Category: Indonesia

VOD – here come Asia!

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

We all know VOD is big. Just check Netflix for reference. I pretty much never watch actual TV or cable – except for the news.

Normally I am watching HOOQ, HBO Now, or Netflix. Plus a lot of iTunes video.

Given all that it is no wonder that global VOD growth is gonna keep growing.

What is exciting is the Asia numbers:

The VOD market in Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ) is expanding at a robust pace and by 2020, the market is expected to reach $80.5 billion.

How do you like them apples?

Good times.

Koprol

~ michael_msft ~ 1 Comment

I was sitting at a dinner with some VC’s and a LP talking about the region.

This came up:

https://www.techinasia.com/happyfresh-asia-funding-news/

I chatted a little about Yahoo and Koprol. How Yahoo totally blew it and this closing of Indonesia R&D was the signal for the slow, ever continuing downfall of Yahoo.

At the same time the Koprol deal kicked off the SEA deal making phase and created a group of techies that are slowly infiltrating the region working for startups or startung them. Or hanging at the mall.

I won’t try and list names. You all know who you are.

Congrats!

#SEArising

Is Apple all about China?

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

My brother sent me this link :: http://om.co/2015/03/16/apple-is-all-about-china/

Actually I don’t think they are all about China although they are emphasizing it more and more but somehow I don’t think they will always do that. I think they used the last keynote to highlight how far they have come in China since everyone always talks about how the valley tech companies get hosed in China. And mostly they do. Look at Google, Yahoo, Tesla and many others who have tried and have failed to go big in China. Now look at Apple. Killing it in China.

I think from here on out it will just be the norm for them. I don’t think it will have to be continually highlighted.

However I would add that the focus on China is really just a pivot to Asia in general and that is the right pivot. I find it comical when people say oh the Chinese will love that gold iPhone. Or that gold macbook. Sometimes I think the people saying this crap are the same people pontificating about Asian trends just because they eat at Panda Express a few times a week.

Folks – all of Asia is quite similar to China. I suspect more than a few rich Indonesian, Thai and Singaporean folks will be doing all they can to order a gold Apple watch to go with their gold iPhone and iPads. It just comes with the territory.

So yes – China is huge for Apple. But I know they are working hard to crack India and to make a thorough dent in SEA region as well. My guess is they only get more dominant for the time being.

Can anyone run Yahoo?

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Adding this for everyone :: http://thomasdiong.com/post/105578350652/marissa-mayer-is-doing-a-fine-job

The internet is all on fire with the latest article about Yahoo and the forthcoming book. It is too juicy of a subject not to talk about it. Here I go.

In case you are wondering I have written about Yahoo before – and normally these posts always make my top 10.

Starting from the most popular on down:

Fuck you, I’m the ‘D’ on this

What the hell happened to Yahoo! Messenger

Thinking about Koprol 2.0

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 1

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 2

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 3

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 4

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 5

Fuck you, I’m the ‘D’ on this – part 2 (#marissadidit)

What is happening with Yahoo?

That is my core 10 posts regarding Yahoo and they make up most of my blog traffic. I actually had another post on how Carol Bartz was the worst pick as a Yahoo CEO but I erased it one day, actually my first day at Yahoo, thinking that someone might read it and fire me. The rest of the posts were all written after I left Yahoo.

I get emails from people saying I like to bash Yahoo but I don’t. I loved working there, I loved Yahoo before I worked there and I still love Yahoo. I write about it cause I think about it. I do not intend to cause any harm to people working there even if I am sometimes accused of that.

Here is the new article on Yahoo :: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html . It is a riveting read and of course the book will be a must read.

Nothing in the article is really news apart from the fact that it seems Marissa thinks a lot of herself and likes to be late to everything. I heard about the Ross story first hand and of course everyone knew Ross would quit right away. I personally think Ross should have had a shot at running Yahoo. He would have massively cut staff, it NEEDS to be cut, and he would have focused on the right bits. That would be a better course of action than doing nothing or trying to acquire everything. Yahoo could make money as a smaller, more nimble entity. Ross also wanted to buy Hulu but not sure that would have worked but I think trying a big acquisition is smarter than a bunch of small ones for the purposes of recruiting.

At first I was excited about the Marissa news but I had so many current and ex Google friends tell me what a mistake it was. In hindsight a lot of what they were saying was right. She is out of touch with reality, is not a great manager and is not the right fit for Yahoo. As I am in the States right now hanging with my folks, who use Yahoo religiously, I realize that people like my folks are Yahoo’s current target user base for the USA. Yahoo may not like that fact but it is true. They use Yahoo mail, front page, news, weather and the yahoo news digest app. They used to use messenger but let’s be honest – no one uses messenger anymore. It’s dead. Huge, huge mistake for Yahoo to lose out on the messaging craze. Huge.

Enter Marissa, a CEO who knows little about my parents. Marissa is too wealthy, sheltered and full of herself to ever understand my parents. Yes – I know a lot of tech CEOs are out of touch with my mom and dad but the difference is Yahoo needs turing around, Yahoo’s strength is folks like my mom and dad and it will take knowing them to serve them. I know Yahoo wants the young ones but that ain’t happening. In fact, I am not my parents or a young one but I don’t use Yahoo anymore either. That’s the problem really – no one is really waking up everyday and checking Yahoo like they used to.

On this point one has to hand it to Gruber for somewhat nailing the decline of Yahoo :: http://daringfireball.net/2014/12/yahoo_decline . I don’t disagree with him on what happened but I don’t think those mistakes spelt the end of Yahoo. What cooked Yahoo was years and years of not changing course.

Yahoo knew the old stuff was dying and the new web was taking over – but they didn’t respond to it at all.

They missed mobile, then they missed apps, they missed the emerging markets and they blew their Asian deals. Let me be clear here – Yahoo made money on both their Alibaba and their Softbank deal but what they never did is take advantage of those deals. They should have learned how to import stuff from Japan and China back into the States. They should have worked closely with Alibaba and Softbank on Southeast Asia, India and North Asia. Yahoo had huge leads in these markets and now they have virtually nothing. Korea closed. Yahoo Japan is not Yahoo. There is no Yahoo in China. They are dying in Southeast Asia. Properly executing in Asia could have done a lot for Yahoo in the big picture. They let it all die.

I agree with Gruber that a comeback is highly unlikely but along the way they could have fallen less farther than they did. As to now – I don’t know if it can bounce back. It may just be too late. Apart from Flickr I use nothing from Yahoo and they could spin that off if it were up to me. Their mail sucks. Their messenger sucks. I never hit the front page. The new digest thing was interesting but too fluffy and not customizable enough for my tastes. There is just nothing interesting about Yahoo and to top it off – I live in Asia – Yahoo in Asia is even worse than Yahoo in the States. 

Yahoo makes money. They have too many people. They still need to cut back and focus. Then they would make even more money.

As to a Yahoo/AOL thing. Kill me if this happens.

Maybe Alibaba or Softbank might try to buy them. At least that would be interesting.

 

Path Talk

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I keep using Path cause my parents are on it and it’s an easy place to share things. Because of this my brothers are also on it. So we all use it – but not heavily.

It’s funny how it is growing though, feature wise not users, and it reminds me a lot of my Koprol days and how we use to daydream about what we wanted Koprol to be when it grew up. It was always about the conversations around places. So it is interesting to see Path add the ability to talk to a place versus about a place. It sounds cool but it only works in the USA. I am sure it is useful but I still don’t see how it will make money, unless they charge for it, and how they will scale it – while still making money.

http://blog.path.com/post/98818902277/now-in-path-talk-message-people-and-places-in-one-app

Thoughts on SEA ecosystem and location

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Lots of twitter activity over the this post :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/08/28/hong-kong-versus-singapore/

As mentioned I wanted to follow it up with some thoughts on this post :: http://thenextweb.com/asia/2014/08/23/time-founders-southeast-asia-accepted-location-used-advantage/

Let me preface I did not attend GOAB nd I don’t know Mona. I used to follow her on twitter but she broke my follow rule of never replying to my replies. One of my twitter rules is if I reply a few times to folks – famous or not and they don’t ever reply back then I figure there is no point in following. The point of twitter is reasonable discourse – at least for me anyway.

Mona nails well the recent rise of the SEA ecosystem and how one can most likely build a startup anywhere. Totally agree! However I think there are still some issues.

I will add that this is a tough soapbox to get on for me these days cause I will admit I am NOT in the scene as much as I used to be but this is also one of my weird opinions on the local scene. People talking about the scene and eventing tend to get more attention than those just heads down actually building a startup. Maybe that is just my personal feeling but the local media tends to focus on funding, rumors and covering events talking about the scene more than going deep on what is getting built, by who and the obvious failures that can happen. If I had more time I would do a few things – start a podcast talking to folks building things about how they got here and why they are building what they are building. I would start a review service going deep on all the consumer facing products that are coming at us everyday – some good and of course some bad. An investigative service trying to uncover why local startups fail so we can all learn from it. Alas – I don’t have the time. I am too busy with Spuul and my family to take on any more tasks. I will keep up my mentoring and writing as I see fit. The podcast idea is still brewing cause I miss TWIA and figure there is still some local demand for a good audio feed.

That being said, unlike my time at Yahoo, I am not running around at events or attending many startup focused conferences. Which leads me to another need in the local ecosystem, there are not many events or communities to lean on for those in the local startup land that are a few years in and maturing. This will hopefully improve over time.

Back to some of my thoughts on the article…

– I think seed funding is getting pretty easy to get. However it might all depends on your definition of it. Let’s say less than 150k USD for starters as a rough estimate. I think anyone with some connections, a good idea and some perseverance can land some money in this range. But anything past this I think is hard – there are some trends that buck this. Do something in ecommerce or transportation and for some reason the money is just flowing. Try to do anything with a large risk portfolio, hardware or enterprise and I think the money is much harder to find. Jump in the 150k to 1 million range and unless you have rockstar metrics, a super connected angel or crazy PR – it gets quite hard to find. This is from my personal experience and what I hear from companies I either mentor or talk to a fair amount.

– Location is still tricky. We at Spuul experience this some. The local press tends to pass us up cause they don’t see us in Singapore much. The Indian press always wonders why we are not in India and the USA press tends to overlook global plays from Singapore in general. I think the funding conversations take a similar tact at times. I think for location to work well for you it might make sense to be sure that you can dominate in the market where you have your HQ. Then figure out your regional play and maybe the globe later. Saying you are here and working on the globe might not work for those that like a tangible way to grok things. Of course you may have built something killer or viral that just works for everyone. I am speaking in terms of products as well – not the notion of outsourcing or being a vendor.

– The silicon valley stigma. I look at this one from a different angle than others. I base this on doing some focus groups with yahoo and talking with anthropologists who also study tech. If you get in a room in let’s say in Indonesia. You have a set of normal people who use tech and the internet. You present them with a novel product idea, some screens and user stories. You ask some of these people would they use this if it it came from Indonesia. Or Singapore. Then ask some of them would they use it if it came from Silicon Valley. What happens is they almost always get more excited about the product from the valley. Always. I don’t think this will change anytime soon. It is no different than people loving a Hollywood movie. It is not about what is better but just the cultural aspects that appeal to folks. I think startups in the region have to contend with people on a very local level to win or doing something very unique. If you build something similar to something else that comes from the the valley I think it won’t be successful. Granted this does not pertain to closed or unfair markets like China or say Vietnam who don’t allow truly level playing fields.

The local scene is exploding – just figure out where to make your mark.

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 5

~ michael_msft ~ 3 Comments

Part 4 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/03/25/koprol-the-inside-story-part-4/

Yes – we closed the deal. My hope was to bask in the deal closing success and enjoy the moment but unfortunately there was not a lot of time to do that. All sorts of stuff needed sorting from deciding how to announce the deal, to sorting out the structure of operations and of course just dealing with all the demands placed on the newly acquired team. Koprol was now our emerging markets baby – everyone inside of Yahoo wanted access and people outside of Yahoo wanted to interview the principals. All good. I think Yahoo’s bonus from the deal was the huge amount of positive, organic pr. Something Yahoo was not normally used to.

As far as the event itself – the announcing the deal to the public, we planned for a medium sized private event where all the regional bloggers and media where invited. At this time there was some notion of activity around Koprol and Yahoo but there had not been any leaks and no one had forecasted what had actually happened. I was proud of both the Yahoo and Koprol team for not having leaked anything. I am sure many people suspected something but no one called it. The event allowed the Koprol guys to announce the deal and the APAC management to introduce themselves to the community at large. Corporate stayed out of it and the excitement of the deal took center stage. All in all I was proud of the moment and of Yahoo.

Post deal announcement my friend from the IGTF and I spent some time in Bali hanging and trying to come up with some basic plans. Apart form this celebration and a few post deal parties at some of the regional events the air of celebration was exhausted quick since the need to get down to business was at hand.

Fortunately the IGTF lead for the deal was still at Yahoo and focused on making this work – this along with the APAC team focus allowed us to plan next steps. The goal being to grow the product in the region, learn from it and see what the team could offer Yahoo in ideas for emerging markets. Apart from the this the rest of the details needed to be worked out.

There were lots of open issues:

– what to name or brand it?
– long term reporting structures
– dealing with logins – yahoo users
– scaling points of interest
– platforms to grow into
– how to scale the team in Indonesia
– how to engage the rest of Yahoo
– how to spread in the other Yahoo regions

Post closing the Yahoo APAC marketing team started to discuss the branding and of course wanted it to be called Yahoo Koprol. Part of me resisted this cause I felt that the best way to conduct the experiment in the large would be to not overly influence it. Koprol was tiny and Yahoo was huge and it was assumed everyone knew Yahoo and no one knew Koprol. The idea was call it Yahoo Koprol and everyone would feel better about it. The focus groups mostly alluded to the same answer but for me I was more interested in using the resources of Yahoo but yet trying to not over Yahoo everything.

This was really the entire crux of our new found paradox – how does one take advantage of all that Yahoo has to offer and get shit done but not be saddled with all the bullshit of Yahoo that is notorious for not getting anything done. This is where my Yahoo career probably nosedived as I stated to assume the role of protector as someone wanting to do the right thing for everyone but yet having to piss people off along the way.

There was the local team, the Koprol team, the users, Sunnyvale and the world all watching and everyone wanting a piece. Yahoo wanted to learn from the team, the world wanted to interview them, the users wanted a growing product and the Koprol team wanted to try and please everyone – there was no easy way to do this but my full time gig become trying to make all this happen. I am sure I failed – but I learned a lot along the way and I think everyone else did to.

Decisions were quickly being made – the product would be called Yahoo Koprol, the product would keep the multi login system although would need to make the Yahoo stuff the real login and we would start throwing some marketing dollars at promoting the product in Indonesia. In theory this was all good but there can be too much of a good thing since the product was still really new. The idea of marketing a hong product might make some sense but the offer on the table was to do a TV commercial for Indonesia. At first reaction one thinks hell yeah – let’s do that but then reality sets in and one realizes that the product may just not be ready for something like a TVC. Here is another decision that needed to be made in that we wanted the marketing help but we honestly wanted it to come later however the TVC budget was there and needing to be used ASAP. Looking back I think we should not have done the TVC since it made us put off some product evolutions to prep for the TVC and we were forced to make some decisions around the features or the marketable features so that the TVC would have the message Yahoo wanted for the region.

Essentially it meant accepting more compromises for what the team would be working on and how the product would be presented by Yahoo to the region. It was all too soon really since we wanted to experiment around product features and we wanted to grow it more organically or within the Yahoo ecosystem prior to doing any hardcore marketing. Yes – the TVC was well done and it made a huge difference in users but it was probably also the wrong kind of user and it meant Koprol was getting a huge amount of attention both within the company and around Indonesia. Other groups at Yahoo were slightly peeved at such a young product getting so much money since marketing money had to be shared around the region and the product was having to deal with rampant growth without the time to work on engagement and making it a better product. It was a mass tradeoff that in my mind wasn’t worth the hassles.

This began the journey for what ultimately started to cave the entire experiment – Koprol was now expected to be the hero product for the region with the idea that market it enough and it will be big rather than building the best product and figuring out how to make it something the region desires versus flogging it. This is actually a typically Yahoo dilemma since there are ways between marketing dollars, PR and the front page to unleash a firehose on something within or outside of Yahoo that will result in mass traffic but won’t king make something that is not ready or is not a good product. Koprol now had the firehose but it really needed more time to mature first.

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 4

~ michael_msft ~ 4 Comments

Part 3 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/03/04/koprol-the-inside-story-part-3/

The process for acquiring Koprol was kind of a chaotic one at best. For my part all I could do is step aside and let the corp development team work their magic. I was involved in helping to complete the technical due diligence process and to act as a chaperone for all the comings and goings to the Koprol team. I was not involved in any of the deal negotiations at all since that is the responsibility of the corp dev team and by design the people agreeing to the tech or the initial product desire are not involved. This is to keep it from getting personal and to make sure there is no funny business.

One of the big worries was how much strain the acquisition would put on such a small company since the needs and wants of the Yahoo deal could easily put too many requirements on the small team. My singular worry was that in the event the acquisition did not go through how would Koprol survive? This one was tough cause the due diligence process and the post acquisition integration needs were already keeping the senior management quite busy but the rank and file needed to keep working like nothing would happen. So my goal, not sure I kept it, was to try and stay close enough to keep the acquisition moving forward and to help mitigate any issues while encouraging the team to keep building according to their plans and goals. Of course I was in and out of their office all the time and was talking to the management team daily. There was much to do in both prepping for the acquisition and planning for post acquisition activities.

At this point the process of closing the acquisition was in place and it was just going to take time on the due diligence side plus working through the negotiation and legal process. So in other words I sat back and let the corp dev machine do their thing. We had lawyers, integration specialist, security specialists and even had the Yahoo APAC marketing team working on the acquisition message plus post acquisition marketing. Even the outside PR companies were brought in – will talk about the post acquisition press plans later. It felt pretty incredible but also scary as shit since anything could go wrong and of course something did.

This is something never mentioned in the press or the public story cause no one was suppose to talk about it, it nakedly exposes how big companies are so messed up, but as we neared the due date we suddenly lost our core sponsor. To be clear the due date is the CFO of Yahoo being presented with all the info, the price, the plans and then deciding at the moment to sign or to bail. My feeling was as we neared this point there was no bailing out but turns out even at this juncture it is quite easy to not close the deal.

As I stated in the beginning the person running product at the time and who also was overseeing the IGTF was the sponsor of the deal. Without a sponsor there is no deal but I never really thought about what would happen if prior to closing the deal we would lose our sponsor. I don’t blame our sponsor at all – life goes on and people leave companies and at that point more people were leaving Yahoo than ever. Of course the sponsor did the best he could to transition the deal and to make sure that the CFO knew what was going on but unfortunately at big organizations the sponsor is key and without the sponsor deals generally just die.

I remember the call with trepidation – all of us involved with deal, on the line from various corners of the world with the CFO making a case that the deal was almost concluded, the IGTF would go on, the corp dev team was still for the deal but that yes – we lost the sponsor. Shit. Already I was coming to grips with how to tell Koprol and how to unwind something that was months in the works. I was a nervous wreck. The Indonesian country manager and I were discussing how to tell the market if the news leaked out that we tried to buy Koprol but pulled out knowing that no matter what we would say the market might paint us as the big evil company. Keep in mind, as stated before, Yahoo already tried to by one Indonesian company but pulled out for various legit reasons.

What can I say other than I am very thankful that at the time the APAC Yahoo management, who used to carry a lot of power, decided to lobby heavily to keep the deal alive. They had plenty of good reasons – Yahoo could use a good SEA story, Indonesia was (is) a hotspot and the ramifications of a failed deal might be worse than a small deal, closed, possible going south due to a lack of sponsorship. In theory APAC stepped in to play the sponsor role. It took a lot of convincing and unfortunately the downside was having to agree to some APAC metrics that now forced us to push things a lot more than the original IGTF plans. In hindsight this is another juncture that probably influenced the overall outcome.

We did the deal with the devil. Deal was closing but now we had to push things harder and faster than what made logical sense.

Part 5 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/04/27/koprol-the-inside-story-part-5/