Essay
The real opportunity is not a new financial universe; it is a better settlement layer between familiar fiat endpoints—one that reduces the exception tax of cross-border payments: delays, FX leakage, prefunding, reconciliation, and capital trapped in transit.
Essay
Enterprise AI’s $20 seats are not a bargain but a temporary subsidy that will snap back into usage-based bills big enough to shock any company that built core workflows on fake prices.
Essay
The Philippines built a $40 billion IT services industry — and almost none of the ownership. AI is about to expose that gap.
Essay
Vanity metrics die fast when your CFO demands grounded unit economics. Tonik's Wanda Pascua on building a revenue-first marketing org in a low-trust market.
Essay
This article is based on a conversation with Niña Terol Aquino, CEO and Co-Founder of FoundHer, and the gap that's costing the Philippines one of its biggest economic opportunities.
Ecosystem
Indonesia’s startup boom didn’t just stall — it got repriced, as the eFishery and TaniHub scandals turned “growth at all costs” into a permanent trust tax on every Indonesian founder raising capital.
Digest
January clarified the rules of participation in Southeast Asia’s tech ecosystem. Capital, exits, and AI deployment now reward preparedness, positioning, and institutional alignment.
Essay
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.
Essay
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 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
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 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.