Going into 2022, Victor Lim and the team realised they needed to do something different to stay ahead of the curve in the cloud kitchen industry. The Philippines economy was re-opening, and dine-in was hitting pre-pandemic numbers, so the timing was perfect for experimenting with new features.
“We were originally working on an interactive VR experience in a virtual food hall concept. However, we couldn’t achieve that ‘wow’ experience we looked for. So we shifted gears, and in the end, we found a much better way by launching the Kra-Verse Food Hall (KFH),” Lim, Co-Founder and CEO Kraver’s Group (operator of the cloud kitchen startup Kraver’s Canteen), tells e27.
Kra-Verse Food Hall is a concept developed by Kraver’s Group to provide an interactive metaverse experience for F&B brands. Customers can walk into the ‘buildings’ of its brand partners, explore the virtual food hall, and run to other customers walking around in the space with live video capabilities. The KFH staff walk around as ‘waiters’, taking live orders and answering customers’ questions.
“The objective here is to recreate the experience of an offline food brand, wherein customers can walk in, browse menus, and order their favourite dishes. Being online-only brands, cloud kitchen startups don’t get the same branding and offline recognition benefits as other brands, which is a disadvantage. By utilising these new technologies, we just found a way to turn our digital nativity into an advantage,” Lim explains.
Kra-Verse Food Hall is a collection of six in-house online brands, including CharSilog, Jok Time Lugaw, I Love U, Stew, Everything Gravy’d, and krave. The firm has also partnered with US-based D. Wade Burger, a brand owned by NBA legend Dwyane Wade. Kraver’s Canteen will operate the brand exclusively in the Philippines and set up meet-n-greets and various activities for Wade to connect deeper with the archipelago.
As part of the KFH project, Kraver’s Canteen has also introduced a new self-heating technology. It utilises activated carbon and measured distilled water to create a ‘self-heating’ chemical reaction, which keeps the food hot for up to 15 minutes.
The team also explores new use cases for this technology, from boiling stews to sizzling platters, melted nacho cheese to dessert fondues.
The Philippines is a fast-growing market for Web3 and metaverse. There are different versions of and applications for metaverse technology, and many of them are doing well in the Philippines. The Philippines is a key market for the popular play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, which is a rage among the youth. It shows the incredible cycle of growth in technology and innovation in the country in general, particularly these last few years. Kraver’s aims to leverage this growth to introduce new products.
“Kra-Verse Food Hall is just one of the most immediate and fun things we were able to set up for the customers that apply this technology, but we are also investing in other applications,” Lim notes. “We will pilot its first dine-in location in Makati in partnership with Kaya Founders to enable diners to enjoy a plated meal from Kraver’s while browsing and purchasing NFTs from local artists and creators. This space is intended for founders and funders to get together with an augmented meta-experience.”
Lim says he is excited about the metaverse space and its future potential for artists, creators, and brands. “It’s super interesting because there are so many different forms of metaverses and applications that may be relevant for various brands. We found a fun way to use this technology for the F&B space. Still, the space would be equally as exciting for instant commerce brands or any other plays that leverage the digital economy, online-first,” he concludes.
Launched in 2020 by Lim, Eric Dee, and Victor Mapua, Kraver’s is backed by Quest Ventures and Foxmont Capital. The startup recently raised a US$3 million Series A round led by Quest Ventures Asia Fund II. This came almost a year after securing a US$1.5 million seed round led by Foxmont Capital.
The cloud kitchen’s list of investors also includes Brian Cu, Christopher Po, George Pua, Lance Gokongwei, Paulo Campos III, the Foodee Group, Oak Drive Ventures, Martin Cu, Francis Wee, Anthony Oundjian and Rohit Gulati.
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A few months back, I needed help hiring a few great freelancers. So I naturally posted on LinkedIn asking for recommendations.
Within 24 hours, my inbox got flooded with messages from all sorts of agencies. I had such a hard time going through all messages that I needed to pull in one of my colleagues to help.
At first glance, that sounds like a great success. I needed help and got plenty of options. But when I started looking deeper, 95 per cent of all messages came from mediocre agencies. Their websites were terrible. I could not find any social proof, and the people reaching out to me were way too pushy. Rather than trying to understand my needs, they tried to force their way in.
So I copied the same message and shared it in a few paid communities where I am a member. Organisations such as OnDeck, Reforge, and DemandCurve. A few days later, I met a great copywriter who is currently working with us. The volume of requests was lower, but the quality was substantially higher.
That was not the first time when I tried to source great talent or insights via platforms such as LinkedIn, Quora, and Facebook –and got disappointed. Please note that I am pretty active on LinkedIn with about 5,500 followers, many of them highly curated connections.
Despite that, over time, I have decreased my outreaches via LinkedIn and doubled down on paid communities. Communities where the members are fewer but better curated. That has helped me spend less time on unqualified prospects and more time-solving hard problems.
The more I reflect on that experience, the more I start seeing value in two upcoming verticals:
Paid communities
NFTs
Paid communities and a brief history of the internet
Web1
In Web1, we discovered the internet through dial-up modems, which helped us access static web pages. By today’s standards, web1 was a laughable experience. I still remember how an average movie took three days to download during my childhood. The internet was slow, expensive, and had a terrible user experience.
Yet, the fact that we could share information so easily with the entire world had an incredible impact on our progress. Before the internet, we relied on printed books. We could spread information only at the speed of physical distribution. Access to information was slow, gated, and not even possible in some parts of the world.
Platforms such as Craiglist got a lot of traction because they served as digital yellow pages. Yes, indeed, the experience of browsing such venues was not extraordinary. But users could easily access organised directories of relevant information like never before in human history.
Web2
Throughout the past 10 to 20 years, we have seen the rise of the second wave of the internet, the so-called Web2. Three core innovations enabled Web2:
Mobile
Social
Cloud
All those innovations unleashed many attempts to unbundle well-established, horizontal marketplaces. The classic example here is the unbundling of Craiglist:
It is important to note that the image above points out only the success cases. Many startups attempted similar approaches but failed. Some disruptors lacked the necessary frequency of usage. Other, adequate business models to build sustainable businesses.
Yet, the startups that survived have often turned out to be more powerful than the entire horizontal platform as a whole. In other words, niche products can have a substantially better user experience. That allows them to capture a massive market share from both digital and analogue players.
“The moral of the story is this: In all but a few circumstances, the broad horizontal verticals eventually break. They become a victim of their own success. As the platforms grow, their submarkets grow too; their product gets pulled in a million different directions. Users get annoyed with an experience and business that caters to the lowest common denominator.
“And suddenly, what was previously too small a market to care about is a very interesting place for a standalone newco. Like clockwork, a new wave of innovation begins to swell, picking off the compelling verticals the new horizontal players cannot satisfy,” says Jeff Jordan and D’Arcy Coolican.
Let’s go back to LinkedIn and how its value has been slowly depleting. As the platform grows and attempts to monetise more verticals, the experience for the average user degrades.
“The unbundling of Linkedin will create 20+ companies worth US$5 billion+. Heavily segmented, heavily verticalised, with highly specific functionality for each vertical. Let the unbundling of Linkedin begin,” says Harry Stebbings on Twitter.
LinkedIn is an excellent platform for some use cases. For example, think of recruiters and salespeople. But for more specialised verticals like blue-collar workers, engineers, or healthcare professionals, the platform fails to create the minimum necessary value.
To prove this point, consider the growing number of highly specialised startups: engineering (Hired), blue-collar (Wonolo), healthcare professionals (Docquity), hospitality (Pared), oil and gas (Workrise), bookkeeping (Paro), etc.
Each of those platforms builds digital experiences that are considerably better. Specialisation results in more personalisation and contextualisation for both candidates and employers than the generic LinkedIn model.
The future of consumer social
I do not mean to pick on LinkedIn alone, though. I think the same statement is true for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other similar platforms. The market is big enough for everyone. I expect those platforms to continue to exist and deliver value to shareholders. After all, the winners of the Web2 era helped us to:
Discover and connect with people and companies around the world
Build digital profiles and a sense of credibility on the web
Databases of opportunities around the globe
Valuable content and permissionless ability to create
But it does feel like those winners have started to stagnate. At such a scale, it’s simply too difficult to cater to everyone’s needs. Therefore, there are opportunities to unbundle further and thus create niche communities. Platforms that would be smaller by design but will have 10x better experiences.
The intersection of communities and education: OnDeck
Now let’s take the opposite stance and study niche communities. In particular, I would like to review OnDeck.
Everyone who knows me well has heard of OnDeck. I am pretty impressed with what the company has achieved in such a short period. In turn, I have been actively promoting the company to my entire network.
At its core, you can think of OnDeck as an educational platform.
“On Deck is building a modern, digitally native education platform at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional higher and continuing education.” – What’s On Deck for On Deck? by Packy McCormick
The image below illustrates some of the current educational programmes and thus communities that OnDeck runs. When I first heard of OnDeck, there were only two to three fellowships. Today, I counted 28 programmes ranging from no-code to chief of staff and all the way to longevity biotech.
One of the challenges with building communities is that they are tough to scale. If you are not careful, the community will become a generic network like LinkedIn. A platform that attempts to cater to everyone will inevitably degrade the average user experience.
In business, that’s called “evaporative cooling”. Evaporative cooling occurs when high-value community members leave a community because they are not getting sufficient value. In turn, that leads to a decrease in the quality of the overall community.
OnDeck is one of the few platforms that has managed to scale its efforts while retaining a fantastic community gradually.
Initially, the company started with a Founders Fellowship. A typical approach for them would have been to continue growing that programme. Instead, they decided to build a variety of small, intimate communities that are complementary to one another. Each new programme is small enough to retain great talent but complimentary enough to reinforce other fellowships. The resulting flywheel is illustrated by the tweet below.
Today, OnDeck has built a platform where like-minded people go to learn, connect, find jobs, and create. In the process, they have re-imagined a variety of LinkedIn features:
At first glance, NFTs look de-attached from the narrative that I am driving. But if you study success cases of NFT-driven community forming, you will quickly realise how that’s not the case.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique. You can think of them as web3 media assets. The most popular use case of NFTs today are pieces of art, but it can be a lot more. Music, code, tweets, gifs, access passes, digital identities, domains, game character skins, and even this very essay that I am writing can be converted into an NFT through a platform like Mirror.
Organisations like CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club (now the same company) have shown us how communities can be formed around characters. Hate it or love it, most people think of NFTs as a trading asset.
But let’s leave the revenue generation opportunities aside. Instead, let’s focus on better cultural representation and streamlined collaboration. People who own a crypto punk or a bored ape feel a sense of belonging. They are part of the same community of somehow similar people. Most probably, each person who owns such an NFT shares similar characteristics:
Middle upper class or higher as otherwise, you won’t be able to purchase such an expensive NFT.
Interest in the forefront of technology, i.e., web3.
Similar taste in aesthetics, you won’t purchase a particular NFT if you find the design unattractive.
Tech-savviness. Otherwise, you won’t be able to deal with the complexity of purchasing and storing an NFT securely.
The list goes on and on. Theoretically, you can create characters representing distinct cultures and ethnic or religious minorities. The more depth an NFT collection has, the higher the probability of bringing together a group of similar people.
Today, all NFT-formed communities take place on a Discord server, but that won’t be the case tomorrow. So while everyone is racing to create the metaverse, we see the first attempts to bring NFT-centred community members together to the offline world.
Contrary to what most people believe, good web3 communities have a strong sense of cooperation, support, and recognition. It’s not entirely focused on trading and get-rich-quick schemes.
For example, as a birthday present, I received an NFT which gave me access to a well-managed discord community, Zen Academy. Members are helpful to each other, and my NFT serves as an accreditation of credibility. Unless you have that NFT, you cannot access the community.
But once you do, members seem to be quite like-minded and supportive of each other. The founding members put a lot of effort into ensuring everyone shares similar values.
Let the great unbundling begin
Those thoughts have been going through my mind for quite a while. On the one hand, established tech platforms are more powerful than ever. But on the other, the user experience and perceived value have been eroding. Trying to satisfy users from all walks of life is challenging.
As a result, the product gets pulled in a million different directions. In turn, that dynamic attracts new startups like vultures. Entrepreneurs are especially good at sensing opportunities.
Over time we start seeing a lot of disruption. So founders pick niche verticals and build gated communities, vertical marketplaces, and NFT collections. Driving 10x better experience for a niche community of similar people in the process.
Having said that, I think that the network effects of big tech companies like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube make the products highly defensible, thus, difficult to disrupt.
So it will be challenging to reach a similar scale. But you do not have to. The market is large enough to accommodate smaller yet highly successful communities.
As the infamous saying goes: “There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle.”
You either aggregate or specialise.
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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic
Website hacking is becoming increasingly common, no matter the size, scope or kind of organisation. In 2020, more than one million WordPress sites were hacked. On average, 30,000 websites are hacked each day, most owned by legitimate small businesses.
Despite these worrying facts about hacking websites, many companies still believe that hackers have no reason to attack websites because they are not hacked. Attackers are constantly crawling and snooping on websites to identify vulnerabilities to break into them and bid.
Cybercriminals target startups to reach 50 per cent, because security measures may not be fully implemented. In SMEs, customer trust is critical in a time of widespread cybercrime and data privacy attacks. Startup owners now face the challenge of building consumer trust as they build their businesses.
Financial motivations trigger many websites hacks about hackers using sophisticated tools to break into cybersecurity, data files, and corporate servers. Negligent employees, contractors, and third parties cause the majority of data breaches. And startup owners should beware of this.
Through this article, we want to help you understand all startup cyber safety best practices.
What happens if startups get attacked?
The consequences of hacking are complex, time-consuming, and expensive, and can eventually shut down businesses. Hackers can steal a business’ confidential information, from its financial report, business plans, intellectual property, employees’ and customers’ information, and many more.
In other words, hackers can take anything they want that may destroy your business’ reputation.
Team training is not just about improving their cybersecurity knowledge. But to build a culture of safety protocols in your team. In terms of security practices, everyone should be on one page to avoid all vulnerabilities.
Some data breaches recorded over the years started with an employee accidentally opening a phishing email, or someone on the team accidentally leaking sensitive information. These should all be avoided.
Make a written security policy
Startups need a written security policy that is easily accessible to all employees and covers all possible hacking scenarios and how to respond to them. So that in the event of a hack, employees can use the security policy as a checklist to ensure compliance with standards.
Update your software
Threat actors are constantly looking for ways to exploit software vulnerabilities. Threats use ransomware and software to start installing hacking systems.
But you don’t have to worry, because software companies usually provide regular updates to deal with these types of problems when they are found and to make other fixes. So as a startup owner, you have to pay attention if your cybersecurity software makes the latest updates.
Restrict data access with a strong password
Startups, whose core team has no cybersecurity experience, will be vulnerable to data clutter.
To avoid this, it’s a good idea for each team member to protect their data with a unique, complex, and hard-to-decrypt password.
Also, ensure that your employees do not have access to download or install their own software programs. Restricting network access further increases the security of your network.
Do the same for customers, if they subscribe to or log into your site, ask them to use a complex password and two-step verification for their own protection.
Backup and encrypt your data
Always backup and encrypt all your data and keep it in a safe place. This technique helps stop the ransomware before it causes significant damage. If hackers save data for ransom, you have the option to wipe the device and start over with a new device. You can recover data from there.
Encrypting data can also prevent hackers from decrypting stolen data.
Stay up to date with hacker news
Today, there are many variants of ransomware and malware. And this variant will probably continue to grow even more dangerous than the previous one. You can wait until your startup is hacked, to learn about the risks involved. But you have to be able to prevent it.
Try to follow blogs or news about cybersecurity for all new and existing threats.
Prepare for failure
When it comes to cybercrime and malware, there is absolutely no certainty. Even the safest companies can be hacked, but they can get out of hacking without damaging their reputation or customers because they have a plan of action.
Startups need to be prepared for all eventualities, look for good security systems, keep up with hacking trends, and constantly test and investigate security policies and best practices to keep them as secure as possible.
Engage with cybersecurity experts
The success of a tech startup depends heavily on speed and agility and investing time and resources in cybersecurity. Startup owners should work with a good security service provider, so they can focus on growing their business.
There are many SOC service providers to assist business owners in overseeing cybersecurity in their companies. But with today’s technological developments, ArmourZero is here to help startup owners provide subscription-based cybersecurity.
Startup owners don’t have to buy software licences and pay people to supervise, because ArmourZero does it all.
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Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. Share your opinion by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic
Fintech company SYNQA today announced that it has rebranded to Opn altogether with the announcement of their US$120 million Series C+ funding round.
The funding round included the participation of JIC Venture Growth Investments, MUFG Bank, and Mars Growth Capital. It brings the total capital raised to over US$222 million to date.
In a press statement, the company said that it will utilise the funding to continue scaling its business and expanding into new geographies.
The rebranding itself was introduced to support the company’s expanded strategic vision and global aspirations. It aims to “better reflect the company’s strategic vision and bold purpose of enabling access to the digital economy for everyone.”
The company also stated that the new name underscores its commitment to making payment seamless and borderless for both people and businesses.
“We are extremely excited and proud to bring on board this high-quality investment, allowing us to accelerate the development of our core payment solutions, while also expanding into new territories within our core markets of Southeast Asia and Japan and beyond,” said Jun Hasegawa, CEO and Founder of Opn.
“As we approach 10 years since we started as a payment gateway company, and now customised fintech solutions to help businesses grow, we have continued to obsess over how to make payment ever more seamless for both businesses and the people they serve. Through our fintech solutions, we are realising our vision of enabling access to the digital economy for everyone.”
Founded in 2013, Opn specialises in online payment, blockchain technology for fintech applications and digital transformation solutions for Southeast Asia and Japan markets.
The Opn platform is powered by its payment infrastructure sister company Omise Payment Holdings which provides one-stop online payment solutions.
Opn’s parent company SYNQA is one of the first companies to receive certification for its business plan from Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) through a ministerial program that started in August 2021, guarantees private-sector loans for deep-tech venture companies.
Under this programme, companies that have had their business plans approved by METI are able to receive loans from private financial institutions approved by the METI. The loans are backed by the ministry’s Organization for Small & Medium Enterprises and Regional Innovation of Japan (SMRJ).
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Indonesia-focused VC firm East Ventures announced today it has raised a total of US$550 million in the final close of its latest fund.
The firm will allocate US$150 million for early-stage deals and US$400 million for growth-stage deals, according to Willson Cuaca, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of East Ventures.
“We have been transforming ourselves from a seed-stage investor into a multi-stage investor and becoming an efficient and robust platform to support entrepreneurship,” he added.
“Digitalisation in Indonesia has become more robust, with a 73.7 per cent internet penetration rate in 2021 and equal digital competitiveness across the regions shown by the increased EV-DCI score from 2020 to 2022. We also saw the IPOs of some of Indonesia’s largest tech companies in recent times, a significant milestone in paving the way for other startups in the country to follow suit. We believe the strong initiatives made by the relevant stakeholders, such as the government, in promoting digitalisation through G20 Presidency, will further elevate the tech ecosystem and create even greater investment opportunities in Indonesia. At East Ventures, we will continue to double down our investments in Indonesia,” said East Ventures Managing Partner Roderick Purwana.
Founded in 2009, Singapore-headquartered East Ventures is a multi-stage investor that has backed over 200 seed- and growth-stage companies in Southeast Asia. It is the first investor of unicorns Tokopedia and Traveloka. Other notable companies in the portfolio include Ruangguru, SIRCLO, Kudo (acquired by Grab), Loket (acquired by Gojek), Tech in Asia, Xendit, IDN Media, MokaPOS (acquired by Gojek), ShopBack, KoinWorks, Waresix, and Sociolla.
East Ventures claims that it has experienced significant growth, with more than 200 portfolio companies graduating from seed to growth stages. The firm, which manages over U$1billion in AUM, has attracted US$6.7 billion in follow-on funding for its portfolio companies.
The VC firm also said it recorded more than US$86 billion of annualised GMV in aggregate by its portfolio. The firm will also incorporate sustainability aspects in every practice and usage of the funds.
East Ventures has launched many strategic initiatives in supporting the overall progress and development of Indonesia. They include supporting the digital transformation through its annual East Ventures and ensuring the sustainable investment and practices by signing the Principle of Responsible Investment (PRI), a UN-supported network of investors.
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