In Conversation with Laurent Thevenet, Co-founder of Awan-Awan

A French who successfully sold a startup in his home country before, Laurent is now in Singapore doing yet another startup, RightBrain. Awan-Awan.com is their latest creation that focuses on the Malay community. We sat with Laurent to hear his thoughts on Awan-Awan, his experience in Singapore and why he chose to move here.

What is Awan-Awan.com? What does the name mean?
With awan-awan.com (“clouds” in Malay), we seek to be the pre-eminent rich media online destination targeting the Malay community. However, the site will be presented in English for international appeal. Our first phase of launch is our webtv with self produced bilingual content with subtitles. In the future, we will have a music section and also a webfilm section to feature our local Malay talents and products.

Who’s behind this and what were your backgrounds before doing this?

RightBrain Pte Ltd, the company behind awan-awan.com was founded in April 2008 by my partner, Nina Halim, and me.

Nina (Singapore) is our creative director and has a background in the media industry, having been active on TV as a talent and a producer for a long time while diversifying her skills more recently by doing business development and marketing.

Myself (Laurent Thevenet), I am coming from Marseille (France) and i am the technical director at RightBrain. I have a degree in Software Engineering but have became a Java Engineer, a Database Architect or a UNIX adminstrator through different jobs and companies while being a lecturer at the Marseille University from 2002 to 2006. I suppose I can be considered a geek 😉 I created my own startup in France in 2006 before deciding to move in Singapore beginning of 2008.

We do not forget Zac Boon from Thymos Capital. A great guy.

awan-awan.com – Season 1 – Teaser from Laurent Thevenet on Vimeo.

Why did your team start Awan-Awan?

We created RightBrain with the initial ambition of going upfront with etsy.com in the region but we became quickly aware of the i.Jam program and start thinking about an IDM project by mid-june last year. The project was initially named ChopTwist.com and got an approval from MDA by mid-august. We had that simple objective of reaching this large number of Malay viewers who don’t watch TV anymore and are online instead. We are going to catch them where they are on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, iTunes…

As a foreigner, what made you come to Singapore to continue your entrepreneurial pursuits?