After Zeemi.tv investment, DeNA’s James Riney sees live-streaming as the future of Indonesia

James Riney, principal of the DeNA venture arm

Remember earlier this week when the venture arm of Japan’s DeNA made its premiere investment in Indonesia in the form of a US$1 million seed round for live-streaming entertainment site Zeemi.tv? 500 Startups participated in the investment also, and Zeemi founder Tom Damek now has the bragging right of grabbing one of the largest seed rounds on public record in the archipelago.

Tech in Asia caught up with the principal of DeNA’s venture arm James Riney this morning in Jakarta.

“I do DeNA’s investments outside of Japan. I do Southeast Asia but also Silicon Valley,” explains Riney. “We’re looking around in Indonesia, but I wouldn’t right away say we’re getting too aggressive just yet.” Riney says that DeNA is opportunistic when looking at emerging markets like Indonesia. Therefore, the firm hasn’t earmarked any set amount of capital for Indonesian startups.

Riney sees Zeemi as a fairly safe play for DeNA, however, as the firm was able to see success with live-streaming in Japan. “This deal has actually been done for a while. […] We were already on the live-streaming boat a long time ago,” says Riney. “Showroom is the Japanese version. Obviously, sites like TwitCasting are also big but we’re a little bit different from TwitCasting because we monetize much better with the virtual goods.”

See: CliponYu wants to get Indonesia hooked on social TV

Going forward with Zeemi in Indonesia, Riney says he and his team are going to try it out for a period of time then simply pivot the monetization method if they feel it’s necessary. According to him, the success of live-streaming is inevitable in Indonesia – in one form or another – following its success in other Asian markets. “If we find that we can’t monetize with the gifts Indonesia, then we’ll try the other ways like advertising,” says Riney. According to him, while Zeemi is Tom Damek’s first venture built from the ground up, DeNA is confident he can pull it off. He says:

When I look at a founder, I usually ask myself: Would I want to work for this person? As the company evolves, you’re going to take on more people. Something that I took away from the book Zero to One is the idea of how you’re going to hire the 20th person into the company. […] The later employees have to believe in the vision of the company and they have to want to work for the founder. We believe Tom can make this happen as Zeemi gets bigger.

Riney is optimistic about the future of Indonesia’s connectivity speeds. From his perspective, the evolution of live-streaming will be closely tied to the development of Indonesia’s broadband improvements and its developing 4G networks, and now is the best time to be making moves in this space locally.

“As soon as we closed the deal, it seemed like we had a bunch of people knocking on our door saying, ‘hey, take my money,’ which is great, so when the time comes we’ll call them,” says Riney.

He also hints that Indonesian service marketplaces that are similar to Homejoy – the San Francisco-based house cleaning marketplace – could also be an area of interest to DeNA. He does admit, however, the he hasn’t fully explored the space in Indonesia yet. In Jakarta, one site that is similar to Homejoy is a local startup called Pembantu, which connects homeowners to domestic workers and nannies in their area.