In 2016 Kenneth Tan began following a roadshow around Singapore because the people running it had stopped replying to him.
The roadshow belonged to Mediapreneur, Mediacorp’s startup programme. Tan had met one of its representatives at Tech in Asia that year, applied, and then heard nothing back, lost among the other applications.
He turned up at the next stop on the tour. Then the one after that.
“I never gave up and basically followed the programme promotional tour everywhere,” he says. Francis Yeoh, then the programme’s curator, gave in and asked him to present to the committee.
He got in. Mediacorp put in cash, media credits and mentoring, and by Tan’s account the programme opened the angle for a US$1.5 million seed round.
Nine years on, that company is BeLive Holdings, listed on the Nasdaq Capital Market under BLIV, selling white-label live-video and live-commerce infrastructure to retailers and marketplaces.
The account turns on what Tan says he was before any of it worked.
He had been a director of product at DeNA, the Tokyo-listed gaming and social company. People came to him there, he says, because he sat on the buy side, investing in projects and buying products to publish across the network.
Out on his own, he was a salesman, and the calls went unanswered.
Asked what that did to his sense of himself, he offered a diagnosis.
It forced me to realize that I was immature, disconnected from reality as a corporate worker, incredibly good at corporate navigation but bad at creating real value.
“It forced me to realize that I was immature, disconnected from reality as a corporate worker, incredibly good at corporate navigation but bad at creating real value.”
The line reads as a confession. It works as a decision rule, and it governs every large call he describes since.
The consumer platform reached about a million users and never cleared its own costs. “Pure consumer was not feasible, the unit economics did not work. We were paying the streamers more than what we were earning.”
A message on LinkedIn from Rakuten, proposing what became Rakuten Live, gave him somewhere to go. The rebuild into a B2B supplier took six months.
Nobody was fired for it. “We didn’t let go of anyone, we repositioned everybody.”
Asked what he had been afraid of losing, he answered with arithmetic.
He turned down a takeover approach from what he describes as a large Chinese technology company on the same test. Asked what he had been afraid of losing, he answered with arithmetic: “The economics didn’t make sense.”
The instrument is narrow, and it has a blind spot.
Twice he called BeLive’s streaming stack among the best in the world, a claim he attached no test to. When the questions moved to the consumer platform’s monthly revenue and its take rate, he skipped them.
The public record fills part of that gap from a later period. BeLive reported about US$2 million of revenue for the year to December 2023, against a valuation near US$56 million at the midpoint of the range it first indicated.
BeLive priced at US$4 a share in April 2025 and raised roughly US$10 million. It has traded under the offer price since, at US$2.38 in mid-July 2026.
Tan says the listing was for reputation and access to public capital, and that what founders get wrong is “that going public is the end; you sell out and live happily ever after.”
He has the scrutiny he asked for. The answer he skipped in conversation is the kind a listed company files rather than offers, and a filing does not care whether the arithmetic still flatters.1
Footnotes
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Tan gave this interview to CÈ’s AI interviewer on 27 July 2026, by text. Quotes lightly normalised for print, wording untouched, transcripts on file. He declined one question, on the consumer platform’s monthly revenue and take rate, and gave no reason for declining. ↩