In this episode, join us in a new series on our show as we recap fireside chats held at our fifth-year anniversary summit where we featured several thought leaders and founders across industries sharing their insights on various sectors and trends shaping the future of ASEANnovation. We’re starting things off with our Women in Tech panel featuring two growth-stage CEOs, WIZ.AI’s Jennifer Zhang in the AI enterprise space and Pinhome’s Dayu Dara Permata in the Indonesian proptech and fintech space. The panel was moderated by Trang Bui from the investments team at Insignia Ventures Partners.

Highlights and Timestamps

(01:04) Panel and Panelist Introduction;

(04:21) Jennifer’s and Dara’s Entrepreneurial Journeys;

“…you could be born an entrepreneur or bred to be an entrepreneur. For me, I was not in either one of the two. I was trained in a real battlefield to be an entrepreneur…That’s basically entrepreneurship: finding opportunities, creating opportunities, working from inside a company, building a venture from the ground up, building a team from the ground up.” – Dayu Dara Permata

“I got the opportunity to help build a small family office in LA and that actually helped me become closer to founders. And I noticed, actually this is how founders build companies, which I really learned by talking with them and actually seeing how they build from one to zero.” – Jennifer Zhang

(09:02) Jennifer’s view on evolving opportunities for Women in Tech across borders;

“The limitation of the culture we have, especially Southeast Asia cultures, I think one thing that is missing is really encouraging girls to be braver, trying more things, and not be afraid of failure.”

(12:14) Dara’s view on Indonesia’s unicorn cycle creating opportunities for Women in Tech;

“So lack of women representation in tech is not a function of opportunities that are limited for women…it is a function of two things. One is a lack of confidence and lack of interest…I couldn’t see myself in a kind of engineering technology role because I thought I didn’t see enough examples of success and I didn’t know if I belonged there. But I think my experience at Gojek, getting pulled in at an early stage and being part of the management team, the leadership that helped push the growth, that gave me interest and then confidence.”

(17:30) One thing Jennifer and Dara would tell their younger selves before they started on their entrepreneurial journeys;

“The best sailor basically is the one that has been through the toughest sea, the toughest storm and I think will emerge of these very difficult times, a better, stronger founder who builds not just a profitable business, but hopefully a sustainable multi-generational business.” – Dayu Dara Permata

About our guests

Jennifer Zhang is the CEO and co-founder of WIZ.AI. Prior to WIZ.AI, she has been a VC across both sides of the Pacific, as Managing Partner of GCC Capital in Beijing and General Partner of Cybernaut Zfounder Ventures. Before that she covered cross-border entrepreneurship resources and content. She received her Masters in Public Policy from the University of Southern California.

Prior to Pinhome, Dayu Dara Permata was a Senior Vice President at Go-Jek where she led Gojek expansion to 100+ cities as SVP Regional Growth, co-founded and scaled Go-Life from concept into 15M users in 80+ cities in Indonesia & was responsible for Commerce Product Group in Gojek like Gomart & Goshop. She was also formerly a consultant at McKinsey before joining Go-Jek. Dara graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering from the Bandung Institute of Technology, and was an honor student and full scholar.

Trang Bui is a senior investment analyst at Insignia Ventures Partners. Trang was previously an investment associate at Vietnam private equity firm Mekong Capital where she was involved in investments into consumer businesses including Pizza 4Ps and Marou Chocolate. She graduated from Bucknell University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration.

Transcript

Trang: Before I introduce my lovely panelists, I would love to just take a moment to set the context as to why the topic of women in tech remains as relevant today as ever before. So you probably know that Southeast Asian cultures have historically been more rooted in gender equality than other regions, however, women in Southeast Asia, are still faced with longstanding challenges in terms of getting opportunities, especially in the tech sector.

But that is increasingly changing. So recently I read research and it showed me that, you know, in 2021, startups founded or co-founded by women in Southeast Asia bagged close to US$4B in venture funding comprising of 17% of private capital raises in Southeast Asia.

Now this is compared with a meager number of 2% in the US. So in this panel, I would love to dive into the stories of two amazing women at the helm of growth stage companies and what they’re seeing as opportunities on the crowd for women founders and women in tech. Please welcome on stage Ms. Jennifer Zhang from WIZ.AI and Miss Dayu Dara Permata from Pinhome.

So Jennifer, do you want to start off by giving a quick introduction about yourself? 

Jennifer: Thank you everyone. I’m the CEO and co-founder of WIZ.AI. My name is Jennifer. Before I met with Jianfeng (Chairman and Co-founder), I was actually a VC in LA and then later, my co-founder Jianfeng convinced me to join him. Actually he was in the panel before to introduce our solution. 

Maybe I can do a very quick two sentences to introduce our solution again. So we basically do two things. Number one is to really automate the touchpoints especially the voice touchpoint which means using voice to automate all the calls and now adding more channels like WhatsApp, adding more channel tools. The second one is an analysis of all the behavior behind these voice calls, with data sets and also other channels.

So that’s actually what we do. We have been in the market for 2.5 years and now we’ve grown to 200-plus people. Our employees cover 10 countries and we do actually serve 10 countries, especially in emerging markets for their English-mixed languages, and these other countries are actually quite interesting.

Dara: Thanks Trang. I’m Dara, CEO and co-founder of Pinhome, a proptech-fintech startup based in Indonesia. Our vision is to unlock home ownership for better livelihood and financial inclusion. What we build is essentially a full-stack property transaction platform, building an e-commerce platform for property transactions.

We are building the world’s first home, seeking home buying, home financing, and home services, all in one platform. It’s a bit surreal to be called out to this stage as a growth stage startup because it was just two plus years ago when the business started from my home garage, with five interns and now we are operating in 80 cities in Indonesia, 450 people strong. I think in terms of topline now we’re looking to get to our triple-digit million dollar revenue in the next year, and so it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you Trang.

Jennifer’s and Dara’s Entrepreneurial Journeys

Trang: So when it comes to a topic like Women in Tech, I see that a lot of discussions come from a generalized point of view, whereas in reality, the opportunities and challenges are really shaped by personal context and experiences.

So Jennifer and Dara, to start off, I would love to hear you share how your own entrepreneurship journeys have been shaped by the cultures and the environments that you grew up in. 

Dara: Sure. I’m not coming from an entrepreneurial background. So people have said that you could be born an entrepreneur or bred to be an entrepreneur.

For me, I was not in either one of the two. I was trained in a real battlefield to be an entrepreneur. So my first [experience] of entrepreneurship was when I got pulled into join Gojek as the first 15 management team. I was an entrepreneur then because literally when I joined Gojek the first day, all that Nadiem, who is the ex-CEO founder of Gojek, said to me was, “Hey, I want you to build something empowering informal service sectors.”

And I asked him, “Do you know exactly what kind of services I have to build?” 

“Not sure, go find out.” 

“Do I have a team?” 

“No, you’re the only one. Go hire.”  

“Do we have money?” 

“I’m not sure. but we can talk about that later.”

So that’s basically entrepreneurship: finding opportunities, creating opportunities, working from inside a company, building a venture from the ground up, building a team from the ground up.

That was my five-year journey at Gojek. My experience started with sitting on a floor in a 150 square meter humble old house that was our Gojek office in 2015, right at its series A, maybe a few thousand drivers, doing maybe 10,000 orders a day.

And then five years later, it was basically kind of the operating system for transportation, logistics, payment, services, food delivery, ecommerce in Indonesia with 3 million drivers, between two-wheel and four-wheel and kind of this massive super app, where it has its core services.

And then there are adjacent and add-on services and also it empowers like third-party platforms, kind of the real definition of superapp. So that’s basically my taste of ownership or entrepreneurship. And those five years at Gojek were like a bootcamp to start my own venture. 

So I pulled in my CTO for the same product group I was responsible for. So I was responsible for a product group called Lifestyle and Commerce Product Group, so it’s a billion-dollar portfolio within a decacorn, running about 600, 700-strong team across, three countries, Indonesia, Singapore, and India. 

And in 2019, we were very convinced that it was the right time to transition out and build our own venture in a sector that we’re extremely passionate about, which is property and financial services. And that’s when Ahmed and I went out to launch Pinhome in 2020. So that’s a bit about my story. a

“…you could be born an entrepreneur or bred to be an entrepreneur. For me, I was not in either one of the two. I was trained in a real battlefield to be an entrepreneur…That’s basically entrepreneurship: finding opportunities, creating opportunities, working from inside a company, building a venture from the ground up, building a team from the ground up.”

Jennifer: I think I can break my story into three periods of time because most of the time I feel quite lucky. Actually at that time when I was about to graduate, I see it was really around the rise of the Los Angeles startup ecosystem.

So I was very, very lucky. All my peers — actually everybody was looking up to Silicon Valley and a lot of my peers were not really going for the big companies, but instead they were actually funding or starting companies. So I think some of my peers actually became the first hire of TikTok in the US or made a company like [Alters] that recently raised US$50 million, and [NextTracking], I think they’re about to IPO.

All my peers actually, USC alumni, didn’t want to work for other people and I started to build out our own company and at that time actually, I made a very small company, 30 people event space, and I realized, actually, it’s limited by cash flow and I was stuck there.

So later I got the opportunity to help build a small family office in LA and that actually helped me become closer to founders. And I noticed, actually this is how founders build companies, which I really learned by talking with them and actually seeing how they build from one to zero.

Then later 2018 I had the opportunity to come back to China because of family reasons and I met Jianfeng. I met him actually in Silicon Valley. At that time he was still one of the LPs for my friends. Then we met and we talked all the time. In 2018. I was literally in the office quite close to where he was and he came back to me and he said like, you know, hey, why not just don’t do the V anymore? Let’s build a company together. There’s a lot of opportunity here. We have the tech, we have good people, why not do this? 

So I was convinced by him and I went to Singapore, where I had never been before for more than three days, now to start this new journey called WIZ.AI. That’s actually the real story of how we ended up building WIZ.AI together.

“I got the opportunity to help build a small family office in LA and that actually helped me become closer to founders. And I noticed, actually this is how founders build companies, which I really learned by talking with them and actually seeing how they build from one to zero.”

Jennifer’s view on evolving opportunities for Women in Tech across borders

Trang: Throughout the panels today, we’ve heard many panelists touching on the ideas of expanding their businesses across multiple geographies. So Jennifer, having worked with founders in the US and founders in China, and now leading WIZ.AI, with multiple teams across Southeast Asia and beyond, I’m curious, how do you see the opportunities for women in tech evolving and varying across different levels and across these markets?

Jennifer: I think it’s growing. The limitation of the culture we have, especially Southeast Asia cultures, I think one thing that is missing is really encouraging girls to be braver, trying more things, and not be afraid of failure. That’s actually fundamentally what I learned from very basic education. So I think I was born into a very traditional family.

I was told to go to the best school, to go off for a scholarship and go work for a big company, and that’s good enough. But I’m lucky enough early on that actually I saw the value of failure; it’s okay to fail. And even I told my early employees who are actually struggling with going with us or choosing the offer for other big, enterprise opportunities, I would say maybe the company will fail, but it will be a success for you, as the experience will be there. So that’s actually the thing I value most. So that’s actually the message I used to convince most of my peers who joined us in the early stage

And even in some countries, where we even don’t have an entity, recently we hired some members from Latin America; we don’t have an office, but they’re with us in spite of a very big time difference and management has a lot of challenges, because we were able to convince them with the right message. 

And my second point comes back to the opportunities for girls, especially in the tech industry. I see great female founders building in the Web3 industry, and then for us in the enterprise sector, because we are in the solution side it’s not only about building amazing tech, but we also care about the experience, how users experience tech.

We have one department called customer experience or interface experience. They design the voice interface with all the enterprise customers’ needs. That’s actually the department where we have a lot of ladies and from the management level, all the way to the different middle management and juniors. And actually they need to not only understand the tech, but also they need to design what is the best experience.

Like when we receive a call or during any customer touchpoint, when is the best time to call you? What’s your name so I can address you? Let me give you a very simple example. When we designed the bank use cases, people calling will ask “Hey, I lost my card.”

So the first sentence our teams designed is “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.” We do not ask what’s your card number first. We are going to actually say, “I’m sorry about that. I’m so sorry to hear your message.” That actually comes from our designers who we call the CX designers, of whom a majority are ladies.

So I think that’s actually quite a good angle now because we do not compete only on the technology itself but actually how our users can feel, be benefitted from, and have a good experience with technology. Actually, that’s actually where you win a lot when you have a lot of women employees joining to build the experience there.

“The limitation of the culture we have, especially Southeast Asia cultures, I think one thing that is missing is really encouraging girls to be braver, trying more things, and not be afraid of failure.”

Dara’s view on Indonesia’s unicorn cycle creating opportunities for Women in Tech

Trang: And that definitely echoes the sentiment that we also keep hearing throughout the day of using technology, combining technology with social dynamics to use it as a force for good. 

So Dara I really enjoyed your story. You were there in the early days at Gojek and in Indonesia, there’s this cycle of the old-generation unicorns producing the next generation of startup founders. How do you see this phenomenon creating more opportunities for women in tech, not only in Indonesia, but also potentially in other markets in Southeast Asia?

Dara: So lack of women representation in tech is not a function of opportunities that are limited for women. I think opportunities are there. It’s immense. I think it is a function of two things. One is a lack of confidence and lack of interest. And women are generally — and I was like that before; despite coming from an engineering background going into the professional career workforce, I couldn’t see myself in kind of engineering technology because I thought I didn’t see enough examples of success and I didn’t know if I belonged there.

But I think my experience at Gojek, getting pulled in at an early stage and being part of the management team, the leadership that helped push the growth, gave me interest and then confidence. I do think that the next generation founders would come from Ivy Leagues and more developed markets but a big chunk of that would come from these unicorns, the alumni of unicorns. 

And that is because these leaders or maybe management teams of unicorns get to feel kind of the thrill and the excitement of not just building a product that’s monetizable, but also pushing it at scale. Seeing what scale really means, seeing millions of users every day using your service, that’s kind of the case with Gojek. 

In my first three years, I was tasked with nationwide expansion, basically expanding Gojek from one city operation to an operation spanning hundreds of cities, building a 1,500 people team. I didn’t think it was possible. I just laughed at the idea of like, Indonesia has 514 cities, can we make it available in 250 cities? I just laughed at the idea. That’s like an impossible mission. but we achieved it and actually we achieved it much earlier than we ever thought we could.

And so there’s this five Ps of venture building that we as a management team at unicorns get to experience first hand being part of the leadership. The first is purpose. Understanding that venture building starts with setting the right purpose, not just about doing well, but also doing good.

And so it was very strong in the DNA of these unicorn founders. And I got to learn first time from the like of Nadiem Makarim. It’s not enough for you to have a financial mission, all these top-line metrics that you are after and eventually hopefully profitability, but you need to have a social mission and that’s what’s going to get you through the hard times.

Even though you probably miss your financial missions, but at least there’s that emotional, mission that helps you move forward. And for Gojek it was about empowering the informal service sector and for Pinhome that is about unlocking home ownership for better livelihood and financial inclusion.

The second P is about people. It’s about attracting, recruiting, retaining, and developing world-class talents. And I thought it was impossible to do because Gojek in 2015 was nothing. It was a company like a microenterprise perhaps with a 15 to 20 people team, working out of a very old house. Who would be interested in joining a company like that?

I posted a job post on LinkedIn, and it wasn’t just like a job post where this is the eligibility, requirement, and criteria and send your CV to this email. No, it was about a story. It was a story of we are digitizing the informal service sector in Indonesia and a story about who we are and who is behind the company.

I get 1,500 CVs in two weeks and some of these people are people who have been in some industry for 20 years and they send a CV to me, then there are those with five years of experience. So I think it’s possible actually for you to attract world-class talents. 

The third P is about product and it’s about not just building a product with cool features, it’s actually building something that’s impactful, meaningful, and that has basically rapid adoption rate, and many founders maybe in the beginning, especially if you’re a first-time founder, you’re not exposed to that.

You would think that it’s enough to build a product. No, it’s not enough. You need to think about go-to-market strategy. You need to think about incentives. Is there an emotional, financial, and commercial incentive for users to use it? If not, it’s not gonna go far. and the last two Ps are about process and performance.

And the process is about building something from a one-person team to a thousand people team. It’s very easy for you to get stuck in basically less meaningful processes like bureaucracy. So making sure that as you grow very rapidly, like in a year or two years time, growing to a thousand people team, you still remain nimble, you’re still agile and you make decisions very snappily, but of course responsibly. 

And then performance is about setting the right OKRs and just getting it done from the organization all the way to the individual. And so that exercise, I did that like 15 times in Gojek because we launched 15 different B2C consumer products and did that every time we rolled out a new offering. 

“So lack of women representation in tech is not a function of opportunities that are limited for women…it is a function of two things. One is a lack of confidence and lack of interest…I couldn’t see myself in a kind of engineering technology role because I thought I didn’t see enough examples of success and I didn’t know if I belonged there. But I think my experience at Gojek, getting pulled in at an early stage and being part of the management team, the leadership that helped push the growth, that gave me interest and then confidence.”

Trang: Amazing. So we have a couple of really good questions in the app. I think this one is very interesting. So Jennifer and Dara, if you could go back in time, what is one thing you would tell your younger self before you embarked on your journey as a founder?

Jennifer: Oh, so many small tips, but one thing is to just do it and also the second one is really hiring the best people you can from day one. So that’s actually the mistake so far I made and I still regret it from the early days of the business.

Dara: I think it’s about being confident and just believing that you can do it because I think as a woman there’s that mental barrier or you don’t see enough success. It seems impossible sometimes if you think about it. We launch Pinhome at the height of Covid, and that was exactly in January and in March, when Covid hit, and all of a sudden you have this lockdown period.

You have alpha, beta, delta, omnicron, and then now tech winter, next year inflation, right? But for us, every time we hear this, we’re like “Okay, now what? Here we go again.” But I think every cycle of that, every cycle of economic downturns that we go through, we’re getting more and more confident. We’re getting that calm and composure, that mindset and spirit because we’ve gone through something worse and this is just another exercise that we have to go through.

And the best sailor basically is the one that has been through the toughest sea, the toughest storm and I think will emerge of these very difficult times, a better, stronger founder who builds not just a profitable business, but hopefully a sustainable multi-generational business.

“The best sailor basically is the one that has been through the toughest sea, the toughest storm and I think will emerge of these very difficult times, a better, stronger founder who builds not just a profitable business, but hopefully a sustainable multi-generational business.”