Where are the cool kids in Asia hanging out? It’s not where you think it is.

Dear readers,

It never ceases to amaze me how one generation is different from another. I belong to the Facebook generation. It was the thing cool college kids were on back then.

Now, it’s become the epitome of evil.

Where are today’s cool kids hanging out these days, especially in Asia? The typical answers are Instagram, Snapchat, Tinder, and Spotify.

The actual answers, though, might be surprising. Not too long ago, I’ve never heard of Bigo, TikTok, Hago, Tantan, and Joox. Now, they’re dominating the app charts in Southeast Asia.

And they’re all made in China.

That was the topic of a recent subscriber-only piece I wrote, about how Southeast Asia is becoming China.

China’s exporting its culture – and tech – to the world. Photo credit: Higher Brothers

As China’s tech scene mature, it’s extending its tentacles worldwide and setting trends. It’s starting to dominate your screens. Soon, it’ll dominate other tech verticals.

This observation is a crystallization of months of reporting on the Southeast Asian scene by my team.

And here’s one thing I appreciate about my job: It allows me to escape my echo chamber and see what people I wouldn’t normally hang out with – such as teens – are doing.

I hope you’ll experience the same effect too when you subscribe to our content.

While Facebook may keep you in an echo chamber, we’ll break you out of it.

Here are our other recent subscriber-exclusive pieces you should check out:

1. Stress among founders in Southeast Asia is still a big problem. Help is on the way
2. Milieu Insight wants to make market research pain-free; raises seed funding
3. Netflix has a notorious ‘firing culture.’ Here’s how they made it work
4. Airbnb had only one engineer for their first year of existence. Here’s how he hacked growth
5. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman explains why ‘bad management is a good idea’
6. What would happen if Didi and Meituan abandoned the price war and stopped subsidies?
7. Blockchain ride-hailing platform teams up with insurance giant Axa
8. Rising SE Asian startups this week: Bitsmedia, NeuroTrend, and more

Thanks for reading, and I look forward to sharing more of what we’re up to soon!