Asia Tech Podcast – Episode 110 – Oswald Yeo – CEO and Co-founder of Glints – Missionaries, Not Mercenaries

The Asia Tech Podcast had a great conversation with Oswald Yeo, a co-founder and the CEO of Glints.  Glints is a Southeast Asia-based recruitment platform that helps companies build successful teams with young talent.  Its mission to help companies hire the right, young talent effectively and for young people to discover and develop careers they love.

Some of the topics that Oswald and I covered:

• The biggest trend in HR Tech is remote hiring and remote working
• COVID did not initiate this trend, but definitely accelerated it
• Online learning and the rise of Glints Academy
• How the team of co-founders initially tried to balance university and their startup and both suffered
• The reactions of their families and friends to leaving Wharton, Stanford and Berkeley
• After coming home to a lot of fanfare, three years of near-death experiences
• The difficulty of finding the right business model and product-market fit
• The significant impact of COVID on the Glints business
• Learning about managing through a crisis

See the full transcript below:

Michael Waitze 0:10
Hi, this is Michael Waitze, and welcome back to the Asia Tech Podcast where we deep-dive into all things Asia, and all things tech. Today I’m joined by Oswald Yeo, a co-founder and the CEO of Glints. Oswald, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really appreciate it. How are you doing?

Oswald Yeo 0:29
Hey, Michael, good. Good to talk to you today. Thanks for having me.

Michael Waitze 0:33
It’s my pleasure. Look, let’s just jump right into this. And then I want to get a little bit of your background. But from your perspective, what do you think is the biggest trend in HR Tech in Southeast Asia, and by definition, all of Asia? And how do you think it’s shaping the labor market?

Oswald Yeo 0:48
Right, remote working and remote hiring, it’s the biggest trend that we’re seeing right now. And way before COVID started, we already had some of our employees working remotely. We were helping some customers hiring the teams remotely. But COVID has certainly accelerated this trend. It really is sort of a new normal right now. Before COVID, most of our placements and matches were local hiring matches, just Jakarta, Jakarta, Singapore to Singapore. But post-COVID most of our placements and matches are cross-border remote hiring right now.

Michael Waitze 1:24
And do you think there’s anything else that COVID accelerated? One of the things that I hear a lot from my InsurTech podcast is that two years of digital transformation has happened in two months.

Oswald Yeo 1:36
Definitely. I think, one other trend that comes to mind online learning. We are seeing a lot of that right now, amongst our user base as well. We launched an online learning product sometime in April of last year, it’s called Glints Expert Classes, where people can go on to a platform to give online classes. And that took off much faster than expected, because of COVID, actually.

Michael Waitze 1:58
Okay, I want to get to that in a little bit, but first, let’s get a little bit of your background for context. And I want to get into the founding story around Glints as well, because I think it’s actually kind of compelling.

Oswald Yeo 2:17
Sure, let’s get into it.

Michael Waitze 2:19
Go for it.

Oswald Yeo 2:21
So also here started Glints about five years ago with my two co-founders. And back then when we first started a company, we were actually still just going to college. So this is actually not just my first company. This is my first job ever. Really? Yes, yes. So we first start the company, we’re actually just on the way to the US for college. And the initial idea was that we will juggle both our startup and the studies, right. That’s a terrible, terrible idea. Because five months in, we realized that neither our startup nor studies were going anywhere. Exactly. Yeah. So we’re failing both academically and in the startup. And so when we, when we realized that we just needed to focus on one thing, we decided to focus on the thing that was more important to us, which was the startup and not the university degree.

Michael Waitze 3:10
Can I ask you, where you were all going to school? You’re going to school together? Or no?

Oswald Yeo 3:14
We were going to school in three different places, which made running the company even more impossible.

Michael Waitze 3:20
Tell me tell me. So where were you all going?

Oswald Yeo 3:22
So my co-founders were at Stanford at Wharton, I was at Berkeley.

Michael Waitze 3:26
Right? So here’s what I really wanted to ask you for a long time. Right? And I haven’t seen this in writing. So you’re at Berkeley, and your co-founders were at Stanford and Wharton, so it must have meant that you excelled as students prior to entering university, right? Your parents must have been super proud. Your relatives must have been super proud. Even your friends may have even been a little bit envious, like darn, I really want to go to Berkeley. And, obviously very aspirational to start your own company, but when you decided to leave, what was that conversation like with your family and your friends? And you’re like, yeah, Berkeley, I’m out of here. I’m coming back to Singapore to continue doing this company.

Oswald Yeo 4:07
Yeah, so it very much was a case of asking for forgiveness and not permission. Because I knew that I would never get the permission of my parents to do it. I was actually because I was actually you’re right, because my parents had were very excited. That was going not just to Berkeley but going to university. Yeah, because I was the first in my family to do so. My parents came from very humble background and never graduated high school. So when I had the opportunity to do so, they were very happy for me. So when I decided to go down the path of entrepreneurship and not go to university, they were very surprised for sure. So so it was very much asking for forgiveness, but I didn’t ask you for permission is I had really made up my mind back then.

Michael Waitze 4:51
Right and did your friends also have the same conversations with their friends and family? And I’m wondering what that conversation like was among you three was it like we all have to do this together or, you know what I mean?

Oswald Yeo 5:03
Yeah, so it was, I think it was a bad influence. My friends, my co-founders, parents maybe still hate me to this day. Denying them have the right of having a Stanford and Wharton son. Right. But no. So it was very much, it was very interesting because the conversations that we have with our friends in the US, and a conversation that we had with our friends in Singapore, were very different to us, our friends, were all like, Oh, this is a great idea. We’re so happy for you guys. You got some funding, and you can get out of here and be a real business versus Singapore, which is very much still tech. This was about five years ago. So tech was less popular back then. Right. So people didn’t really know what startups were they didn’t know what VCs were. So all of our friends and family in Singapore reacted very differently from our friends in the U. They all thought we were crazy. Chinese New Year was certainly awkward because they thought it would be gone for four years, not four months.

Michael Waitze 6:04
That’s what’s really interesting to me is that even back in 2015, which, frankly, wasn’t that long ago, and from my perspective, sitting in Bangkok, you know, all of the venture capitalists that had sprouted up in Singapore, all of the government support whether through the NRF, or all the other programs that they have, you know, seem to me to be very robust. But depending on what your family is going through at the time, they may not be so well connected to the venture capital space and the tech startup space. So explaining to them what’s going on, can sometimes get really tricky. Yeah.

Oswald Yeo 6:37
Yeah, there were very few success stories back then. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Waitze 6:41
So you mentioned that one of the reasons why you came back was because and your friends in the US commented on this was because you’d been funded, right? And I remember because I’ve been following Glints since its founding. And I actually remember reading this story about, you know, essentially the way the story was told three kids leave college leave University in the US to come back to Singapore to build this company called Glints. And even I thought, like, okay, that’s insane. But, and there was a ton of excitement in the community, not just in Singapore, but in all of Southeast Asia, about the funding, and all that stuff. And it was a really compelling story. But when the cameras metaphorically turned off, right and stopped filming, and you had to get down to work and get going, was there a lot of pressure on you, and your teammates to succeed? You know what I mean?

Oswald Yeo 7:32
Yeah, certainly. So the first few years were really difficult after we came back from the US to be the business. Yeah, the initial version of Glints was a graduate jobs and internship platform. Right, right. So there were a few mistakes, mistakes that we made there. The first was that we were running on a classified model. And the second was that we were only based in Singapore, which is a very, very small market of like, five, 6 million people. So the first two years, two and a half years, we didn’t really have much product-market fit, and there wasn’t really much traction. So it’s a it was a long hustle to a few near-death experiences, we almost ran out of cash, right. And it was only until 2018, where we decided to pack up our bags, move to Indonesia to build a business there. And also, around the same time, we pivoted the business from a classifieds model to a transaction for hire model, where we were relying much more closely on our customers’ success because instead of paying for an advertisement, they’re paying for results. And so the combination of having the right geographic market of Indonesia versus Singapore, and the right business model finally allowed the business to take off. But this was like three years into the business. The first three years were really difficult. There were lots of near-death experiences, and kind of sleepless nights pressure.

Michael Waitze 8:54
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about those near-death experiences? And the reason why is because not just in this region, but globally. All we hear really is are these glory stories about startups. It’s hard work. And particularly inside of this story, you obviously left a great education and came back, you pivoted the business model pivoted the location and stuff. What is that feeling like as you’re kind of running out of cash? And you’re thinking, what are we going to do?

Oswald Yeo 9:25
Yeah, it felt really uncertain. For the most part. Yeah. We were sort of just feeling our way around. We didn’t really know what was the next steps. I remember one point where we were running off cash. And we had about two weeks worth of runway left, right? We get all of our team members in the room and we said, Hey, we have two weeks of runway that there was a chance that a funding round may not go through. And if that happens, this might be the end. But what the founders are doing is we’re pouring in all of our savings, which wasn’t much. Another week, maybe but this was to show we were committed. But we wanted to be transparent to everyone. And that felt like a very scary conversation. Because we weren’t sure how they would react, we weren’t sure what would happen if they left as well. Eventually, very luckily, the team members all decided to stay on. They decided to back us. They went on no-pay leave for a few weeks. And the funding round happened just one week before the company was running on runway. Yeah,

Michael Waitze 10:24
Good stuff.

Oswald Yeo 10:26
Yeah, I think that’s one this one kind of uncertainty, where, you know, there’ll be moments like this where it was like a near-death experience, right. But what’s interesting is, throughout the first three years, we were actually default dead, because we’re not profit, not only were we not profitable, yet, we did not have a clear path to profitability, or product-market fit. So I would say that was actually the more painful part because the short, intense periods of running out of cash, we somehow managed to always solve them in a couple of weeks. But it was sort of that meet to long-term uncertainty. That was a bit more painful, because we never sort of knew what when we would find, right business model, when would the business take off? Yeah.

Michael Waitze 11:10
Did you sometimes feel like you were, what I like to call at least for myself, like operating in the dark or in a vacuum where you just felt like nothing around you existed, except that that desire and that attempt to try to find that product-market fit?

Oswald Yeo 11:24
Yeah, very much. So. I felt like that for a long time.

Michael Waitze 11:28
And then here’s what I want to know what I want to fast forward a couple of years, you said you moved to Indonesia, you redid the business model. Obviously, it started to work for sure. And then in 2020, everything is probably going well. And then boom. COVID. Okay, yeah. So what was the impact? And because you’re looking at this every day, day in and day out? From your perspective, what was the pandemic’s impact on the labor market? And not just in Singapore? But like in Indonesia? And in the whole region, actually?

Oswald Yeo 11:59
Yeah. See, it was a huge impact on the market and our business. For context, we saw the business started to take off in 2018, we managed to raise a round of funding from Monks hill Ventures in 2019. It was in July 2019. And so quarter, three and quarter four of 2019, we were ramping up our sales team, in anticipation of growth in 2020. We had like a three X growth target, we ramped up our we doubled our sales team in two months. Wow. In November and December, because funding just closed, and we’re ready to go. And just when we were all ready to grow, we had an army all built up, the pandemic hit us in quarter one of 2020. And it was significant for a few reasons. Because one was it completely threw us off course, because we were all ready to ramp up. But now it seemed like there wasn’t enough demand to justify the sales headcount. And two personally, for me, it was a bit scary, but also exciting because it was the first major downturn that was going through my career. I said earlier, this is not just my first company, but my first job. So I’ve never seen or heard the last time there was a crisis. I was still in school. So. So I saw it as a great learning experience as to how a founder or CEO should be reacting in times of crisis.

Michael Waitze 13:20
This idea of crisis management is really tricky. So Mat Ward, a guy that we talked about offline, and I talked about this as well, if you’ve never been through a crisis, in an employment situation, it’s hard to figure out what the right thing is to do. And I’m wondering if the near-death experiences and all those operating in a vacuum feelings that you had in 2016, 2017, and 2018 somehow prepared you for this. In other words, when the pandemic struck, you weren’t like, Oh, my God, we could die. But Okay, wait a second. How can we get through this?

Oswald Yeo 13:53
I would say that this is great book by Andy Grove, the founder of Intel called, “Only the Paranoid Survive”. Exactly. And I was rereading that book last year, and I and I felt like it really conveyed such a useful mindset in 2020. And I think the paranoia that we had going through so many near-death experiences definitely helped, because it pushed us to make difficult decisions a lot faster. So even before it was clear that COVID was spreading all the way to us, and also to Southeast Asia. We already started to look at our cash runway, we started to raise additional funding from my existing investors to build a more buffer. And we started to take difficult decisions that rationalizing the team. So I think having that sense of paranoia was was painful but it certainly helped us to move a lot faster.

Michael Waitze 14:44
Yeah, so we talked earlier about how a lot of the feedback I get is that two years of digital transformation is happening in two months. Do you feel like you’ve aged a lot or maybe grown up a lot or learned a lot in the in the past two or three years that maybe you wouldn’t have learned if you had just been in school?

Oswald Yeo 15:05
Definitely, I don’t think it would have taught you how to rationalize a team or raise emergency capital during a pandemic.

Michael Waitze 15:14
Maybe they should, though, don’t you think so?

Oswald Yeo 15:17
Maybe I don’t see many professors doing that.

Michael Waitze 15:22
Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah.

Oswald Yeo 15:25
Yeah. from investors and people and other entrepreneurs.

Michael Waitze 15:29
Before. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I want to understand, maybe a little bit more detail if the pandemic also accelerated any business model changes. And I’m really curious what it’s like from the hiring side. You know what I mean? Because a lot of hiring in the past was taking place face to face, you’d meet somebody, they’d come back in for another interview, how have things changed, for people that are trying to hire the best talent?

Oswald Yeo 15:55
Yeah. So I think there were two biggest changes that we saw from the ground. The first was with online education, we have this business unit called Glints Academy, essentially a three months coding boot camp, where we’re training up fresh graduates to be developers to work for our clients. And before COVID, we had a one and a half to two years transformation plan to bring back for bring that from offline to online. So that when COVID happened, we literally had to move everything online and not even two months, about two weeks, because the city was going to lockdown. So that certainly accelerated our own transformation, but also the acceptance of our own users. Because before that, we will have many graduates or students will not be so ready to pay for an online coding classes. Whereas because of COVID, that made it very normal. So there was one change that we saw. Second change that we saw with regards to hiring, any question that you saw was really remote hiring, taking off before COVID. Most of our measures were done as local recruitment matches, to help other employees in Jakarta, Singapore and Singapore and etc. But because of COVID, cross-border hiring has taken off in a huge way. And employers were waking up to this, everybody has really leveraged on this opportunity, because Singapore employees and Hong Kong employees are no longer restricted by the high costs of labor and the low talent supply in these markets. And they can go regional. So that’s really a huge trend that we see.

Michael Waitze 17:30
I really want to dig a little bit deeper into this, right? Because this is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. But did that surprise you? In other words, when people in Singapore were saying, You know what? There’s a and I want to talk about a talent crunch in a second. But they said, Look, we can’t hire enough people in Singapore to do this work. How about Vietnam? How about Indonesia? How about Malaysia? Are there candidates there? You know, that speak English or that speak Mandarin that we can hire? And how can we connect to them?

Oswald Yeo 17:56
Actually, it didn’t surprise us that much. Because to us, it has always felt like a move that makes sense. Because internally, even at Glints, we build up our teams remotely as well. We have teams in Vietnam with teams in Indonesia, right. But what surprised us was how quickly the adoption happened because of COVID. They always felt like an uphill conversation, especially when we were talking to more traditional companies Exactly. So to us, it made a lot of sense. But it was very difficult to get some of these more traditional SMEs or even large enterprises on board with that idea. But because of what has happened last year, the adoption really shifted really quickly that whatever quarter, or conversion rates of meetings to clients saying yes went from like 20% to 60 70%. So there was like a tripling of conversion rates because of that.

Michael Waitze 18:49
Yeah, not surprising to me at all. I want to talk about this idea of what I call employment arbitrage. You know what arbitrage is right? Yeah. So as I come out of a financial services background, right, so I was a trader at you know, at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. And whenever there’s an arbitrage what normally ends up happening, if that arbitrage is obvious, it tends to revert to a mean right so you can get into an ARB trade but it normally collapses. We call that mean reversion. Are you seeing or do you expect to see a mean reversion in salaries? In other words, one of the reasons I’m presuming, why a Singaporean company would hire somebody in Vietnam or in Indonesia, outside of Singapore is because of it, because it’s less costly to do so. Yeah. But the more that happens, the more remote working becomes normal. Do you think that those salaries will then collapse to a mean, and more like moving up towards the Singaporean level? Not exactly right. Because the cost of living in Singapore is higher. But do you understand what I mean? Do you see salaries inching up?

Oswald Yeo 20:34
Yeah, great question. So yes, and no, because I think it’s gonna be different for different types of roles. Sure. For the most senior roles where there’s increasing liquidity, and if I’m a talent in Indonesia, I will have the option to work for a Singapore company, or Indonesia company, or I can even be based in Singapore in the future, if I want to, right. And so yes, we see that salaries are moving up. But also No, because there are certain types of roles where the Singapore employers would almost overtime just outsource exclusively to, to lower-cost markets that Indonesia, Vietnam, for example, the entry-level developer roles or like QA developer, for example, got it. So over time, they just wouldn’t want to pay 4 to $5,000 a month for a QA developer in general as well. So the market or the supply market for such Junior roles, would probably still be limited to these regional markets, especially as it becomes known.

Michael Waitze 21:31
So as this and I think these two things go together and tell me if I’m wrong. I want to get back to Glints Academy because you mentioned that there’s a What do you say, a three-month coding course? Are there other places where you think you can expand? And I don’t mean, I don’t mean geographical locations. But I mean, the idea that you can have an academy that teaches things besides coding? In other words, is there a plan to have sort of like a, what is it a General Assembly style, teaching, where Glints doesn’t just teach coding, but maybe it teaches a whole bunch of other skills, digital skills, maybe marketing or UI design or UX design or, whatever, so that when employers are ready to hire those types of people, they can get hired as well.

Oswald Yeo 22:13
Yeah, certainly. So two other areas, we’re looking at our data science and digital marketing. Yeah. And reason behind that is it’s Glints Academy. Glints Academy’s mission is to help train in-demand talent, and meaning that we take a demand led strategy, we look at what are the fields where’s the most demand by employers? And we’re seeing that there’s more and more demand for for both data science talent, as well as digital marketing talent. Yep.

Michael Waitze 22:42
So the implication of that is that you’re actually talking to, because it’s a two sided market, right? In a sense, where you have people that want to get a job and people that want to hire people that want to be employed. So from the employer’s perspective, does that mean you’re in relatively frequent contact with the employers and saying, What do you need? When will you need it? At what scale do you need it? And then how do you do your own data science around that data that you’re gathering from them?

Oswald Yeo 23:13
Yeah, so yes, we talk very frequently to employees. And because we are helping them to build up their remote teams, we know exactly, which are the roles that are the hottest field, for example, they give us out of 10 roles. And we see that these three particular roles take very long to fill over time consistently amongst the four employers, we see that these are probably the roles that we should start building up supply through Glints Academy. So that’s how we do that. So quantitatively, we aggregate these signals across different points, we see which other roles that take the longest or feel they have the highest latency. And, and that’s what we see that there’s a signal for that. The second is a bit more arbitrary wages through qualitative conversations are employers with hundreds of recruiters on the ground who will always be talking to them through this customer discovery interviews, and, you know, we get an anecdote. So we get stories about which roles are hired as a field, or what roles they anticipate hiring for in the next 6 to 12 months. And we try to map that against our own talent supply.

Michael Waitze 24:14
And do you have your own data science team? And if you don’t, do you think that that’s something you’re going to build out as well?

Oswald Yeo 24:21
Yeah, we do have our own data science team. It’s a small team of about three to four data scientists right now. And a team that we’re looking to grow ourselves too.

Michael Waitze 24:28
Yes you’re gonna have to, because the longer you’re around, the more data you’re going to have. And the more data you have you are going to have to clean the data, have the right ML ops in place, and all these other things that go around with data science. Yeah?

Oswald Yeo 24:38
Exactly. Yep.

Michael Waitze 24:39
So I’m curious about you know, you talked about data science, digital marketing. It sounds to me and again, not just in this region, but globally, people are talking about this idea of gig workers. What role does that whole gig economy play for Glints and just kind of in shaping the future of work?

Oswald Yeo 25:01
Hmm, we’ve heard a lot about the gig economy. And we, we see the benefits of that as well. But at Glints, we have a slightly different philosophy that might be more controlled, where we actually believe more in building permanent teams for our employers, rather than building up helping them to hire short term freelance workers is a good ourselves, we believe that we want to hire missionaries and not just mercenaries, right. And it’s much easier to do that when we recruit people by joining us with long-term, who believe in the mission. And from an enterprise-building perspective, it’s easier to build consistent values and culture when everyone’s been there for a while. So internally, we have that view, if it gains our customers, that’s what we’re focused on as well, which is to help them build out permanent remote teams, or permanent teams locally, rather than this short-term, gig economy, workers. We think is a great opportunity, but it’s not an area that we’re focused on right now.

Michael Waitze 26:00
So missionaries, not mercenaries, I think is going to be the title of this episode, if that’s okay with you. Very much so. It’s just such a great phrase. Is your in your mind? Right? And also, I’m asking by extension in your founders, co-founders minds as well? Is there some kind of sort of social impact aspect of this as well in the sense that, you know, somebody who has a full-time job, so they’re on a full-time team may feel more secure financially than somebody who’s, and I have no problem with the gig economy? It does some great things. I agree with you. But is there sort of a social impact aspect of this with you and the team thinking, if we can get people a full-time job, the benefits to not just to them, but to the economy and to society are much more longer lasting?

Oswald Yeo 26:45
Yes, so at Glints, our mission is to help people realize their human potential. And we believe part of that includes just making sure that their basic needs like insurance and healthcare benefits are taken care of before we can think about career progression, and all and that usually comes with a full-time contract, rather than a short term gig economy contract, especially markets like Indonesia, Vietnam, where this actually really, really important benefits for employees.

Michael Waitze 27:15
So yeah, I mean, I could not agree with you more. I mean, you know, how much time I spent? I have an entire show on InsurTech. So yeah, no, no, no, I have a show called the Asia InsurTech podcast, we’ve done 100 and something episodes, and it’s something that I think about in the context of any company that’s building a platform. Because as you know, insurance is a pooled thing. And the more people you have on your platform, the more you can offer them pool insurance, even if you’re unemployed, right, like the problem today, you tell me what you think is that insurance in most places, is tied to your employer. which feels like a weird thing to me. Because if you’re unemployed, you’re probably more likely to need insurance than if you are employed.

Oswald Yeo 27:57
Exactly. Yeah.

Michael Waitze 27:58
Anyway. And maybe that’s a conversation for a different time. But you understand what I mean? Right?

Oswald Yeo 28:02
Yeah. Interesting is a huge, huge pain point for a lot of people right now.

Michael Waitze 28:06
I agree. Do you feel like because, again, you’re so involved in this, do you feel like we’re in this sort of massive structural transition period? I think about this a lot, like, from the agrarian economy, into the industrial economy, into the knowledge economy into the service economy. I feel like we’re going through something right now. Particularly on the employment side. I’m not even sure what to call it. I hate calling it the future of work. But do you feel like we’re at the start of, but you feel like we’re at this sort of inflection point?

Oswald Yeo 28:36
Yeah, it certainly is a phase shift. I’m not sure if it’s as big a change as a sort of entire economy shifting, like from industrial to knowledge, but it certainly is a phase shift that we’re seeing from how people working and how we are hiring.

Michael Waitze 28:52
Yeah, fair enough. Look, I want to talk about, I want to talk about the tech that’s used to do this. You know, when I was working in a corporate role, we never ever hired anybody without a bunch of face-to-face meetings, and I feel like hiring is this sort of viscerally personal thing. Um, do you know what I mean? Like really personal?

Oswald Yeo 29:12
Yeah, you gotta get a feel of the person.

Michael Waitze 29:14
Yeah. So how do you leverage technology without completely removing that sort of visceral human feeling?

Oswald Yeo 29:23
No, it’s really difficult. I think the fact that video communication is getting so much more reliable with Zoom already helps. Sure we don’t have to buffer and pause every 10 seconds. That really helps. I remember just a few years ago, we will all will ask you stuff and just came here without conversation. Right?

Michael Waitze 29:44
Right. I mean, isn’t the first thing you say, and most calls at least five years ago. Can you hear me?

Oswald Yeo 29:49
Yeah, exactly. And throughout the call, actually.

Michael Waitze 29:52
Sorry, go ahead. I interrupted you.

Oswald Yeo 29:54
Oh, no. Yes, sorry. Now, it works pretty well. So I think that helps. Beyond that I one thing that struck me that one thing that comes to mind is actually having live events. I actually attended this live event by this self-help guru called Tony Robbins a few months ago.

Michael Waitze 30:15
Did you really? A Tony Robbins event?

Oswald Yeo 30:17
Yeah, he did a very impressive online event. And he will always have these massive conferences with 1000s of people in person. Yeah. Very impressive. Yeah. He mentioned a very impressive online version of that he booked out a whole studio offline. So it was like, studio, great production quality. Wow. And, and everyone was involved, and people are jumping around their living rooms and all. So I think there is a way to do it to make such that online events engaging. But we’ll see how things go in the next few years. Yeah.

Michael Waitze 30:52
Yeah. I’m really curious to see how telepresence, haptics all these things that try to mimic a physical presence, change the way these video conferences go, I think, again, I think that’s still kind of in development. But if someone like Tony Robbins, who has maybe more resources to do this than most of us can pull it off, it means that at some point that’s going to drop to the bottom of the funnel and get to the rest of us, right.

Oswald Yeo 31:15
Yeah, it’s gonna. It’s gonna expand to the general public. Sure.

Michael Waitze 31:21
Yeah, I’m trying to figure out how that’s gonna work. But I guess that’s again for a future conversation. You mentioned earlier, I think it was in July of 2019. Again, tell me if I remembering correctly, but you were invested in by Monks Hill Ventures? Yeah. . So again, a super, super great team. We don’t have to spend a ton of time talking about them. But yeah, just a great team. Yeah. Great team. Yeah, I know them well. Anyway, you are also not just being invested by them, but you’re collaborating with them. You do some research as well. Do you want to talk about that? And what you expect the output of that to be or what the output of that has been already?

Oswald Yeo 31:59
Yeah. So one piece, one piece of one project we’re working on right now, that actually hasn’t been publicly announced yet. But I think we’ll be doing so much about the right timing. It’s a Southeast Asia talent compensation report. Because a common pain point that we hear amongst founders, and even investors is how much should I be paying this person? How much should a CEO of a Series A, tech-savvy pier seriously tech-savvy, right, the founders? So it has been a topic that’s been pretty opaque over the past few years. There’s not a lot of data on this right, publicly available. So what Monks Hill and Glints are doing, it’s we’re pulling together our networks and data points because Glints has over 30,000 employees in our database, right, just come up with a tech talent for Southeast Asia salary report, so that everyone will know what’s the right price. to rewards their talents.

Michael Waitze 32:58
Yeah, I mean, the recruiters, at least in the financial services industry do this at the end of every year, right. Whether it’s the options group or, you know, McKinsey, or any of these companies that are involved in doing research around salaries, they’ll actually publish it, you know, 2020, salary summary kind of thing for investment banks,

Oswald Yeo 33:16
Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s right.

Michael Waitze 33:20
Yeah. So maybe at some point in the future, we can actually have either you or maybe somebody on your team or somebody from amongst he’ll come on and talk about that as well. Once it gets released.

Oswald Yeo 33:30
Yeah. Happy to would love to share with your listeners.

Michael Waitze 33:32
Yeah, that would be super cool. So is there anything else you want to mention that I haven’t talked about that you think is important?

Oswald Yeo 33:39
I would love to learn from your experiences, sort of seeing how things have changed in Thailand as well. That’s where you’re based right now, right?

Michael Waitze 33:46
I am. Yes. What do you want to know? Ask me anything.

Oswald Yeo 33:49
Just in particular, on the hiring market? Is this industry when interested enough? Cause it’s how have you seen things change in Thailand?

Michael Waitze 33:59
Last year, so it’s a really good question. And let’s go back to March 15, or March 18 of last year, when we went into lockdown. I didn’t leave my apartment, literally, except to go to the end of the street to buy food at a Family Mart for three months. Yeah, right. So I literally sat in an apartment and tried to get all my work done from March 18 until the end of June. But, but because I wasn’t the only one right? It wasn’t I don’t remember if it was mandated, or if just people were scared, right. So right. What that did was it really impacted the virus’s ability to spread in Thailand. And you know this right? People in Asia are used to wearing masks. Yeah, and nobody complained about it. So if you were on the BTS or if you did get into a taxi after that, everybody was wearing a mask. Nobody was moaning about it, and people did keep their distance. And it was a really great environment. And what that means is that there was very little impact going forward after June and July on regular life. Is that fair? So, like I’m sitting in my office right now in True Digital Park, and it’s now more full than actually it was at the beginning of last year. Well, really, yeah. But people still wear their masks when I’m in an office. But when I leave my office, I put my mask on. When people use the men’s room, the ladies room, they use their masks as well. And in the building here, everyone uses their masks when they go downstairs to get food and stuff. But it appears to me that because of that, hiring has not so it’s subsided for sure between let’s say, March and September. But in Thailand, and again, this is something that most people don’t know, because internet connectivity here is ubiquitous. It means that remote teams have been possible for a while now. So I’m sitting again, in traditional Park, I have 400 megabits of internet speed, up and down, up and down.

Oswald Yeo 35:55
Yeah, wow!

Michael Waitze 35:57
Yes. And a lot of the teams that have been built. So if you listen to any like an interview that I did two years ago, or a year and a half ago with one of the best funded companies in Thailand, they have offices in London, Portugal, and in Texas, and they’ve had remote teams around that forever. So I think that people here have been kind of used to that.

Oswald Yeo 36:19
Yes, the remote work culture has been very common in Thailand even before 2020.

Michael Waitze 36:24
Right? Yeah, it was definitely happening before obviously, COVID accelerated that, like I said earlier, it just accelerated a whole bunch of things. But I think people were comfortable with it. And the CEOs to whom I’ve spoken here, you know, in the InsurTech space, and there’s the general tech space and in the VC space, and VCs have been sort of remote forever, right? Because somebody has to be in Indonesia, somebody has to be in Vietnam. But from a company standpoint, and from an investor standpoint, people here are now very comfortable with this. And even in True Digital Park, the staff here is some days at home some days here, and nobody cares. And it’s been very productive as well. People have been very productive.

Oswald Yeo 37:03
That’s great. Sounds like it’s not and it’s always fuller than ever office.

Michael Waitze 37:07
Yeah, it’s really, really great. It’s very dynamic. In other words, in this space, I’ve used to work at a co-working space called the Hive on Sukhumvit soi 49. This is a few years ago, yes, yeah, it’s a great place, small…on a few floors, four or five floors. And I used to walk around to each individual office and just say, Hey, what are you working on? If I if the sign that was on the door didn’t actually explain what it was. But here, there are just so many teams here. 500 startups, it’s on the floor over there. I see them here every day. There are plenty of startups here. I mentor some of those startups. So to me, it’s very vibrant here.

Oswald Yeo 37:41
Nice, nice. Nice. Sounds like Thailand is coping really well with whatever’s going on.

Michael Waitze 37:47
Yeah, so I don’t know. And remember, you mentioned this earlier, Singapore has approximately 6 million people. Thailand has 70 million people. I think. Bangkok officially has 8 million, but it’s probably more like 12 million on any day, right? Because people come in from the countryside. Yeah, yeah. But I don’t know anybody that’s had COVID. And I definitely don’t know anybody personally, that’s died from it. So I don’t know anybody who has been infected. And I don’t know anybody who’s died. So to me, that’s amazing.

Oswald Yeo 38:15
Wow, it sounds like it has dealt with the crisis really well. It was similar to Vietnam and Singapore because we have a huge team in Indonesia. And it’s not been easy for the people on the ground there.

Michael Waitze 38:25
No. So I speak to people in Indonesia every week and the teams to whom I speak, you know, they want to do business with me. And they’re like, Can we just wait a little bit because my team five people on my team actually got sick kind of thing.

Oswald Yeo 38:36
Wow. Oh, yeah. That’s not uncommon. Right. In Indonesia right now. Right. Yeah. We’re lucky to be where we are right now. In Thailand, Singapore.

Michael Waitze 38:44
Yeah. I frankly, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world right now. I definitely would not want to be in New York.

Oswald Yeo 38:50
For sure, for sure.

Michael Waitze 38:52
Okay. Anything else? What else can I tell you?

Oswald Yeo 38:55
That’s all. That’s all I have for now. I would love to catch up at some point as well. Absolutely. Okay.

Michael Waitze 39:01
I want to thank you then, Oswald Yeo, a co-founder and the CEO of Glints for coming in and doing this today. This was awesome. I really appreciate your time.

Oswald Yeo 39:09
Thank you, Michael. It’s been a great time…