Lightspeed report, from Gojek co-founder, aims at resetting expectations of founders and investors
Lightspeed Venture Partners, the multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends, has released a report on “South-east Asia: Resetting Expectations”, to give “a more realistic and focused approach” to building businesses in the region.
Listen to the AI-generated podcast covering the report here, created with NotebookLM:
Kevin Aluwi: “If I had understood these when I was still running Gojek, I definitely would have made different decisions.”
The report gives a good overview of South-east Asia markets, looking at reality vs hype with benchmarking to China, India and MENA. It sets out to explain that comparisons between South-east Asia and China/India are misguided, and that while the region has promising growth, there are significant challenges and over-optimism has led to inflated expectations.
In a LinkedIn post, Kevin Aluwi, venture partner at Lightspeed and co-founder of Gojek, said, “Believing the hype that reports over the past decade were saying about Indonesia and South-east Asia led me to make many wrong decisions while building Gojek. The narrative that the Southeast Asian consumer class will be the next China or India was, at best, decades early, or at worst, dead wrong.
“These overly optimistic assumptions about the region led founders, operators, and investors to allocate capital (in the form of marketing, hiring, and fundraising/investing decisions) in a way that was out of touch with reality – leading to the disappointments that all of us in Southeast Asian tech share today.”
He said that with this report, his team (Pachara (Pinn) Lawjindakul and Dat Han) in the region “wanted to reset expectations about a still-exciting region. We wanted to show data that reflects reality. We hope this will be a ground-truth understanding on which founders and operators could make better decisions on; if I had understood these when I was still running Gojek, I definitely would have made different decisions. South-east Asia is still a large, fast-growing region with many opportunities to create valuable and impactful companies, but a more realistic and focused approach will be necessary.”
The key takeaways are:
- The frequent comparisons between Southeast Asia and India/China are misplaced.
- Thinking regional from Day 1 is needed for large outcomes.
- Be realistic about who can pay, where they are, and how to serve the rest
- Singapore is Southeast Asia’s most important market.
- Advertising is a viable form of additional monetisation in Southeast Asia.
- It is possible to build a business that is valuable at scale, but both founders and investors must reset expectations.
For more details, visit the report.
