Section
Founders
Long, unhurried profiles of the operators shaping the region's next decade.
FoundersProfile
Garena's profits built Shopee, so why is Shopee now the one funding Forrest Li's next bet?
Within twelve months Monee's loan book passes US$18 billion and Brazil alone crosses US$2 billion, a bet that holds only if Sea keeps underwriting new borrowers off Shopee's own data without breaking the 1 percent delinquency rate the expansion has held so far.
FoundersProfile
Picked one vendor and moved fast? Nadiem Makarim did too, and a court just gave him nine years
This column bets Indonesia's Supreme Court upholds Nadiem Makarim's core conviction on cassation review within the year, trimming the sentence again without erasing the verdict, because two lower courts have now read the same procurement file the same way, and cassation corrects law, not fact.
FoundersProfile
DeepSeek’s Huawei chip bet broke R2, so why did Liang Wenfeng just order 160,000 more Ascend chips?
DeepSeek will miss its own early-2027 target on a 160,000-chip Huawei training cluster and ship its next reasoning model on Nvidia hardware first, because the interconnect failures that broke R2 live in training a model from nothing, not in the smaller run DeepSeek already proved out.
FoundersProfile
Wang Chuanfu built BYD to make its own parts. Why did that habit cost a fifth of profit?
BYD’s board asks shareholders on 29 September to approve a new asset-pool financing arm it has not explained. Within twelve months it will be funding the group’s Southeast Asian plants apart from a China balance sheet already absorbing a battery-driven profit drop, on the assumption that the shortfall proves temporary.
FoundersProfile
Posting a loss? Tony Fernandes borrowed US$1 billion for AirAsia and let the Philippines unit fund itself
AirAsia Philippines landed a new investor on 21 September to pay for more planes, five days after Reuters reported Malaysia’s government was asking rival airlines whether they could take over AirAsia’s routes. Within twelve months AirAsia Group Berhad repeats that split at the next unit that needs growth money, because the group’s own stock, down roughly 75 percent since fuel prices spiked, is too cheap for Fernandes to sell without losing the company a second time.
FoundersEssay
Betting on AI? Mekong Capital passed, and the pawnshop chain it backed went from 11 shops to 972
Tech in Asia reported on 9 September that Vietnam's best-known private equity firm shuns AI-native bets. What sits on its books instead is F88, the first lender outside Vietnam's banks to be cleared for public markets, whose loan book has grown three hundred times since 2016.
FoundersProfile
Anthony Tan controls Grab on votes, not shares. He just spent US$1.49 billion buying Atome.
Tan is due to keep selling down the little Grab stock he holds directly before September 2027, on the same pre-set trading plan that took him from 400,000 shares to 28,498 in one afternoon in July, because votes, not shares, are what keep him in the chair, and the US$1.49 billion for Atome came from Grab’s account, not his.
FoundersProfile
Betting the house again? Masayoshi Son borrowed US$11.87 billion this week to avoid selling a single OpenAI share
SoftBank just borrowed US$11.87 billion rather than sell a single share of its winning OpenAI bet. It is the same instinct that turned a US$20 million wager on Jack Ma into Alibaba and floated Grab into Southeast Asia’s biggest ride-hailing company, and Sam Altman just pushed the payout past the year Son’s new debt assumed it would land.
FoundersProfile
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.
FoundersInterview
Jonathan Por left his award-winning flooring firm. His IPO school cleared US$780,000 a year in its first three years.
Jonathan Por, founder of Singapore’s PIF Capital, has spent a decade readying owners for the stock exchange, and his first screen is the owner’s appetite for answering to shareholders, ahead of revenue and structure.
FoundersProfile
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.
FoundersProfile
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersInterview
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersEssay
Training your first hires? This property agent says 18 months ahead beats a 10-year veteran
Around 40 percent of Singapore’s registered property agents do not close a deal in a year, and the industry hands training to its veterans. Christian Oh’s counter-position is that the useful trainer is the one who still remembers earning nothing.
FoundersInterview
Christian Oh paid US$93,000 to quit teaching. Now he collects US$80,000 a month in rent.
Christian Oh had written permission to sell property on his teaching scholarship and still paid US$93,000 to leave it, and the rule he would hand you before your own jump comes from pole vaulting: set the bar before you run.
FoundersInterview
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.
FoundersInterview
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersInterview
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersInterview
Short-staffed, Sonic Song turned down a US$610,000 project. How does he now pick partners in five minutes?
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersInterview
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersInterview
Jan Wong's first client paid under US$250 a month. How did his firm reach US$1 million in yearly sales?
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.
FoundersInterview
Nobody took Kenneth Tan’s calls after he quit his job. How did he raise US$10 million on Nasdaq?
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersInterview
Allan Ling's US$1,600 fee came with late-night client calls. Now he sells strategy and others do the work.
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersEssay
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.
FoundersEssay
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.