Section
Founders
Long, unhurried profiles of the operators shaping the region's next decade.
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Founders Profile
Funding your own losses? Vietnam’s richest man is pledging factories to cover VinFast’s US$1.12 billion quarterly loss
Vingroup has promised VinFast will break even by the end of 2026. Its Q1 net loss widened to US$1.12 billion instead, and Vuong is covering the gap by pledging Vingroup’s own factories against new loans, the same move he made with a personal US$2.1 billion pledge in 2024.
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Founders Profile
Robert Kuok told his negotiators to give in three times. It made him Malaysia’s richest man at 102.
Kuok Meng Xiong took over PPB on 1 September. Within twelve months PPB puts listed money behind K2 Strategic’s Johor data centres, because a US$9 billion build cannot come out of a private family vehicle whose listed arm just wrote down RM4.17 billion.
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Founders Profile
CATL spent US$6 billion on a nickel mine. Then 150,000 people ordered a BYD with no nickel.
Karawang’s cell line is due to report first commercial output before 2026 closes, the one date in the chain CATL has already promised, because Zeng cannot survive a second slip while BMW, Volkswagen and Volvo are pricing an exit from the very nickel supply chain he just spent US$6 billion building.
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Founders Essay
In Vietnam a terminated distributor is owed nothing. Hold the supply contract.
Vietnamese law does not recognise a distribution agreement as its own kind of contract, and it awards nothing automatically when one ends. That makes the clause the wrong place to look for protection.
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Founders Essay
Why most Asian family firms cannot replace their founder
The succession gap in Asian family business reads as missing paperwork, and behaves like a founder who never built anyone able to replace him.
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Founders Interview
What CÈ's interview machine asked the man who built it
CÈ’s interview tool ran for the first time and questioned the publication’s own founder, who built both the masthead and the interviewer. Five questions, one thesis, and a disclosure stated at the top.
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Founders Essay
How to show pain without losing your audience: Ah Lok's three questions
Every organisation that has to communicate hardship, from donor films to restructuring notices, is guessing where the audience stops following. The Hong Kong illustrator behind Nalok Lok has a tested answer, and he paid for it in readers.
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Founders Essay
When to split co-founder equity: weeks in — not day one, not months
Founders are told to settle ownership on day one. The OpenMinds founder waited a few weeks, used a paying client to reveal who was really contributing, and draws the line at the point where the delay turns dangerous.
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Founders Interview
Christian Oh paid $120,000 to break his teaching bond. Set the bar first.
The Singapore property investor spent close to six months choosing between an MOE teaching scholarship and the real estate business he had built alongside it, and the rule he came out with is borrowed from pole vaulting: fix the height before the run-up starts.
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Founders Interview
Why every leader needs to name the five people who lead them
The Jubilation International founder built an emotional-intelligence practice on the one rule he refuses to waive for himself: every trainer needs a trainer. He names the five people who hold that job for him.
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Founders Interview
Why Ah Lok reserves a third of his week for work nobody pays for
The Hong Kong illustrator behind Nalok Lok built a commercial studio around a fixed reservation of unpaid time, then learned the hard way how much weight a story can carry before readers leave.
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Founders Essay
How to know if you are raising a round one stage too early
Southeast Asian founders are taught to treat a round as the proof. The OpenMinds founder, who has never taken one, names the threshold that decides whether capital accelerates a business or holds it up.
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Founders Essay
The four checks that catch a bad co-founder before you sign
Sixty-five percent of startup failures are people problems. After Zilingo, and after paying that tax herself, a Singapore founder runs a four-part audit that fits inside a courtship.
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Founders Interview
Jang Kều wins accounts by doing the job her customer is afraid of
Jang Kều has built a distribution company, a brand agency, a Singapore ingredients group and Vietnam’s best-known flood-housing programme on one move: take the part of the deal the other side cannot face. Where that move stops working is the useful part.
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Founders Essay
Kling AI sits in Beijing. Its round is 68% of Southeast Asia's AI year.
The region's AI total doubled on the strength of one Series D belonging to a Beijing company. It is the second time this year a Southeast Asian headline has described a single balance sheet.
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Founders Interview
Sonic Song decides on a partner in five minutes. Here is the test.
The Taiwanese brand operator lost a NTD 20 million mandate to a staffing gap, then built a filter short enough to run in five minutes: one minute of introduction, three achievements, three failures.
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Founders Essay
Sonic Song carries Naoki Takizawa’s name in Taiwan. He owns the designs.
Every agency growing a name it does not own is working inside a termination clause. Song’s answer is to stop reaching for the brand and take title to the specific designs instead.
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Founders Interview
How Nevinn Leow decided what to keep when he rebranded his parents' company
The second-generation chief executive of Malaysia’s Souper Tang spent two years rebranding his parents’ herbal-soup company and three more rebuilding its footprint. His test for what to protect is the part a reader can use.
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Founders Essay
The fixed cost of entering another country — and how Souper Tang zeroed it
The administrative cost of being a company in another country is fixed. Souper Tang carried it on a single Orchard Road restaurant until 2019, and its return to Singapore is built to never carry it again.
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Founders Essay
Robot training data fell from $340 an hour to $118 in two years
JD.com wants ten million hours of human demonstration footage and China has stood up more than forty centres to collect it, which leaves the Southeast Asian firms selling into that demand running a business with a visible expiry date.
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Founders Interview
OpenMinds never raised — so a RM1,000 client settled who owned it
No investors meant no one to referee ownership and authority. Jan Wong decided both on evidence — a chocolate manufacturer's account under RM1,000 a month that ran four years.
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Founders Interview
BeLive’s founder on the pivot, the takeover, and the number he skipped
The BeLive founder tests every large call against arithmetic, which explains the platform he killed, the takeover he refused, and the one question he would not answer.
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Founders Essay
Temasek is moving up to S$78 billion into AI, and four of its five targets are businesses a startup cannot become
Temasek will take AI-related exposure from six percent of a S$518 billion book to as much as fifteen by 2031; read the five segments it named and the founder’s market turns out to be on the buyer’s side of the ledger.
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Founders Interview
Repricing after ten years (the advisers never looked at his results)
Allan Ling built two agencies on execution, burned out on both, and is now trying to sell judgement instead. The interesting part is what he did when he was contradicted.
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Founders Essay
Harry Stebbings turned 2,750 podcast interviews into a US$400m fund.
A podcast just financed a US$400 million venture fund. In a region where trust outranks capital, the case for founders owning their own press writes itself.
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Founders Essay
Why SEA founders are building their own models (a worse one that answers beats a better one that can be switched off)
Indosat and GoTo just shipped Sahabat-AI, a small open model built for Bahasa Indonesia. The reason has less to do with performance than with who can switch the rented alternative off.
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Founders Essay
Indonesia sentenced Gojek’s co-founder to ten years over a laptop procurement
On 30 June a Jakarta court sent Nadiem Makarim to prison for ten years without finding he took a cent, and the part every Southeast Asian founder should study is how a lawful call became a crime.
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Founders Essay
What Singapore’s S$1 billion deep tech top-up actually changes
Budget 2026 puts a billion dollars behind Singapore’s deep tech founders through a scheme that only moves when private investors move. The math it changes, and the math it leaves exactly where it was.
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Founders Essay
The four-person company that does thirty people’s work (and rents the difference)
The same subsidised AI operators are warned not to lean on is, from the founder’s chair, the thing that lets four people do the work of thirty; in a region that has always starved origin, that moves the binding constraint.
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Founders Essay
Late-stage SEA funding rose 140 percent in H1 2025. Seed fell 50 percent.
Late-stage funding in Southeast Asia surged 140 percent in H1 2025 to $1.4 billion; seed-stage funding fell by half to $50.7 million. A year on, the funds that write seed cheques have stopped forming.
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Founders Essay
Southeast Asia’s biggest rounds are no longer the companies worth studying.
Funding measures one thing about a company. Whether the company is worth studying is a different question. The answers have stopped overlapping in Southeast Asia.
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Founders Essay
Singapore now funds 92 percent of regional startups.
The number reads like a triumph for Singapore's industrial policy. Read more closely, it is the visible measurement of a regional ecosystem that has narrowed under pressure, with Jakarta dropping to eight percent.