Episodi

  • The $13 billion costume

    The $13 billion costume
    Oct 14 2026
    In the first nine months of this year, startups in Southeast Asia raised more than $13 billion. A record. Depending on whose tracker you believe, that is somewhere between a 120% and a 170% jump on last year.Hold on to that range for a second. Two serious data providers, looking at the same region over the same nine months, cannot agree on the number. That is not an accident, and we will come back to it.Here is the second number, and it is the one I want you to actually feel. Of that $13 billion, seed and angel rounds, the first real cheque a brand new company gets, came to about $270 million. Spread across roughly 90 companies.Sit with the gap. $13 billion at the top of the page. Ninety founders at the bottom, splitting $270 million between them. The money in this region has never been bigger, and it has almost nothing to do with the founder in Manila, KL or Bangkok trying to make payroll this month.I have watched the money here change shape about four times in a decade. Every time, it arrived looking like the boom had finally come. Every time, the headlines said we had arrived. And every time, when you followed the money to the end, it was not here to build a Southeast Asian company at all. It was here for something else.So this week I want to follow the money through all four of its disguises. Then, at the end, I will tell you why, after taking a blowtorch to all of it, I am more bullish on this region than I have been in years. I mean that. This is not a sad story.One. The headline is the trickThirteen and a half billion dollars, nine months, a record. If that is the only line you read, the drought is over and it is time to go out and raise again.Here is what the line does not tell you. Three deals were 54% of that number. Three. Widen the lens to every round of a billion dollars or more, and four deals were about 63% of all the money raised in the entire region this year. Before we have even started, nearly two thirds of Southeast Asia’s record year is a handful of enormous cheques going to a handful of enormous companies.So here is the one habit that will protect you from almost every misleading funding headline about this region. When a number says funding hit a record, your first question is never how much. It is how many. How many companies? Here, more than almost anywhere, one or two giant transactions can carry the whole number and make a starving market look like it just ate a feast.Look at where the money actually sat. Late stage, the Series C and beyond, the pre-IPO money, more than tripled to over $10 billion. Early stage, the seed and Series A, the part of the market where companies are actually born and where the next decade here gets decided, barely moved.Data centres alone were about 35% of all the money. I would love to know when we started counting data centres as startup funding. Video generation tools took another big slice on top.Think about what a data centre is. Power, concrete, cooling, and rack after rack of servers. It is a real estate and energy play with a technology label on the front. Perfectly good business, and we need them. It is just not a Southeast Asian founder with an idea and a laptop. The single biggest category in our record year is, quite literally, buildings.So the record is not founders getting funded. The record is a small number of very large, very late cheques going into physical infrastructure and a couple of foreign technology giants, sitting on top of an early stage market running on fumes. That is not a recovery. That is a costume. A big, shiny, $13 billion costume.To understand the costume, you have to understand the waves that came before it, because each one taught us a bad habit. We are still paying for all of them at once.Two. The hype moneyMost of you lived through this one. Rates were on the floor, capital was effectively free, and it flooded into Southeast Asia from big global funds that had made a fortune in China and were hunting for the next one.The instruction attached to that money was simple. Grow at all costs. Buy the users, buy the market share, buy the headline. Worry about a business model later, or frankly never.For a while it worked the way a sugar high works. Valuations went vertical. Everyone was a soonicorn. The pitch stopped being “here is a company that makes money” and became “here is a rocket, get on before it leaves the ground.” Burn was no longer a warning sign. Burn was the strategy. You were supposed to lose money faster than the next guy, because that proved you were winning the land grab.I sat in rooms where a founder losing $10 million a year was treated as more investable than one quietly making $1 million, because the one making money was clearly not thinking big enough.Then the free money ended. Rates went up, the global funds pulled back, and reality walked in through the front door and turned the lights on.You know the wreckage, because some of it made headlines around the world. eFishery in Indonesia,...
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    30 min
  • Seed is booming. Not here.

    Seed is booming. Not here.
    Oct 7 2026
    Let me describe a company to you. Real revenue. Customers who pay every month, on time. A product that works and a team that ships. By every standard that mattered three years ago, this is a fundable company. Three years ago it raises a Series A without breaking a sweat. Today it cannot get a second meeting.Nothing about the company changed. The bar moved underneath it while the founder was busy building. That is happening everywhere, in San Francisco, London and Bangalore. But if you are building in Southeast Asia, here is the part almost nobody says out loud. The bar did not move once here. It moved twice. And the second move is one no venture podcast in San Francisco will ever explain to you, because none of them has had to raise a round across six countries at once.So this week I want to walk all the way through it. Why your next round is harder than your last one had any right to be. What it costs in months and in cash. And what I would do on Monday morning if I were sitting where you are.One. The seed mirageThe headline going around is that seed funding in Southeast Asia is up this year. On paper, true. DealStreetAsia’s half-year numbers have seed dollars up 128% year on year to $328 million. Read only the top line and you would think the taps are open and the hard years are behind us.Now look at who got the money. In the first half of 2026, 63 companies in the entire region received their first institutional cheque. Sixty-three. Across six countries, 680 million people and six months. That is not a wave of new founders getting funded. That is a number you could seat on one decent coworking floor in Singapore.Here is the part that should make you suspicious. While the seed total went up, the number of deals across the region fell to its lowest level since at least 2018, and the typical seed cheque got bigger. Hold those two facts together. Bigger cheques, fewer of them than in nearly a decade. That is not money spreading out to more people. That is money piling up on fewer of them.Who gets the fat cheques? Overwhelmingly AI and deep tech. A normal software seed in this region is still one to three million dollars. The AI rounds run at roughly double that and climbing, and they are the ones dragging the average up and making the chart look healthy. The chart is not lying exactly. It is letting you believe something that is not true. When you hear “seed is back,” the honest follow-up is “back for whom.” The honest answer is: for a small number of companies that probably do not look like yours.One more number, same story at a bigger scale. The region raised $7.25 billion in the first half, the strongest half since 2022. Almost all of it was one data centre raise, DayOne’s $4.5 billion Series C. Take that single deal out and the region raised about $2.75 billion, down on the half before and below the same period a year earlier. One deal, one building full of servers, is doing the work of making an entire half-year look like a recovery. I made the same point about exits a week ago. The discipline never changes: how many deals?So here is where we stand. The money that exists is real. It is also concentrated, going to a narrow slice of companies, and the breadth a healthy early stage is supposed to have is not there. The costume says boom. The body underneath says something much tighter.Two. The bar moved, and the Americans admit itNow the thing that actually decides your future: the bar for your next round.Listen to the American shows, 20VC, SaaStr, the ones every founder here has on in the background, and the same confession comes up every few weeks. A partner gets comfortable in the chair and says the quiet part out loud. The bar to raise a Series A today would have been a Series B three years ago. They say it the way you mention the weather, and then they move on.Here are the numbers behind the anecdote. The revenue a company needs to clear a US Series A has roughly tripled. A few years ago, about $1 million of annual recurring revenue got you a serious conversation. In early 2026 the figure doing the rounds is closer to $3.5 million. Not double. More than triple.Graduation fell off a cliff too. Carta, which sees a huge slice of American cap tables, tracks the share of seed-stage companies that go on to raise a Series A within two years. For companies that raised seed in early 2018, that was about 31%. For the early-2022 cohort it was about 15%. One in three became one in six. And it takes longer. The median walk from seed to Series A is now past two years, against roughly a year and a half in the late 2010s.Put those together and you understand what people mean when they say a stage of the market got deleted. Seed became the new Series A. Series A became the new Series B. The old Series A, the round you raised on promise and early traction, quietly stopped existing. The companies standing on it got no warning. They raised their seed, hit the milestones that used to be enough, went out ...
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    33 min
  • Twelve doors out: Southeast Asia's exits are back, and the buyers are flying in

    Twelve doors out: Southeast Asia's exits are back, and the buyers are flying in
    Sep 30 2026
    There are two ways out of a company in Southeast Asia.One of them is loud. On 20 October, GCash will ring the bell at the Philippine Stock Exchange in the biggest listing that country has ever done. Cornerstone investors with names like BlackRock and T. Rowe Price. A valuation that starts with a number most Filipino founders will never see in their lifetime.The other is quiet. A few weeks earlier, on 8 September, private equity firm Navis Capital closed the sale of a chain of premium Malaysian supermarkets, Village Grocer, Ben’s Independent Grocer and a few others, to a Thai retailer. No bell. No cameras. Just a wire transfer and, reportedly, around five times the money they put in more than a decade ago.For years the complaint about this region was that there were no exits. Great companies, nowhere to sell them. That complaint just stopped being true. The door is cracking open. But before anyone pops the champagne, walk through it with me and look at who is standing on the other side. Because it is almost never a Southeast Asian.One. Six and a half times the money, four more companiesHere is the number that made me put this on the docket. In the first half of this year, venture-backed companies in Southeast Asia returned $5.65 billion in exits, per DealStreetAsia. Trade sales, listings, the lot. In the first half of last year, that figure was $856 million.Call it a six and a half times jump in twelve months. Hear only that and you would think the drought is over, and the region has finally figured out how to give investors their money back.Here is the part that gets buried. That $5.65 billion came from twelve exits. Twelve. The year before, it was eight. The value went up more than six times. The number of companies actually getting out went up by four.Sit with that, because it is the whole story of this market right now. The money is real. The breadth is a mirage. Twelve companies is not a wave of liquidity. Twelve companies is a handful of very large outcomes, and everybody else is still sitting in the waiting room.We saw the same trick with funding. The region raised $7.25 billion in the first half, the strongest since 2022. Sounds fantastic, until you notice that deal volume fell to its lowest level since at least 2018, and a single data centre deal carried the headline. Strip that one out and regional funding actually fell. The median Series A cheque shrank. The average founder is not living in the record. The average founder is living in the drought.When you see “exits are back” or “funding hits a record,” your first question is always the same. How many deals?Two. The loud door, and who already has a keyThe public market. The listing. The dream. And in the Philippines, that dream is about to come true in a very big way.GCash, the wallet on almost every Filipino phone, is going public through its parent, Mynt. The offer could raise around 80 billion pesos, roughly $1.4 billion, and closer to $1.6 billion with the overallotment. At the top of the range, Mynt is worth 669 billion pesos, about $11.5 billion. It is the largest listing in the history of the Philippine Stock Exchange, and it beats the old record, Monde Nissin, comfortably. More than 20 cornerstone investors are in, BlackRock and T. Rowe Price among them. The offer period opens on 6 October. Trading starts on the 20th.I want to be genuinely positive here, because this matters and I am on record as bullish on the Philippines. For a decade, the knock on Manila was that it could not host a listing like this. Any serious technology company would have to go to Singapore or New York to find money deep enough. GCash is proving that wrong on home soil. That is a real milestone, and Filipino founders should take a moment with it.Then I put the investor hat back on and read the cap table out loud, because Real. Raw. Relatable. means I do not just clap at big numbers.GCash is not a scrappy startup three friends built in a Makati garage. Mynt is a joint venture between Globe Telecom and the Ayala group, one of the most powerful families in the country, and Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of China’s Alibaba. The anchor buyers flying in are the giant American asset managers. So the biggest technology listing in Philippine history is, honestly described, a telco and a Chinese fintech giant selling a slice of their joint venture to Wall Street.That is not a criticism of the deal. It is a great deal, and GCash is a great company. It is a question about the pattern. If the only way to a landmark listing is to already be owned by a conglomerate and a foreign tech giant before you start, what exactly does that prove for the founder with no conglomerate behind them?Across the region in the first half, there were 47 listings raising about $3 billion. Healthy on paper. But reliable public liquidity for a venture-backed technology company still exists on a very short list of exchanges. Malaysia will point out that Bursa has been busy, and ...
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    20 min
  • Count who gets paid: the least glamorous AI money in Southeast Asia

    Count who gets paid: the least glamorous AI money in Southeast Asia
    Sep 23 2026
    Somebody is going to stand on a stage in Singapore this month and tell you two things. Southeast Asia now has more than 60 profitable tech startups. And the region is in the middle of a $4 billion AI boom.Both numbers are true. Both are also lies. Not made up. Lies the way your uncle lies at dinner, where every word checks out and the whole thing is still nonsense.So I am going to tell you up front where this lands. The most profitable AI business in Southeast Asia is not building the model. It is not even the thing people are calling the AI boom. It is teaching people how to actually use it. That is a services business. It gets paid on day one, or net 30. And it is the one lane where being a follower is not a weakness. It is the strategy.I am writing this from KL with the haze back, the Twin Towers invisible from three streets away and a throat that sounds like I gargled a satay grill. We cannot see through the sky this week. We can still see through the press releases.One. The 40 people who never logged back inThis did not start with a report. It started with watching the same movie play out across my portfolio and my network.A company I am close to spent good money last year buying every AI tool you can name. Seats for the whole team. I did the same thing myself. I had so many subscriptions I lost count, and I justified every one as my R&D budget.Fast forward to today and ask how it is going. Past the slides, the honest answer is this. A handful of people went fully red-pilled and got the lift. The rest logged in once, maybe twice, felt a bit confused or a bit silly, and quietly went back to doing the job the way they already knew how.Nothing was wrong with the tools. The tools are incredible. What was missing was the boring part. Nobody sat down with 40 people and taught them, in plain language, for their actual job, how to make the thing useful before nine o’clock on a Monday.Once you see it, you see it everywhere. Startups, SMEs, corporates. The gap is not the model. The gap is the person in the chair who was never taught, and was too embarrassed to say so.Multiply that person across 680 million people and you do not have a technology problem. You have the biggest teaching job this region has ever faced. And where there is a job that big that nobody has done yet, there is money.Two. Take a wrench to the headline numbersFirst, the 60-plus profitable startups. It comes from a single list, quoted everywhere, and nobody says who is on it or how profitable is defined. I sanity-checked it against my own portfolio and I would apparently be a meaningful chunk of the region’s total. I am a good solo GP. I am not that good.Here is what I will concede. Directionally, it is right. I sit across from early-stage founders every week, and genuinely profitable venture-backed companies are less rare than they used to be. The capital drought forced it. Treat the number as a direction, not a fact.The second one is worse. Native AI startups in the region raised about $4.1 billion so far this year, roughly double all of last year. Pop the champagne.Now pull the thread. Kling AI, the video generation unit of Beijing’s Kuaishou, raised a $2.8 billion Series D. That one round is about 68 percent of the entire “boom.” Strip it out and you are looking at a fraction of the headline. The number of rounds actually fell, from 41 last year to 23 this year. That is not a boom. That is one cheque and a thinner deal count.Of what is left, almost all of it lands in Singapore. With the usual caveat I will keep repeating until it stops being true: half the region is incorporated in a Singapore holdco, so the geography in these tables is partly an accounting artefact.So put both numbers down. Neither tells a founder in Manila or Bangkok where to make money in AI this year. Here is the rule I want you to carry for the rest of this piece:Do not count logos on a slide. Do not count dollars in one giant round. Count who sells a thing and collects cash.Three. AI projects do not fail. They stall on people.We have all seen the MIT-style reports on enterprise AI projects that never deliver a return. I do not think most of them fail, exactly. They stall. And not because the model is not smart enough, or the tool is badly designed. They stall because nobody knows how to use it, nobody trusts it, and the pilot dies quietly in a slide deck.If you have ever rolled out a CRM at a growing company, you know this movie. The software was never the hard part. Changing the daily habit was.Research on the roughly $400 billion corporate learning market lands on the same point: workforce readiness, not technology, is what blocks most enterprise AI. One survey has three in four companies saying they cannot keep up with their own demand for new skills. They have the tools. They have the budget. They do not have the drivers.That flips the story. If the model is not the moat and the model is not the blocker, the bottleneck in the entire AI economy is ...
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    36 min
  • Exposing the AI panic: who actually profits?

    Exposing the AI panic: who actually profits?
    Sep 16 2026
    This week a guy who, as far as anyone can tell, had never posted anything in his life put up a thread about artificial intelligence and got 170 million eyeballs on it in five days.A former Anthropic employee, or so the byline says. Within 48 hours you had Senator Bernie Sanders talking about banning superintelligence, market people calling for a bloodbath on Monday morning, and half my group chats forwarding the same screenshot to each other.Then, almost on cue, the chief executive of one of the biggest AI labs on earth published an essay saying, and I am paraphrasing, we need to slow this thing down before it gets away from us.And then China told him to get lost.So here is the question I want to sit with. Not “is AI going to kill us all.” That is the wrong question, and frankly it is the question everybody wants you asking, because it sells. The question is this. When the most powerful people in the most powerful technology of our lifetime suddenly all agree you should be afraid, or suddenly all agree you should not be, who actually benefits from that?And the second one, the question that matters if you are reading this from KL, Manila, Bangkok, Jakarta or Singapore. While the big boys fight about the brakes, are we building this future, or are we just being told what the rules are?One. Where I stand, so you knowLet me put my cards on the table before I say another word, because I am about to be skeptical of a lot of people in this piece, and you deserve to know where I am coming from.I am an optimist on AI. Full stop. I invest in it. I use it every single day, in my fund, in my other businesses, in how I read the market. I think it is one of the best things to ever happen to a small team trying to compete against a large incumbent. If you are a founder in this region with four people and a good idea, this is the closest thing you have ever had to a fair fight.So I am not here to scare you.But optimism is not the same thing as being naive, and this is the part people get wrong. Every powerful technology in human history arrived with bad actors attached to it. Every single one. Fire, gunpowder, nuclear fission, the internet. Even the ATM got used for fraud. Cheques got used for fraud. The tool does not decide. People do.There will always be rogue states. There will always be criminals. There will always be somebody who wants to take the sharp end of a good thing and hurt someone with it. That is not an AI problem. That is a human problem, and it is as old as we are.So hold both of these at once, because I am going to keep coming back to it. I am bullish. I am also clear-eyed. Those are not opposites. Anybody telling you that you have to pick one is selling you something.Two. Panic has sponsors nowBack to our mystery man and his 170 million impressions.Here is what should bother you about that thread, and it has nothing to do with what he actually said. Multiple outlets that dug into it came away thinking the virality itself was manufactured. An account with basically no history, suddenly spiking on numbers that do not behave the way organic posts behave.In plain language: somebody may have paid to make you panic.I do not know that for certain, and neither does anyone else, and that is exactly the point. We now live in a world where the fear itself is a product. Somebody can build it, ship it and sell it. Whether the goal is attention, influence, or moving a stock on a Monday morning, panic has sponsors.So when a piece of content seems engineered to make your stomach drop, the correct response is not to feel the fear and forward it to the family group chat. The correct response is to ask a boring question. Who wanted me to feel this way, and what do they get if I do?That is not cynicism. That is media literacy in 2026. And it applies just as hard to the calm, reassuring voices as it does to the scary ones. Keep it in your pocket, we need it in about two minutes.Three. Sincere and self-serving are not oppositesOn 12 September, Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, published an essay called “We Must Pace the Frontier.” Just under 4,000 words, which by the standards of this genre counts as restraint.The core argument is reasonable on its face. He is not saying stop, and he is careful about that. He is saying slow the rate at which these models get more capable, so that the safety work and the outside checking can keep up. His worry is recursive self-improvement, which is a fancy way of saying an AI that gets good enough at building the next AI that the whole thing starts accelerating on its own, faster than any human can supervise it. His ask is that each generation gets aligned and checked by independent evaluators before anyone sprints to the next one.Honestly, as reasoning, that is not crazy. If you were building a bridge and you had a machine that could design the next, taller bridge by itself, you would want to inspect a few of them before you drove your family across.But here is where ...
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    35 min
  • The tourists went home: who is actually left to fund Southeast Asia

    The tourists went home: who is actually left to fund Southeast Asia
    Sep 9 2026
    Last week one of the firms that taught this region what seed capital even looks like quietly admitted that it will not raise another Southeast Asia fund.500 Global showed up in KL, in Jakarta, in Bangkok more than a decade ago, when honestly almost nobody in the Valley could find these cities on a map, let alone wire money to them. They ran the accelerators. They wrote the small early checks that nobody else was writing at the time. For a lot of founders here, a 500 check was the first time a real Silicon Valley name said yes.DealStreetAsia reported on 31 August that they are not raising another dedicated Southeast Asia fund. Future bets here come out of the global pool. A smaller local team, mostly managing and winding down what they already own.To be fair, and I am going to try to be fair the whole way through this, Khailee Ng pushed back a few days later. Still committed to the region, still managing the existing funds, still looking at new mandates. I believe him. He is tied to this place far more than I am, because I was not born here. And both things can be true at once. You can be genuinely committed to a region and still decide you will not raise a dedicated fund for it.Hold that thought, because the gap between what people say and what they will actually write a check for is the entire point of this piece.And this is not a 500 story. That is just the way in.One. Two canaries, one coal mineRewind and look at Y Combinator, the most famous accelerator on the planet. In 2021 and 2022 their batches swelled to something like 400 companies. Founders from everywhere, checks everywhere, the whole world invited.Then under Garry Tan they cut the batch back to roughly 100. They stepped back from late stage. And they pulled back from the rest of the world. The Winter 2023 batch was about 21% international. The batch right before it was 42%. Cut in half. Today something like 80% of the batch is an AI company, which surprises nobody.Now look at what those two decisions have in common. The biggest early stage machine in the United States, and one of the most important funds this region ever had, a decade apart, looked at the whole wide world and reached the same conclusion. Smaller. Closer to home. Pointed straight at AI.That is the tide going out. Two canaries in the same coal mine, singing the same note. This piece is about what the tide leaves behind here.Two. The boom is four companies wearing a trench coatStart with the number everybody is celebrating, because that number is part of the tell.Global venture capital just had a record six months. Around $510 billion in the first half of 2026. That is more than all of last year in half the time. If you only read that one headline, you would think we are living through the single greatest funding boom in the history of the industry.Put your skeptical hat on with me, because here is the number that actually matters. Artificial intelligence took roughly 77% of all global venture dollars in that half year. Two companies you already know, OpenAI and Anthropic, raised somewhere around $217 billion between them.Say that a different way so it lands. Two companies, essentially in California, took about 43% of all startup funding on planet Earth. The US on its own was about $412 billion, and 86% of that went to AI.Now the caveat, because I promised I would and because the whole brand of this show is that I do not read you a number without telling you what is wrong with it. These figures move depending on who is counting and what they choose to count. Different reports land on slightly different numbers, so treat them as directionally correct rather than precise. And the definition of an AI company right now is extremely generous. Anyone with an API wrapper and a login screen qualifies. Out here we are throwing data centres and chip companies into the same bucket, and it is a fair question whether hardware belongs in an AI funding total at all.Every version of the number tells the same story anyway. The money is concentrating into the US. Inside the US it is concentrating into AI. Inside AI it is concentrating into about four companies, mostly the two I just named.So when a fund manager gets on a stage and tells you venture is back, ask the simple question.Back where?Strip out those few mega rounds in San Francisco and the rest of the planet is not in a boom. Some markets are recovering. That is not the same thing. The oxygen got pulled into one room, and we are not in that room.Three. This time they have something better to do at homeHere is the part that should sting, because it is a change from the old story.This is not the usual complaint where American money ignores us because it does not understand us. This time the US money has something better to do at home. So ask yourself honestly: why would capital that has that choice get on a 14-hour flight to underwrite a logistics startup in Kuala Lumpur, when it can walk three blocks from the office and put a check into...
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    32 min
  • Southeast Asia's Superapps Finally Made Money. Do Not Copy How.

    Southeast Asia's Superapps Finally Made Money. Do Not Copy How.
    Sep 2 2026
    Three of the biggest companies this region has ever produced just did something they had never done before. They made money.Sea, the Singapore company behind Shopee and Garena, posted a net profit of 487 million US dollars in a single quarter, on 7.8 billion dollars of revenue. GoTo, the Indonesian giant behind Gojek and Tokopedia, booked its second profitable quarter in a row. And Grab, maybe my most hated company in Southeast Asia but the ride hailing app none of us can avoid, is now profitable for a full year and buying back its own stock.If you are a founder, the obvious temptation is to take one lesson from that. Burn. Burn hard, burn big, buy the market, and the profit comes later. That is what the superapps did, and look at them now.I want to talk you out of it. The real story of Southeast Asian tech in 2026 is not that burning worked. It is that Southeast Asia grew up. And the strategy that got these three to profit is the single most dangerous thing a normal founder can copy.THE SHORT VERSION· The burn is not what made them profitable. Discipline in the last two or three years did. The burn is just what they survived.· Two ingredients made it work, and you have neither. A once in a generation land rush, and a backer deep enough to outspend everyone until they died.· Read past the adjusted number. Sea still carries a 6.6 billion dollar hole. GoTo’s real quarterly profit is about 15 million dollars. Grab trades at under a third of its listing price.· Payments is becoming a loss leader for lending. Which means the profit engine of regional fintech is a bet on the credit cycle.· The funding window is not shut. It got selective. That is good news, if you are building something that actually works.1. The scoreboard nobody reads past the headlineStart with the good news, because it is genuinely good.For a decade the knock on Southeast Asian tech was simple. These companies do not make money. They set investor cash on fire to buy growth, and one day the music stops and there is nothing underneath. I said versions of that myself. A lot of us did. Well, the music got quieter, and they adapted.Sea is the cleanest win. Full year 2025, just under 23 billion dollars of revenue and about 1.6 billion dollars of net income. Not adjusted, not massaged. Actual net income. The stock ran from around 102 dollars in late July to about 130 on the back of the quarter. If you held Sea through the pain, you got paid.Now read the fine print, because the fine print is the whole point.SeaThe headline: 487m US dollar net profit in the quarter. 1.6bn net income for FY2025 on about 23bn of revenue.The fine print: Accumulated deficit still around 6.6bn dollars. Two great years have refilled a bit more than 2bn of the hole they dug.GoToThe headline: Second straight profitable quarter. First time crossing 1 trillion rupiah of adjusted profit.The fine print: Actual bottom line net income for the quarter was about 252bn rupiah, roughly 15m US dollars, on a company that size.GrabThe headline: Just under 1bn dollars of quarterly revenue, up 22 percent. Adjusted profit up more than half. 750m dollar buyback.The fine print: Trades around 3 dollars and change against a listing price near 11. Day one shareholders are still deep underwater.The number the headlines love is adjusted, and adjusted quietly removes things like share based compensation and financing costs before it shows you the shiny figure.The burn was vindicated at Sea. It was survived at Grab. It is still being paid off at GoTo. Three outcomes from one strategy, and only one of them is the fairy tale.2. Why the burn worked, and why you have neither ingredientEven for Sea, burning only worked because two things were true at the same time. You need both. You almost certainly have neither.One, this was a genuine land rush. A region of more than 600 million people came online, on mobile, all at once, in categories that really are winner take most. Ride hailing. E commerce. Food delivery. When the prize is a whole region and the market collapses to one or two winners, spending to be that winner can make sense. Most businesses are not like that. Most markets have room for several healthy players, and there, buying share with subsidies just trains your customers to leave the moment you stop paying them.Two, and this is the one people forget. The burn was funded by a capital pipeline almost no founder on earth can access. Sea had Tencent. Grab had SoftBank. GoTo had SoftBank, Alibaba and the biggest names in Indonesia. These companies did not out innovate their rivals. They out funded them. They raised so much, from backers so deep, that they could afford to lose money for longer than the competition could stay alive. The capital was the moat, not the app.So when a founder tells me they are going to run the Grab playbook in their category, I ask one question.Who is your SoftBank?If you do not have a backer willing to fund losses all the way to the horizon, and a market that...
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    25 min