Ep216 - Chris Withers (Founder & CEO - Klikit) on lessons from Uber & Gojek, beating cancer & solving hard problems

Speaker A: I had just come off the back of completing the seed Fundraise in February, March 2023. And at that point I think that many people would be over the moon. Wow, we've been charged up with a ton of cash. Let's go for the problem. It was difficult for me and it was difficult because at that point in time I got diagnosed with cancer. And the hardest thing is a lot of investors out there refuse to back companies with solo founders, probably for this very reason that they want to de risk the business. And I don't have another co founder. It's just me. And so at that point in time, I had to make a very clear cut decision. I had to basically say, do I care enough about this problem and enough about what we want to do and the things we want to solve for to push through and make this happen? Or is it the best outcome, uh, for me to put the tools aside, give back the money and focus on my health, focus on my life?

Speaker B: Hi everyone, I'm your host, Rohit Bhagavai and you are listening to episode 216 of the startup Playbook Podcast, a weekly series where I sit down with successful tech founders, investors and operators to unpack their journey lessons and insights to help current and future entrepreneurs. My guest for this episode is Chris Withers, the founder and CEO of qlikit, a platform that helps merchants to grow revenue, cut costs and streamline operations through a powerful all in one platform. Prior to founding qlikit, Kris was an early team member at Uber in Australia, helped scale their Uber Eats business across Asia, and was a VP of Global Mobility at gojek, giving him a front row seat at some of the most intense and high growth and high performance cultures. I've had the pleasure of backing Chris personally through our investment via Playbook Ventures. And I've seen firsthand how he's overcome the challenges of building in a very complex environment across the Southeast Asian market. But also his grit and resilience in overcoming a personal cancer diagnosis that he received just after raising a round of capital. In this episode, we dive into the high performance cultures at Uber and Go Jek and what Chris took away from each other, why hard problems are worth solving, his battle at Canton, what it taught him about leadership, health and grit, the realities and misconceptions about the Southeast Asian market, and much more. Without further ado, here is my interview with Chris Withers. Hi Chris. Welcome to the Startup Playbook podcast. Glad we can finally make this happen. But for those people who may not be as familiar with you and your background. Do you want to share a little bit about your story and what got you here today?

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So thanks so much for having me, Rohit. Thank you. Where do I begin? Basically, long story short, I'm Chris. I'm the CEO and founder of qlikit. I won't go back too far but, uh, at university, studied economics and law. That was a pretty interesting kind of process. It was at the University of Queensland. I guess the funny story there, and the reason I bring it up, is that during my university days I ended up having to get a job, was cut off from the bank of Mum and Dad and uh, happened to stumble across an ad, I think on Seek and it was looking for a smart, hungry, ambitious intern. I thought, wow, this job's written for me. So I checked all the details. I applied and they told me to turn up to this location in Brisbane in Fortitude Valley. And I came, I was wearing a suit, had all that sort of stuff. It um, was actually a mechanic's yard and There were about 100 cars there all lined up. And the guy asked me like, why are you dressed like that? And I said oh, like I'm here for the job, you know, I'd like read this ad. And he was like, hey listen man, you know, you're just working for the illegal taxi company called Uber. We're inspecting vehicles. And so that was sort of like how I fell into my first kind of, I guess, tech role, uh, by accident. But at the time, you know, like Uber was illegal in Australia. And so for me, I actually got in a lot of Trouble with the T.C. byrne School of Law at UQ. They told me that I'd never pass an ethics committee. And so yeah, ended up having to tell my parents that, you know, five and a half years of study amounted to me becoming a taxi driver. So, you know, had a great time at Uber, uh, worked in the ride sharing business until around 2016. At that point in time, Uber was thinking about food delivery and about Uber Eats. And they had just started a business unit in Singapore. Looking at APAC at the time, no one really wanted to join it. It wasn't seen as a cool business, it wasn't seen as a fun business. And in fact the founder, uh, and CEO at the time, Travis Kalanick, he also thought the same. And so I, I guess again, maybe somewhat contrarianly thought, hey, this is pretty interesting, like food delivery, three sided marketplace. And so yeah, wanted to go out and do food delivery. So worked on Uber Eats, the head of growth for APAC for about two and a half years, and then we sold that business to grab. And so since then, you know, my background in online food delivery, in marketplaces, in building and scaling tech companies. And for me, I guess, like, I really obsess on solving hard problems.

Speaker B: Chris. I mean, there's so many parts of your story that I want to dive into, but maybe it's the starting point. I think sometimes we kind of, like, make decisions that cut off particular parts to open up future doors. Sometimes they're forced upon us, like being told that you probably would not be able to practice law ever again off the back of an internship, that you didn't even know what it was for. Obviously, in hindsight, definitely the right thing kind of put you on this different path. But in that moment, like, what was that like for you?

Speaker A: It's a really interesting thing to, like, think about, right? And people talk about things like butterfly effects or that, you know, windows in sort of time and space open, where things could have just been, like, so radically different. I think for me, it was mostly like, at the end of the day, sure, I, um, might not have been able to be a lawyer, but I probably could have ended up somewhere on Eagle street as a consultant or working an accounting firm. And so for me, it was more like, well, on balance, what does, like, worst look like here? And I think it was really, you know, the assessment of risk. Right. I think that you. You sort of take these calculated risks, and you have to think through calculated risks. And I guess for anyone listening to this today, you know, and you're thinking about starting a company and you're thinking about becoming a founder, uh, arguably that is the single largest superpower. It's the ability to evaluate risks, the right kind of risks. Know that if things, like, do fail, you know, there are other options in front of you. And so I gu. For me, I. I recognize that worse wasn't that bad. And so at that point in time, like, I just took a calculated risk and I said, hey, this Uber thing looks like it's pretty big. It seems to be getting reported by the AFR all the time. It seems like politicians don't like it, therefore, you know, it's taking up mind share. Like, people are talking about this thing. And so I made that jump then. And I made the same one when the food delivery stuff came onto the scene. Right? And so, you know, again, it was a risk internally at Uber. It was sort of like a lot of career capital that I was spending, taking myself out of the ride, sharing business, moving To a totally new region where I knew nobody and knew nothing. But I could see that, like, hey, food delivery is going to be like a big thing, right? In the 70s and 80s it was pizza stores and Chinese takeaway. But I could see that people are using mobile phones more and more because I was using my own phone more and more. Right. And so it was that assessment of risk, like, hey, you know, what does worse look like here? It's not actually that bad. Take the leap and see where it leads.

Speaker B: When you kind of mention about it being in the news and politicians are saying it's bad or whatever, I think, you know, coming from a, uh, Australian context, and I know you grew up in the Gold Coast, I imagine most people's natural response was like, oh, well, that's not going to last. Like, why would I spend more time or kind of double down on this? Which is what you ended up doing. And that, you know, seems to be a pretty common theme in your career of like, you know, you sort of reframing, uh, a lot of the, uh, perspective on that. Where do you think that came from for you?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's something I do think about a lot. I think that my, a bit of my family background is, you know, my parents, I was, I was fortunate. I grew up in a great household. Both of them were doctors, both of them played a very safe path, conventionally safe path. And I think that for, for me, I, I looked at some of this stuff more like, surely there's more to all of this, right? Like, you have to. I talk a lot, but others have talked certainly a lot more than I have about doing what's called like second order thinking. Right. You know, a lot of people out there, we only really think in the first order. We rationalize by analogy. We say, wow, X looks like Y, therefore something's going to happen. But actually like when you do the second order thinking, you look at the sort of flow on effects or consequences of things happening, that's really where there's like a lot of opportunity. Right. And you know, that's also how I built qlikit. Right. For those who are listening, you know, and I probably didn't even talk about QLIKIT yet, but, you know, we're an all in one operating system for merchants across Asia. And part of that involves, you know, the aggregation and consolidation of all these different online sales channels. And for us it was like seeing the writing on the wall that more and more of these channels are going to keep emerging, more of this complexity is going to exist. How are Merchants going to manage this problem. And so that gave us the opportunity to take and look at it.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: So I think for me, you know, it's, it's about really doing the second order thinking. It's about questioning the conventional kind of like wisdom and things that you have and then going from there.

Speaker B: Uh, I've mentioned this story a couple of times on the podcast, but when I decided to leave my engineering job to start a fashion tech company, that is a very fun conversation to have with Indian parents. But thankfully we worked out a agreement, uh, that everyone was happy with, so they were fine. But my friends, uh, held an intervention for me and like, sat me down, like, what are you doing? What do you know about fashion? What if this doesn't work? And to be honest, all very valid points around it. But you know, I think to your point about the second order thinking, the framing for me was always, I'm very conscious that this is most likely not going to work. But if this does work, then I get to spend all of my time doing and building this thing that I want to do. If it doesn't work, I'll just get to do what I'm doing now anyway. And so like, I didn't really see that as a, as a loss. But to your point about second order thinking, I think a lot of the time we sort of think about like in the next year, do I make more money or less money versus actually it's about all of the doors and opportunities that would open up, um, to you that wouldn't be possible otherwise. It's just very hard to kind of think like that in the moment. Is there anything that you use to sort of really focus on the focus on the sort of second order thinking in those sort of moments where it's easy to be more sort of reactionary, sort of look at things more, shorter term?

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. And this isn't going to be like an off the cuff or gut response. It's going to sound like I'm academic. You know, there's a popular book out there, Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman. So very famous economist, Panamanian Sversky, arguably changed the entire field of kind of, you know, behavioral economics. And you know, they talk a lot about this kind of like second order thinking and how this needs to kind of like play out. So I guess, you know, from my kind of perspective, it's like, it's really understanding that if we allow ourselves to be taken over by the first order, uh, allow ourselves to rationalize by analogy, we're cutting out A lot of potential opportunities. Right. And we're cutting ourselves off from a ton of possibilities that may exist. Right. Even if in the short term, some of those may be very painful, the payoff or the gain is large. But humans have this thing, you know, loss aversion theory. Right. We value or we ascribe a higher emotional response to loss. For all those who are listening in the sales field. Right. I'm sure that they know what I'm talking about. If you're an sdi, you're an aa, you're picking up the phone, you're telling a customer, hey, you know, there's this big discount, I've got it approved by the boss, you know, but if you don't sign by the end of the week, like, you're not going to get that. And that drives that kind of response. And so it's this ability to somewhat step out of that kind of thinking and to do that not only at the macro level, but also somewhat, sometimes at the micro level to understand that, hey, what's about to happen is going to be very painful. Right. To the point that you raised about when you were going to run the fashion company and your friends, like, what are you doing? You don't understand it, you don't have a clue. Right.

Speaker B: Sure.

Speaker A: All those rejections come in the short term, but, uh, arguably, you know, if you worked it out, then great, you get to spend all your time doing those things. And I think that that is something that's really important.

Speaker B: Yeah. You know, I imagine being sort of early into Uber and being on the rocket ship that Uber was, would be such an eye opening sort of experience and kind of change your reference point on what is normal and also what's possible. Particular things as well. But what was that experience like for you? And I guess what are some of the things that you took away from your time at Uber, uh, in particular and Grab and just some of the other things that you've done that have shaped how you sort of think about things. Click it.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So I, I think this is a great, uh, talking point to always ask. And again, to those listening to the podcast, if you ever do run into the current Uber employees or ex Uber employees, it's, it's, it's almost always a great conversation starter. Uber was tremendous for me, both professionally and personally. I think that, you know, if you know anything about Uber, um, you'll know. There's a book called Super Pumped. There's also a TV series. I can't read the book. I can't Watch the show. It's all too. A bit real for me, too visceral. But I think people would classify me as being a part of what we used to refer to internally as the Uber 1.0, which was the early days of Uber, and then there was a sort of transition period where it became 2.0. And I'm sure now under Dara's fantastic leadership, it's. It's some iteration of the number higher than 10. But in the early days of Uber, I think that, you know, to your point, the biggest thing was that anything is possible. Like, every problem has a solution. And, you know, people look at Uber and say, like, why was Uber so successful? Like, how did it get into all these markets, how to do all these things? You know, Travis Kalani for flaws that he might have had this tremendous superpower of finding really smart people with high levels of agency and ownership. And I think that was the most remarkable thing about the company. Like, I would look around and I would see people who had traded off careers in investment banking in. In other areas of finance, in law firms, and they were here, like, solving a problem, arguably at that time for an illegal company in Australia in defiance of, like, the law, because they genuinely believed that it was such a transformative kind of company. And so it really, like, I guess, for me, defined that, you know, boundaries that we think exist are often just, like, arbitrary. They're just like these fictions in our mind that we kind of, like, create. And to points that I've talked about on loss aversion theory, we think, like, oh, it's going to be, like, too scary or, like, too bad, or, like, what will people think about me if I do these things? But the reality is, like, again, what does worse look like? Like, if worse doesn't look that bad for you, if the worst scenario is you move back home with mum and dad on the Gold coast, okay, sure. You know, and are there social consequences to that? Maybe. But are those people really your friends? Probably not. So I think that was the single largest thing that I learned at Uber. I think I really learned that boundaries are these sort of arbitrary things and that you can really push towards what Travis affectionately called the red line. Like, everyone has a red line. And the goal of Uber was to. For you to find your red line. I still don't think I found mine, which. Which I love and I obsess over. But that was really, I think, the most magic thing about Uber, or at least early Uber, in terms of what I learned after Uber. That's also really Interesting. So as part of my career, I spent four years at a company called gojek, which is arguably the largest super app in Indonesia. And at Gojek, you know, for those who are listening, uh, to the podcast, they don't know about gojek, what Go Jek is, it was founded by, uh, a guy named Nadeem Makarim, who's an incredible individual and who basically through this platform unleashed the technological revolution of his country in the Internet age. And you know, when I got to Go Jek, it was strange because I'm not Indonesian. And although I was sort of viewed a bit like an Uber mercenary, I think the most fascinating for me, Rohit, was, uh, up until that point I had never seen people so connected to a mission. I think people were at Uber, uh, not because of the mission. Uber's mission of making cars as accessible and easy as running water or, wow, everyone's private driver. That wasn't really the case. Like we were there because Travis Kalanick was a revolutionary firebrand kind of leader and we were inspired by his vision to sort of like take on the world. But at gojek it was so different. Again, Go Jek's sort of company motto is Pastiha Dajalan, which in Bahasa means like there will always be a way. And I remember like one of my first all hands just seeing the level of inspiration that Nadeem had amongst his staff. And again, like he would never refer to them as staff. And so that for me was something also very strange. It was a different kind of culture and it was one that was powered by a love of country and a love of change and progress and that Asia could do things despite the world telling it that it couldn't. And so, you know, I think the thing that I learned at Gojek importantly was one not only how to navigate more across cultures and at a deeper level, but certainly that, you know, if you want to build an enduring company or any company really, you need to think deeply about the culture that you're trying to inspire and the sort of knock on consequences of that culture.

Speaker B: We're going to take a very quick break from this podcast to talk about one of our partners, Vanta. Um, so if you're building a SaaS business and want to quickly unlock growth and build customer trust, one way to do this is by achieving compliance with SOC 2 ISO 27001, CPS 234 essential 8 or other in demand compliance frameworks. However, this process is often time intensive and very costly. Vanta automates up to 90% of compliance, making you audit ready quickly and saving you up to 85% of associated costs. And not only that, Vanta scales with your business with a market leading trust management platform to help you continuously monitor compliance, unify risk management and streamline security reviews. You can join over 8,000 global companies like Atlassian, Dovetail and Indebted that use Vanta to build trust and prove security in real time. As a listener of the show, you can get up to $1,000 US off Vanta when you head over to vanta.comdemo all right, let's get back to the episode. You mentioned this in both stories, but like the sort of ability to attract, you know, really talented people with high levels of agency and ownership, I wonder how much of that is kind of self selecting in some way, especially in Uber's case of people like yourself who would lean into everyone saying this is illegal and all of those sort of things and going like actually that's kind of cool that you're sort of, you know, breaking the rules and breaking the boundaries and sort of really trying to push it in that way. Because by comparison it kind of sounds like you kind of have a similar experience in Gojek, just in a very different culture. But it's still people finding that own sort of self identity and going that's where I choose to work and choose to kind of give my all to.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think that this is a question which in my mind, without derailing our podcast has been something that I think about a lot sort of post pandemic, I think that and certainly differs generationally. So although I might look young or maybe I don't look young, I don't know. I'm a millennial. Right. As are you. People who are in Gen Z think very differently about all this stuff. And I think for millennials, a lot of us do find there to be a lot of identity in work, in our professional calling, in what we do and the career narrative that we tell. And that is why LinkedIn was acquired by Microsoft for all this money. Because, you know, people like to tell that story and like others to engage with that story. But I think what I've noticed sort of post the pandemic is that people are finding a lot less meaning in that and certainly the Gen Z, they do not find very much meaning, if any at all, in that. Right. And so I think for me personally, going back to your question, yeah, it was about these kind of like the breaking of the boundaries and like figuring out different ways the modalities between Uber and gojek of like how to sort of like live that mission and leave those values. But I think the interesting thing at qlikit, you know, we have a very young company in terms of like the average age. And I have a bunch of really, really smart people that work at qlikit. But do all of them find that level or that sort of same, I guess, desire to tell that career narrative or career story? Like, definitely not. And so, you know, you have to kind of think then about motivation in different ways. Less about maybe contributing to the vision, more about how do you contribute to someone as an individual, like personally rather than professionally. I think that's been a challenge to kind of like navigate as a founder.

Speaker B: Yeah. So super interesting. I mean, speaking of your experience with qlikit, now I know bits and pieces of the story obviously through previous conversations, but what was the catalyst and the genesis for uh, qlikit?

Speaker A: Yeah, so it's an interesting one. Basically I, as I mentioned, right, I was in this kind of online marketplace space, right? Uber was a marketplace. It started with peer to peer ride sharing, right? And then I moved into Uber Eats, which is three sided marketplace. You have customers, we call them eaters, and then you have merchants and you have drivers. And the three sided marketplace really fascinated me. It was like probably the thing that I would just like, like I just locked onto the problem. And the reason I locked onto it was because I was seeing the way that these marketplaces, these aggregation marketplaces, were impacting merchants in particular. And I was trying to divine the future of the restaurant industry. Not really sure why I was trying to do that, but it was something I was like obsessing over. And as part of the time when I was working at Uber, I was coming across these things called virtual brands. And basically for those who don't know, like pretty common knowledge now you have these things called ghost kitchens or dark kitchens where people are running these kind of brands through online storefronts, but, but out of just like a single restaurant. And that really interested me. I was really interested because at that Same time in 2018, we were seeing this sort of like great revolution in content, right? So you know, we had vine and things like that, right? Short form video was starting to emerge and people were exploring and experimenting that stuff. And so I kept thinking about these virtual brands and like what the future of arguably commerce was going to look like. And for me, I had hypothesized doing the second order, thinking that basically the way that commerce would trend would be it would have to intersect with Content. And so I needed to figure this out. And so I did what any sane person does, you know, it was during COVID I was still working at Gojek at the time. I asked a bunch of buddies who owned restaurants, hey, can I come in? Can I build virtual brands? Can I test? They promptly told me to get lost. They were like, get out of here, you techno weirdo. You don't understand this. You have never been in a kitchen. Go away. And again, I thought, I'm just obsessing here. I need to figure this out. So I built my own kitchen. And, uh, during COVID I would work at Gojek from 8am, um, Australia time to about 10pm and then from about 10.30pm to 2am, I would run my delivery kitchen. And again, for all the Australian viewers, they know it's the Gold coast. Everything shuts at 6pm but for, uh, international viewers, you know, Australia, typically, our restaurants and staff, they generally like, stop between sort of 6 to 8pm and so I had this, like, fantastic monopoly on the delivery market from about 10.30pm to 2am and so I started, like, launching brands. I launched a fried chicken brand because I knew that the negotiations between Uber Eats and KFC had broken down, so they weren't on the marketplace. So I knew customers would want fried chicken. That was my first. And then I very quickly decided I needed to test a new brand. So I had my friend and I whip up a bunch of brownies, and we said, if you spend 30 bucks on our chicken, we'll give you a free brownie. As part of that, we had to put a price right on Uber Eats. All of a sudden, in 24 hours, we're just getting orders for brownies. So we launched an entirely new virtual brand, just called Brownie Boy, that was just selling the brownies. And I started doing this again and again and again. And I got to about six, six brands in my kitchen. And at that point I was selling on four platforms. So I had 24 devices in my kitchen trying to manage all these different orders. And so I sat back and I thought, wow, I've been part of the problem here. I helped create these marketplaces that clearly were not architected in a way to deal with where I thought the future was going. And so I set out, uh, to solve my own problem, but also the problem that I thought, or I maybe irrationally believe that the future would need, which is, how do you build an operating system that is multi brand, multi location, multi channel, and allows for this intersection, this union of commerce and Content. And so that's really where qlikit came about. And so for uh, those listeners who go and research Qlikit and they look at us and they think, oh, is this just a POS or a payments company or whatever? Absolutely. To many clients that's exactly what we are. But actually deeper we want to be that operating system for content and commerce.

Speaker B: It's such a big vision, you know, especially where you sort of want to head towards the creator market and kind of like seeing where the future is with it. How do you break that down and chop that down? Because I think that's one of the challenges that a lot of startup founders face. And like one, we're very fortunate to have you in our portfolio. We've got another portfolio company that's doing exceedingly well that always kind of pitch this like grand vision that they want to build in. But they're like, we have to go after the low hanging fruit first and you know, make sure we've got the runs on the board that enable us to build into that. But it is really hard. And I think one of the challenges of founders is focus around those elements as well. But what does that sort of look like for you in terms of having this really big audacious vision that you want to build into? But where do you start?

Speaker A: Yeah, so I can't take all the credit here. There is an incredible investor in arguably one of the best in Southeast Asia, Paul Santos at wavemaker and was one of the first checks in the company. And he sat me down and said this creative vision is amazing. And I agree with you. I think the thesis directionally is correct. But is the world ready for this? Are the merchants ready for this? Probably not. So you need to figure out the pipes and rails that will make sense for them, that they will pay for that. You can build a sustainable business on top of that, then enables that vision. And I think that was some of the best advice I ever got along this whole road. Because you know, if I think about Qlikit and the many paths it could have taken, one possible path is I raised all that money, I rented a bunch of kitchens, I tried to pull off these kind of creative brands, similar I guess to MrBeast Burger. And being honest, bro, the whole thing probably would have blown up. And so instead it was like, hey, build the pipes and rails, build the basis or the foundation of that ecosystem to emerge. And then when you have that, you start to assemble brick by brick what this future kind of looks like. And so for us at Qlikit you know, that somewhat I won't say has come true, but is coming true. When we started Qlikit in January 2022, there was a little experiment that was being run by a Chinese company called TikTok Shop. And everyone thought that TikTok Shop was just that a little experiment was never going to amount to anything, was never going to be able to challenge enormous E commerce incumbents like Amazon or arguably in Asia like Lazada or Shopee. And I took a look at it and I said, that aligns a lot with the way that I see the future. And so where are we now? You know, we are an Approved partner of ByteDance and we integrate TikTok Shop orders and we can power instant delivery for restaurants and merchants across the region. And in just a little over three years, TikTok shop is now generating over US$22 billion of GMV. It is now the second largest marketplace in Asia. And so those listening who think, wow, like, I can't even imagine, like what purchasing products on a live stream or a video is like, you know, this is exactly where this stuff is heading. And I remember again, you know, doing the second order thinking, being a bit contrarian, investors would ask me, like, why do you think this is going to be the case? Why, like, on what basis and what evidence? Right. And you know, for me it was like, it's a bit like the Ray Kroc phenomenon, right? Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's? Well, not the founder, but we'll say the visionary behind McDonald's. And you know, he said, if you have a dollar and in marketing, you spend it on the kids because they'll bring mom and dad. And you look at what children are doing these days. They're spending a lot of time on their phones. They, uh, are watching and consuming content. And we are already seeing early signs of this. You know, us as millennials again touching on something. We also just kind of, I guess, brushed over this difference between millennials and Gen Z Millennials. We still enjoy marketplaces based on choice. We want to see all the options laid out in front of us by price, by quantity, whatever. Gen Zs are happy to see it based on content. If someone tells them to buy something and they trust that person, they will make that purchase. And so these are very interesting market dynamics that are shifting in big ways that I guess, like for us, maybe I predicted some of it, but, uh, none of it would have been possible if we didn't build the pipes and rails to begin with. And so, yeah, I think that Was, was definitely like a seminal sort of moment for us to understand how we break that down.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Because to your original question, when you have this amazing big vision and it's inspiring and it's. It's amazing, the reality is, you know, Rome ran on the aqueduct. You know, they have to move the water around. Someone has to be the plumber of Rome. And so, you know, you have to get those pipes, sort it out first before you can build the Coliseum.

Speaker B: Totally. One of the things that really stood out to me, to us at Playbook Ventures, when we sort of backed you, was just your ability to just move at speed with things. And I think there's so many different examples of that. But one thing in particular that sort of stood out to us was just how quickly you ship things. In particular, product wise. And just the very innovative approach that you kind of took to sort of building out your engine as well. Do you, do you want to share a little bit of what that looked like?

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So, you know, my. My engineering team sits in Taka in Bangladesh. As part of that time that I mentioned I spent at Gojek, I was there for about 18 months and I had such an amazing time and opportunity to meet some of the best engineers I'd ever had the pleasure of working with and still to this day have the pleasure of working with. And so, yeah, I created a very interesting kind of hybrid engineering model in partnership with a offshore development company run by two of my very good friends, Shaf and Tarek. They run a company called vivasoft. And we were able to get to this really interesting kind of hybrid model that allowed us to not only sort of like lean in and flex contractors as and where we needed based on the complexity of product, but also just to, I guess, ensure that the quality was where it kind of like needed to be. And so for us, you know, I still take a very active role in product management, uh, every design that goes through the company, every PRD that goes through the company, and arguably every, we call it, tech grooming session where we need to, like, review the backlog. I am there, like, spearheading those discussions with my head of product and my head of engineering. And so, you know, I think the reason for that is that in Asia in particular, you need to have a wide gamut of products and they need to really work. I think that this has been something which I, despite my years of experience in this region, is something I still grossly underestimated relative to my peers in Australia and the United States. And so, you Know, it's something where we really have to not only go deep, but also go wide. And that's really challenging because inevitably stuff has to get traded off. And so you have to get also very good at this kind of like ruthless prioritisation, thinking through what is going to unlock the immediate revenue opportunity, but at the same time time what could potentially give you that explosive kind of J curve that you want.

Speaker B: Sender is the OG startup accounting firm in Australia catering to all stages of your business life. If you're busy running a business, you don't always have the time to do your own books and forecasts and instead you can fully outsource your finance function so that you have the time and resources back to do what you do best, which is growing your business. They have a dedicated focus on founders, funds and startups and have an experienced team that can help you with everything from managing your tax to balancing your books to even helping with your exit strategy. I trust and use them with all of my businesses and can't recommend them highly enough. To find out more or to speak to Gareth and the team, head over to sennder.com. all right, let's get back to this episode. I know through like multiple conversations we've had, we've just had Ben Dunphy, um, recently on the podcast as well. And one of the things that we spoke about was just the challenges of trying to operate a across the Southeast Asian market and just the sheer complexity of uh, all of it. You mentioned a little bit earlier about taking on hard problems and this is a extremely hard problem that you decided to take on. First of all, why, why take the approach of kind of doing sort of multi region within this market and yeah, I guess what are your sort of lessons in terms of being able to execute that in the right way?

Speaker A: Yeah. So this is, this is a topic I love to talk about and I'm sure we could have an entire series based on it. So why take the problem? I think it is a problem that, uh, from a domain perspective, I think I knew better than, and I know better than anybody else in the region. So for those who are investors listening to this podcast and you're out there looking for founders and you're looking to back people, you need to find someone or some team that has this just like unfair advantage or edge. And I think that I was able to acquire a lot of that thanks to my time as the head of growth for Uber Eats in apac. I think then, um, to the sort of second part of that question, like, why take the Problem. I think that Asia is just such a fantastic, vibrant region. It is the fastest growing by middle class in the world. You have big chunks of disposable income now, like moving through the markets and there is just so much amazing opportunity here. But the reality is it's locked behind huge steel bulletproof doors. And so, you know, the idea that I get to try and be the individual to sort of lock pick that and work out how to make that opportunity work, I think was too attractive and too exciting for me because I love doing things that other people say are impossible. Right back to the boundaries question of Uber. And you know, there are a lot of Australian investors in particular, we definitely don't need to name them, who told me that at the current price point and the markets I serve, uh, building a SaaS business is totally impossible. Like it's actually impossible and it would never work. And I refuse to believe that.

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker A: And although all of the evidence suggests that we have no Pan Asia SaaS unicorn, and we have very few exits in this region, it does not change the immutable fact that there are incredibly smart people in this region and that we should still bet very big on Asia. And the reason for that and the reason why I went multi region is because if we look at conventional Silicon Valley wisdom, the Paul Graham gospel, it says, do one thing, do it very specifically and do it well. And that won't work in Asia at all. In fact, you have to do the exact opposite, which is counterintuitive. It leads you to spend more money than you ordinarily would spend. It leads you to build products that you ordinarily wouldn't build. But the reason I think that you have to do it is because, right, you have to build into the DNA of your company incredibly early that you can go multi market. And if you can't figure that out within the first sort of six months after sort of like leaving your home company country, then inevitably you'll be stuck as a domestic zombie forever. And so that was, that was a concerted decision that I made at qlikit. I said, we will go into these countries, we will bend and break and reshape not only our country teams, but our very product, like every fiber of our being, to make it work in the hardest markets, with the hardest languages and arguably currency decimal systems in the world. Because if we can do that and we can make a profitable business, what's stopping us in America, in Australia, in Europe, in Latin America, the Middle east, everywhere else. And it affords us this fantastic walled garden opportunity to then start moving in these other markets and playing unfair games. US founders, Australian founders, arguably, sometimes get this wonderful opportunity that there is a high willingness to pay and people willing to give you a go. I don't have those opportunities. I have the exact opposite. I have. Nobody wants to pay, nobody wants to give me opportunities. And so if I can make the impossible set of circumstances possible, then what I can do in these other countries is going to be huge. So that's why I kind of did that. But, uh, I guess, like, the resounding point is that when you are dealing with a very complicated market and a very complicated problem, there are a lot of things that sort of like, need to go in your favor and not all of them will. Right. And I've learned a ton of lessons on the journey.

Speaker B: You know, one of the things that, that really sort of drew us to investing in qlikit was obviously the big sort of vision and the market opportunity ahead. But a large part of it is backing the founders. And like you said, not only the. You know, I don't think there was anyone better placed to go after this than you, given your sort of track record. But. But I think, as people can tell, listening to this episode, your kind of like sheer will and determination of just kind of getting it, just solving these hard problems is incredible. One thing that you said in terms of, like, you know, what's gonna stop you from doing that is. I know. I still remember the phone call that we had when you told me that you got diagnosed with cancer. And yeah, just a. First of all, like, seeing how you've kind of like, handled that has been incredible to see. But again, for the listeners that are listening to this, what was that like for you in trying to go a million miles an hour with this while, you know, juggling your own health and, uh, everything going on with that?

Speaker A: Yeah. So more than happy to answer this question, I think before I kind of like dive into details, I definitely want to let all the listeners know this is just my personal response to the set of circumstances. I think that there are a lot of people out there that will extol this advice, like, be a hero and do this and do that. But the reality is, like, until you're faced with it yourself, you know, like, you, you have to decide, like, what your reaction is going to be. And so mine was an interesting one. You know, I had just come off the back of completing the seed fundraise in sort of February, March 2023. And at that point, you know, a lot of founders out there they love celebrating funding as a milestone. It's not a milestone, it's an obligation. But anyway, beside the point, I think that many people would be, you know, over the moon. Wow, we've been charged up with a ton of cash. Let's go for the problem. It was difficult for me, and it was difficult because at that point in time I got diagnosed with cancer. And the hardest thing is a lot of investors out there refuse to back companies with solo founders, probably for this very reason that they want to de risk the business. And you know, I don't have another co founder. It's just me. And so at that point in time, I had to make a very kind of clear cut decision, right? I had to basically say, do I care enough about this problem and enough about what we want to do, um, and um, the things we want to solve for, to push through and make this happen, or is it the best outcome for me to put the tools aside, give back the money and I guess focus on my health, focus on my life. And I think for me, you know, like, and I've talked about this with several other kind of folks, I have this, like, you know, arguably my worst streak, uh, but maybe some would consider a blessing in disguise, is like my total and utter self delusion. You know, for me, I was just like, so convinced that this was just like some test from the universe and that I needed to overcome this challenge and prove that I was ready and, and that the company was ready for the next steps. And that's probably me over, rationalizing, overfitting all of these different things that you do when you're sort of staring at your own mortality. But I guess for a guy like me with hyperactive imagination in mind, and obviously, you know, someone who wants to build and create and do things, I could think of nothing worse than sort of having to give back the money and sitting in a chemotherapy ward and wondering, well, what if? And so when, obviously consulting with the oncology team and the doctors and everything and evaluating the set of circumstances, you know, I was fortunate that the cancer that I had, despite it being an unfortunate set of circumstances, was one that was treatable and one that had good odds. And although the process was going to be miserable and it was going to be hard, that was mostly just on my body. But, you know, the body follows the mind. And so for me it was like, I'll push through this. And it's not like I can, it's like, I can, I will, I must. And that was really what it was about for me.

Speaker B: I Know that you're extremely stoic about this and, you know, have that kind of, like, bigger mission. Ah. In mind and kind of, like, helps maybe keep that perspective. And in some ways, maybe having something that you kind of believe so staunchly in helps you, like you said, like, reconcile the set of circumstances around that. What happened? Because, like, I remember we had you at the launch for Gala. You were on our table, and I, like, was sitting next to you, and we were talking about all of this stuff, and I was like, uh, oh, like, what are you doing? You're kind of heading back. You're like, I've got a board meeting that I need to get to. How, if anything, has kind of like, has your perspective shifted at all after, uh, obviously going through the diagnosis and chemo and just like you said, having to face your own mortality. Has anything changed for you in your perspective at all, or is everything kind of business as usual? This is just like a bump in the road.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I think that for me, the way I'll answer this question is there's a very famous Zen Cohen that says every man realizes he has two lives. His second begins when he realizes he has one. And so I think that something that I'll share, obviously, with your listeners in the podcast is that my father died of cancer as well. And so he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the same time that the Uber Grab merger kind of of kicked off. And so during that time, I recall pancreatic is obviously a much worse diagnosis than what I had. And they gave him six months, and he managed to suck up chemotherapy for about three years. And so I look back on that experience and also thought, well, you know, he was a sucker for punishment, and I've decided to be a solo founder, uh, building a SaaS business in Asia. I must also be a sucker for punishment. And so, in terms of, like, did those things change my perspective, in particular, how and what I saw with him, the fact he ended up dying and that was the sort of consequence of. Of his cancer. Uh, but mine didn't have to be. I think, provided, like, a very interesting mirror for me to kind of like, gaze into. And I think for me, it was more like, for those listening on the podcast, I think you need to always answer this sort of fundamental truth of about yourself, about what makes you happy. And I probably sound like I'm, like, proselytizing or like that I'm a priest or something. And I'm not suggesting for a second that people need to get religious, but I do think that people need to examine what are the fundamental drivers that make you a who you are and be motivated to do anything at all. And for many people, maybe some who are listening, they might just be happy working the kind of nine to five and having one or two holidays a year and watching the latest series on Netflix and all of those different things. And if they are content in that happiness and they have examined that, then that is fantastic. But I've recognized that there are, um, way too many screws loose in my head for that to be the case. For me and for me to be happy, for me to be self actualized, I need to think that there is something that I have built or created with my, my own hands or my own effort that even at the least helped someone or something. And so that in and of itself was a strong enough driver for me to look at my illness at the time and say I need to keep going. Because the sort of thought of giving up, there would have been far more misery. Even though on paper people would have said like, oh, but you know, all the pressure would have been off you and you could have just taken the time to get well. I think that the thing that they're missing is that like, for me, that's my definition of unwell. Not having something to work on, not having this purpose, not having this like drive. And so if anything, in conjunction with my sort of self delusion, it just galvanized efforts even more that I needed to overcome this, that I needed to prove that, that I was still the right guy to tackle the problem and do the thing. But again, I want to stress for everyone listening like that is and doesn't need to be the case for you or anyone else. This was just a personal battle that I decided I chose with myself and that like, I was committed to see it through.

Speaker B: We're going to take a very quick break from this podcast to talk about something really important and meaningful and probably something that a lot of you listening can relate to. For the last few years, I've had a front row seat into how, how challenging and difficult it can be to build something meaningful. The late nights, the constant pressure, the feeling that no matter how well you're doing, there's always more to do and that whatever you're doing is never enough. For a long time I thought that was just a trade off. To be successful in business, everything else, your health, your fitness, your relationships had to take a backseat. But what if that wasn't true? As an investor, I know that the most successful and impactful businesses are built over decades, not over months. But so often we approach life at our businesses as if we're running a 100 meter sprint rather than the marathon that we're truly running. These are the questions and insights that led me to launching the Como Club, the world's first human accelerator. Earlier this year. We brought together 26 incredible people, from founders, investors, professional athletes, to senior executives at some of the largest companies. It's an eight week program designed for high performers to implement systems for long term success in their business in all areas of their life, from fitness to mental health, relationships and leadership, all within a trusted and high caliber community that just gets it. So if you've been doing well but know there's another level, or if you've been running hard and want to recalibrate, I'd love for you to check it out. Cohort 2 kicks off in August and applications are now open. You can find out more details or apply at the Komoclub. That's T H E K-O-M M-O-C-L-U-B.com all right, let's get back to this episode. It's interesting because like I like this is a large part of the catalyst, the Como Club. Now for me personally and for me it was probably slightly different to you and obviously a very different catalyst around that. But for me it was kind of realizing that I felt like because of all of the work that had happened before, I had to make the most of every single opportunity that came up. So I had to say yes to everything. I had to do a million different things. I had to go and look after like go and look for what is the biggest thing that I can build. Like what is the big unicorn startup that I need to build as much part of that. And I sort of realized that like actually those are not things that make me happy. I was doing it because I felt like I should. I was doing this for other people versus what it is that was actually sort of aligned to me. And I think for both of us, like for me as well, a big part of that driver is like how do I impact the world or people around me in a really positive way? And I realized the way that I was doing that wasn't right for me. And so I needed to find a different way of doing that. But I love the way that you frame this as well. It's like, you know, it's, it's. Everyone just needs to find that out for the themselves and just needs to be more intentional. I think the issue is that More. A lot of the time we make very, very important decisions in a very unintentional way and that are often not aligned to things. We just kind of are running the treadmill without stopping going. Is this actually even what I, what I want or should be doing?

Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. And I think that Jeff Bezos, again pulling out of the cauldron of startup wisdom, talks about type one and type two decisions, right? Like the ability that things are, are reversible. Sure. There are some things in your life, if you do it, if you cut off your arm, you suddenly don't have an arm, and that's like, currently not reversible unless you get to A and A within a certain amount of time. But for most things, they're reversible. Right. You can go back to the way that things were. And I think that it's, it's understanding that intentionality and understanding how to make that process of exploration part of your life. Um, just last week or two weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to speak here at Google Apac to a fantastic group of marketers. And, you know, they're obviously looking at this space and how it's evolving and AI and all these different tools. And I kind of said to all of them, you know, as if they were sort of hoping that I was going to be some font of wisdom for them in their career, I kind of just said, hey, you know, ask yourself that question, like, what do you want to be doing? And do you find meaning in that? Uh, and if you don't, then make the process of exploration intentional. Don't make it like, don't think it's going to be serendipitous. You know, it's a little bit, unfortunately, to pull against this, but online dating, or dating generally for many people, they kind of take this very laissez faire approach to this sort of stuff. And the reality is, you know, like, it's one of these things that you will inevitably get out what you put in.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: If you make it intentional and you build a plan around that sort of stuff, generally speaking, the outcomes are, uh, kind of in your favor. Right. And so I think more people should do that and should be, again, linking to stuff that we were talking about earlier, less afraid of the risk that comes with those things. Um, you know, especially people that are sitting in larger kind of corporates, in big corporates, although arguably the space is changing fast with AI now. Maybe you ask for that sabbatical for two or three months and start a YouTube channel, or maybe you join culinary Class and see what it's like to be a chef. Right. And make active decisions in your favor for figuring that out.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Uh, it doesn't necessarily. None of it's going to be the quote unquote right decision until you find that thing. But as long as there are active steps being taken, then I think you're on the right path.

Speaker B: Yeah, I love what you, how you framed it around exploration because even your journey to starting qlikit sort of started with you still having the full time job and working what most people would assume are ridiculous hours. That would be a combination of two companies working two jobs at once and still making time to explore around all of this stuff. Because I think that um, it's very easy to romanticize or fantasize about a particular decision, but it's not until you actually do it that you go, oh shit, is this actually, this is actually so much more difficult and not what I want to do. Or it's the opposite. And you're like, I cannot wait to, you know, spend time kind of working on this. And if it was the other way around, it wouldn't be the case. But building that up and having that sort of exploration stuff is really important. I think the bigger you, uh, know, I think one of the challenges around all of this stuff in general is I think there are ah, very extreme views one way or another based on people's personal experiences. And like, even for me, I remember when I was younger, I just couldn't imagine why everyone didn't start a business. I was like, you get to grow, you get to create all these opportunities from scratch. You get to do all of this, like, why would everyone not do this? Like, everyone must be miserable, they're not doing this. And then it took me a while to realize that like actually no, just like you, I have a few screws loose and I can't help myself. But this is the right thing for me. It doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing for everyone. And so part of that is, I think one of the challenges is a lot of the messaging that we kind of hear and things that we, we feel like we should do because that's what someone else is doing or someone, people, uh, are talking, ah, about doing particular things might be great for them, but may not necessarily be the right thing for you. And so exploring and trying things for yourself just gives you a lot more of an understanding, uh, around that for yourself versus trying to chase after things, uh, just for the sake of chasing after them.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Right. And I'VE said this before on other kind of segments.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You have to be in love with it, not the idea of it. If it's the latter, that that path just like, leads to misery. But if you're in love with it, then that's it. It's the journey is the thing that you obsess over. Right.

Speaker B: I know one thing that you're extremely passionate about is this particular market and this region. And, you know, I think that they've, like you were telling me about, uh, a recent situation with a company called E Fishery that's, you know, unfortunately has made things even more difficult in this market. Do you want to share, Abe? Do you want to share a little bit about what kind of happened with that so our, uh, listeners have some context in case that they don't already know. And what does that meant for a market like, Like Asia?

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So for the listeners on the podcast, we, we had a really unfortunate set of circumstances emerge where a company called E Fishery in the agricultural tech space and predominantly building automated fish feeders, ended up being exposed for fraud, serious amounts of fraud. And by no means am I trying to mitigate or sort of minimize that level of fraud that occurred. But, you know, if you, if you look at the details and if you look at the story from Gibran, who's the founder, uh, I want to assume positive intent and just say that he and some of his management team were caught up in a cycle that they inevitably just got to a point where they couldn't stop. And so as a result of that fraud to the tune of several hundred million dollars, I think that there are a lot of investors and a lot of people generally globally, that have written Asia off as a region to build a business, especially businesses that, uh, focus at least predominantly or in the first instance on Asia. I think that there are definitely businesses getting built out here that are shipping and selling software to Americans or to Europeans or even to probably Australians. But, uh, businesses that are in Asia, for Asia, it's become very, very tough. And that makes me very sad. It makes me very sad because this region is full of very, very smart talent, especially young talent that we need to inspire to build the next generation of those businesses. Or if they can't build it, they at least try. And I think that what we are seeing at the moment is this sort of wide aggregation of capital being spent on startups that are solving sometimes not even that big of a problem for a wealthy market. And that upsets me. And that is a natural consequence of capitalism. It's why you get lots of competitors, it's why you get a lot of email AI companies, it's why you get all of these different things. But the reality is there are so many more problems to solve out there. And for every one of those founders that potentially like is in this region, you know, uh, engineering graduate in the Philippines, you know, who could be building an amazing tech company, solving real problems in his home country, the sort of warped perverse incentive structure tells him to build an AI chatbot bought for American auto dealerships. And that is the thing that I get upset over because I genuinely believe that there is fantastic talent in this region and that there is a big story here, uh, that needs to unfold. It's in the process of unfolding and sure there's going to be some bad chapters like one we just had, but fundamentally don't write off Asia. I think that there is a lot of people here and a lot of progress to be made. But it's, it's definitely like within our reach. And so, you know, I think for all the listeners out there, should one sort of bad egg spoil the bunch? I hope not. You know, maybe the evidence suggests otherwise. We'll, we'll have to see. But it has been difficult and it will continue to be difficult because of these problems.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, what's next for qlikit?

Speaker A: In terms of what's next for qlikit, I think for us, you know, I kind of mentioned this idea that we've gone multi region and Asia is by and large, uh, our single largest focus. What comes next is arguably if we can win Asia, we'll win the world. And I think that having worked in these markets, having solved problems that Australian or American startups don't even need to solve until they're at the series 6C or D, you know, it's been an entirely transformative experience both for me as a founder, uh, but arguably all of the fantastic teammates that I have at qlikit. And this experience has demonstrated that even, you know, as a seed company, you know, we can operate in seven different markets with multiple payment gateways and integrations and logistics players and platforms. And again, in I guess defiance of those VCs, build a business that we believe can work. And so that's what I'm hoping. I will be striving for that and I will keep on forging along that path and we'll just see where things end up. But at the end of the day, these are calculated risks and I think the odds are going to be in our favor.

Speaker B: Chris, absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. And like I said, it's been absolutely remarkable watching what you've kind of built as a solo founder, uh, with the challenges, both internal and external, that you've kind of faced. Like I mentioned one of the posts about us doing an event together. Like, you know, one of the greatest founders that I know and, you know, extremely grateful to be supporting you on your journey as well. But Chris, for, uh, anyone that wants to find out more, say hello, get in touch. What's the best way for them m to do that?

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So anyone that wants to get in touch, ask questions, know more, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place for it. And yeah, I mean, I'd love to hear from some of the listeners and if I can shed light on anything for them, whether it be Asia, whether it be Uber, whether it be anything at all, I'd be more than happy.

Speaker B: You're a legend. I'll make sure those links are in the show notes. Chris, once again, thanks for coming on the show, mate.

Speaker A: Amazing. Thanks, Rohit.

Speaker B: Cheers. Thanks for listening to episode 216 of the Startup Playbook podcast. As always, full show notes from this episode will be available at startupplaybook.co. i'll be back next week with another episode, but in the meantime, if you enjoyed this interview, please don't forget to, like, share and subscribe. As always, thank you for tuning in and I'll see you next week.