Essay
The Capital Deployment Problem in Southeast Asia
Founders in Southeast Asia know the math of dilution, but the ecosystem’s incentives push them to behave as if the math doesn’t matter.
John Soriano
Head of Marketing @ PayMongo (YC S19) Growth hobbyist and cat dad
Digest
Southeast Asian Tech Roundup December 2025
Grab’s Web3 payments push, Google Pay’s PH debut, and SEA’s $300B+ digital economy headline a week of bold moves, game-changing regulation, and deep tech bets shaping the region’s future.
PayMongo Enables Google Pay for Filipino Merchants
Integration expands digital wallet options as Philippines accelerates toward mobile-first commerce
Digest
Southeast Asia Tech Roundup November 2025
Southeast Asia’s tech scene this week saw major consolidation moves, breakthrough digital infrastructure, and bold pivots in AI and payments—revealing an ecosystem where operational scale and regional specialization increasingly outpace old-school growth and VC narratives.
Essay
Most Southeast Asian Businesses Aren’t Built for Venture Capital
The founders who win aren’t the ones who raise the biggest checks—they’re the ones who know exactly what game they’re playing and have the courage to run it on their own terms.
Essay
Japan's Patient Revolution in Startup Collaboration
Japan's startup ecosystem is learning to innovate the way Japan has always excelled: through discipline, precision, and the patient accumulation of small improvements that compound into transformation.
News
What Southeast Asian Founders Can Learn from Airwallex
Jack Zhang turned a coffee shop headache into a $1B fintech. Here's what SEA founders can learn from the playbook he wrote—and how to adapt it for our fragmented reality.
Culture
Scarcity Is a Feature, Not a Flaw
Scarcity doesn’t hold Southeast Asian founders back—it sharpens their edge. In Manila’s pressure cooker, ambition thrives where patient capital is rare, challenging Silicon Valley’s playbook with hard-won resilience.
Culture
The Taste Gap: Tech Makes Creative Work Forgettable
Technology makes content creation effortless, but widens the taste gap between what we produce and what truly matters. Excellence requires craft.
News
When Legacy Buys Culture: What Publicis' Hepmil Acquisition Really Means for Asia's Media Future
When a Euronext-listed holding company writes an undisclosed check for a meme factory, it's not buying jokes—it's buying the blueprint for how marketing works when platforms automate agencies out of existence.
Digest
Southeast Asia’s Power Moves – October 2025
Southeast Asia’s digital economy is undergoing a strategic transformation, with capital and regulatory power moves laying the foundation for the next decade. This month’s digest reveals how disciplined investment, infrastructure buildout, and policy clarity are reshaping the region’s future.
Southeast Asia
Why Entrepreneurship Education Is Southeast Asia’s Most Strategic—And Most Overlooked—Ecosystem Lever
Southeast Asia's future will be scripted by young builders who learn to navigate uncertainty, build from scratch, and iterate through failure. The organizations teaching them how to do that, at scale, are the region's most undervalued backbone.