Analyse Podcast

Fresh out of the studio and we hit our 500th episode milestone, guest host Yana Fry from Yana TV turns the tables on Bernard Leong, CEO of Dorje AI and host of Analyse Asia, in a special ask-me-anything format. We start with Bernard's journey from finding his first guest to navigating 11 years of podcasting, revealing his 12-word life philosophy: "Learn from everyone, follow no one, obser...

Fresh out of the studio, Ling Hai, President of Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, and Africa at MasterCard, joins us to explore how payment networks are evolving to embrace stable coins, AI agents, and the future of digital commerce across diverse global markets. He shares his career journey from management consulting to retail banking and eventually to MasterCard. Ling Hai shares that MasterCard...

Fresh out of the studio, Yuying Deng, Co-founder and CEO of Esevel, shares her transformative journey from corporate lawyer to healthcare operator to tech entrepreneur with our guest host Yana Fry from Yana TV. Yuying discusses how the pandemic's sudden shift to remote work in April 2020 revealed critical gaps in IT infrastructure for distributed teams, inspiring her to launch Esevel—a platfor...

"In the context of where Confluent can play a critical part, it's also the interoperable integration with all the respective AI ecosystems. If you think about what AI is doing, it's working across microservices, working across data lakehouses, databases - could be a different endpoint service. Bringing all that together in a secure and consistent manner, constantly serving that information, is whe...

“I think this is a sort of coming-of-age moment. When I say coming of age, I mean collectively for Chinese entrepreneurs. Many of these founders are my age, or even younger, and I’ve spoken with some of them. I can really relate to why they want to build businesses that target the global market instead of just China. In the past, you could build a company in China first and then think about expand...

"85% of AI use cases are being evaluated by the engineer who built it saying, 'yep, seemed to work pretty well.' If you're gonna build a system that's going to be critical to the business, that's going to be important that it gets it right, then you can't do that without evaluations." - Craig Wiley Fresh out of the studio, Craig Wiley, Senior Director of Product Management at Databricks who leads...

"I think the biggest trap to potentially fall into is, "Hey, it's moving so fast, so much is changing. Let's just wait it out." Completely the wrong approach. You just gotta get started." Nick Eayrs from Databricks "As tech people within the shipping industry, how do we explain, how do we make it accessible to all our users? So that's where we came up with the idea of a data supermarket, with in m...

"We took a longer time, there was a bit of roundabout, but the fact that we actually made like two or three times on whatever investment amount we did in the beginning - that for me was a very pivotal moment. Just because we didn't give up. The line between success and failure is so thin. So the impact of being a VC space is that you really can influence the technology founders that you back." - B...

Reuniting after more than a decade since their days in This Week in Asia Podcast from 2009, Michael Smith Jr., co-host of The Generalist podcast, and Daniel Cerventus Lim, semi-retired entrepreneur and community builder in Malaysia, join us for a candid assessment of Southeast Asia's tech ecosystem evolution. In this raw conversation, Michael offers his unflinching perspective on what he calls the...

"The way that institutions emerge and entrench themselves and become a part of the functioning of an economy and society is because they solve some problems. So they're usually a non-market solution toward solving some problem that the economy, that the market system couldn't necessarily solve. Of course the most prominent example of an institution that solves an. Market problem in the non-market...

"APAC represents 40% of global GDP. So you can see that there's huge opportunity in a very, very diverse region. The needs of Japan are different to the needs of China. India is exploding with SaaS, software, AI. Australia one of our larger markets, again, very different. And so Southeast Asia, the complexities of Asia make it a joy to work in." - Paul Harapin Fresh out of the studio, Paul Harapin...

"AI is in the minds of a lot of people right now and naturally with such big technological shift, you find that there is a big skill gap. You know, there is companies demanding skills in this area, and yet naturally in the marketplace, they might have difficulty finding that skills that is required for companies. So, you know, job seekers need to be a lot more conscious in terms of how they are eq...

"If you're going to be running a very elite research institution, you have to have the best people. To have the best people, you have to trust them and empower them. You can't hire a world expert in some area and then tell them what to do. They know more than you do. They're smarter than you are in their area. So you've got to trust your people. One of our really foundational commitments to our pe...

"China's approach is very pragmatic. People have been saying DeepSeek did it out of necessity. There's obviously a GPU constraint and hardware constraint in China, something they're working around. In many ways, the engineering genius and engineering innovation is what set DeepSeek apart. It challenged a global narrative around needing more GPUs and more money to get better AI. It was about throwi...

"[Question: So what was the biggest misconception for most business leaders usually when it comes to operationalizing AI governance?] Based on my interactions and conversations, now suddenly they think they have to erect a whole set of new committees, that they have to have these new programs. You almost hear a sigh from the room. Like, oh, we have now this whole additional compliance cost because...

"You can try to develop self-awareness and take a beginner's mind in all things. This includes being open to feedback and truly listening, even when it might be hard to receive. I think that's been something I've really tried to practice. The other area is recognizing that just like a company or country, as humans we have many stakeholders. You may wear many hats in different ways. So as we think...

"I quote a study that looked at  84 countries in terms of internal migration and India was dead last. That's not a knock against the culture. It's just not part of the culture that young women in particular leave home at 17, go to the other side of the country and work in a factory. You don't have that. So what's the phrase: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Apple might have a plan, but  like g...

" At IBM, we really work on two emerging technologies: hybrid cloud and AI for enterprise. These two are deeply connected. Hybrid cloud for us means that regardless of where the data sits whether the compute is on-premise, off-premise, or across multiple clouds. We believe the client should have the control and flexibility to choose where to run and place their data. If you look at the facts, a ve...

"If you take a step back and ask, how has the last 10-15 years panned out? The truth of the matter is that Southeast Asia has not done as well as it should have based on the reports and projections that existed earlier. There have been fundamental flaws from a culture standpoint with respect to how the ecosystem has been shaped. I think there has been too much of a mirror of what's happening in Si...

"I think the why is so important, but it's always not really being asked. Most people want to know, 'What's your growth look like?' or 'How is this offering different from another offering?' Those are the questions we get most of the time. But going back to the real why we actually do this in the first place is the most critical question if you ask me. For myself personally, it is all about having...

"Now, some people are only ever going to want to use WhatsApp to message the people in their life, and they should be able to carry on doing that and have an incredibly simple experience in doing so. But we're increasingly seeing that users want to use WhatsApp for more than messaging close friends and family. It's why we're doing things like business messaging. It's why we built new features like...

" We did a survey with The Economist globally which obviously included Europe and APAC as well. And we asked the question, 'Does my organization's current architecture supports the unique demands of AI workloads.' Basically 85% said, 'No. We don't have the architecture to support it.' Some partially does, but it needs lots of modifications. So we can still feel a lot of people are still in the ear...

"The thing that's most fascinating, we talk a lot about how complex North Korea is here but when you compare it to some of the other illicit groups, particularly those that are sanctioned, say your terrorist organization that's soliciting donations on Telegram or some other social media outlet understanding what that difference in the level of complexity is, I think is really fascinating to actual...

"When I discuss with senior leaders, interview them, or assess them for senior roles, they often come to me, and I ask them: 'What makes you unique? How do you see yourself?' Eighty percent of them tell me what they can't do. They talk about their development needs, and I say, 'Is that how you pitch yourself? Is that what you really bring to the table? You sit with a headhunter and tell me what yo...

"They will judge Masa to have been an extraordinarily consequential investor and historic figure in world investing and tech investing because he has made not just spectacular bets—but he's made so many people rich. I mean, with other people's money. All these founders, he's given them money, he's been an enormous disruptor, and he's built global businesses. He's built a huge business in Japan on...