Peng Ong, on the ‘In-It-To-Win-It’ mindset: how decisions and faith help

Hello and welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm your host, Rich Robinson. Over the past 25 years, I've been an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and professor here in Asia. After nearly a quarter of a century in China, I'm now based here in Bali, Indonesia, the island of the gods. Asia is my home now. 60% of the world's population also lives here, but I would contend 80% of the world's dynamism and opportunity is right here in the region. On the show, you'll hear candid and fun conversations with some of my friends and colleagues, people I've met along my journey, entrepreneurs, operators, experts. It will help you unlock actionable insights around the Asia region and the entrepreneurial agility that actually defines it. This first season, season 1 of The Rich Robinson Show, is titled At the Speed of China. Like, wait for it, at the speed of light. Things happen fast in China. And in this season 1, we're gonna take a deeper look at that. The rapid economic development over the past few decades, as well as the speed and cycles of innovation taking place all day, every day, right now.

Let's go, Jio! Hang on, ladies and gentlemen. As I was saying right before we hit record, the Buddha of startups of Southeast Asia, the man, the myth, the most generous soul in the startup ecosystem in Asia. He's going to deny it, but I can tell you it's unequivocally true. Welcome. Thank you for being on the pod.

Thank you. I cut my hair to match the name.

But you really leaned up and you got like fighting fit ever since I met you. So you don't really have that Buddha belly at all. You're a lean, mean. Coming back.

Yeah.

Everybody's putting on that COVID weight.

Wow.

It's so wonderful. The last time we saw each other, I was in Jakarta and visiting you and you were sort of renovating your apartment there. And we got to know each other through your time in China. And now since COVID I've become a pandemic refugee in your adopted country of Indonesia in Bali. And it's, it's really wonderful to be here.

Yeah. I'm glad you're enjoying Bali when the tourists are not there.

Yes, it's really hard hit, but I have to say it's pretty, pretty wonderful. I've said it on the pod before, like if you're thinking of coming to Bali, think twice because it's not that great. Well, except for the nature, the culture, the weather, the people, the food, the price. But other than that, it's not so great. So, wow. So thank you so much for taking the time. I'd love to dig into your sort of origin story. You're the founding partner of Monks Hill. And I love the story how your secondary school is named Monks Hill and like you go back to your sort of like Singapore public education roots. But you have this monk-like quality in the very best way. Not that you're sort of far from being a somebody who's completely in solitude and removed from people. You're probably one of the most open helping people, but I'd love to hear about your upbringing in the Lion City and your path to UT Austin and your incredible entrepreneurial journey, please.

I'll try and compress this as much as I can because I'm not a young guy and we could spend the whole hour. So I grew up in Singapore, did the army thing here, as all guys have to do, and then went off to Texas. Oh, my first exposure to computers was in high school. So that's when I knew I was going to do computing. I was going to be a doctor before then, but that's too long ago. And then Texas, and then graduated there, went to Illinois and got my master's in computer science there.

And that was the home university of Netscape eventually, right? Andreessen.

Actually, yeah. Marc Andreessen was there building Netscape, or it wasn't called Netscape.

I forgot. Mosaic.

Mosaic went out there. We would hear about this group in NCS. I forgot the name of the center, but they were all trying to build this thing that would run on the World Wide Web. But we went off and did our own things. And after that, I joined startups. It was startups after startups and finally founded my own startup in '90-something. And that was Match. It was called Electric Classifieds.

Electric Classifieds. Wow. I mean, just a story, like so many great companies that came out of the dot-com boom, but you were there. even pre-dot-com boom and that company exists till today. Like there's very few companies like that, right? It's been 27 years.

Even my second company got acquired and got sucked into some corporate deal, all that. So, you know, so Match is still around. That's pretty interesting.

Tell us about that origin story. Like sort of, first of all, like Electric Classifieds is like such an old school, it's Electrolux or something like that. Right. And but then like just nailing it, like using the internet for dating, that was like, absolutely. There's so many crazy ideas that just went into, but that was great.

I guess only engineers would think of this stuff, right? You know, how inefficient dating is, right? It's really inefficient if you think about it. You go in a big room and you see like hundreds of people and how do you know you're a perfect match?

All random. Yeah. Yeah.

Right.

And then you have to have the bravery to go up and say, oh, excuse me. And then like, oh man.

So the computer just takes care of that for you. So your date is going to be a good match, right? At least psychographically, right? You got to go figure out the chemistry.

Like somebody was going to figure that out eventually. You just happened to be there early, but like, talk about a legacy. Like I know I'm thinking in my top of my head right now, 3 people that pop up who are all married with kids that are all met on Match.com. Right? Like somebody said like 6% of the Chinese people have Genghis Khan's DNA. Like you've been more prolific in making people around the world than Genghis Khan through Match.com, right? I mean, even in an indirect way using code.

Yeah. The first few years was interesting because you go, oh, I met my fiancée or my wife through Match.com. Then you go, wow, really? And then now it's like everywhere you go, you see.

Yes. Oh, it's kind of weird to say you met somebody in a bar. It's almost kind of weird.

Yeah. What were you doing there? Yeah, no, but yeah, we've basically changed human mating habits around the world.

Right? Like the number one drive, like you literally careened that off in a different direction.

I think that's a PhD to be done there. How did that happen? And what, some anthropologist, we get a Fascinating.

Fascinating indeed. Wow. Can you share an anecdote from those very early days? Like it was mid-'90s, like it was probably '95, '96 that things started to get traction, but you started in '94, right?

Yeah, but it was '95, '96. Yeah. Yeah.

Like something from those days, like people that are doing stuff now, like they wouldn't even have to think about now, but back then it was like a non-trivial problem.

Gary, and we're talking about what kind of marketing programs to run. And I still remember we were all talking about different ideas and then someone said, look guys, the internet is like 90% men, so you just have to get the women there and the men will show up. It's a different internet now, but you go onto the dating site and you find people that will match with you. Well, it wasn't that clear early on.

Interesting.

And how you start a city going was another thing that we learned. You needed to aggregate enough people in the digital community before it could get off on its own. Why will it keep going? For example, and it's very practical. If you get on the internet and you try and find a date in your city and you can't find one, drop off, right? And then so people come on, they drop off, come on, drop off. And so nothing happens. So how do you people into that group and before it starts to get going.

And this is a standard marketplace conundrum, I guess, kind of.

Now it's like people have studied it to death. We were probably one of the first groups to see that.

Remember?

Yes. Like 10 years before Facebook and 5 years before Facebook.

Yes.

A decade before Facebook. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. It's almost 30-year-old company. Like think about that when you started it in '84. That would be like a company that started in '64, right? So it's like, wow, that's some staying power. Amazing. And then from there, I know you're a very modest guy, but I'm going to advocate for you. You get up to bat like on your own with Interwoven and you create a unicorn before there's unicorns, right? And it was an incredible success. Like tell people out in podcast land about the origin story and like the problem that you were solving and what you saw.

Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. The next company I started is a company called Interwoven. Some of you who are old enough might have heard of it. It's an enterprise company. So when I say Match.com, everyone goes, yeah. When I say Interwoven, people go, hmm, unless you're in the business of building websites and all that stuff.

Wow.

You say, oh, what happened to it? So the problem we're solving is pretty simple. How do you get like hundreds, sometimes thousands of people working together on One delivery platform that delivers something, right? Which is the website. And we figured out the workflow management that's needed and the quality testing and the checks, et cetera, that's needed to do this. And we did it in a way that was very natural to old patterns. So every other year we would have a bunch of people that came to attack the problem in different ways. And then 2 years later, we see different guys because what I think we figured out right was how to address the issue, the product market fit, right? And we grew from there. The dot-com bust hit us because our customers were building websites, right? That was hard, but we survived that. And in the end, about 10 years after being a public company, we sold, ultimately ended up in HP. And then I'm not sure where the parts are today.

It's—

corporate land. So that was an incredible experience. I think it's incredible because I was fortunate enough to find lots of really good people to work with. And I was so fortunate that I didn't realize how lucky I was until after the fact, right? When you start doing more and more things after Interwoven, then you start realizing, oh, you know what? You got to be careful with people sometimes. So that gang of folks I still stay in touch with till today. So many of them.

That's great.

And some of them have done, built Larger companies, et cetera.

But I think that's important you say that is because you, like, there's a lot of people that are great engineers, but I think that your EQ and IQ are equal, right? So you have turbo engine under the hood, but you have this likability and socialness. It's like a lot of people who are really good at the engineering side can really make people want to follow them or work with them. Right. And it makes a big difference, right? It really does.

Yeah. Actually, I disagree with you a little bit because one thing I'm very conscious of is my intuitive EQ is very low. I grew up without a mom, right? My mom passed away when I was just a little kid, so I never knew my mother. And comparing myself with— actually, I have a good friend who grew up without his dad, right? And we were 9 and 10, our ability to understand if people were happy, sad, you know, up to you. So the interesting thing I always tell my engineers is that the good news for you is if you have a reasonable IQ, You can use that to work on your EQ.

But if it's the other way around, you're screwed.

But that's what I did. After a while, you go, oh, you need to pat the guy on the back to say good job. And then the guy would go, wow, he'd be happy. And so I'll do that, right? Then I'll figure out something else. And then over time, your brain starts telling you, and it becomes a matter of habit. Say good job, right? Say good job because you're not lying.

Or maybe I just got to know you 10, 12 years ago when you'd already built that up, right? And since then, yeah, I mean, it's a real Like you're either shining light or you're kind of shining darkness. Like there kind of are people or jobs or just vibes that you can give out there. And then your ability to sort of like shine light on the startup community. Like I make it my business to know a lot of people and to try to shine light myself. And you're just extraordinary at that. Right. And I'm not kissing your ass. I'm just telling you, it's like something where I was like, if I hear another story of like somebody who has kind of no business getting Peng's time. Oh, Peng helped me out a lot. And it was great. He really sat down and he made me feel like I was the only person in the world. And I was like, that's who he is. That's what he does. So that's pretty terrific. And a lot of people, especially at your stage and age, are like, I'm done. I'm like, I don't even want to, I got enough friends. I don't want to put my time into that.

Right. No, but it comes down to your definition of why you're even alive, right? What we're doing here, right? And my definition is I'm supposed to be helping people build value for society.

That's great. I love it. Yeah. And I think I have a similar view that like my wife's like, what's your purpose? And she made me go through an exercise. Like my purpose is to be a connector of people and ideas and opportunities and to try to do it in a positive way. Right.

Can I take this a little bit sideways? I want to talk a little bit about, so the purpose thing turns out to be a really interesting and important question. Every time I talk to entrepreneurs. The ones that succeed have some level of clarity on why they are doing what they're doing, right? And what I discovered is if you don't decide, right, consciously decide this is my purpose, you have no purpose. So that's number one. It might sound technical, it might sound like a trick, clickbait or something like that, but if you think about it, what is your purpose? Your purpose is what you decide to do with your time. So if you don't decide to do something with it, you have no purpose, right? Even if the purpose is to experience life, at least you don't have a conscious purpose. Number 2, which I learned over time, is that if you decide on a purpose, the other thing you need in order to be successful is faith. I'm not going to start preaching, but the faith you need is the faith that your decision is the right one for yourself. For the world, because nothing tells you that. And if you don't have that, at some point you'll be going, why am I doing this? And you give up.

So faith.

So decision and faith. This is odd because I'm a very engineering logic guy, and when you reason down life to that level, you start to see it's not about logic. It's about decisions based on what you feel. Right. What you want to do and then fail. Right. Which is not logic again.

But I think you've probably filtered so many people through your gills and so many situations that you see engineering-wise, the pattern of like, wow, if somebody really is aligned with their purpose and someone really believes, then they can. Yes. So Justin Kan, the founder of Twitch, I was listening to his podcast and he started Ethereum and burned through $140 million. And he's like, I'm trying to solve this problem. He's like, but I didn't care about the problem. I just did it because it was transactional. And he's like, there's product market fit, but there really needs to be product market founder fit. Because even if there's a product market fit, who cares if you don't, if you don't really care about it, right? Especially when shit like disintegrates, which it probably will then. Yeah. So it's great. Excellent. That's really terrific formulation. And the fact is. We're not really thinking machines. Even the best engineers, we're feeling machines that think. And the best engineers, maybe quarter of the time they're really thinking. And there's just some sort of underlying emotion that maybe they can't even, but probably most people it's 10 to 15% of the time that thinking, just look at the US right now. Everybody's like, I'm red, I'm blue. And they just feel, and they don't even, they don't even thinking about stuff. Right. I'm not getting a vaccination because I'm red. And it's like, what are you even talking about? Right. But that's human beings. Right.

Been very surprised that some of the conversations I've had with some good friends after 3 years.

Right. Wow. And then from there you had another startup that ended up getting acquired by a small company called IBM. Another HP and IBM, you can't really do better than that. But tell us a little bit about that journey.

That was a little bit different. After Enova, when I wanted to come back to spend time with family here, and then got really bored and started another company. Which I should have thought 2 or 3 times a day because I ended up spending about 6 years on it. And we built it up and we met some very good friends and folks, very good people that one of them is my partner at Mungso Ventures.

Called Yi Lim, right? Yeah.

And another just used to work for us in the pitch and he just left. So a lot of really good people came out of even that last group, last company. Singapore Software Labs was started because of my team. Right. IBM Singapore Software Labs. So that's all historical. That's like 20, 15 years ago.

Great legacy. And then from there, is that when you started to get a little bit more involved with your Chinese roots in the Middle Kingdom?

Yeah, that's just before I met you when I sold the company. And then my dad had unfortunately passed around that time at the end of the whole process. And I realized I didn't know our roots in China. Been born in Beijing and never went back. He left in the 1920s, right? So he was Singaporean and he grew and grew. And then one of my cousins, actually my uncle, got in touch with a whole bunch of the Ongs. They were the Wangs, Mandarin, near Xiamen in a big city, Zhangzhou. Zhangqiu is what we say in Hokkien.

That Hokkien diaspora is like everywhere.

Yeah, everywhere in Taiwan.

Yeah, Southeast Asia.

80%, 70, 80% of the Chinese here, Hokkiens, or Minnan, as they would say in China. So I went and visited and I went to my home village and met with 41 male parents.

Wow.

I think my generation, if you count me. But out here, it's me and my sister, so it's not so uncommon. But in that village where I'm from, all my Dad's cousin's kids are Pengs, right? And the women actually left. So I didn't— they got married and moved to other villages. It's that old school. Yeah. And so that was a big realization, part of this genetic journey that was sort of pushed off to the side to Singapore, right? And then the main pool just kept going in China.

Fascinating. Wow.

Man, lots of people.

Love it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have no genetic ties to China except through my 2 sons who are half Chinese, because I figure I got to put some chlorine in my Irish gene pool, but I have such warm feelings for Chinese people, right? I mean, that's why the whole kind of purpose of this book is that I really think things are a lot more nuanced and I just love China and Chinese people. And then from there you got involved in the investment scene, still pretty early on, it was still not That real pasta. And GSR was where you landed from the get-go, right? You had some sort of Singaporean connection there or something?

Richard Lim, one of the founders, is a good friend of mine. In fact, he introduced me to Goh Yee Lim. So my partner was introduced to me through Richard.

Amazing. Yeah.

But before we built, was at GSR Ventures. I spent about 5 years there, Beijing. We had a house. We lived in Beijing, you know, in the US days.

Yeah, you were already super generous and involved with the startup ecosystem there. You guys invested in Didi early on.

Yeah, that was an interesting—

Do you have any stories around that?

I think, yeah, I'm just trying to figure out if they're public, but it's long ago enough, it's probably okay. So we actually, Richard has this uncanny ability to spot interesting things to do, right? So we saw Uber going in the U.S. In fact, the back office is in Palo Alto of GSR Ventures. So we saw Uber going in the U.S. and we thought, okay, it's going to happen here. Let's go hunt for a company. So all of us went looking and the first company we found that was reasonable was a company called Yi Tao Yong Che. And we almost invested. We had term sheets, we had conversations, but the founder kept going back and forth with One of the partners so much that we went, you know what, probably the wrong fit here. And we backed off. And the next guy that walked in the room was Cheng Wei. And they had been asking for way too high a valuation from too many people that by the time they came into us, whatever we offered them, I won't say the number, but they said, okay. And we did the Series A.

Yeah.

That returned us Yeah.

Nice move. Yeah. That's not just a fun-making investment. That's a multiple VC firm investment. And like not obvious, right? Because there was a few dozen competitors and he was a young guy, not necessarily that experienced. He wasn't a first-time entrepreneur, right? But you guys smelled something like, what was it that you sort of like?

You know, that's the other thing we do reasonably well. We still fail a bit and I still fail a bit using the same kind of thinking. We invest in people. We don't invest in ideas as much. And if you find the right people, they'll have the right ideas anyway. So we got the gut sense that he was going to build a big company. Yeah.

And you were absolutely right. As I understand it, he had a great relationship with the taxi drivers, which was a little bit unusual. And then there was one really bad night of snowstorms in Beijing and he was able to like call all these taxi drivers or text them. And then they came out of their night off and then everybody's like, wow, he's amazing. So there were people that had to walk home. It took them like 2 or 3 hours, but there's that kind of like pivotal moment. Right. So it's really fun to watch. Who knows who's going to be the winner, but you guys picked well.

There are a few, uh, the, the Elema gang in, in Shanghai when they were still in their dorm rooms, we invested. There were 4 guys in the dorm room.

Now their delivery service, the amount of volume that they do, it's just become part of the fabric of society.

Yeah. And that's just in 10 years, thereabouts, 11. So it's amazing how fast tech can take over how we do things, just change the way we think about what's possible, what's doable.

Fabric of society. Yeah. So I guess maybe you were seeing, because you already knew Silicon Valley well. And you knew Southeast Asia well. So you go to China in '09, it was still kind of fits and starts. Like it was early days in a way, but you saw that rapidly change and you actually did it. You actually, you know, made it happen with some of the investments. Like, do you have an anecdote or something that you kind of felt like, oh wow, like all of a sudden the treadmill got a lot faster here in China, or there's something—

It's not, I can't give you one. Yeah, I know. I'm going to think about it. I can't give you One where it was kind of, ah, it's just the realization that people were working at a different rate than Silicon Valley, right? The weekends, there's no weekends. People just kept working, right? When they were burnt out, they'll just take some time off and they'll come back and kept working. The intensity, we've got companies that made interviews at 9:00 PM to basically make sure you know what you are getting into. Just to be clear, I'm talking about startups here, right? Everything, but just startup. So they'll have interviews at 9:00 PM at night. So when you come in and you look around, the whole office is there, right? So if you're going to take this job, you're signing up for that, right? There's no such thing as work-life balance. It's just make it happen. And this is a bad thing kind of point of view. I think this is a choice thing kind of point of view, right? You can choose to do that or you can choose to Have a balanced life, whatever that, right? And some people think, and I do too, if you think about excellence in the world relative to everybody in the world, there is no balance. The world's best tennis player wakes up playing tennis, wakes up, gets ready. What he or she eats is about tennis, right? The diet, everything's about tennis, watching tennis.

Schedule, recovery schedule, everything. Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

I know an Olympic swimmer well and his family, and there's no balance.

But nobody's forcing them to do it. Right. You're right. Like you probably chose that earlier in your career. You were doing that. And in my 20s and early 30s, I was constantly sleep deprived for better or worse, but I wanted, like, I was in it to win it. Like I really wanted it. These days I have a much more balanced lifestyle, but I'm still in the game because I have a skills experience network and I can do things That I couldn't do when I was younger. But yeah, you're right. There actually is a choice.

And I remember when Evan Katz, he was the CEO of Eventbrite, when he visited China and we're talking about it, his comment is kind of clear. We in Silicon Valley need to be woken up a little bit. We should be afraid. The intensity at which the Chinese company prosecutes the market is unheard of, right?

Well, I mean, your Olympics example is clear, right? You can see all of the medals that China had this year versus Brazil versus the one in Beijing, right? And like, they're competing on a global basis. And that's part of the book is that like, maybe you don't want to be in China or maybe you don't even think that you're going to be necessarily competing against Chinese companies, but you probably will be competing against Chinese companies. And there's a lot to be learned, right? JoJoLeo996 or Joe Shirachi, whatever it is, right? 9 to 12, 7 days a week. That's one component. It's multivariate, but there's all kinds of other things that can be learned. And my purpose of the book is like, people should be kind of like a Sputnik moment, like a wake up, like, hey, you know what? This is coming and there's a lot to be learned from it. And you don't have to embrace a super intense work schedule, but there's other components that you should.

And it's kind of interesting that the core of, I guess, the US was about Competition making the country better in business, et cetera. And I think we shouldn't look at it any differently now that China is able to compete at that level. So I think the effects of the sort of falling out between China and the US in the long run might be good for the world in terms of creating 2 innovation tracks that are happening.

That's an excellent point of view. That's a very Ultimately optimistic and positive. Why not?

Well, when we're sitting in Southeast Asia and we're looking at both of them, right?

Well, talk about that because Monks Hill now, you guys are doing terrific investments in a lot of companies, Series A, early stage, like what's happening in Southeast Asia. I know that a lot of people are looking to Silicon Valley, but other companies you look at, how many are really looking at Silicon Valley versus looking at China for operation?

As I said, we're looking at both because There are companies, especially sitting out of Singapore, that are going after the global markets, just like companies sitting in Israel, right? If you're sitting in Israel, you're not trying to sell to Saudi Arabia and you're going after the global markets. So there's a whole bunch of, I would say a third to half the companies in Singapore are not as concerned with the regional markets, the dàokan or grassroots markets, as they say in China, right? In China, it's just mostly grassroots, big cities. That's all we go after in China. But in Southeast Asia, there's a group of us that are going after the US markets, the European markets, the Australian markets, first world, or should I say developed economies. So that's one group of folks. So generally we look at Europe and US as examples, model for us to maybe imitate or at least get inspiration from. And then There is China and how the local companies, the regional companies think very, very healthy. For example, just something that's actually quite close to me. When Nadim started Gojek in Jakarta, I think one of our GSR partners was linked to his investor and he was invited to invest. So. He did. And at some point he brought a small group of Gojek folks, including Nadine, to China to look at. And one of the things they showed them was our company, Erlema. And guess where GoFood came from?

Direct inspiration. Excellent. Highest form of flattery. Yeah.

Well, yeah, but this is innovation. I call it geographic innovation. This happened throughout the history of the US copied from England copied from, I don't know where else. And then Koreans and the—

England copied from China, right? The porcelain and tea curing, right? Those are technologies. And like, that's all it comes around.

The Koreans and the Japanese and now the Chinese and now, you know, Southeast Asians. Why create new ideas when you can just transplant them?

Sure, right? Yeah. And then Africa will copy Indonesia and India, right?

Yeah. But it's not just copying. It's always then copy and modify and localize. And that's where success and failure comes in. If you don't localize well enough, you don't succeed. So a lot of these companies doing regional businesses get inspired by the Chinese businesses. Like for example, previously the P2P, and they got into the same problems as the Chinese P2P. It's almost endless. The way I talk about this is, I hate to use this term, but it properly describes what's happening, is the technification of services. I'm not sure if I ever mentioned this to you.

No.

Its services at about 4,000 GDP per capita gets to about half.

Oh no, no, no, you did. You did. Yes, please. Oh no, you got me all inspired. I didn't know it was called that though. That's why I moved to Indonesia because the way you framed that was so beautiful. Please, please share. Yes.

Yes. Yes. So half the GDP services at about 4,000 GDP per capita, that's China about 10, 15 years ago. All of that is totally inefficient. Because you're just using human beings running around trying to figure that out. And if you take a look at what tech is good for, tech is good for using information to do things productively. And in fact, just using information, you can double, triple, quadruple the productivity of the services sector, which is what happened to China in the last 10, 15 years. I would argue that China has the most efficient services sector in the world. Because it's all new and it's all computerized, right? And the profit margins of this whole $6 trillion in GDP of activities go to tech companies mostly that didn't exist.

Beautiful nuggets.

So I realized this about 10 years ago and went, okay, maybe it's time to come down here because our GDP here You know, about 5 years ago was about 4%. Lagged.

It wasn't ready in '09. Now it was ready.

Well, we started amongst about 2014, cut our first check 2015, and the rest is history. And that thesis is happening, right? If you look at retail, right, the biggest companies in retail are tech companies now. And not quite the biggest because the brick and mortar guys are still quite big, right? But pretty soon you can see the writing on the wall. Just like the biggest retail company in the US is not Walmart, right? It's Amazon. This has happened throughout the world. So we see that in retail and that's just the higher end of services, logistics, transportation, everything, recruitment, property sales, whole SIC codes of services is going to convert over the next 10 years in Southeast Asia. Just like in— Wow.

I think that could be a whole chapter, the technification of services, and I give Multiple shoutouts to you. I don't know how many times I've repeated that to frame that in my mind that it's $11,000 US GDP per capita in China. But of course, you know, yeah, it's 4 here, right? But 4 here, right? But then the Gini coefficient. So China, it's actually probably much higher in the big cities, probably. But here there really is this inflection point as informed by GDP and like, okay, we're ready now. Like the oven is like, ding, now it's ready to go bake, right? Otherwise it just wouldn't work. Right. So like, that's one of the reasons why I started really looking at Indonesia when I had a chance to be here.

Yeah.

So thank you for that. I just forgot you called that techification of service. That's beautiful. Like there's some like wisdom of you to like pulling together these decades and like shifting between hemispheres and countries and regions, and then being able to see like, okay.

I happen to be there and I happen to be from here. So it's not that hard. You see it and you see the value creation both for the founders, investors, as well as for society, right? Think about how convenient it is to live in Beijing now versus when you were Workers there.

So, but also Beijing has the most billionaires in the world. It's not Singapore or London or New York. Most of their children are like going to school with my children. So it was like, okay, maybe I don't need to spend $150,000 a year after tax for like middle school, high school, and preschool. Right. And then I can move somewhere else. Right. It's been wonderful to chat with you. I really love your sweeping views and your amazing Entrepreneur journey and what you're doing in the startup community. I look forward to giving you a big hug next time I see you in person in Lion City or Jakarta.

Yeah. When we can actually hug. I've forgotten how to hug now.

I just hug myself in the morning to get going. But hey, thanks so much. Terima kasih banyak. To be continued.

Yeah.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye. Thanks.

That's a wrap. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Rich Robinson Show, Season 1, At the Speed of China. Visit therichrobinson.com/show to smash that subscribe button. Please also go to iTunes or whatever platform of choice, rate and comment. And until next time, thank you very much. 再见，谢谢。