As Juwai IQI’s COO and CIO, I lead the effort to manage and build our technology platform and “super-app” Atlas. Today, Atlas has more than 20,000 users, all of whom are agents in Juwai IQI’s global real estate network, IQI.

Here, I’d like to share the five most important lessons we have learnt from creating this global tech platform from our headquarters in Malaysia.

Talent matters

The first and most important lesson we learnt is that when it comes to building a global tech platform, talent matters. A lot. Having a great team is critical to success.

Salaries for software engineers vary country by country, with some, such as the United States, paying more for the same talent as in other places like, say, Malaysia. But a good team-building strategy can’t be focused on paying the least. It has to be centred around finding the best available talent. I’m proud to say we have been able to attract and retain some world-class engineers and operators thus far and continue to grow our team.

We did this by building a strong culture of excellence and teamwork. We were very intentional about the values we wanted to instil in our team, and we hired people who aligned with those values.

Setting a good foundation is even more critical because our team is still in its early stages of growth since we intend to employ more than 1,000 tech and data staff in Kuala Lumpur. Especially after we take possession of our new larger offices, we will need to fill many, many roles. These include platform and mobile app developers, data scientists, and social network community specialists.

Also Read: Tips on building your startup out of that spark of frustration 

So, if you’re working on building a global tech platform, my advice is this: talent matters. A lot. Invest in your team and your culture and establish your core values early.

Put the users first

Another important lesson we learnt is that you have to put the users first. Always.

When we began building our platform, we constantly asked ourselves: what do the users need? What are they trying to accomplish? How can we make their lives easier?

It sounds simple, but it’s not always easy to do. There are a lot of competing interests and agendas in any organisation, and it’s easy to get caught up in those and lose sight of the users. What’s more, corporations tend to focus on the desire to create the perfect solution, but application development only succeeds when you focus on the user’s needs.

If you keep the users in the front and centre of everything you do, you’ll easily stay on the right track. For us, that has meant consulting directly with our users, engaging with them at every stage of development, and receiving direct feedback on what they think about our latest release and how we can improve it.

You also must manoeuvre delicately around the difference between what users say they want and what features they would actually embrace.

One lesson we learnt from our users is to avoid over-engineering the product. A product plan can include many features that users simply don’t want. For example, we found our real estate agent users wanted to maintain personal control of their lead and client information. We had to build around this desire. Some other real estate platforms have struggled because their business models depend on agents sharing this data.

Think globally from day one

From day one, we knew we wanted our business to scale internationally. That meant our platform would have to be used by real estate agents worldwide. So, we made sure it was built to be scalable and accessible from anywhere.

We are committed to localising our content and supporting different languages so that users worldwide can use our platform in their mother tongue. From the very first, our app has supported multiple languages and currencies, has been hosted on servers worldwide and has relied on robust infrastructure to accommodate future growth.

Thinking global also meant that we had to be more ambitious. We weren’t simply trying to digitise a formerly offline process. We hoped instead to re-engineer the process, reduce complications, and make our agents more efficient.

In this journey, we constantly walk the tightrope between doing too much and too little. We can neither present our users with entirely new and unfamiliar ways of doing things nor offer them too few efficiency advantages. We must strike the right balance.

Be willing to pivot

The next lesson I want to share is that you must be willing to pivot. Pivoting means changing direction – both when things are going badly and also when you identify an opportunity you hadn’t planned for.

Our platform looked very different when we started than it does today. We had to make many adjustments along the way based on user feedback and changing market conditions.

Early on, we found our users would often fail to enter complete and accurate addresses, including postcodes. As you can imagine, valid addresses are critical in the real estate business. Even so, our users told us they wanted to save time by entering partial addresses while on the go.

We resolved this challenge by creating code to use machine learning to identify correct property addresses from the available information. This took more work but also resulted in higher satisfaction and usage rates.

Also Read: The profitability trade-off: How startups navigate uncertain times to achieve quality growth

So, if you’re building a global tech platform, my advice is to be willing to pivot. Be flexible, be adaptable, and be open to change. It can be painful but can also make your platform much more successful.

Data is vital

The final lesson that I want to share is that data is vital. Without data, it’s impossible to understand what’s working and what isn’t, identify new opportunities, or fulfil your broader business goals. If you’re considering building a global tech platform, make sure you have a plan for collecting and analysing data. It will be essential to your success.

Sometimes, you collect data even in the absence of an immediate plan for making use of it. I find that data is like money: it is best to save what you can because, eventually, you’ll find a need for it.

Data allows you to understand your users and make decisions that will improve your platform. And because our users are the agents in our network, data also gives us deeper insights into our business. Without data, we would be flying blind.

These are the five most important lessons I learned while helping build a global tech platform in Malaysia for Juwai IQI. I hope they are useful to you as you plan your own development efforts.

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Ecoxyztem, a venture builder for climate tech startups in Indonesia, has received undisclosed funding from TAP Applied Agri Services, Konservasi Hutan Indonesia (a global investor from Pegasus Tech Ventures), and Roni Pramaditia (Chairman of Medco Foundation).

The funds obtained will be used as working capital to develop at least four startups annually.

It will also reach more business actors in the climate tech sector, which can contribute to reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions in the archipelago.

Ecoxyztem provides access to talent, venture architecture for business modelling, go-to-market activities through business matchmaking, and investments.

Also Read: ‘There’s a lack of urgency among companies in achieving net zero targets’: Unravel Carbon’s Grace Sai

Currently, Ecoxyztem has four startup portfolios: Waste4Change (waste management), ReservoAir (solving flooding problems), Ravelware (driving the green industry transition), and Enertec (working in the energy efficiency sector.

Ecoxyztem conducted three launchpads: Circular Jumpstart, Urban Innovation Challenge, and Climate Innovation League. They acted as a medium for Ecoxyztem to get to know over 45 climate tech startups in Indonesia through learning classes and mentorship programmes.

The team is currently promoting the #TrustinEcopreneur movement to raise public awareness about climate tech solutions and increase the confidence of ecopreneurs.

Jonathan Davy, Co-Founder and CEO of Ecoxyztem, said: “The venture-building process from Ecoxyztem is needed by ecopreneurs (environmental business founders) in the early stages of their business growth. Ecoxyztem becomes an institutional co-founder for startups by facilitating their business growth with methodologies tailored to the Indonesian context.”

Bijaksana Junerosano, President Director of Ecoxyztem, said, “Ecoxyztem was born based on the concern of environmental issues, which is growing faster than the solutions. Through the venture builder model, we believe it will encourage the creation of more innovative solutions to address the environmental issues around us.”

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Echelon 2022 aims to provide intimate and focused discussions on key topics and business matching services to facilitate business-driven connections during the two-day event. e27 will curate and invite key stakeholders of startups, investors, corporates, and ecosystem enablers to drive towards fruitful business outcomes at Echelon. 

Here’s the full list of the speakers for the 2022 edition, which will be co-located with SWITCH at Resorts World Sentosa from 27 to 28 October 2022. Learn more here. 

The post Indonesia’s climate tech venture builder Ecoxyztem secures investment appeared first on e27.

On September 28-29, Singapore became a host for TOKEN2049, one of the leading global crypto events where founders and executives of leading Web3 companies share their views on the market.

On the sidelines of the event, e27 speaks to three global Web3 companies to understand their views on the Asia Pacific as the next big market for them –and how they intend to win this.

Seeing the Asia Pacific from outside

The first company that we spoke to was WEMIX, a South Korean-origin company that started out as a game developer before expanding to the Web3 space. Its offerings now include DAO and DeFi services.

“We started the blockchain business in 2018,” WEMIX CEO Shane Kim explains to e27 on the first day of TOKEN2049. “As a gaming company with more than 20 years of history, we have very big IPs and game titles. We need a game platform to onboard our games, so we launched our platform in 2020.”

Although founded in South Korea, the company has set up an entity in Singapore, which it views as a “significant area” for its blockchain business WEMIX.

Also Read: Web3, wallets, and winning the next culture revolution in Southeast Asia

“We think Singapore is the best place to extend our blockchain business because Singapore has friendly regulations. It is also not far from South Korea, so there is little time difference. It is the best place to expand our blockchain business,” Kim says.

We also spoke to Anton Katz, CEO and Co-Founder of digital asset technology provider TALOS, who explained to us the difference in their user profiles from the early days of the company and today.

When the company first began, most of its clients were crypto-native organisations that wanted to provide services to the customers. But today, they have a wider variety of clients, which include traditional financial institutions and service providers who are looking to enter the Web3 space by adding digital assets into their regular offerings

Katz also noticed a difference between US and the Asia Pacific clients.

“In the US and Europe, there is a 50-50 balance between crypto-native organisations and service providers. But what we have seen in Asia is more lopsided towards the service providers,” he said. “There is a strong, long-term thinking in Asia in terms of providing services to underlying clients, and those can be retail or institutional customers.”

“We definitely did not expect this level of interest,” Katz stresses.

Another global Web3 company looking into the Asia Pacific market is Amber Group, a global digital asset company that has recently secured unicorn status. Having grown from 60 people to almost 1,000 in the recent year, the company also sees a shift in the profile of its customer base.

“Our client base is actually quite diverse. Four or five years ago, it was mostly the crypto-native participants because back then, there are not that many outsiders trading crypto. So you can think of crypto miners who have the need to get liquidity or manage their Bitcoin exposure. Then there are many and token projects,” explained Annabelle Huang, Managing Partner at Amber Group.

“Right now, we have also expanded into a lot of the traditional financial institutions, a lot of hedge funds, that are scaling up to add crypto to part of their portfolio. We also have traditional family offices and ultra-high net worth individuals who are willing viewing Bitcoin as an alternative investment,” she continued.

Also Read: How Web3 will impact the future of employment

Having started her career in the US, Huang also noted the difference in how Asia Pacific customers are behaving.

“I saw a very different crowd. In the US, it is a lot more developer-focused, more R&D perhaps. In terms of user activity, I think it’s definitely a lot more vibrant here in the Asia Pacific,” she said. “People are generally open-minded about new products and willing to try. It is a perfect ground for a lot of innovation that comes to this space to become real, tested use cases eventually.”

This placed the Asia Pacific as a top priority market for Amber Group.

“We are continuing to build upon the offerings here. All the way from the base layer, from security to all the product offerings that we can offer to clients. For example, on the institutional high-net-worth side, maybe their need is more around trading or wealth management. But I think we are not ruling out retail opportunities down the line,” she elaborates.

“Looking at the trends we have seen so far, in GameFi and others … I think we’re building out the infrastructure so that we are ready to onboard many more users. By infrastructure here, we mean technical infrastructure and regulation infrastructure.”

Seizing the APAC market

When it comes to the strategies these companies are using to seize opportunities and win market share in the Asia Pacific, there is a great variety between TALOS, WEMIX, and Amber Group. But one thing in common for these companies is the importance of word-of-mouth in a nascent industry such as Web3.

“For many years, it happens organically,” explains Kim. He adds that as a gaming company, WEMIX only began implementing marketing outreach with its more recent titles by hosting offline events in Japan, where most of its attendees come from abroad.

“We always focus on the essence of the game business: Fun. Basically, a game has to be fun,” Kim stresses. “Money is [even] a second objective, I think. Many P2E games focus too much on making money, which is not sustainable. Users will always want a fun experience with a game.”

Also Read: A look into (brand) love in the time of Web3

Amber Group also benefited from the concept of word-of-mouth.

“We have established ourselves as the most trustworthy, secure, and service-oriented platform. I think that is what our clients liked. Internationally, this space is still quite small,” Huang explains.

“So, for new players looking to come into space, I think they will get around to recommendations, and our name is always on top of the list,” she concludes.

With the Asia Pacific playing an important role in their expansion plan, it is no surprise that both TALOS and WEMIX have set up entities in Singapore to spearhead their operations in the region.

“By having these interactions in APAC and abroad, we have a better understanding of how service provider organisations are adopting these technologies. We are better at providing a more coherent set of services,” Katz explains. He gives an example of how crypto trading platforms tend to focus more on improving trading efficiency, connectivity, and stability while other organisations may put a stronger emphasis on relationships with clients.

In the case of WEMADE, the company is also looking forward to investing in more blockchain projects and companies in the region.

“We focus on the quality of the game and the fun [aspect of it], but we expand our business to new trends of the blockchain industry. We always go out looking for new trends,” says Kim.

Also Read: How Web3 will revolutionise borderless banking in Southeast Asia

Huang explains more details of Amber Group’s plan to grow further in the Asia Pacific market. It starts with expanding its team to include the best talents in the region.

It also puts emphasis on surviving the crypto funding winter.

“The most important thing is to weather through this cycle, making sure that we can continue to build in this so-called crypto winter. To remain competitive and still offer the best-in-class services … to make sure that we can onboard the next wave of users coming our way in the next Bull Run,” she closes.

The post Global Web3 companies on why Asia Pacific is the future of the industry appeared first on e27.

In this episode, we are excited to welcome Marvin Liao. Liao is a partner at Diaspora Ventures and GAMEGROOVE Capital and previously was a partner at 500 Startups, where in total, he has invested in over 400 companies. Prior, Liao played a major role in the international expansion efforts (in APAC and EMEA) at Yahoo!

In our conversation, Liao shares why it is crucial to building an internal network and trust to be successful in new markets, the pitfalls of too much localisation and autonomy, the importance of two-way innovation, and why bad economic times are great opportunities to expand in international markets and viewpoints on how investing in fast-growing companies is getting more global.

Also Read: East Ventures, Yahoo! Japan Capital, and SMDV launch EV Growth

Get your copy of our Wall Street Journal Bestselling Book, Global Class, a playbook on how to build a successful global business.

This episode is sponsored by our partner ZEDRA. Learn more about how the ZEDRA team can support you in expanding to new markets here.

Find our entire podcast episode library here.

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The content was first published by Global Class.

Image Credit: Global Class

The post Why Yahoo!’s strategy to give local teams near full autonomy cost them the global search market appeared first on e27.

In my eight-month career at e27, I have had the privilege of walking closely with our contributors and propelling their thought leadership journey via the e27 Contributor Programme.

I have come across different perspectives and opinions leading the change towards positive growth and learnt so much about the ecosystem thanks to our incredible contributor community.

A few weeks back, we published an article by John Tan, Co-Founder and CEO of Doyobi, an edutech startup, where he talks about how our current education system has been struggling to nurture curious and self-directed learners, focusing on finding solutions that go way beyond the four walls of a classroom. And thus, I was introduced to the hybrid model for our education system and how edutech is making it happen.

Our contributor articles from expert thought leaders of the tech industry call for an evergreen stature of content. Our club has founders, investors, innovators, technicians and startup professionals expressing their views.

And since its inception, we have tried to nurture our growing family of contributors. While at it, we have realised that nothing is more enriching and heart-warming than learning from each other.

Day in and day out, the ability to strengthen this vibrant community and how we can serve our contributors better keeps us going. And it is time we give them the much-deserved spotlight. Each one has a unique voice and perspective and deserves to be heard. Check out our latest product update — a contributor-only leaderboard to glance at the most popular voices on e27 at all times.

This leaderboard is a ranking chart based on article views where you can see our top trending contributors and their published bylines. With this new launch, you will be able to discover the most popular contributions from the community and stay connected at any given time. We aim to ensure that accessibility becomes as smooth as a bowl of butter and that a bright spotlight is always shining on our top thought leaders.

Our responsibility is to bring out the choicest voices and opinions and keep strengthening and nurturing this evergreen community. Don’t forget, we are just the glue holding this community together; the real magic dust is you.

So without further adieu, head to our news page (hyperlink) and see the magic brewing for yourself. If you want to see yourself on our new shiny leaderboard, join our vibrant community today by submitting a byline.

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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

Join our e27 Telegram group, FB community, or like the e27 Facebook page

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