Tech In Asia Conference — Jakarta 2019 Review & Takeaways

Last week, I was in Jakarta for Tech In Asia Conference 2019, the flagship event of Tech In Asia. Previously, there were 2 TIA conferences organized in Singapore and Indonesia. This year, all the conferences are combined under a single roof in Jakarta. This makes sense since Indonesia is rising rapidly to take over the leading position of Singapore in the tech and startup ecosystem in SEA.

Content-wise, this is the best event I've ever attended. The event lasted 2 days with sessions in investment, tech, product, marketing, sales, talent, legal… with amazing speakers and panelists from Google, Temasek, East Ventures, Grab, Traveloka, ONE Championship…

Here are some of the key takeaways of mine from 2 important panels:

[Investment Landscape in Asia]

• Indonesia is all about up now: big market, spending increases rapidly, talent and fundings are abundant. Meanwhile, in Vietnam, the tech talent pool and entrepreneurial energy are very strong, but spending is still small.
• The recent story of IPOs in the US implies that SEA startups need to be very careful about margins, profitability, and unit economics.
• Valuation is going up very fast, that's the problem of demand/supply. However, that doesn't mean that VCs will stop investing, it's just that VCs will stop investing in expensive startups.
• The tech and startup ecosystem in SEA started to take off around 2015, and exits will take 8–10 years to take place. So the lack of exits in the region at the moment is not a problem.
• There is currently a big gap in growth fundings in the region: Series B, C, D. Some said that raising $4m or $400m in Indonesia is much easier than raising $40m.
• As the investment landscape matures, VCs will evolve in 1 of 2 directions: (1) expand to cover other stages, (2) differentiate and go niche.
• There will be unicorns in healthtech, edtech and insurtech in the next 7–10 years, exactly the way it happened in China.
• Some of the undervalued sectors: the adjacent sectors that stem from the giant sectors: e-commerce (e-commerce enabler, e-commerce infrastructure, marketing & sales tech…), logistics & transportation (supply chain tech, food marketplaces…)

[Entering the Unicorn Zone: Southeast Asia’s Golden Age]

• We are currently at a tipping point in the region and this is the best time to start a startup. There will be around 20 new unicorns in the next 10 years.
• SEA’s current zone of per capita income sits between India and China. At this zone, discretionary income increases very rapidly, from 5% to 15% of total income. That zone is when most of the tech companies go private in China. That also explains why it's hard to build big tech companies in India, despite the massive population: income is too low.
• All the tech ecosystems are built in 4 layers: (1) Telecommunications Infrastructure, (2) Internet 1.0: Games, Travel, Horizontal E-commerce, (3) Internet 2.0: Specialty E-commerce, Videos, Social, (4) Mobile and Offline Hybrid.
• Based on that model: we can predict the categories of future unicorns in the region: E-com logistics, online video, social/chat, healthtech, fintech, O2O…