About our guest

Thothathri Srinivasan (who goes by “Tho”) is the Head of AI and Engineering at Flip, one of Indonesia’s leading fintech companies. With over a decade of experience in Silicon Valley, Tho has built products and systems at some of the world’s most recognizable tech companies including Groupon, Netflix, and Pinterest.

Originally from Bangalore, India, Tho began his career in electronics and software engineering before moving to the United States in 2010 to pursue his master’s degree in computer science. His Silicon Valley journey started at Groupon in 2011, where he worked on merchant-facing products and learned the fundamentals of dynamic pricing and A/B testing. He then spent six years at Netflix Studio, building the infrastructure that powers content rights management, deals, and contracts – essentially everything from “pitch to play” in Netflix’s content ecosystem.

After a stint at Pinterest working on shopping monetization, Tho briefly explored the AI startup space before relocating to Southeast Asia with his family. His transition to the region led him to Flip, where he now leads AI and engineering for Indonesia’s growing fintech market. 

Tho is also an alumnus of Insignia Ventures Academy’s Certificate in Venture Capital program and became involved in angel investing through the XA Network, bringing his technical expertise to early-stage startup evaluation and mentorship.

Timestamps

(00:00) Introduction to Tho;

(03:32) Driving merchant sales at Groupon;

(05:15) Building rights and compliance technology at Netflix;

(09:24) Monetization at Pinterest;

(11:25) Moving to Indonesia and joining Flip;

(13:23) Joining Insignia Ventures Academy;

(17:03) Joining XA Network;

(19:03) Learnings from IVA;

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Directed by Paulo Joquiño

Produced by Paulo Joquiño

The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Insignia Ventures⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ fund. Any and all opinions shared in this episode are solely personal thoughts and reflections of the guest and the host.

Transcript

Introduction and Guest Welcome

Paulo: We’ve had a couple of leaders from Flip on call with us, from their founder Rafi Ari Arriyan. They’re now VP of Product Sourabh Gupta, as well as their current CEO Pratyush Prasanna.

And now we have their head of AI and engineering Thothathri Srinivasan. Really happy to have Tho on here for a few reasons. Not just because he’s from Flip, but he’s also now officially an alumnus of Insignia Ventures Academy, our certificate in venture capital program which just finished a few weeks ago from this recording.

We’re not just gonna talk about Flip, we’re also gonna talk about his experience there. But I think even more exciting, we’re gonna talk about what he has learned over the years of experience he’s had at various tech companies here in Asia, and also in Silicon Valley as well.

Guest Background and Early Career

Paulo: But first off, maybe you can talk about how you decided to get into engineering and then go from there.

Tho: Sure. Thanks for the intro. I have three T’s and three H’s in my name, but I just go by Tho. That’s my full name, but I go by Tho. Thanks for that intro. I would love to start off, I think I originally am from India. I grew up in Bangalore. I pretty much grew up there. I remember the first time I started getting into computers and electronics was probably in high school. That’s when we went to the old Infosys campus in Electronic City as they were just setting that up.

I played around with a bunch of computers there and I was like, damn, this is good. I got into electronics software with typical microcontrollers, breadboards, all of the nice stuff. Then over time I did my undergrad in information technology outside Bangalore. I did it in a place called VIT Vellore, which is a branch.

Journey to Silicon Valley

Tho: After that I moved to the US, so it was about 2010. I did my master’s in computer science in North Carolina. I was there for a couple of years. I think we talked about this earlier, but that’s when The Social Network movie came out. They were talking about this place called Palo Alto. I said, let me look up what jobs they have in Palo Alto. Turns out there were quite a few. The one that I applied and got into was a company called Groupon, the internet darling back in 2011.

Paulo: Started a lot of careers, I would say.

Tho: Definitely. I was there from 2011 to 2012, I was there for about three years. Then moved to Netflix and then to Pinterest, AI companies after all of that.

Paulo: I really like about your whole story was the whole Social Network appearance and how that sort of influenced your decision to actually check out what possibilities there are for you as an engineer and that led you to Silicon Valley.

Tho: Absolutely. I think that’s one of the things. I saw the movie and they talked about Palo Alto. In fact, there’s a dialogue in the movie. It says it’s time for them to see this in Palo Alto, and Zuckerberg is talking about it with Severin. That’s what got me into this whole thing. Also being a huge movie buff. That’s what got me into Netflix.

Paulo: It just shows the power of these kinds of media formats. You worked at a couple of companies, Groupon, Netflix, Pinterest maybe for our audience out there maybe for those who are thinking about their own careers or maybe in engineering like yourself what are some of the takeaways from those companies that you worked at, especially I guess since you joined them at a stage where they were already pretty, I’d say well known, established no longer the startup from a garage kind of setup. What are some of the learnings from working there that are particularly still impacting you or influencing you until today?

Experience at Groupon

Tho: I think from an engineering standpoint, obviously if you talk about Groupon, it’s one of the first few companies which was moving away from some of the conventional ways of building software. We were starting to use Ruby on Rails, Backbone.js. All of these sorts of new technologies and talking about, back in 2010, 2011, using all of that to build our product and infrastructure. That was a very interesting experience, especially coming out of the Java world at that time for a lot of companies.

I was in the Merchant Center at Groupon, building dashboards and APIs for merchants to use to monitor how well they’re doing. How many coupons are being sold, what is the redemption status, the timeline. Typically we also used to see a peak where people buy a coupon, they don’t really use it, they use it right before the coupon expires. Which is very annoying for merchants. We were trying to make that a little bit more even for merchants. A lot of things that we did.

But I think the biggest takeaway there on the non-engineering side, I would say, is how hard sales were. I remember trying to pick up the phone and calling some of these merchants. One, merchants are super busy. Two, you’re trying to sell them coupons. That’s when I realized, sales is one of the hardest things that you could do. To nail it and see our entire sales team doing this day in and day out. I think that gave me a newfound respect for the entire sales team.

At Groupon, again, beyond that, we started doing dynamic pricing. We started doing specific A/B testing. We learned a lot of things on how to A/B test things. We used to try a bunch of products out if it didn’t really work. Then we just scrap the idea and then move on, which is pretty interesting. Obviously headquarters was in Chicago. I was based in Palo Alto. We’d also acquired a team in Berlin called CityDeal. I worked with these locations to build some amazing products.

Transition to Netflix

Tho: I was at Groupon till about 2015. I moved to Netflix after. This was an interesting phase for Netflix. I joined the team at Netflix, which is called Netflix Studio. They were trying to become the world’s biggest studio and so Netflix at the time to give you context was only in the US, Canada, LATAM, Japan, a handful of countries, and they were trying to expand to 192 countries that they’re in now.

Fundamentally what they were trying to say was Hollywood is a hundred year old industry. We’ve spent a lot of money in VFX, in animation, in getting the best cameras and the best techniques, but it’s built on a hundred year old institution, which needs some reformation.

I started working initially on content rights and music rights specifically. If you have movies, you have music in that movie, the rights work differently for that. We wanted to build a system that the legal, finance folks can use in a streamlined way to reduce cost across all of these different aspects. I did music rights for a while. I also did deals and contracts for a while. Typically how it works is we make an overall deal and then we say we are gonna make a movie with specific folks. You say, okay, I’m gonna do a movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, a few other people, and then you say, okay, this is an overall deal. Now let’s get actual contracts as a part of that deal to start the whole process.

Paulo: You’re building the infrastructure to enable those activities.

Tho: Exactly. Ultimately, what is the goal here? Of course, we’re trying to monitor all of this in a better way to make sure that we have enough movies in specific genres releasing at the right time.

Role at Netflix Studio

Tho: If you look at the entire Netflix studio space, what we’re looking at is pitch to play. From the time someone pitches an idea all the way to when you hit play on Netflix as a user, that’s the part that Netflix Studio handles. This includes your recommendation engines and making sure that this movie can actually be played.

It’s basically can it be played in a specific format? If you’re flying from Singapore to Manila on a Singapore Airlines flight. Does the airline have the rights to show it on the screen in front of you? In the language that you’re watching it in? That’s the level of detail and granularity that it gets into. We maintained all of that as a part of our system.

Paulo: Before the message of it’s not available in your territory.

Tho: Exactly. I’m sure some people are not entirely happy about that. All of that was part of the Netflix studio team. I was there for about six, seven years. I worked on all of these things. I also did things in copyright management back at Netflix again, building things ground up. The scale of Netflix is obviously much bigger than what you would see at Groupon, at least on the merchant side. But primarily I was building internal applications for our teams to use and decide whether this movie should be played by this user or not.

I think, obviously working at Netflix, at Netflix studio on contracts, deals and everything else we are talking about overall pitch to play. What does all of this do? We have a ton of data on Netflix. What this gives us a unique advantage of is saying what is the next genre we need to invest in? Who are the different artists who should be a part of this and come together and say, okay, let’s do this. Let’s, these are, this is gonna be the director. A good example here is The Irishman. Who says, okay Scorsese is gonna do a gangster style film, a genre along with De Niro and Pacino. We think this has a very high possibility of being a success based on the data that we have.

That’s how Netflix started producing movies. Clearly using data and saying hey, let’s use the data.

Paulo: It’s like a scoring system.

Tho: Absolutely. Exactly. Then they say, okay, predict, these are different combinations that will make a great movie. Let’s do that. But obviously fundamentally in the movie industry, there’s a creative aspect to it. That’s very hard. Netflix, as they’ve built Stranger Things and done all of this amazing content that they’ve produced, there’s a huge creative aspect that you can’t just rely purely on data. It’s a combination of both. It’s basically an art, not a science. Same as VC I guess.

Paulo: There’s a point at which it goes from a science to an art. I wonder if that’s how they got Squid Game out. They had a score for the script and then they were like, okay this one will work. So they pushed that out.

Move to Pinterest

Tho: I left Netflix and went to Pinterest. This is again, because I wanted to be a little bit more involved on the shopping side. Pinterest was creating this new shopping vertical. I figured, okay, this is an interesting time to come. Also Pinterest is a company with hundreds of millions of users. Similar to Netflix. But I felt like it hadn’t gotten to the scale that it could be at specifically from the monetization side. That’s what I came to tackle and handle. Built systems to handle monetization primarily from, again, the merchant angle.

This sort of ties back to what I was doing at Groupon. I did that for some time. I was there for about a couple of years, but I think the overall goal at Pinterest was to integrate shopping into all of the other verticals trying to make it its own thing.

Exploring AI and Relocating to Indonesia

Tho: It had just been a couple of years, but that’s around the time the first wave of AI started kicking in. I think maybe a few months before I joined an HR AI startup, that’s when ChatGPT really started getting popular. Primarily, going from traditional machine learning models, into using some of the LLMs for AI. I think that transition started happening and that’s when I said, okay, I feel this is something big and I need to be a part of that. I did that for a few months and then I realized, people weren’t hiring in the US folks didn’t really need HR AI startups at the time that I was there as much.

I started thinking about what to do next. I took a break. That’s the time I actually came to Indonesia to spend some time with my wife and kids. 

Paulo: Why Indonesia in particular?

Tho: Indonesia, my wife grew up in Indonesia. It was obviously very close to her. We had been thinking about moving post COVID both from a family perspective as well as just being close to things here in Asia. We felt we had a very wholesome life growing up in this part of the world and we wanted our kids to experience that same thing. At the same time, I think from a growth perspective, everyone’s talking about Southeast Asia. What’s happening, very different market from what we have in the US with 100 million people. Let’s get into a zone that we’re not as comfortable in. More of a comfort zone and see what happens here. That’s also part of the thing of course being close to parents is a huge plus.

Moving to Singapore and Meeting Flip

Tho: Since we’re here in Singapore originally our idea was to move to Singapore. To Bangalore where I grew up, as well as Jakarta where my wife started. So middle ground.

Paulo: Flight wise.

Tho: Exactly. I was in Jakarta just on a break, but that’s when I met Rab and Prish for coffee.

Joining Flip and Initial Impressions

Tho: One thing led to another and they were like, hey, we have this head of engineering role. I think it’s pretty cool. Pretty exciting.

Paulo: Did you know of Flip already before?

Tho: No. Funny story here because I was telling my driver that I’m going to this company called Flip and I want to talk to the CEO. He pulls out his phone and he is like, hey, I use Flip and look at how much money I’ve saved using Flip and I was like oh man. There was a sign. I was like, okay. Damn. Okay, now so then I went and met Prish and Rab and that’s…

Paulo: Unintentionally. The driver was doing marketing for you? Basically. He recruited me.

Tho: That’s the story there. I talked to them and I saw the vision for Flip. Of course I met Harry Luger after. But I talked to them, saw their vision, building a FinTech company here in Southeast Asia, in Indonesia, a huge market, 250 million plus people. Building this for them, I think that was also pretty exciting. The scale of things is just huge and obviously if you think about it from a transaction amount perspective…

[Content continues with the rest of the conversation about Flip, IVA program, angel investing, and career insights…]

Learning and Experiences at IVA

Tho: I met a lot of interesting companies there. But how I got into IVA was when Mohammed introduced me to folks who are heading the program at IVA. I talked to Jiaway and Megan and got to know what exactly is happening and what the goal of this program was. I think I was Cohort nine.

It’s come a long way, I think in the last three, four years. Obviously I think we have a lot more structure now than folks in the first cohort there. But that’s how I got to know about what IVA does. I said, okay, I think I should just do this and learn about it. It was an amazing experience.

I think it was pretty intense. I wanna say the first half. Everyone who goes through this program will probably tell you that especially, how to source deals. Talk to founders, make sure they’re not wasting their time. This is something that you actually want to invest in. But I think the entire experience was a lot of fun.

AI and Angel Investing Insights

Paulo: I’m interested to know how that sort of intersects with your purview at Flip is also AI. You had already joined an AI startup prior to joining Flip as well. I’m curious to know how that whole program, obviously it’s a VC program, but at the same time you get exposed to a lot of these startups that are building and the kind of products that they’re putting together. How did that impact your view of AI, especially in this part of the world?

Tho: I think what was very interesting to me was the way I started thinking about some of the companies that are pitching AI specifically, they’re like pooling companies. I will be using them today and if not. What is preventing me from using these guys?

Paulo: It’s great you have that kind of use case readily available to you.

Tho: As soon as anyone pitches an idea, the first thing I do is will I use it in my company today? Let’s leave the commercials separate. If not, what can I do? Then I started thinking more about, obviously as an angel investor you also start thinking more about how do I help these guys?

A lot of the companies that pitched to me would say, who would address maybe 5% of the problems that we have, and I’m like, guys, you are focusing on 5%, not on the 95%. Why don’t you like to invert your product timeline and build the 95% that not just me, but I’m guessing most other companies would need.

I started noticing companies were pretty receptive to that. I know a couple of examples. They said, okay, we’ll do that. They came back in two weeks. They inverted their entire timeline. That got me thinking…

Paulo: We still fit in the IVA timeline.

Tho: Like that fast of a product pivot. Very quick. I think that was probably the biggest learning for me. Like how do I use any of these tools in my current company? What would prevent me? At the same time, just broader thinking about what is the most for some of these AI companies? I think that’s also very important. Your distribution, do they actually have the data? Is it incumbent, trying to get into the AI space, which also we’ve seen a lot of. Definitely different learning angles there.

Paulo: I think it is pretty interesting being on an AI team, I guess there’s a little bit of advantage to companies and giving them feedback. It’s a little bit more actionable in a shorter time period. Especially if they have a SaaS model and its smaller organization is not necessarily the enterprise they’re selling to. I guess they could readily test any feedback you might have for them.

I’m also curious to know what are your takeaways I guess, from an investing point of view?

Joining XA Network and Building a Network in Southeast Asia

Paulo: We talked about like off just before recording this, that you’re part of the XA network, which is an angel network as well. You mentioned you’ve been investing in public tech companies before. What made you, I guess confident enough to eventually get into Angel investing and what are the takeaways from IVA that have influenced that?

Tho: I think IVA, the biggest takeaway that I have, was obviously doing enough due diligence. As you are getting into all of these companies at the angel stage, you don’t have a whole lot of context about what this company can do. A lot of times you are investing in the founders, which is part of the appeal for Angel investing. I think what I was looking for I’m sure a lot of other folks are too, is how good are the founders? How good are they at execution, at sales? Do they understand their weakness and are they willing to hire people to cover that need? I think those are the sort of important things. Of course, we’re also looking at product and market and making sure that they have a good strategy for all of these aspects.

But I think early stage angel investing, that’s what it was. Why I got into XA was I think obviously I was ex-Netflix. The XA network was started by I think ex-Google and ex-Netflix folks. Or ex-Amazon. Anyway, ex-FAANG. That sort of put me into that bracket and I said, okay, this is also a great way for me to network with folks from a similar background.

Obviously I lived in Silicon Valley for a very long time. This is the first time I’m working here in Southeast Asia. Basically means my network here is non-existent. I said, what do I do to build a network out here? XA was a very obvious choice.

Paulo: I think it’s a great network. We have some portfolio founders in that network. Like JJ from Port One is, he’s been a great wingman for you. I’m also curious to know, like from IVA, what was the highlight for you throughout this whole program that you would actually recommend to other people who are maybe exploring how they can better integrate or embed themselves in the ecosystem and are looking for programs like these.

Highlights and Learnings from IVA

Tho: I think the 12 week program that IVA has, each week you’re learning a different part of how to think as an investor. Then obviously the eventual goal is to pitch to the investment committee. Over the 12 weeks you have multiple check-ins to actually do that presentation. You’re looking at how exactly you are presenting the companies that you have sourced. A lot of times you’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and effort talking to these guys. You really wanted to succeed. You need to be currently prepared, I think, for the investment committee.

Obviously you have different parts of it. You’re looking at the market itself, you’re looking at the founders, what they’re doing. You’re looking at the idea you’re looking at all of the due diligence that you need to do GTM strategy that they have. Eventually of course you’re also looking at the cap table and everything else.

I think for me it was, I didn’t understand what any of these terms meant. I didn’t know what customer acquisition cost meant. I didn’t know what a TAM SAM was. Obviously coming from an engineering background, it’s very different. But now that you understand all of these things, you understand what a cap table is, why we use safe notes, all of these things I’ve learned over time.

I think a hundred percent of that credit goes to IVA because it just teaches you all of those different aspects that you would spend a lot of time learning. But the beauty of it is, I think after each class you go back, do some work, come back and pitch the next week. You have some learnings from there going forward. I think each week our pitch kept getting better and better. That is something that we see a lot. Eventually, I guess we got the best due diligence. So congrats on that.

Paulo: We’ll definitely get you guys back to mentor future generations on how you guys did it. But I think the interesting thing is that obviously you get to see a lot of improvement from the cohort, not just your cohort, I think the previous cohort as well. When people tell me oh, they’re not really sure about how they’re gonna perceive it at their first IC meeting. I say that’s fine because it’s probably not gonna be great, but at least if you’re starting from not so great, at least there’s room to improve and all that. You join XA post IVA and what else has this kind of inspired you to do like this whole experience?

Transitioning to Venture Capital

Tho: I think it’s been great. Like I said, I think this has been my pivot to VC in some ways. Obviously on the angel investing side through XA. But also, just joining part-time as a venture partner at MVP. Venture partner is a small fund here in Singapore trying to grow to a much bigger scale. MVP has been interesting. Mayan and Anja from MVP talked to them multiple times and seemed like a very right fit. I think these are the opportunities that you can get post IVA, which could be very interesting to folks, especially as folks trying to transition out of product engineering, sales, marketing into what the VC world means and taking small steps. I think this sort of accelerates that significantly in my opinion.

Final Thoughts and Recommendations

Tho: Another thing I want to add about IVA, obviously, is talking to all of the partners who come on and learning from all of them. I think we had Yinglan, we had Tim, we had Shefali, YC all of them. You know how each one of them brings a unique skill in what they talk about. There’s so much to learn there. It just feels I’m a sponge and I’m just trying to absorb all of this water from pretty much everyone sharing it.

Yinglan, just the way he thinks about, who am I today and can I be 1% better tomorrow? I think that sort of really resonated with me. All of that as well as the other aspect. I talked about how hard sales is but interestingly how Yinglan thinks about it and saying hey. First go talk to your customer, figure out what they want, then go back to your engineers and say guys, let’s build this because we have a customer with a problem. Then go back to the customer and say hey, it’s time for you to pay up. We built this amazing thing for you. I think just all of those different aspects based on his career and his life, that also has been super amazing.

I really enjoyed the program. Highly recommended.

Paulo: If you guys are interested in the program, then obviously reach out to our website or message any of our team to schedule a call and learn more. But thanks Tho.