BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech: Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines, Thailand & Malaysia Startups, Founders & Venture Capital VC (English)

"How are you going to stay ahead of the competition in a world where two kids can vibe code a clone of your product over a weekend?" Itamar Novick is a solo capitalist and the founder of Recursive Ventures, a pre-seed fund focused on AI and emerging tech startups. He has supported over 50 successful startups, including Deel, Honeybook, Placer, Credible (IPO), MileIQ (acquired by Microsoft), Automatic Labs (acquired by SiriusXM), Tile (acquired by Life360), SafeGraph, and Armory. He's been recognized by Business Insider as a Top 100 global seed investor (#17 in 2021, #29 in 2022). As an operator, he helped take Life360 from Seed to IPO, scaling the business to over $250m in revenue. Itamar joined Jeremy Au to talk about what still counts as a moat in AI, why proprietary data is only the starting point, and where AI actually replaces people instead of augmenting them. He also looks back on twelve years at Life360, joining as VP of Product and leaving as the CFO who took the company public, and why he now writes the first check at pre-seed. Itamar’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/itamarnovick/ Recursive Ventures: https://www.recursiveventures.com/ Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/itamar-novick-recursive-ventures BRAVE is Southeast Asia's leading tech podcast, hosted by Jeremy Au. Honest conversations with the region's top founders, investors, and operators on building startups in Southeast Asia. New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one. Listen & Subscribe YouTube (English), YouTube (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (English), Spotify (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (Chinese), Spotify (Vietnamese), Apple Podcasts Follow BRAVE LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp Follow Jeremy Au LinkedIn, X / Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Threads, Twitch Resources Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com #AI #VentureCapital #AIStartups #SoutheastAsia #Startups #Founders #Fundraising #PreSeed #SeedFunding #DataMoats #VerticalAI #ReinforcementLearning #VibeCoding #SiliconValley #Singapore #Malaysia #Indonesia #Philippines #Vietnam #TechPodcast #Life360 #SEAstartups #Entrepreneurship 00:00 Introduction 02:01 Coding at 11, and the army cybercrime unit 04:12 Product management before Agile 06:00 Gigya, and meeting Zuckerberg in 2008 07:27 Morgenthaler Ventures and the first inning of SaaS 08:37 Twelve years at Life360, VP Product to CFO 11:36 "Kids are never gonna have smartphones" 13:53 Raising $500M and 11 corporate VCs 16:31 The VC story problem, and which VCs got it 22:26 Going full time into venture, and why pre-seed 27:48 How Itamar picks: team, TAM, and moat 30:06 Data as the moat, and the customer data flywheel 35:48 Where AI can and can't replace humans 40:33 Taking the one big swing

The next three years should deliver what the last thirty did. That is John Lin's argument, and it is why he thinks the ground under founders has shifted. John Lin is the Founding Partner of Linea Ventures. Previously, he helped start F-Prime Capital's west coast tech practice and was also a Principal at Trinity Ventures. He has invested in 50+ companies, including Numeral, Squire, Branch, Side, Weights & Biases, Triumph and You.com. Prior to that he led Product and Engineering at Roomi and worked at McKinsey and Yelp. John graduated with degrees in Business and Computer Science from UC Berkeley. He joined Jeremy Au on why AI coding has made good engineers five to ten times more effective, why everything in AI is both overhyped and undervalued at once, and where value still accrues now that a model costing billions to train can be built for tens of millions. Then the part most founders have not priced in. A Series A used to mean $800K in revenue and a $40M round. Today it is closer to $3M and $70M, and by John's reading only 1 in 5 to 1 in 7 companies make the jump. Round to round survival has fallen from about half to somewhere between a third and a sixth. Plus how he picks: a $1B market, a path to 25x, companies between $1M and $10M in revenue, and the one question every founder has to answer. John’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-lin-39a18921/ Linea Ventures: https://lineavc.com/ Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/john-lin-ai-investing BRAVE is Southeast Asia's leading tech podcast, hosted by Jeremy Au. Honest conversations with the region's top founders, investors, and operators on building startups in Southeast Asia. New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one. Listen & Subscribe YouTube (English), YouTube (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (English), Spotify (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (Chinese), Spotify (Vietnamese), Apple Podcasts Follow BRAVE LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp Follow Jeremy Au LinkedIn, X / Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Threads, Twitch Resources Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com #Singapore #TechPodcast #AIInvesting #SeriesA #SeedFunding #Startups #Founders #Fundraising #AIInfrastructure #VerticalAI #SiliconValley #EmergingManagers #SEAstartups #Malaysia #Indonesia #Philippines #Vietnam #Berkeley #Entrepreneurship 00:00 Introduction 00:43 From Berkeley to Trinity, F-Prime, and Linea Ventures 02:59 Is AI huge, or overhyped? 04:34 AI coding, and 30 years of innovation in 3 07:44 Where the economic value of AI will accrue 11:26 Overhyped, undervalued, and no longer defensible 13:10 How John picks: market, founder, inflection point 15:12 Case study: Numeral and US sales tax filing 18:08 Red flags, and how to validate an AI idea fast 20:26 Are billion dollar seed rounds the new normal? 24:41 A tale of two cities in startup funding 26:50 Only 1 in 5 to 1 in 7 reach Series A 30:04 Personal investing versus investing out of a fund 35:56 What a decade of reps teaches you

An offhand compliment from a leader becomes praise. An offhand insult becomes a verdict. Nobody in a leadership role gets to opt out of that. Three conversations from the BRAVE archive with three best-selling authors, and one thing they share: all three went and checked what everybody already assumes about leadership, and found the data pointing the other way. Adam Galinsky is a professor at Columbia Business School, currently spending a year at NUS Business School in Singapore, and the author of Inspire. He explains the leader amplification effect, why the people we call great are characterised on two dimensions and excused on the third, and what he found after asking people on every continent to describe an inspiring leader and an infuriating one. The answers were the same everywhere, with one variation: hypocrisy comes up more in Asia. Eric Ries wrote The Lean Startup. Fifteen years on, he went back to the founders who used it and found many of them miserable, and many of them no longer recognising the company they had built. His argument: we taught people how to build and never how to protect it, trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in business, and since 2008 the companies rated bad on governance have outperformed the ones rated good. Nir Eyal has written three books on why we do what we do. He starts with the most uncomfortable pattern in his own office hours, which is people waiting months for a call to report that the step they never did didn't work. Then the mechanism: what stands between us and what we want is not information, motivation is a triangle of behaviour, benefit and belief, and we quit because we have never separated pain from suffering. People, then institutions, then yourself. Watch the full episodes: E709 Adam Galinsky, Professor at Columbia Business School https://youtu.be/MhVfGQ8iI7I E700 Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup https://youtu.be/8wihh7uYpRo E706 Nir Eyal, Author of Hooked, Indistractable and Beyond Belief https://youtu.be/4eM2OOMyruA Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/leadership-authors BRAVE is Southeast Asia's leading tech podcast, hosted by Jeremy Au. Honest conversations with the region's top founders, investors, and operators on building startups in Southeast Asia. New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one. Listen & Subscribe YouTube (English), YouTube (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (English), Spotify (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (Chinese), Spotify (Vietnamese), Apple Podcasts Follow BRAVE LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp Follow Jeremy Au LinkedIn, X / Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Threads, Twitch Resources Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com #Leadership #SoutheastAsia #Founders #Singapore #TechPodcast #Management #Startups #VentureCapital #BusinessBooks #LeanStartup #Psychology #FutureOfWork #Productivity #CorporateGovernance #SEAstartups #Malaysia #Indonesia #Philippines #Vietnam #Entrepreneurship 00:00 Three findings that contradict what you believe 00:41 Adam Galinsky: you don't get to choose your impact 03:01 The Steve Jobs defence, and Mother Teresa 05:10 The captain of Flight 1380 07:07 Inspiring vs infuriating, and what Asia judges differently 08:57 Eric Ries: they built the companies and ended up miserable 12:09 Since 2008, bad governance has beaten good 16:31 Costco, Sol Price, and the locks that were changed 20:19 Nir Eyal: they read the book, they didn't do the book 23:48 Why visualising success backfires 26:52 Pain is not suffering 30:35 The thing nobody checked

What is technology actually doing to healthcare, and what can it still not touch? Four conversations from the BRAVE archive, on the gap between what medicine can do and what a doctor actually has time to do. Dr. Thomas Kelly walked away from vascular surgery to build Heidi, an AI scribe and care partner now used by clinicians in more than 100 countries. He argues a doctor's paperwork is a patient safety problem, not an inconvenience. Jay Fajardo started over as a solo founder at 58 to attack "pajama time," the 40% of a doctor's day that disappears into admin. Ed Booty spent two years learning that a pure-play tech platform will not reach a rural village, and rebuilt reach52 around community health workers instead. Joshua Wang works upstream, on why we keep catching cancer too late to treat it well. And Dr. Tom closes on what it actually takes to make medical AI work across Malay, Hokkien, English and Singlish. 00:00 Intro 00:40 Dr. Thomas Kelly: paperwork is stealing clinical capacity 04:47 Jay Fajardo: pajama time and the 40% problem 09:59 Edward Booty: why pure-play tech doesn't reach rural patients 14:32 Joshua Wang: we catch cancer far too late 19:53 Dr. Thomas Kelly: Malay, Hokkien and Singlish, and the cost of localisation 25:19 Outro Watch the full episodes: E716 Dr. Thomas Kelly, Co-Founder & CEO of Heidi Health https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA5jzWf4V_Y E694 Jay Fajardo, Founder & CEO of BetterClinic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIOCY_LtObM E502 Edward Booty, Founder & CEO of reach52 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pE0LFpCp_Q E628 Joshua Wang, Founder & CEO of Verimmune https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roXPyXASiRk Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/ai-in-healthcare BRAVE is Southeast Asia's leading tech podcast, hosted by Jeremy Au. Honest conversations with the region's top founders, investors, and operators on building startups in Southeast Asia. New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one. Listen & Subscribe YouTube (English), YouTube (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (English), Spotify (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (Chinese), Spotify (Vietnamese), Apple Podcasts Follow BRAVE LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp Follow Jeremy Au LinkedIn, X / Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Threads, Twitch Resources Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com #HealthcareAI #SoutheastAsia #HealthTech #Singapore #TechPodcast #MedicalAI #AIScribe #DigitalHealth #Philippines #Australia #Startups #VentureCapital #Founders #SEAstartups #Malaysia #Indonesia #Vietnam #Biotech #Entrepreneurship

Jeremy Au joins an episode of The Accidental VC podcast. Hosted by seasoned founders and VCs from ANZ and SEA, this show reveals how unlikely beginnings can lead to extraordinary outcomes. Whether you’re building, backing, or just curious—tune in for stories, strategies, and sharp takes from those who’ve been there. In this episode, we explore the thought that “Everyone wants a unicorn. But what if that's the wrong goal?” Mohan Belani and Jeremy Au join Milan Reinartz to challenge what founders and investors think they know about building in Southeast Asia, from venture capital and AI to startup exits, global expansion, and the future of entrepreneurship. Support The Accidental VC: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAccidentalVC Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/stop-chasing-unicorns BRAVE is Southeast Asia's leading tech podcast, hosted by Jeremy Au. Honest conversations with the region's top founders, investors, and operators on building startups in Southeast Asia. New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one. Listen & Subscribe YouTube (English), YouTube (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (English), Spotify (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (Chinese), Spotify (Vietnamese), Apple Podcasts Follow BRAVE LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp Follow Jeremy Au LinkedIn, X / Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Threads, Twitch Resources Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com #VentureCapital #SoutheastAsia #StartupFunding 00:00 Intro 02:44 What 2026 actually looks like in Southeast Asia 07:10 Big problems, small wallets: who in the region can actually pay 10:00 Why a $50 million exit is a real outcome 11:14 Power law investing vs micro private equity 17:13 Block lays off 40% and blames AI 18:43 Is Southeast Asia facing a K-shaped economy? 26:21 Future shock: a Waymo, a Costco chicken and no jobs 27:59 What founders should focus on now 31:03 Moat building in the age of AI 36:48 Quick fire: biggest wins and fails in VC

Everyone has the same access to the same frontier models. So what's actually left to compete on? Jeremy Au moderates a panel at the Crosscurrents Summit in Parañaque on where enterprise AI adoption really stands. Aravind Kandiah is CTO and Co-founder of Bifrost, a robotics infrastructure company that simulates the world to evaluate robots. Its simulations power some of the largest robotics companies, from Mars exploration with NASA to high-risk industrial work. Bifrost is backed by Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital and Airbus Ventures. On the panel he splits enterprises into those running pilots to hit an R&D spend target and those facing a real forcing function, like Korea's birth rate leaving factories unstaffed. Only the second group ships. Jun Wakabayashi is a Venture Principal at AppWorks, one of Asia's leading accelerators and VC firms. He rose from Analyst in 2017 to Principal by 2023 and leads its Beacon Funds arm, a fund-of-funds backing emerging venture managers across Southeast Asia and web3. He holds a B.S. in Finance from NYU Stern and previously worked at PwC. He puts engineering at 60 to 80% of enterprise token spend and tracks teams accidentally burning $5 million a month. John Homer Alvero is Head of AI Engineering at Converge ICT, one of the Philippines' largest fiber broadband and digital infrastructure providers. An AWS architect across fintech, telco and gaming, he was previously Cloud Solutions Architect at SM Investments. His blocker isn't the technology: governance and cybersecurity teams can't write credible guardrails until they're AI-literate themselves. Where they split: Aravind says the moat is everything except the model. Jun says it's distribution, the one thing the labs lack. Crosscurrents Summit, presented by Clouted Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/enterprise-ai BRAVE is Southeast Asia's leading tech podcast, hosted by Jeremy Au. Honest conversations with the region's top founders, investors, and operators on building startups in Southeast Asia. New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one. Listen & Subscribe YouTube (English), YouTube (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (English), Spotify (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (Chinese), Spotify (Vietnamese), Apple Podcasts Follow BRAVE LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp Follow Jeremy Au LinkedIn, X / Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Threads, Twitch Resources Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com #EnterpriseAI #AIStrategy #AIAdoption #BuildVsBuy #AIROI #PhysicalAI #Robotics #SoutheastAsia #TechPodcast 00:00 Introduction 00:40 Meet the panel 03:02 Is enterprise AI adoption actually real? 05:34 Engineers have stopped typing code 08:21 What's really holding enterprises back 10:30 How to measure ROI and cap token spend 15:32 Where the returns show up internally 18:36 Build or buy, and why services came back 23:23 Advice to a three-years-younger self 26:02 Model, brand, or distribution?

An 18-year-old got kicked out of high school, built a data startup from a bathroom stall, and now raises millions to race human sperm on live television. In this episode of the BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast, Jeremy Au sits down with Eric Zhu, founder of Aviato and Sperm Racing, to unpack one of the strangest venture-backed stories in tech. Eric explains how he ran founder calls from an Indiana high school bathroom using a green screen and hall passes bought from drug dealers, why a billionaire dared him to turn sperm speed into a spectator sport, and how the first race cost $1.5 million and went viral overnight. He also breaks down the real business behind the memes: biomarker sports, rolling up e-commerce and software brands, and running them with AI agents. Along the way he shares why he bets on young, hungry, underpriced talent, why he thinks founders are "degenerate gamblers" chasing asymmetric upside, and why AI may be the biggest inflection point since the early internet. Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/eric-zhu-sperm-racing BRAVE is Southeast Asia's leading tech podcast, hosted by Jeremy Au. Honest conversations with the region's top founders, investors, and operators on building startups in Southeast Asia. New episodes every week. Subscribe so you never miss one. Listen & Subscribe YouTube (English), YouTube (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (English), Spotify (Bahasa Indonesia), Spotify (Chinese), Spotify (Vietnamese), Apple Podcasts Follow BRAVE LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp Follow Jeremy Au LinkedIn, X / Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Threads, Twitch Resources Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com #SpermRacing #Startup #VentureCapital #TechPodcast 00:00 The High School Bathroom Startup 03:02 - Moving to San Francisco 04:20 - Building a Data Engine 08:14 - Lessons in Leadership 09:13 - The Genesis of Sperm Racing 10:09 - Production Chaos in LA 14:02 - The Business of Biomarker Sports 21:35 - Hiring Gen Z Talent 23:44 - The Reality of Silicon Valley 26:39 - AI and The Future of Work