XA Podcast 012 | The Roxy Dynamic: Building Great Co-Founder Relationships W/ Ronald Ros And Rexy Dorado, Co-Founders, Kumu

Before you have funding, product-market fit, or a business event, you have your co-founders. And it has been said that the co-founder relationship is almost like a marriage. It can be a magical partnership, where you see each other through thick and thin. Or it could be a match made in hell, ending with your startup imploding. How does one create a co-founder dynamic that’s built to last?

Discussion Topics: The Roxy Dynamic: Building Great Co-Founder Relationships

• How they met while working on social initiatives for the Philippines
• The Roxy dynamic – how they create a positive dynamic between the cofounders and even the leadership team
• Evolution of Kumu from messaging to live streaming
• Becoming the Disneyland of social media
• Developing their fund-raising strategy

Transcript: The Roxy Dynamic: Building Great Co-Founder Relationships

Welcome to the new episodes of the XA Podcast. I think all of us who are at XA, feel very passionately about working with phenomenal founders. And so today, it really is our honour to host Roland and Rexy as our guest speakers for the very first installment of our Lunch and Learn for 2022. So, Roland and Rexy are the founders of Kumu, the largest live-streaming community app for Filipinos around the world. And since its launch in 2018, Kumu has passed over 10 million registered users across 55 countries.

So Roland and Rexy welcome. We’ll start it off kind of with your story. So in four years, Kumu has become one of the most successful social apps in Southeast Asia.

We’ll talk a lot about Kumu. But you both have this really inspiring story of how you ended up meeting and co-founding Kumu. Could you share with us how two founders who grew up in the US ended up in the Philippines running the largest live-streaming community app for Filipinos around the world. We’d love to start with that founder’s journey and story.

Roland: Wow, thank you so much for having us like feeling in my heart right now I feel very honoured and grateful for this opportunity. Originally, I’m actually Filipino American. So growing up in Los Angeles. And so when my mom raised me, I never really got to really fully explore what it meant to explore the Filipino side of my identity.

So I had an opportunity to study abroad in the Philippines. And when I went through that exchange program, there was this life-changing experience, where I felt more at home in the Philippines than back home in LA. And similar to what you alluded to in the previous shared after graduating from college, experiencing being an entrepreneur, and having that exit, I finally had the resources to finally go back home to the Philippines, but most of it was mostly NGO work and humanitarian work.

So a lot of like anti-sex trafficking work, clean water projects, poverty alleviation, and things like that. And so going back and forth, I had this cadence where I was in the Philippines, doing nonprofit work. But when I went to the US, I was mostly engaged as an entrepreneur or more as a business person in technology and advertising. And so it was actually during that back and forth cadence when Rexy had founded Kuya Collaborative he reached out about the non-profit that he founded taking Filipino students from all the best schools, you know, he was at Brown at the time Filipino students from Harvard, Stanford, and then taking them to the Philippines during these life-changing experiences.

So very similar to the movie Ratatouille, when he told me what he was doing, it reminded me of my life-changing experience in college. And I just knew in my heart, I wanted to work with him. And that really set the foundation of what eventually became this collaboration for Kumu.

Rexy: Yeah, and I mean, I guess on my side, you touched on a bit of the work that I was doing before Kumu, I think through the line that actually lead to connecting with Roland and having these conversations about like, how can we do this at a bigger scale, how that led to Kumu was this one, just understanding of excitement about the way the Philippines was at and what the future had in store for the Philippines, as the economy was moving to digital as the people’s, this young population was taking on more and more of a role and not just kind of local economy.

But globally I think there was one piece of it that was just like this macro view that the Philippines was on the verge of still a lot of growth over the next few years. And I think a more specific kind of view on Filipino talent and urge to build things, which in that context was more around the building businesses and nonprofits that I did in my previous work, but also more kind of extracurricular I guess, like Filipino culture and Filipino musicians and Filipino stories, the Filipino talents in film and TV, all these things that we’re starting to kind of pick up more and more year by year that started to get a sense that Filipino creativity can make a mark at a global level.

Roland: Yeah, because in the Rexy context, it was actually his work as the Philippine ambassador to the US, I had dinner with him in Los Angeles and he was really inspired by Rexy’s work. I mean, imagine a Filipino college student rejecting their job offer at Amazon to move to Manila to start an AI company, or instead of being an investment banker in New York, they would decide to help a family business in Manila, you know, a lot of these stories coming out of Rexy work as through his nonprofit, but when he was telling us about, okay, look, we appreciate your passion for the Philippines and your NGO work.

But digital transformation, Fourth Industrial Revolution, all the changes that are happening here, Roland, you’re a technology entrepreneur in California what if you created more technology jobs in the Philippines what type of impact can you bring to the country? And it was really that type of inspiration where you’re noticing like, okay, let’s talk Tam, you have over 100 million people. And the median is Gen Z millennial, you have billions of dollars being spent on internet infrastructure. And you have Vivo, Oppo, Huawei, and Xiaomi, basically releasing the iPhone 7 for the cost of $100.

And you’re seeing a certain macro effect, where it says, Wow, there is this opportunity that Rexy and I have always dreamed about engaging the diaspora to really helped develop the Philippines it really felt like a perfect storm to just, I don’t know, walk away from everything and just move to the Philippines.

Amazing. Thank you both for sharing. So look, I think what’s very clear is your passion for the Philippines and also to interplay that both of you share, I think it’s so clear that there’s so much respect and admiration for each other. And one thing I’d love for you to advise us on is like, what do you think a good co-founder relationship looks like. We are angel investors, we meet with hundreds of founders, and we backed over 100 founders that say, we’d love to understand what’s so special about the Roland and Rexy relationship, and what should we be looking for in terms of other co-founders who are going about trying to change their countries or their regions with amazing technology products. So we’d love for you to comment on that just a little bit.

Roland: Yes, so one of the things that we’ve noticed, and something that our Series C investor also had recognized is Martinez this kind of dynamic, the dynamic duo dynamic of a co-founder, where I love to tell stories, I love the passion, I love recruiting and building teams, and I remember first looking at Rexy going okay, I don’t know how to read a contract, you know, like the way that he engages with our legal counsel, to his strategic mind, and his ability to build consensus where maybe sometimes I kind of shoot the name in my approach.

I think that a lot of times, it’s just really recognizing that symbiotic nature, where we do complement each other a lot across a variety of because when you look at those key things at the time, one of our first advisors Dato Binotto, a key venture capitalist who’s Filipino American, was advising us he is really looking at these key things before thinking of funding.

One is your technical advantage, two is your operating plan, three is your team, and number four, most importantly, is the timing of it. And so the more that we’re doing deeper thinking around these four key elements, you start to see how Rexy and myself are really complementing each other. And at the same time looking for other co-founders to plug in a lot of those key kinds of concerns that Dato brought up before we even think about funding.

Rexy: Yeah, I think also call it Roxy, the Roxy dynamic is I guess within Kumu not specific to Roxy, but something that maybe not accidentally there’s also this DNA that’s shared within the core leadership team and, and how we work with our key leaders. And I think for us, it’s helpful to have overlap in like one just shared vision and like being excited about like 90% of the same things in the context of the business and where it could go, two is just kind of respect and being on equal footing.

I mean Roland is 10 years older than me and he has 10 years more experience than me, but it doesn’t feel like that when we’re kind of creating ideas and having conversations. And so I think that also is something that people who are younger appreciate, and in three years, I think shared pace and urgency is also really important where, for me and Roland and for our leadership team, it’s important that we all are on the same page about how important getting to these particular goals are.

And I think if we were able to kind of have overlap and strong overlap between those three, then you can really kind of complement each other in specific actions and activities and skill sets. Struggling is where there’s not a sense of equality or there’s a misalignment of vision or there’s one person who is taking things a lot more seriously than the other.

Roland: Yeah, correct Rexy point, that level of trust on the key fundamentals like on shared vision and just really on the urgency to execute and just make sure that we’re able to do that allows us to then kind of specialise in particular key focus area points that really move the needle on things. So like, for example, in our case, we are spending probably more time on growth dynamics from a marketing perspective, or maybe spending some time on first-time user experience and things like that.

Whereas, like, on content bets and things that really migrate communities like that, there’s a lot of trust that Rexy is doing that. But even though with that said, we’re so intermingled that, for example, I have a personal relationship with like, folks at Miss Universe, technically, that’s content but in terms of like, working with an organisation like that, I would step in or Rexy, jumping in and noticing that maybe there might be something wrong in the customer acquisition. So, there’s a lot of respect and clear communication, especially with our core with Crystal, our chief product officer, you know, a couple of key leaders in the team.

That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing, you know, it’s so clarifying when we hear that from successful co-founders, like yourself, and it’s something that we get to apply in the future. So I’d like to switch gears just a little bit to the amazing product that you built. So from what we gather Kumu began as a messaging app, right? So we’d love to get that traceroute from a messaging app to a live-streaming app. And one thing we were also very curious about is, do you think Kumu was responsible for shifting behavior. Or do you feel that there was an unmet need that you then solved when moving from messaging over to live streaming?

Roland: That’s actually a great question. I mean, I can talk about that first initial. So we’re traveling around the country as Rexy and I know that we can’t build the product on our own. So we went full-on Avengers, my cousin Claire Blackwidow, in New York to James Nick Fury in Silicon Valley, and then Hulk Bruce Banner, Angelou, who’s driving content in Los Angeles, we all move and thinking about the particular problem we’re solving we were actually really inspired by the consumer internet plays prioritising local time.

So we saw what WeChat did in China as the basis of the economy or ecosystem that they built, or say Cacao, the amazing ecosystem that they built but with their chat, we also saw VNG Corporation, which was a huge inspiration, building a multibillion-dollar app ecosystem on top of the Vietnamese Tam, and looking at what they did with Zolo. So we were just like, Okay, well, I think we’re fully aligned on the mission that we want to build a consumer internet champion for the Philippines. So why don’t we launch a messenger app, oh, it was a fail. It was like, so toxic on our Facebook three years too late, ha ha ha, this is a crappy version of Viber. All that. And we’re halfway through our funding, like, Oh, crap, like, what the heck, like no one likes the messaging track.

But what I love about how distributed our team is, then one thing that we got advice on was to leave enough room for the community to define your product. And there was something about our intern Meeker who we love and adore, she moved on to LinkedIn, and now is starting her own startup. And as an intern, she was like, Hey, guys, I’m taking the call analysis of our cohorts. And I think we’re live streaming.

I’m like, what, what do you mean by live streaming, I feel like I’m looking at it like it’s a feature in the background, it is not even the core part of the app, but look at these retention metrics, and look at the way that people are spending time on the app. And at the time, when we were kind of researching pivot, because this is a big decision to actually move away halfway through funding. And what really inspired us was the bourbon pivot, which started out as a messenger check-in app. And when they saw cohorts and around photo sharing, photo editing, and when they rebranded as Instagram, it gave us that kind of like, okay, that confidence that there’s something special about what’s happening to this particular audience.

So to answer your second part of the question from behaviour change, that was really more as we were talking to the users, and on the creator side, they’re like, look, Kumu, I love this live streaming feature because I’m not pretending like my life is perfect on Instagram. I’m not hiding behind the keyboard and engaging in toxic behaviors, as you see on Twitter and Facebook, but there’s something real, raw, and authentic about creating live content.

And what was really interesting from the aha moment, is the recognition of the content from a viewer side, you’re not recognizing content through views, or you’re not recognizing content through likes, you’re actually recognizing content in the form of a micro-transaction, very similar to like a digital version of busking. watching someone play the guitar on the street and recognizing the content with a $1 bill in their guitar case, but really doing that digitally, and really forming the product and community building experience around that particular behavioural hook. But yeah, Rexy if you have anything other but that was kind of like what was going on there at that time.

Rexy: I think what’s interesting thinking about it, which immediately touches on different questions in theme, but like, and I think there is an element of luck involved in it, but where we did end up finding product market fit also ended up being a place where we found a lot more kind of product market, founding team fit where to the degree that I mean, it was a timing thing. But like, if there was any sliver of a chance that a new messenger app would work in 2018, we probably weren’t the team to execute it.

Because that’s something that’s a lot more like just tech infrastructure and just like utility-driven, right in terms of communications, and maybe some amount of delay in design. But that’s not really what makes the messenger app win, whereas for us like Roland is very much a growth marketing and very passionate about authentic connection type of person. I’m very much like a media geek and creator economy, somebody who’s very interested in that Angelou our head of content was like, personification of beast gauges, like, cool things and making cool things and absorbing cool things. James is a natural community builder. And so that just ended up being, in retrospect, the right team to put together a live stream-focused, creator-focused consumer app versus a messenger app.

That’s such a great story. Thank you for sharing. And so just a follow-up here, you also have this delightful framing around being the Disneyland of social media. Could you talk a bit about that and explain it to us also, we’d love to know the why. like, where did that come from? But also, why did you decide to double down and move in that direction?

Roland: You know, one of the core things that really inspired us, Disneyland that a lot of people don’t really appreciate is how strict their security is, if you don’t look safe, or just don’t look right, you won’t even make it out of the parking lot, let alone the front entrance and purchase a ticket, the cameras involved and really this devotion and dedication to safety.

And because of these core values that we rallied around, primarily, the three things are safety, positivity, and acceptance, the way we moderated our community to moderate content, now, offending content gets shut down within a minute of launch, which is something we’re really proud of. It’s a hybrid between our content moderation team and image recognition technology and all of this sort. And to do that allowed us to do something that I think is really hard, which is creating a safe place online.

I don’t know any platform, even though we’re focused on Filipinos to have several million active users, but still have this overarching sense of safety. And like a quick qualitative, like a couple of days ago, I was sharing with my mom, with three Roman Catholic priests, and a whole slew of people across the socioeconomic spectrum, very wealthy business owners and very poor farmers in the province. And there’s something magical about creating a safe place where people can spend time together.

And if you look at other platforms, who do to utilise live streaming, or do have that social aspect, the lack of content moderation creates a huge plethora of toxic and bullying behaviours that when we talk about the Disneyland of social media, sure, yes, people talk about the entertainment and our ability to migrate amazing content experiences into the app. But it’s actually our devotion to creating a safe place online.

So to be clear, we didn’t say the Disney of social media, it’s Disneyland. And it’s because Disneyland is such a safe place, and positions us as a social entertainment. It’s like, look if you bullying and talking about politics and all that nasty stuff that’s not Kumu, you do that on Facebook, or if you want to pretend and do some things like just go to Instagram and stuff like that like this is the place to be yourself to be accepted, and to do it in a positive place. So there’s an unapologetic approach to the way that we cultivate a community on the app that I think is something that still keeps me up.

Rexy: Yeah, and I think what we’ve seen which wasn’t necessarily what pushed us in the direction but as an overall trend that we’re in a way part of is the last generation of social media was a lot of like, trying to be like this one, or like a handful of things for everybody, and they’re kind of horizontal, winning Instagram winning this format, Twitter, winning this format, Facebook winning the News Feed format.

And I think what we’ve seen already happens in a much deeper way in China, and it’s starting to happen globally, is it starting to become like, every social app is like the full stack of features, but for a particular kind of use case and archetype and type of community that’s being built. I mean, remember, we’re not gunning for a future where everyone is on Kumu for everything.

I think that the existing social platforms and new ones we’re going to be coexisting no matter how well we execute them. So in the future, we want to be the best place for me if I want to go for positivity and fun, and authenticity and meet new people be able to be the place that provides the best experience for that.

Gotcha. Thank you both so much. So, look, I think it educational to hear how you thought through so deeply about all of this. And you just stay on that theme of kind of talking about your relationship as co-founders moving into the product. I think one of the other legs of any entrepreneur’s journey is fundraising.

So this will probably be, I think, the last question from me, and then to everybody on the call, we’re going to open it up for you to ask Rexy and Roland your questions. But we noticed that you’ve been a company that has raised funds from local VCs like Foxconn, regional VCs, like open space, and then international funds like General Atlantic. So we had a two-part question for you. The first was, Was this mixture? Was it deliberate?

Is it something that you put together so that it would help you strategically expand outside of the Philippines? And in the second is, you know, you close the last round, like in the heart of the pandemic. So what was that like? And what do you see is going to happen in the next 12 months, especially given some of the interest rate sort of chatter that’s coming out of the US right now?

Rexy: I think it was deliberate. It was kind of looking particularly for funders, where there was a clear view of how they could be a partner in the growth of the business. And I think that was something that even in the seed round, was somewhat media on the media side and Foxmart, in terms of people who built the venture at an early stage that had gotten to growth eventually. And so we got a lot out of those relationships.

And then that kind of formed our view, that led to a kind of open space is our Series A investor, also being kind of known for being very intentional about the value add that they bring in. And then that fed into, I think, SIG being kind of having that particular perspective from byte dance. And just like social in the Asian context. And then General Atlantic for being kind of having a reputation in terms of really rolling up your sleeves and adding value when they come on the cap table. So that’s always been our philosophy that I think just started, I think we got lucky in the early ones. And then we enjoyed what we got out of it.

And so look for more and more that type of DNA and investors that we brought in, I think the other thing that was common with all of that is, is that probably for open space onwards, we talked to the fundraise at least six months, if not, in the case of open space, maybe a year and a half before for the round closed. And so they’re really long-term relationships where got to know each other got a sense, we had a shared vision and could work well together long before the round closed and for the General Atlantic at the CDC in particular, it was maybe Yeah, I think 18 months before the round close when we started on the introduction happened.

Roland: And just to provide the context, I mean, specifically, I think it is just people’s comfort around the Philippine town. There was a time you know, so we’re endeavoured entrepreneurs, something that Linda had shared with us is just this historic thing that happened not just because, you know, as a global organisation, they noticed too, both the Mexican ecosystem and the Philippine ecosystem is turning a corner, while traditionally Indonesia and Brazil respectively were like the big heavyweights in those respective regions.

And something that one thing a shout out to Justin Hall over at Golden Gate was this kind of perspective, that maybe a lot of the big fish kind of eats up the small fish before there’s even a chance to even raise and we were very, very lucky to have someone as influential as Liza Gokongwei, from summit media and that family to really take an investment in the company at a respectable seed round, kind of international stage and really set the tone for a company, a firm like open space ventures and Hans passion around media, as a former founder of Asian food channel to put a bet on us.

So that we have an international term sheet that actually allowed the local investors to not say, Okay, I’m gonna give you half a million dollars, but I want 80% of your company to okay, you know, we’ll follow the term sheet of open space ventures and then enabled us to attract other local investors because I think, you know, we were the first ever startup to receive funding from three of the top five wealthiest families according to the Forbes richest list.

And a lot of that wants to just give a lot of kudos to the first perspective that Justin gave us from Golden Gate and eventually moving forward with open space to empower us and put us in that position because it just created this kind of snowball effect that after us and then SIGs leading them to C you just start seeing a fundamental shift and people’s recognition and understanding of the Philippines. I mean, when we wrote our Series A it was rare.

Now I think there are 10 people raising a series B, G Cash, raised $300 million are cousins at grocery stores. shared the same office with Summit with grocery they just announced their series C with KKR yesterday. And so this is a lot of movement happening. And again, just from that dynamic, it’s been really cool to witness and I think there’s a lot of luck in that. But I think back to Dato’s advice, luck came from us recognizing the timing of that opportunity and just moving forward with that.

Thank you so much for sharing.

Our Guest: Roland Ros and Rexy Dorado

Roland Ros and Rexy Dorado are the founders of Kumu, the largest live-streaming community app for Filipinos around the world. Since its launch in 2018, Kumu has passed over 10 million registered users across 55 countries. They recently closed their Series C round bringing Kumu’s total funding to over US$ 100 million.

Prior to Kumu, Roland built a career as a growth engineer in the US with a track record of helping Fortune 500 and high-growth companies acquire millions of customers. Subsequently, he engaged in humanitarian work in the Philippines where he was inspired to build a tech company with social impact. 

As for Rexy, prior to Kumu, he founded Kaya Collaborative, a nonprofit that connects the Filipino diaspora to social causes back home.