What’s brewing at Tech in Asia

This article is an excerpt from an episode of Startup Snapshot, a Tech in Asia podcast that features the leaders and innovators in the Asian startup scene, and discusses the highs and lows of their founder journeys. It is heavily revised from the original transcript. Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts.

Today, Tech in Asia is launching the second season of the Startup Snapshot podcast, featuring the roller coaster ride that founders face as they overcome the challenges associated with running a startup.

But that’s not the only thing we’ve been up to. On the first episode of this new season, Tech in Asia chief operating officer Maria Li catches us up on the company’s exciting projects and its plans for the Asian startup ecosystem.

What has Tech in Asia been up to recently?

We had SYNC a while ago. It was originally conceived as an event of 100 thought leaders from the tech industry across Asia. It was always meant to be super exclusive. We wanted to make sure we had the right people in the door, not just people who could pay. Because we felt like it was really important for them to share their ideas and experiences growing in the tech industry in Asia, and share insights and challenges with their fellow startup founders or investors.

That was the original idea. When I joined the company, I was looking through old agreements and saw one for SYNC. Everybody on our side of the office started laughing at me and said, “We were going to get 100 CEOs out, but no way is that possible.” But the idea really stuck with me because I think the opportunity for meaningful dialogue is quite rare, especially when you’re talking about leaders of different companies who are so busy day to day.

So we took a stab at it. We started planning in February. The runway wasn’t nearly enough time; it wasn’t what we were used to in planning these kind of really premier events. But on July 19, we managed to do it. We got 120 people, and we were so honored that the people who came chose to spend their time with us that day. There was some really incredible sharing, founder to founder, VC to VC. We had Forrest Li, Magnus Ekbom, and Nick Nash, who gave an incredible perspective on the opportunity of the tech scene here in Southeast Asia.

The level of dialogue really surpassed my expectations. It was such an incredible feeling to know that we had been able to gather all these thought leaders and give them a wonderful opportunity to connect.

What’s on the slate that people can look forward to?

We have lots of really awesome stuff happening soon. One of them is our flagship conference. As many people know, we used to have different city-specific conferences. This year, we decided to consolidate all of them because it felt like we were splitting the community in many ways and making people choose between geographies, which is not the point of Tech in Asia. Our goal is to build a broader community where everyone is connected, so it made sense to consolidate our three different conferences into one.

Photo credit: Tech in Asia

This year’s conference is going to be in Jakarta on October 8 and 9, and we have truly amazing speakers lined up. It’s meant to be a pan-Asian event, as opposed to just being a very Indonesia-focused conference.

It’s also the first time we’re leveraging all the different parts of Tech in Asia. We’re trying to put a lot of emphasis into the fact that aside from the conference, we also have a new subscription business. We want to make sure our subscribers feel loved and recognized at the conference. We also have our jobs platform, and we want supporters of our jobs platform know that they have the opportunity to identify talent at the conference. So we’re trying to weave different parts of the business together during these two days.

Of course, there’s also the second season of Startup Snapshot to look out for. What should readers know about this season?

I’m super pumped for this season. In one of the internal conversations we had after season one, we talked about how we felt like for just having done a very short mini-season, it was something that really excited us. It felt like we were able to showcase our own community in a very different way than we’ve been able to do with some of our more established platforms like the news site.

Our entire goal is premised on the fact that Asia’s tech scene has a lot of amazing stories that we need to be telling, and the podcast is a different format of those stories. A lot of international media organizations are starting to cover the Asian tech scene because of the big Chinese players, but you can’t shine bright enough of a spotlight onto this region.