XA Podcast 013 | Active Intelligence And The Early Days Of VC In SEA W/ Hian Goh, Co-Founder And General Partner, Openspace Ventures

What do you expect from a market that doesn’t have a developed ecosystem? Many investors are extremely cynical about it and rightly so. But these markets have asymmetries that come with a huge potential for investors to discover; building themselves and in turn the market as a whole. If you want to listen to an expert about how he entered and saw a whole market evolve across Asia, this episode of XA Podcast is for you.

Discussion Topics: Active Intelligence and the Early Days of VC in SEA

• Investing ecosystem and its importance
• Building credibility
• Working as a lone founder versus working with a team
• Raising capital
• Benefits of networking with the right people
• Working with people possessing similar interests

Transcript: Active Intelligence and the Early Days of VC in SEA

Tony Zameczkowski: So it’s an honour to welcome Hian Goh today for a podcast. Hian is the Co-founder and General Partner at Openspace Ventures, a Singapore-based multi-stage investor in Southeast Asia and technology, media, and internet companies. Hian currently sits on the Investment Committee of Openspace Ventures where he focuses on new growth strategies and represents them on the board of many of the fastest-growing investments, including nutrition technologies, Love Bonito, Freshket, and Kumu.

Prior to Openspace Ventures, Hian founded and built the Asian Food Channel, which was sold to US media giant, Scripps Interactive. Hian also completed an MBA from INSEAD and a Law degree from Trinity College, Oxford. He is also active on the board of the Singapore Science Center and sits on the Astar Portfolio Management Committee. Hi, Hian, great to have you.

Hian Goh: Hi Tony, thank you for having me.

Tony Zameczkowski: So first of all, congrats on your new podcast series called Unreasonable. So Hian, would you consider yourself unreasonable or reasonable as a person?

Hian Goh: I’m a totally unreasonable human being. So, I think that just answers the question straight up.

Tony Zameczkowski: Sure, sure. Can you tell us a little bit about what was the main driver in setting up that podcast with Michael? And how’s it going?

Hian Goh: So, I think first and foremost, the ecosystem, and I see so many familiar faces. So, hi to all the familiar faces here. They’ve known me from the time I was an entrepreneur in 2013. So, when I sold Asian Food Channel in 2013, my next point, in my journey, was to switch to investing in startups, as opposed to being a startup founder and so, I think that what we call it eight year journey has been successful.

As Openspace, we believe we have a good rate of return for our investors. But I define success as the ecosystem that I really wanted to have in Singapore because I’m Singaporean. And my concern and my insecurity are that we stay as a relatively conservative society, a relatively not-so-open society and we’re not as creative as we should be as a society. That journey, where today we have seven to eight, I think, very strong regional, as well as call it Indonesian focused venture capitalists, all working sometimes together, sometimes competing, that being the state of play, after almost 10 years of being a venture capitalist that is what I defined as successful as a journey.

I may be the spark that ignited one of many, many lights that now sort of shine brightly in the entire ecosystem.

Now, what we have perhaps neglected is to communicate what we are doing, not only internally to more founders, we as venture capitalists, or to the broader audience. And when I looked at the podcasts, and a lot of the podcasts being done, they’re very specialised and very focused.

So you have a podcast host, sort of interview, a good founder, and essentially stay relatively quiet, or work by asking questions to get the story out of an interview. And there’s a lot of people doing that. And they do a great job of it. So there was no point in me adding to that voice. So I remember this now on LinkedIn, I’m starting to think about this I wrote, like, what kind of podcast would you guys like? And we were very inspired, of course, by the three chatty folks in Silicon Valley, Gomatam, Jia Jason, Calacanis, David Sachson, and the last which unfortunately, I forgot the name of the online podcast.

We thought that was an interesting format because it is really a bit of a crossover. It’s less about venture capital, per se, but more about venture capitalists. And we had the perfect medium which is that, myself, Vishal at 500 Global, and Michael Blakey, for some reason we just live stage wise so we just get along. We used to catch up once a quarter and talk at dinner. So that was how we replicated it.

But the Moniker unreasonable as the name of the podcast, hopefully, communicates the fact that we are here to promote the fact that in life you have to think greater for yourself and for society and really try to reach for the stars. And by doing that you have to be unreasonable. And so it’s really free venture capitalists. And we’re still experimenting with the format.

We’ve gone through personal issues, and we tried to talk about current affairs, so we’re not that like interested in current affairs. We did an episode on mental health, episode six, that really struck a chord. A lot of people listened to that and a lot of people thought that was so impactful. In episode Seven, we capture the founder, actually Cameron Echo.

That recording would sound like he talks at 1.5x, the speed of the podcast, so you don’t have to speed up the podcast. And we’re still trying to evolve what we are as a pod. And a lot of people ask me, like, who’s your audience? And what are you targeting? My answer to that is there is no audience. It’s a very luxurious podcast, we’re just doing it because we don’t really have that much of a KPI. We want to see it evolve, and we’re trying to get feedback from the ground, we see what sticks, and in some ways that is also very much like entrepreneurship.

Tony: Thank you, Hian, and I’m actually one of your listeners, and I find the success of this podcast is mainly because of the tone, the tone is very authentic, and they really come across as you guys having fun doing it. So Hian, I have a question about your background as a founder. And because I think that’s what really gives you a ton of credibility with founders, you back with Openspace Ventures, is the fact that you created the Asian food channel. So, can you tell us a little bit more about your background as a Founder and how did you transition to become a full-time investor? And whether or not in the meantime, you also made some internal investing by yourself on the site?

Hian Goh: Yeah. So, I became a founder, and as background I’m Singaporean. I’m very decidedly middle class. I grew up in a place called Thomson, it is like the home of middle-class behaviour. My dad worked for Shell. So he worked for a multinational for Colin, like 20, 30 years after he retired, they still called him back as a Consultant.

My sister is a doctor and my other sister is a lawyer. So if you bet that the third one would end up being some sort of crazy entrepreneur, I think that would have been a long shot. So you have to understand that perspective number one because I see a lot of founders come from very different backgrounds. Sometimes people come where they really want to push forward. Like, honestly, for me, the reason why I wanted to be a founder was more about self-actualization than survival.

So, it was more like I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And the trigger point I always tell the story is back in 1999, I was still not an entrepreneur, I was a technology investment banker working for Dan Solomon. And we had great access to clients. And I had lunch with a guy called Semong Goh, or rather than everybody having lunch with him, and he told the story about how China Walton gave his first cheque to a creative Sound blaster card and I was so inspired by that. And I said, what am I doing as a banker, I want to be an entrepreneur. And that’s when I started being an entrepreneur.

Had I known how difficult it is to be an entrepreneur, I might not have done it. But I think that’s why I see a lot of founders, they’re so excited, but trust me, they are all foolhardy like all of us are foolhardy, and I feel you have to be foolhardy or else probability basis it’s not going to work. And we should celebrate that as well. So that’s my background and why I ended up being an investor was quite interesting. You know, shout out to the guy in the ecosystem, Zinglan Ton.

It’s actually Zinglan fault. Let me explain to you why. Zinglan at that point in time, 10 years ago, was working. He was a civil servant; he was working for the National Research Foundation and he was desperately trying to kick-start the whole ecosystem. If you said you’re interested in a startup, Zinglan will turn up with this short attention span Hello, hello, hi, hi. He came to my office, and I was at Fusion office and he said, Hey, boss, you’re one of the few entrepreneurs like you’ve got to come down and help the other entrepreneurs and an angel investor, like, where are the other entrepreneurs?

I don’t have any other entrepreneurs, because I was a silo running agency. He went to my window here and went dock he is down there. Unbeknownst to me, I had a full view like Tony, like literally the entire view of block 71 from the 12th floor of Fusion Operators where Asian food channels are headquartered. I say, what? He said yeah, there are like 26 start-ups. Lunchtime, I go down there. And that was how I realised holy cow. The world had moved significantly since the six seven years I was lost and engaged in the start-up.

So don’t forget I was a startup banker, I was a tech bank, who kind of got jaded and went into the media industry, because in the media industry Tony, there’s something called an established business model, you don’t have to invent both the user and the business model at the same time. And, of course, the inventory is it’s not physical, it’s digital. So it’s easier if you don’t have physical shipping problems.

Those are two things that attracted me to the media business. And then of course, I love cooking that’s why I did the Food Channel. And so Zinglan got me down on the ground. And I said to myself, if I survive as an entrepreneur for a decade, I will attempt to do angel investing. And so it was about nine years, and I started looking at it. And I remember this, I looked at 32 projects, and then I chose the first one. And it was called Chope. So Chope was actually an angel investment. Now to clarify Chope was actually in our portfolio, and we subsequently invested a lot in the company.

So what I had to do when I formed the Venture Capital fund was tamasic. And a lot of the initially asked me to take my angel investments long into fund one at cost. So I’ll say, Ah, but we did that. And so Chope was actually my first angel investment. I was not a prolific angel investor, I didn’t do it, I was much more considered. And I was considered in the sense that I really wanted to be impactful after I invested as an angel investor.

So I think I’ve only done to date 4 angel investments, Chope, and then three others in the US. And I did one, which was speculative, and that didn’t work out. I did one that is purely financial, which come me to a return, and then one, I’m actually being more active. So that’s my style of angel investing, but it informed what kind of venture capital firm I wanted to build, which is Openspace. So, Openspace generally has less than 20 companies in each portfolio.

Generally, 75% of the portfolio is companies that we sit on the board and on meaningful lead investors, that we have multi-touch on a day-by-day basis. And we are seen as one of the lead investors or the investors of concern in each and every one of our startups. So, we don’t do the other, you know, equally valid way which is to do 40, 50, 60 investments and have a portfolio diversification.

Tony Zameczkowski: So Hian, Openspace Ventures is what ATO is now, right? You probably set up the first firm in 2014. Can you tell us about your journey raising your first firm? Because it’s tough right, raising the first firm, you have never done it before. How did you do that?

Hian Goh: So, the first thing I did was I did a market map of the opportunity. And so at that point in time, there were a lot of what we call TIS funds. So funds were given half a million dollars, of which the Singapore government would subsidise for 100,000. And I remember, I was lucky enough to spend some time with the Infocomm Investment arm and so, I was on their sort of advisory committee similar to the ACE Advisory Committee.

So that was the first thing I did, I wanted to get involved. And I looked at all the 72 startups that they had invested in. And, in those days, you get five dating startups, six E-commerce startups, so the categories, each category had three or four similar startups, four travel startups trying to do the same thing. And I realised that no one was doing series A very well, in fact, no one was doing series A. No one had the fun of scale, right, all the other venture capitalists the Junko Munko go to get all that $5 million funds, which the Singapore government gave another 20 million on top from a fourth one-matching ratio. But no one had like a $60 million series, A fund that would make 3 to 4 million dollars.

When I did the series when the stock started to progress as an angel investor I helped them raise the series A fund, the A money you know, it was really, really hard. We got 2 million from SPH. It wasn’t even SPH ventures. It wasn’t even started that SPH today, and it was like full due diligence as SPH was a billion-dollar asset when it wasn’t. And that’s why the SPH Franchise was formed. But it informed me that there was a gap in the market, and if you think Singapore was bad, Indonesia was even worse. Let’s not even talk about the other regions. So, I think the opportunity was there.

Secondly, the skill set. So, I don’t have all the skill sets and so I wanted to find a partner. And this is a very similar thing that I always do. It seems to always be the choice that I choose. So even for Asian food channels, my business partner was a lady called Maria Brown. She was an Ex BBC, she was the media person, and I was the finance person. But in this case, I’m an entrepreneur, and Shane Chesson, who is the other partner of Openspace, was a tech investment banker. And so we felt that the two of us not only complemented our skill sets, but we were way more credible.

Because don’t forget, we were first-time managers in the first-time asset class for a lot of people, in the first-time region the joke I always said to Shane was like, hey, this doesn’t feel hard enough. Any other first times you want to like, this seems to be too easy. And so last, but not least, now that Shane and I agreed that we’re going to do this together, we went and talked to as many people as possible. A really good friend of mine, his name is Ashish Shastri. He’s now the Head of KKR. But at that point in time, he was the CEO of Northstar and Northstar was a private equity group that was backed by TPG.

I went to see Ashish and Ashish looked at me and said, you’re never in hell going to be able to raise a Venture capital fund with Institutional Investors in your first fund. This is a shitty idea. He started like, really crapping on the idea. I was like, Ashish, it is being harsh. He flipped back and said that’s why you should join us like, we’re looking for a team.

That was his way of saying, you know, dude don’t do it alone and so what we negotiated was that we would own Openspace ventures and the NSI ventures. But for fun, they would participate jointly in some capital, and a profit share arrangement, but they would get us in the business. And they would teach us all the things, all the institutional things that you need for the IC memos and processes, and we will market it initially as the forefront of Northstar.

And as a result, I think if I’m not wrong, we were the only batch of people that Temasek had invested in 2014, Temasek invested in five, Golden Gate Junko Monks us subsequently, wave maker everybody who was trying to jump from running a seed fund to series A fund I would argue we had the most institutional investors from day one. And that’s not because of us, but it’s because of us and Shane, and also the association and all that stuff.

By fund two, we realised that we should operate ourselves. And so now today Northstar, a very close friend of ours, but we don’t have a strategic or financial relationship with each other. But you see how I thought about it, I thought about starting the fund from a very fundamental first principles basis. And so, in some ways, by being a Founder, you think of it that way.

I don’t know, like, there’s so many other ways people do it, like another very successful way, coming back to my good friend Zinglan, is he just walked around and said I did four unicorns in Korea. And that was how he got into the business. We did the track record or the benefit of the doubt, we had to raise every single cent ourselves. And it was a very new idea. It took us two years to raise funds one, one year to do the first close of 30 million.

And then we took that first and invested in four companies, two of which one is TradeGecko, which we sold to Intuit’s Cameron, and then the other was Gojek. And based upon the early traction of the Markup, Ashish said, look, stop where you are investing, you’ve got a Markup, so go ahead and come in, so they give the portfolio to Markup, but Sequoia coming to Gojek, so stop what you’re doing now really hit institutional investors.

So the institutional investors other than Temasek, really came in only the second close. And it took us two years. And I didn’t draw a salary for two years. That was the promise that we did to Northstar if we were going to do this independently. But also still have a profit share with you that you guys shouldn’t unnecessarily have to bear the operational costs. And that was how we got into business. And that took us from Inception was April 2013 to the final close was December 2015. So it was two years.

Tony Zameczkowski: Great story Hian. So, it seems that the investment in a good rack was really an __ (19:05 inaudible) point for your first firm. Can you tell us the story of how you found them because it was really the early days of the startup ecosystem in Indonesia?

Hian Goh: So it is the one that put us on the map. I try not to talk about it. Because since then, I think we’ve also invested in founders, which are equally amazing. But sometimes you enjoy it. Friends, you’ll always be known as hey Joy.

Like we really didn’t want to do that. But boy, when I went on the road, and you wanted to quickly explain to somebody who’s not from the region, what we did, I always tell people we were the first investors in Gojek. And we literally were the first investors in Gojek. We ran the auction that got Shailendra and his team interested in investing in Gojek. And so how we got into that project was after we did the deal with Northstar, Northstar is very deep in the Indonesian ecosystem, and Patrick and Ashish, and those guys, were quite prolific angel investors.

So they gave us a list, I think it was like 16 startups, and said go have a look at them. And all of them were interesting, but the one that really intrigued us was Gojek, but the thesis was completely wrong. The thesis was that they would do like, just ferry people around. And then, well it wasn’t a thesis very well, the ferry people around cheaper than a taxi because they were charging the orchard rider, the orchad guy would just stand at the bottom of your building fleece you, you need a taxi, he will get you the same place because he can wait for traffic, but he will still charge you the price of the taxi.

So we thought that the unit cost economics was amazing. And while he was kinda like cherry-picking transportation, in the downtime, he could do office mail, he could go and do e-commerce deliveries. That was a really big deal from day one.

Turns out that it’s much different, a business model is much more full-time and stuff like that. But when we invest, it was based upon the thesis that if a company was going to be worth like $100 million, it’s like we figured out because we invested like $10 million valuation and investment committees. And this company will do a 10x, it will get to 100, we’ll sell it for 150. And we invested in them, there were 300 riders, and an app crashed. And in fact, all these when it started to really gain attraction.

Google shut the Gojek service down because they thought it was a DDoS attack on this service. And I had to call somebody in Google to explain what Gojek was, that they were the biggest customer. Of course, Google then subsequently invested. But that was the story behind how we found Gojek. And so if we didn’t have the association with Northstar, we wouldn’t have probably got a jump on that. But I’ll say this, like, it was counterintuitive, because at that point in time, and remember, we invested into TradeGecko.

TradeGecko looked like a safer bet than Gojak because the Singapore ecosystem in 2013 and 2014 was much more mature than in Indonesia. I mean, that much I will say because, you know, it would be a lie for me to say that, Oh, I always knew that Gojak. No, of course not. I think that the beauty about why I would testify and say that we added value is because when the company was growing, and they needed help, we all provided a different form of help.

Koi was really good at getting Ajay, the CTO, and a lot of Indian engineering talent. I would call Google; I do other things. When they were entering Singapore, I would provide them sort of like on-ground advice.

But, to say that from day one that that company was going to be a billion-dollar company, I think everyone says that you should always have a bit of healthy skepticism. I think it’s about probability-weighted outcomes, where they move the needle as an investor. So that’s number one. And number two, if a company has a seller rate, you can put in more money and actually win on that side.

And so I think that is the key thing to understand, which is that and I always tell the team now, look, Indonesia now seems to be the place where everyone gets the most excited, valuations are very exciting, lots of competitive attention. And I always tell the team in the IC meeting, I’m like, we invested into Gojek but Indonesia was not cool. Can we not forget that? Find the company in the Philippines, find the company in Vietnam, and find the company in Thailand.

Now, if you talk to a lot of Summersault venture capitalists, they might tell you it is not that exciting that not that many companies, but I argue that they are and you have to deploy people on the ground. We have two people in Vietnam, two people in Thailand, we have six people in Indonesia. But more importantly, the people in our respective countries, they are senior people.

So Joven, he used to work for Mark Mobius. He’s the head of the Philippines. Chou is the local guy they associate with. So we have a director-level pre-partner person who’s Filipino and an associate who’s Filipino. And we invested in Kumu, which General Atlantic went in and it was the single largest investment done by a venture cap non-MNC or multinational-associated startup.

So all the payment was started by big companies. General Atlantic did that in 2020. But we went in 2017. Again, I tell people like you have to be ahead of the curve. My greatest fear is that Openspace lapse into pattern recognition is not crazy enough. That’s why we changed our name from NSI Ventures to Openspace, always open to new ideas, always open and transparent, and always open a flat internally as a hierarchy. That’s why it’s called Openspace Ventures which took us a year to figure out.

Tony Zameczkowski: Let me double-click on your example of TradeGecko and Gojek. These are very different companies. One is more B2B, and the other one is more B2C. One is targeting more like a global market, the other one is more local for local. If you have to pick between the two global or local for local, what is your investment thesis on that? What are you looking for?

Hian Goh: So the investment thesis for both will be exactly the same, which is that it has a large addressable market. But how you define that large addressable market you know, for TradeGecko, it’s the world and for Gojak it is like 100 million Indonesians. So if you did a SAS company that is only focused on say very high-level, Indonesians. You’d have to question what the market is. I think, you know, the BukuWarung, BukuKas, and others, they have a total US market is big enough.

So, I think both look like that. But when you look back now, and 10 years later, so, TradeGecko was sold for $100 million, plus or minus, I don’t think we disclose it, but I just put that. And then, Gojek is, hopefully, 30 to 35 billion in IPO. The shareholding ratios of these two companies are very different. I own very little of Gojek. Actually, I was the single largest shareholder of TradeGecko. We are actually larger than Junko. But funnily enough, we don’t actually talk about that too much.

That was a meaningful return from a DPI. So, I think as a venture capitalist, if you’re gonna be a generalist, you just have to be intellectually curious. You always have to sort of internally, you have to build what I call an intellectual curiosity factory. And then the other slogan we have is called Active Intelligence. So, we don’t have founders backing founders, or any other founders. Yes, of course, the founders.

But what Active Intelligence means is that we find the asymmetry of information. And then we find the founder who can act upon it. And we also assist the company to have a bias toward action, as Jeff Bezos says. So, it’s not about having intelligence, and certainly not about just being active and not doing what you go it’s about Active Intelligence, and to power Active Intelligence the beginning point is to be an intellectual curiosity factory, and you have to go and be always curious.

I mean, we have now a very, very small crypto fund. And number two, it’s not run by me, I’ll tell you that it’s run by people below the age of 40. And I put money with the crypto fund because it’s run by people who are dated, and why it’s terrifying and I’ve been the longest sort of non-believer in crypto. And I argue I made the mistake because I was seeing crypto being used for very nefarious purposes. I didn’t really understand the underlying technology and how it’s actually a layer that is very, very similar in disruption to TCP IP.

That the thing that really clicked my brain was I remember when I was 20 something year I tried to explain the Internet to a 40-something-year-old person. And then that person goes yeah, I don’t get it. And I’m like now the 40-something. Yeah, I don’t get it. Like if you haven’t seen the Super Bowl ad for FTX, don’t be like Larry. I was like Larry, and my whole team was just beating me up, and then one day I really went off for like a weekend, I am probably slightly on the spectrum. So I’m very good at zoning in. And just like for like six hours, my wife said, where the hell are you? And I just kept on reading about it. And then I realised, holy shit, this is a mayor. And then, I spent more time with it. And so now we have a crypto fund.

So I think the ability for you to just question yourself, and really change your attitude. Same thing, when I first became a venture capitalist, when Zinglan first came to my office, I was like, I really didn’t believe that Southeast Asia would ever be successful. I mean, of course, I was a banker in the 90s. Come on, guys. I’ve been doing this for like 12 years. And I never saw a billion-dollar company. Surely I’m right.

But then when I went on the ground in 2013, I saw non-Singaporean people come to Singapore, do things on the mobile internet, and generate revenue. So they have a rate way faster than I would ever do running a media company. I went from the greatest cynic and I was the greatest cynic to the greatest believer in this ecosystem now. I’m not the greatest believer in crypto just yet, because I can’t see where the final use case is. But I am the greatest believer that this thing will disrupt everything because fundamentally, it’s just about the ability to establish provenance and legal title to an object in a ledger that no one company controls. And we can talk a lot more about it later.

Tony Zameczkowski: Yeah, and with Web3 and crypto it’s definitely a very steep learning curve.

Hian Goh: It’s amazing to create and hype things up and make a lot of money and take money from people and transfer money very quickly, like you know, the guys who get to it first are the fairest ones.

Tony Zameczkowski: My last question before we wrap up is you mentioned the Philippines and Thailand. So you are one of the very first in original form betting on those two markets, in the Philippines you have been very active. You mentioned Kuhmo. But there is also Sookie as well. What do you see in the Philippines? Do you see the Philippines as becoming the next Indonesia in terms of VC activity? Do you see, for instance, the equivalent of Bukukas or Buka Warung being able to survive and grow, just focusing on the Filipino market, for instance?

Hian Goh: Yeah, I do see the Philippines developing in a similar way as Indonesia in terms of the consumers using the mobile phone as a primary method to do many, many things in their lives and digital payments and lending. And, if your SME, if your Sari store is able to do accounting, just like how the Buku do it confidentially, we just made an investment to a Buka Warung type thing in the Philippines because we didn’t do it in Indonesia.

I would argue that we probably made a mistake there. Let’s see, but we’ll figure it out. Because the monetization of that thing was relatively early, that’s much I could just say. So we are trying to take the lessons that we’re seeing in Indonesia and apply them to the Philippines. And the Philippines has 100 million people. And the GDP is probably under-declared by 2x because of the amount of money being transmitted. And maybe the other bias is that I had a great time investing in the Philippines and operating in the Philippines running in the food channel. People are very vibrant. They’re very hard-working, and they speak English, and they love media, and so on and so forth.

Now, coming to Thailand, Thailand is different. Thailand is actually a very developed economy, you know, greater Bangkok is very prosperous. So, we’ve taken a different approach where we invest in things like wealth, and also unsecured lending and we invested in the spin-out of Siam Commercial Bank. So we have an investment called SCB Abacus.

So it’s like, we’re kind of like in the banking business, not with the 95% majority but with a Siam Commercial Bank. And we found that the way to do business in Thailand is through partnerships very strongly. And so, you can’t go in and kind of carpet bomb or you rather just work alongside people. So, I think we’re finding different styles. But the last point I’ll make before I turn it over to questions is that, undoubtedly, while the Philippines has phenomenal potential and Thailand has phenomenal potential, and I think you can build billion-dollar businesses in each and every one of these countries, undoubtedly in the sustained 10-year horizon, it has to be Indonesia.

And I’m saying this because it’s sort of like, it’s more of an admission that I’ve come to realise recently, as opposed to, like me promoting the country. So let me explain that. Indonesia has 300 million people with a GDP of just over a trillion. So, call it 3000 GDP per cap. So greater Jakarta is probably 10,000 GDP per capita. And if you look at Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Lumpur is probably 20,000 GDP per capita. It’s not hard to see a city like Jakarta become as prosperous as a city like Kuala Lumpur.

It’s not hard to see that. So, it’s not hard to see Indonesia getting to 20,000 GDP in Jakarta, and the rest of the region is 6000. So, let’s just call it 12,000 GDP per cap. If Indonesia is a 12,000 GDP per cap, that’s a two to two-and-a-half trillion-dollar country. And if I’m not wrong, if I got my numbers correct, that’s the size of India currently. And that was the size of China, China was above 5 billion with the Baidu IPO. So, the demographic advantage that Indonesia has is phenomenal. Now the administration is also very, very good.

And the next generation of people, they all went to Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, and I think they’re going to run the country in a very different way, much more corporate governance all the way or at least that’s the hope. But you look at something like the Philippines, if they get to 12, 20,000, at 100 million people, they’re going to tap out to maybe a trillion-dollar economy, like the country in 10, 15 years is going to have a $3 trillion economy is going to be Indonesia, don’t even try Singapore, we’re going to be like, what 200,000 GDP per cap per person.

I mean, we will end up like Switzerland, make artificial snow, and it will ski down. And then, we charge you a sausage for 35 Euro, just like I did when I was in Zurich. Singapore is going to tap out in terms of actual raw firepower of numbers. Indonesia, because Indonesia is longer than America, guys, if you haven’t done that trick, where you drag it over the planet. It’s a huge country. So I’ve come to the conclusion that, whilst the numbers are pretty crazy and the valuation is high, and there are a lot of other venture capitalists there, it’s very much a place where you can see probably big situations happen. But again, as an investor, I would rather have a buffer.

So I have avoided very hard situations. And I tried to temporary my entry valuations. And I tried to talk about value versus price. And that’s why we have 30 people, we have a six people operations team, we have Professor Chow as our head of big data. He was ex-Google, things like that. We try to talk about value, not price. But there will be people who invested at high valuation and still do very well in Indonesia because I think that thing is really got one of those exponential type potentials. So, I’m gonna stop there.

Tony Zameczkowski: Thank you Hian. Fascinating insight and looking forward to skiing in Singapore in 10 years, who knows, right?

Our Guest: Hian Goh

Hian Goh holds an MBA from INSEAD Singapore and a Law Degree from Trinity College, Oxford. He co-founded Openspace in 2014 and now sits on the Investment Committee and the Boards of Kumu, Nutrition Technologies, Love, Bonito, and FreshKet. He is a well-known investor in Southeast Asian countries.