He led Airbnb and WeWork’s expansions into Asia. Now, he helps startups do the same.

Then, I wanted to come back to Hong Kong and there was this high-growth company called WeWork that was expanding to Asia at the time. I joined their landing team, and we launched in Hong Kong, Seoul, and Sydney. That was the last six years of my life.

What is Hype and how did you form its business model?

We specifically help startups build and expand in Asia operationally. Just a little bit about the co-founders: All three of us are actually Airbnb alumni. Patrick Lee was the general manager for Korea and Robert Hao was the head of operations for Beijing.

From our eight years of experience helping high-growth companies expand, we realized the challenges that came with it. We wanted to make it our mission to help startups execute well. A lot of startups don’t get out of pre-A or series A. There’s also a big gap with series B where a lot of people don’t expand out of their home country.

Asia is also very complex. In the US, if you’re a Californian startup, you can expand to middle America or the East Coast and tap into a large population using a single language and more or less the same culture and digital channels. Europe is a little bit more fragmented, but the digital platforms remain the same.

But if you move to China, it is a parallel universe. Google and Facebook and the way you do business no longer penetrate. Culturally speaking, Southeast Asia has more than 10 different markets, languages, and ways of doing business. India is similar in the sense that it’s a large domestic market that’s very hard to tap into because of the way business is done there.

We noticed some gaps with all these things. The first gap is that the Asian ecosystem, including the investors, has matured a lot. There’s a lot more great startups coming in, not to mention ICOs fueling the ecosystem in a whole different way. So, funding is not really the main issue anymore; it’s the know-how of expanding and bringing a company all the way to an exit.

The second gap is there aren’t too many success cases of somebody completely expanding in all of Asia. And lastly, startups expanding in Asia all have one common problem: you can be the best startup that you can be in the US, but nobody has heard of you in Asia.

Let’s say I’m a startup thinking about global expansion. How can Hype help me?

We have three services for different startups. One is called DIP, short for dipstick (a very American term). The second one is called BOT (build, operate, transfer). With DIP, we only take a fee, but with BOT, we take fees and equity.

As companies expand into Asia, how do you see the trends changing?

What would you advise a startup founder looking to expand into Asia?