The Venture

Jonathan Sudharta, the co-founder and CEO of Indonesian telemedicine company, Halodoc, is making healthcare more accessible in the world’s fourth-largest country.   When Jonathan started his career as a pharmaceutical sales rep, he spent a lot of time in waiting rooms, watching patients wait—often for hours—just to see a doctor. He recognized an opportunity to address a lack...

The leader behind one of Turkey’s top banking apps shares how an initiative from the country’s largest bank disrupted a crowded fintech market. With over 600 fintech competitors, İşbank’s Nays app carved its own path by delivering a gamified user experience that attracted 1 million users in its pilot and 3 million in just 12 months. Ceyda Yalçın, leader of the Nays app, joins McKinsey’s Andrew Rot...

Dan Vahdat, the founder and CEO of Huma, is on a mission to change how the healthcare industry approaches research, treatment, and care. Growing up in a family of doctors, Dan saw how 24/7 treatment of patients often deteriorates as soon as they leave the hospital – which is typically when complications occur. To fix this, he started Huma in 2011, a London-based company focused on making healthcar...

The CEO of a cutting-edge fintech explain how his start-up offers investment services once reserved for the ultra-wealthy to successful professionals. As the eight cofounders of Singapore-based Arta Finance got to know one other during their years together at Google, they recognized a massive market gap for investment services aimed people like themselves: successful professionals who were doing w...

The global coleader of Leap by McKinsey discusses the firm’s latest global survey, which finds that business leaders and investors are bullish on building new businesses. Despite ongoing economic uncertainty, businesses are increasingly enthusiastic about creating new ventures, according to McKinsey’s latest global survey on new-business building. More than 50 percent of surveyed CEOs cited new-bu...

The CEO of a leading Southeast Asian steel distributor explains why he decided to launch a venture designed to reuse steel, reduce carbon emissions, and disrupt his core business. If the many infrastructure projects across Southeast Asia have a common denominator, it’s steel. And in just 12 years, Singapore-based Mlion has become the region’s largest supplier of steel material for the construction...

The founding partner of a Southeast Asian VC fund explains his company’s global ambitions to create economic opportunity, promote sustainability, and reduce carbon emissions. Human activity began altering the climate in the mid-19th century, when the industrial revolution began unleashing unprecedented amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. But an innovative new VC climate tech venture builder is...

Cardiovascular disease remains the number one killer in every developed country, but only one in ten US patients with severe heart ailments received treatment in 2022. Egnite, a healthcare start-up, has ambitious plans to dramatically improve treatment of heart disease by harnessing the power of AI and big data to identify patients who fell through the cracks after being diagnosed. Egnite was spun...

In this episode of The Venture, we share a conversation with Thomas Gros, CEO and cofounder of circulee, a Berlin-based distributor of pre-owned digital hardware. The German start-up provides smaller businesses with a green and cost-effective alternative to new IT devices, offering them professionally tested and warrantied hardware previously leased by large corporates. Gros sat down with McKinsey...

In this episode of The Venture, we share a conversation with Brian Clark, chief product officer of Ascend Bit, a Bangkok start-up recently spun off from the Ascend Group, itself a part of Thailand’s C.P. Group.  Ascend Bit’s mandate is to leverage blockchain solutions on behalf of the group, focusing on applications for businesses and tokenization for consumers. Current efforts focus on productizi...

In this episode of The Venture, we share a conversation with Tirayu Songvetkasem, also known as Mac. He is the head of Maknet and chief digital officer of Siam Makro, the Thai branch of a multinational serving the hotel, restaurant, café and catering sector (HoReCa). Makro recently leveraged the mothership's market experience and network of partners to launch Maknet, an online marketplace that’s a...

In this episode of The Venture, we share a conversation with Oi-Yee Choo, CEO of ADDX, a full-service capital markets platform based in Singapore. The fintech start-up uses blockchain and smart contract technology to provide access to a range of securities previously unavailable to mass affluent investors. And in less than three years, ADDX’s innovative approach has managed to attract funding from...

In this episode of The Venture , we share a conversation with Moritz Hartmann, global head of Roche Information Solutions for Roche Diagnostics, one of the Swiss multinational’s two divisions. Adapting to constant technological change and disrupting via science has fueled the 125-year-old company’s longevity, which now uses digital tools and data science to provide insights, drive outcomes, and de...

Read more >    Listen to the podcast (duration: 33:25) >  In this episode of The Venture, Andrew Roth shares a conversation with Andre Menezes, cofounder and CEO of Next Gen Foods, a Singapore-based, food tech start-up. Its first product, TiNDLE, a plant-based chicken, is already making waves with chefs and diners in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Amsterdam. It recently debuted in the US, and hel...

Read more >    Listen to the podcast (duration: 38:39) >  In this episode of The Venture, Andrew Roth shares a conversation with Samuel Rhee, Chairman, Chief Investment Officer, and cofounder of Endowus, a Singapore-based financial technology company that transformed the city-state’s cumbersome social security investment process into a fully digital experience. It’s now the only investment p...

Read more >    Listen to the podcast (duration: 35:57) >  In this episode of The Venture, Andrew Roth shares a conversation with Josh Tetrick, CEO and cofounder of Eat Just, a California-based company that makes eggs from plants and produces meat from animal cells. The company was founded in 2011, and has sold the equivalent of more than 200 million eggs via JUST Egg, a plant- based egg made...

Read more >    Listen to the podcast (duration: 38:18) >  In this episode of The Venture, Andrew Roth shares a conversation with Hugh Yao, CEO and founder of LingoAce, a Singapore-based online language learning service aimed at children. Hugh founded the company in 2017, and after a couple years of deliberately glacial growth, the business exploded during the pandemic, growing some 4,000 per...

Read more >    Listen to the podcast (duration: 26:17) >  In this episode of The Venture, Andrew Roth shares a conversation with Edward Ying, former director of planning and transformation at Indonesian telco Telkomsel, and Trio Lumbantoruan, vice president of by. U, the carrier’s fully digital start-up. Telkomsel is Southeast Asia’s largest wireless provider, with more than 170 million subs...

Read more >    Listen to the podcast (duration: 39:31) >  In this episode of The Venture, Andrew Roth shares a conversation with Jakob Angele, CEO of Foodpanda APAC, part of Delivery Hero’s global network of food-delivery services. Angele talks about building a business based on delivering a restaurant meal to someone’s home, which at the time was something new to consumers and restaurants a...

Read more >    Listen to the podcast (duration: 39:08) >  In this episode of The Venture, Andrew Roth shares a conversation with Alvin Cai, vice president of New Ventures, the corporate business-building arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board. Cai talks about his group’s new Corporate Venture Launchpad, a S$10 million pilot program designed to help corporates build Singapore- based st...

Read more >    Listen to the podcast (duration: 34:42) >  In this episode of The Venture, we discuss the importance of a programmatic approach to acquiring and scaling brands, and the multiple advantages of business-building on the world’s largest e- commerce platform–Amazon. JJ Chai, CEO and cofounder of Rainforest, a Singapore-based, e-commerce brand aggregator, shares how his previous sta...

Read more >    Listen to the podcast (duration: 45:19) >  In this episode of The Venture, we discuss the importance of establishing dominance in the core business before branching out, key success factors for a company to win in new marketplaces, and the need to constantly reexamine your key differentiator. Lai Chang Wen, CEO and cofounder of Ninja Van, a Singapore-based express delivery com...

Read more >    Listen to the podcast (duration: 40:41) >  In this episode of The Venture, we discuss the challenge of launching a traditional utility player on a path of innovation and how an organization can build sustainability into its strategy, promote a culture of innovation within the organization, and reinvent its business for the future. Austin Bryan, senior director of innovation fo...

In this episode of The Venture , we discuss the challenge of entering a highly competitive Chinese market without a local partner, the importance of being data driven to understand the customer, and how to embrace a culture of failing and learning in order to scale. Jesper Jos Olsson, group CEO and founding partner of White Peak Real Estate, explains the company's unshakeable commitment to green a...

Read more >    Listen to the podcast (duration: 21:53) >  In this episode of The Venture, we discuss how to introduce a proven business model in different markets, localize that model for the new region, and fertilize it to become the market leader. Joel Leong, CEO and cofounder of ShopBack, explains how the company positioned itself as a pre-shopping destination to cement user loyalty, how...