journey to ease the transition and ensure success. They can be motivated by several factors such as:

1. Hindered by internal weaknesses, which can affect the company growth.
2. Shield against external threats that can endanger the company.
3. Personal interest such as building a family legacy.
4. Urge to build higher barriers of entry to sustain a leading position in the market.

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Paddy Tan is the co-founder of boutique growth consultancy firm BlackStorm Consulting.

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Saphron’s platform NANAI will enable CARD MRI’s microinsurance agents to enrol clients, monitor policies, and initiate claims in short time and lesser cost

Philippines’s insurtech startup Saphron has received an undisclosed sum in investment from local microfinance firm CARD MRI, which also partly owns microinsurance company CARD Pioneer Microinsurance (CPMI).

The strategic partnership will see Saphron marrying AI and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) technologies with CPMI’s products, which is aimed at making microinsurance accessible to the bottom of the pyramid.

Saphron’s platform, NANAI, will enable CPMI’s microinsurance agents to enrol clients, monitor policies, and initiate claims in short time and lesser cost.

According to a press release, CPMI’s enrolments grew from 995,000 in 2014 to over 18 million by the end of 2018. One of the keys to this effort was the tapping and training of nanays (Filipino: mother) as the company’s microinsurance agents for their communities.

“The rapid growth in the volume of enrollments has brought about its own challenges, resulting in a few months worth of backlog as the insurer sought to encode thousands of hand-filled paper forms into the system. But this will soon be resolved through the insurtech platforms we are deploying,” said Lorenzo Chan, CEO of Saphron.

Also Read: Why business transformation is important in the digital age

According to Chan, the challenge has been to process business efficiently — be it enrolments or claims notification — so as to sustainably serve the mass market by delivering insurance inclusion in a timely and mission-critical manner. For Saphron, the answer lies in Artificial Intelligence, robotics, analytics, and chatbots — highly advanced deeptech that lies underneath a simple user interface.

“We’re able to leverage high-end technologies like NLP and AI to enable insurance inclusion for as many people as possible. Through this partnership with one of the largest microinsurers, we are confident of inching closer to our mission of making insurance radically accessible,” added Chan.

“What makes the Saphron tech even more valuable to the nanays is its ease of use. As high-tech as it is, NANAI is, in fact, easy to understand, with nanays reporting ease and comfort in familiarising themselves with the new technology,” said Winston Damarillo, Chief Strategy Officer of Saphron.

Saphron aims to make insurance accessible and close protection gaps in the Southeast Asian region via insurance platforms combining the latest technology with industry expertise. In March, Saphron secured SGD1.35 million (US$1 million) in seed funding from Sage, a VC fund that targets fintech startups, and Talino Labs, a venture lab that supports companies engaged in digital transformation.

Founded in 2013, CPMI is Philippines’s first microinsurance company. The firm is borne out of the partnership between CARD MRI and Pioneer.

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He believes in a technological endeavor that would last indefinitely, despite the market trends

Thanksgiving is a unique phenomenon here in the US. Schools and offices close for up to one week in observation of the holiday. I did not travel anywhere this time. I had hectic last few weeks with jobs and other stuff.

However, I was glad enough to have some time to catch up with friends. I also took some ‘me’ time.

It was delightful.

On the Friday night after Thanksgiving, less than 20 twenty-something recent grads gathered in a meeting room, somewhere in Palo Alto.

We had an intimate discussion with Derianto Kusuma.

He is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and co-founder of Traveloka, a leading online travel-related services startup in Indonesia.

Derianto is smart, humble, and interesting. My good friend said that Derianto thinks like an economist — he considers the prices, supply, demand, and its relationships and apply those to his wide-ranging domains. At the same time, he is a true engineer. He believes in a technological endeavor that would last indefinitely, despite the market trends.

Anyway, I thought that the insights from the meetup are worth sharing:

1. Building a top engineering team

For the scale that they do, Traveloka has one of the best engineering teams in Indonesia. As of now, there around 200+ engineers who work under Derianto’s guidance. But, in the early days, it was only him and his group of friends who built the product.

As Traveloka gained traction, they started hiring the top senior engineering positions from companies such as Apple, Flipkart, Google, and the like. Derianto purposely tapped into the best practices of these senior engineering hires and tried to replicate them in order to make Traveloka a world-class company. If you notice, Traveloka instills a degree of technical rigor in their business, marketing, and sales teams.

Derianto also shared some insights about the software engineering talents in Indonesia. He said that there is an upward pressure on salary, due to the demand and competition for startups to hire the ‘most competent’ talents. They have also started to include ‘stock grant’ (a modification of stock option system) into the salary package.

To give you an idea, there may be 300–400 new graduates every year from the top Indonesian universities. However, not all want to work in the tech industry, thus the number of ‘qualified talents’ is actually smaller.

2. Understanding the political landscape

We digressed a little bit from tech. But, this was the most interesting part.

We talked about the current political landscape in Indonesia, and the nature of the public and private sector. We discussed that in general, the private sector may have an expertise in execution, however, the public sector may have a ‘better’ network and leadership to reach everyone in Indonesia.

How can we best solve this problem?

For example, in the education sector, especially in smaller cities, we see that children feel reluctant to go to schools or universities. They may actually earn money by doing casual labour and therefore have less motivation to achieve a formal education. When they are in school, they may still suffer from lack of inspiration because the teachers are not that ‘competent’. This issue could be caused by the low wages that teachers get, for example. In turn, their teaching quality affects the students, and so on. It’s a vicious cycle similar to the cycle of poverty.

How can we best solve this problem?

The private sector may help in distributing educational materials, but would this solve the root cause?

In terms of policymaking, we also discussed how the legislative body has a ‘monopoly’ on power. There is already high risk of corruption (outright or clandestine alike) in Indonesia. Given that, the executive and the judiciary have to be able to keep the legislature’s actions accountable. Still, this is not that simple due to the complex political bargains that happen under the table, invisible to voters and most people.

To quote on a participant’s comment, “Could we then democratise our ‘democracy’?” Could we use the internet and technology to make sure that the voters’ hopes are fulfilled and delivered?

Okay. Enough about politics. We could talk all night.

(But, seriously, hit me up if you share the same vision to build the country’s financial access and education system)

3. Product and strategy excellence

Derianto mentioned that it was his “rational focus” in identifying gaps that led him to start Traveloka. I believe that his high-calibre team helped him to do the execution, extremely well.

Also read: Insights on tech and the Indonesian diaspora in Silicon Valley

He said that the consumers’ need in emerging markets is quite simple. If you are good enough in your execution, the market will respond to you.

In regards to the Chinese investments in Indonesia, there is a risk that the big ones would ‘kill’ all the smaller startups easily, either through price wars or mergers and acquisitions. We can already witness this in certain verticals such as e-commerce and ride-hailing. Apparently, the marketing and acquisition spend for the biggest ride-hailing rivals in Southeast Asia can easily reach up to US$1 billion per year.

There are no price wars in the online travel industry (yet?). And, regardless, Derianto plans to build features that would make the consumer’s demand to be more price inelastic.

My personal takeaway

I enjoyed the talk as it was different from most of the talks I have attended in the Bay Area. It was great to have an intimate sharing session with one of the most prominent players in the Indonesian tech landscape.

It was a two-way street, as we also shared our passion and thoughts about things that matter. Thank you for your time, Derianto. My best wishes for the great work you and the team do at Traveloka.

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This article was first published on e27 on December 1, 2017.

Special thanks to Mellisa Luis and Samuel Halim for organising the event. The author is not endorsed by nor affiliated with Traveloka.

Originally posted on Medium.

Editor’s note: e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

Image credit: Unsplash

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More than their mid-stage and late-stage counterparts, early-stage startups and the people working for them are likely to use their time inefficiently

Managing and/or working in an early-stage startup is exciting; you have the potential to grow into an internationally known business, but you also get to see it in its infancy. You’ll be making the decisions and taking the actions that (hopefully) allow you to become profitable and self-sustain—but you’ll also be vulnerable to a few key weaknesses that have the power to wipe out that potential altogether.

Most entrepreneurs understand the financial threat; if you go through your initial funding before you can establish a line of consistent revenue, the company could implode. But wasted money is only half the problem; early-stage startups are also vulnerable to wasted time.

More than their mid-stage and late-stage counterparts, early-stage startups and the people working for them are likely to use their time inefficiently, resulting in lower productivity, a lower ROI on your employee salaries, and of course, a delay in accomplishing your goals. Understanding the categories and nature of this time waste is critical if you want to overcome it.

1. The Wrong Ideas

For starters, you and your team will probably spend some time working on the wrong ideas. According to a thorough evaluation of more than 200 startup postmortems, 51 percent of businesses fail because their business model isn’t viable. Of those that succeed, many had to overcome the hurdle of a non-viable business model by pivoting—in other words, changing their approach. If you find out your existing business model isn’t going to work, all the hours you spent fleshing that model out will be at least partially wasted; you may walk away with more experience and a better understanding of what to do, but you’ll have developed modules or practices that no longer work.

2. Unclear Processes

In the early stages of a startup, managers care about getting things done. They aren’t particularly concerned with documenting that process with a formal SOP, nor are they worried about keeping the process consistent between days or employees. That process ambiguity may give employees more flexibility in a chaotic and demanding environment, but it also leads to a drop in productivity and consistency of work.

3. Email and Communication

Most people don’t notice just how much time they spend emailing, and in an early stage startup, the problem is even worse. If you’re sending and receiving 200 messages a day (or more), even a 1-minute loss of time per email can lead to more than 3 hours of lost productivity in a single day. Few managers want to invest the time in tracking down these email- and communication-related issues, but they can save your team dozens of weekly hours if you can correct them.

Also read: Solver teams sail, while cross-functional teams fail

Time-Consuming Clients

Your earliest clients are the hardest to sell. That’s why early-stage clients often require making sacrifices, such as lowering your prices and/or dealing with difficult people. These clients may be necessary to build a reputation for yourself early on, but if you keep them too long, or aren’t able to supplement them with any clients, the work you spend on their account may be wasted.

Generalist Employees

Startups usually need people to flesh out the core team, but they don’t have much money to pay for top talent in a given field. They also have many roles that need filled simultaneously, but might only be able to afford one or two people. Accordingly, startups tend to hire “generalist” employees, rather than “specialist” employees, who are capable of a broad range of tasks, but only excel in one or two areas. As a result, you and your team will spend hours on tasks outside your realm of expertise, which means you can’t possibly work at peak efficiency.

Chaos, Tracking, and Discovery

Even the most planned-out startups tend to be chaotic in their early stages. Your workspace is new, your system is disorganized, and your plans are constantly evolving in response to new threats and needs. Keeping track of all that chaos is exceedingly difficult, and nobody wants to take the time to document how and why they’re spending time. That means you’ll have limited insight into your existing productivity issues, and you certainly won’t have a tool to help you compensate for them.

Fortunately, like most problems your early-stage startup will face, the time loss vulnerability issue is fixable with sufficient investment and attention. Becoming more aware of how you spend your time, and addressing known time wasters proactively are your best tools in ensuring that your team remains as productive as possible throughout your run.

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Editor’s note: e27 publishes relevant guest contributions from the community. Share your honest opinions and expert knowledge by submitting your content here.

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