HeyJaredSEA of Startups
🎙 SEA of StartupsDecoding the pulse of founders, capital, and conviction in Southeast Asia.This isn’t another “startup success” show — it’s the real conversation behind what actually works (and what doesn’t) when you’re building, funding, or navigating the region’s wild,…
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 12
- Latest publication
- Sep 23, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 8, 2026
Latest episodes
Count who gets paid: the least glamorous AI money in Southeast Asia (opens the original)
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Somebody is going to stand on a stage in Singapore this month and tell you two things. Southeast Asia now has more than 60 profitable tech startups. And the region is in the middle of a $4 billion AI boom. Both numbers are true. Both are also lies. Not made up. Lies the way your uncle lies at dinner, where every word checks out and the whole thing is still nonsense. So I am going to tell you up front where this lands. The most profitable AI business in Southeast Asia is not building the model. I
Exposing the AI panic: who actually profits? (opens the original)
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This week a guy who, as far as anyone can tell, had never posted anything in his life put up a thread about artificial intelligence and got 170 million eyeballs on it in five days. A former Anthropic employee, or so the byline says. Within 48 hours you had Senator Bernie Sanders talking about banning superintelligence, market people calling for a bloodbath on Monday morning, and half my group chats forwarding the same screenshot to each other. Then, almost on cue, the chief executive of one of t
The tourists went home: who is actually left to fund Southeast Asia (opens the original)
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Last week one of the firms that taught this region what seed capital even looks like quietly admitted that it will not raise another Southeast Asia fund. 500 Global showed up in KL, in Jakarta, in Bangkok more than a decade ago, when honestly almost nobody in the Valley could find these cities on a map, let alone wire money to them. They ran the accelerators. They wrote the small early checks that nobody else was writing at the time. For a lot of founders here, a 500 check was the first time a r
Southeast Asia's Superapps Finally Made Money. Do Not Copy How. (opens the original)
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Three of the biggest companies this region has ever produced just did something they had never done before. They made money. Sea, the Singapore company behind Shopee and Garena, posted a net profit of 487 million US dollars in a single quarter, on 7.8 billion dollars of revenue. GoTo, the Indonesian giant behind Gojek and Tokopedia, booked its second profitable quarter in a row. And Grab, maybe my most hated company in Southeast Asia but the ride hailing app none of us can avoid, is now profitab
Next, Owned by Whom? (opens the original)
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As you read this, thousands of people are in a convention hall in Bangkok. Techsauce Global Summit, 26 to 28 August, at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center. Three hundred sessions, hundreds of exhibitors, and one word on every lanyard and every panel title. The word is next. The race to the next model, the next unicorn, the next Thailand. So I want to be a little contrarian this week and not talk about next. I want to talk about what Thailand has already won, because it has won real thi
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