Stripe’s SEA head on Asia expansion and Singapore’s startup space

A photo of Piruze Sabuncu

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Piruze Sabuncu is the head of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong at Stripe. In my interview with her, she shared her background, what her company does, and how it expanded to Asia. We also discussed some interesting findings from her company’s recent research on the startup landscape in Singapore.

If you are a startup employee, founder, or entrepreneur, you will find Sabuncu’s insights helpful.

Who is Piruze Sabuncu?

I am running the Southeast Asia and Hong Kong operations for Stripe. For anyone who is not familiar with Stripe, we are a technology company that helps start and scale internet businesses.

I was born and raised in Turkey, but I spent about 15 years in the US for college, grad school, a startup, and big-tech consulting. I moved to Southeast Asia about three or four years ago. I’ve been working with Stripe for almost three years now.

How was your experience working at a startup?

To be honest, it was not easy. The startup was in an area that I was passionate about—health tech. This was 2010 or 2011 when all the mobile phones were coming. Farmville and all those games were coming up on Facebook, and gamification was the thing.

We were trying to help people build healthy habits using these technologies, tools, and behavioral economic findings. It was an interesting ride for me. Unfortunately, we had to close the startup because we couldn’t monetize it. But that experience from building the team, focusing on the product, to monetizing it gives me so much appreciation for Stripe.

Tell us about Stripe.

We always say, “Our goal is to increase the GDP of the internet.” As I mentioned, in my entrepreneurial journey, there has been a lot of progress on the infrastructure side of things (emergence of mobile phones, 3G, 4G, etc.). But it’s still very difficult for people to buy or sell things online.

You may think that there are already a lot of companies trying to solve the payments problem. But we believe that it is not a financial infrastructure problem but a tech problem. It is a problem developers can investigate and solve. That is how the company started.

Our products help businesses set up and on board immediately with the required back-end infrastructure. We now have more features that are relevant to Asia. For example, Stripe users can now accept Alipay and WeChat Pay.

See: Stripe works with Alipay and WeChat Pay as it expands to Hong Kong

We’ve been around for six or seven years. We’ve been in Asia (officially) for two and a half years, but we’ve been working on a solution for the region for about three years already. We started with Japan and Singapore, then we recently launched in Hong Kong. We are also in Australia and New Zealand.

How is your penetration in Singapore vs Hong Kong?

We are working with different types of users both in Singapore and Hong Kong, but these two regions actually have a lot of similarities. We have some Stripe users outside of these countries that are coming in. But there are also a lot of companies launching in Singapore and Hong Kong that are going international. They are working with us too.

Tell us about Startup Stack.

What advice can you give to founders and entrepreneurs?