Editor’s letter: Forget tech – consumer brands are all the rage with VCs

Dear readers,

If online marketplaces and e-wallets are highways, then consumer brands are the cars.

Ecommerce, whether in the US, India, or China, has followed a predictable path: The rise of platforms has oiled the wheels of digitally native consumer brands, letting them attract investors to turbocharge their growth.

This trend is just beginning in Southeast Asia. In our top story last week, we looked at how Indonesia is entering an era of VC-backed consumer brands.

Investors have discovered that these businesses are as capable as tech startups at achieving “hypergrowth.” But there’s a caveat: It often makes sense to invest early in these companies, or not invest at all. Read on to find out why.

That’s not all we were looking at.

We published a post with eight takeaways from India food delivery giant Zomato’s investor deck, released another landscape map (this time covering Southeast Asia’s bustling healthtech space), and analyzed whether Coupang can out-Amazon Amazon in Southeast Asia.

We rounded up the week with a story on why Indonesia’s tech giants find digital banks irresistible.

To read these stories, you’ll need to be a subscriber.

Finally, I’m excited about what’s brewing in our labs.

Working on our ecommerce newsletter, The Checkout, has been fun for me. It’s like receiving a crash course on email newsletters (shout out to Betty, our newsletter guru and GIF extraordinaire, for entertaining my barrage of questions).

Creating a newsletter that gets high open and click rates constantly is a challenging puzzle to solve. (If anyone here has tips, do share.)

We’ve also been busy building up the editorial team – it’s looking pretty strong right now – and trying out all sorts of experiments – some worked; many haven’t.

But I’m inspired by the fact that several groundbreaking discoveries – antibiotics for one – resulted from accidents.