Fintech
Which financial product your software company should launch first
Wallet, card, checkout, or passthrough capital — your first financial product is determined by how deep your customer relationship is and who controls the payment data today.
Technology
Embedded Finance
How Grab, Sea, and GoTo really make their money
Grab is still only at 9% financial-services revenue, but the pattern across Sea, GoTo, and Maya is clear: once the audience is built, the wallet line is the one that quietly takes over the P&L.
Essay
The Bill Hiding Behind the AI Bargain
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.
Embedded Finance
Embedded finance Southeast Asia: How software companies launch a second revenue line
Embedded finance is not a future adjacency for software companies; it is a second revenue line unlocked the moment you have weekly engagement, money flowing through your product, and user trust to hold a balance.
Essay
The Philippines Built a $40 Billion Industry It Doesn't Own
The Philippines built a $40 billion IT services industry — and almost none of the ownership. AI is about to expose that gap.
Essay
The Structural Case for the Philippine Female-Led Economy
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
The Trust Tax: How Indonesia's Startup Scandals Repriced an Entire 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.
Funding
How LP Mandates Rewired Southeast Asia's Venture Market
For anyone building in SEA over the next 24 months: incorporate in Singapore and engineer unit economics for 12-month payback, or accept that institutional venture capital is structurally unavailable.
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.
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.
Fintech
Capital Darwinism Favors the Efficient and the PH was Built for It
Southeast Asia’s Series A squeeze stripped away the illusion of easy money. Singapore may command 88% of fintech capital, but Philippine operators thrive on discipline. The irony? The market that couldn’t attract capital may be the only one that learned to live without it.