Emerging Markets Startups

Rappi is one of the largest superapps in Latin America with over 15M users. The company started out as an on demand delivery service and today has become an everything store across Latin America’s population of 650M people. We’re joined by Rappi’s Product Lead, David Vanegas, who attributes Rappi’s success to their users’ creativity, and the company’s speed and obsession with user feedback. Tune into this episode to hear how Rappi acquired its first 250 downloads with donuts, and ways the company captures user feedback via Whatsapp to continuously innovate.

Grab is the largest superapp tech company in Southeast Asia with over 250M downloads in a region with 600+ million people. Grab first started out as a ride sharing company but quickly grew into food delivery, payments and so much more. In this episode, we speak to Grab’s Head of Product for Deliveries, Zhibo Sun. Zhibo shares insights into Grab’s product culture, growth strategies and how the company has pivoted during Covid.

Like many emerging markets, saving money in Nigeria was expensive. Then came PiggyVest, a free savings and microinvestment product, that's now one of the fastest growing fintech startups out of Nigeria. PiggyVest built a strong following and grew to millions of people by word of mouth. Seriously, check their Twitter mentions. We spoke to Odunayo Eweniyi, the co-founder and COO of PiggyVest, about the company’s growth trajectory and product culture.

In the first 20 mins we talk about Nigeria's challenges and local culture that gave rise to PiggyVest. The last 20 mins is all about growth strategies and how PiggyVest builds a user obsessed product culture. Key takeaways for building a product loved by the community:

1. Help users feel heard by including their ideas into your roadmap
   
2. Give users a sense of trust, it can be more important than efficiency
   
3. Building loyal users who advocate for the product will stretch further than traditional marketing tactics
   
4. Pay attention to tweets that go viral on New Years eve, they may just inspire your next startup idea ;)
   

Bykea is a ride sharing and delivery startup in Pakistan and the fastest growing startup in a country of 220 million people. Founded by serial entrepreneur Muneeb Maayr, Bykea is taking on the juggernauts Uber and Careem. The 5 year old startup is quickly growing due to its obsession with localizing the product to meet the needs of everyday Pakistanis and a “pounding the pavement” startup culture. In this episode we hear from Rafiq Malik, Bykea’s Chief Operating Officer whose passion for logistics and transportation enables him to run a tight ship while ensuring Bykea continues to experiment and grow every hour. Listen to learn:

1. How Bykea continually uses localization to help them innovate and grow
   
2. What helped Bykea grow quickly and be unafraid of the Ubers and Careems
   
3. Ways to scale marketing in emerging markets
   

Have you ever noticed all your Filipino friends seem to have family all over the world? That’s because so many of them have migrated all over the world in the last century. Hence when Filipinos return home to build a startup, they bring a diversity of ideas and experience from all over. In this episode, we explore the Filipino startup ecosystem with Diane Eustaquio, Executive Director at one of the earlier accelerators in the Philippines. She shares with us unique insights and growth hacks like, if you want to grow product adoption in the Philippines, it better first go through word of mouth by way of family and friends.

Since its early days, Malaysia has been a key part of the globalization trend. Malacca, a city in the Malay peninsula, was historically an important destination along the Silk Road trade route. This meant its had a history of a melting pot of cultures. Today it has enabled Malaysian entrepreneurs to excel at building startups serving multiple regions of the world. A shining example is Grab, a ride sharing startup and the most famous unicorn in Southeast Asia founded by Malaysian entrepreneur Anthony Tan. On this episode we’re joined by Daniel Lim, who's been a pivotal part of Malaysia’s startup ecosystem since the dot com era in the late 90s. We uncover Malaysian startups that have had a global impact, the story of Grab, and how Malaysia has blended influence from the east and west in its startup ecosystem.

Over the last episodes, we’ve focused on people and companies in emerging markets building for their markets. There’s also been a wave of companies in Silicon Valley building for emerging markets. Those include Payjoy which focuses on selling smartphones via loans and Branch, Tala and Kiva who give microloans to everyday people. Today we have Mark Heynen, who co-founded Payjoy, helped Google and Facebook expand its products to emerging markets and has worked in emerging markets since 1999. We discuss key trends in emerging markets including: the digitization of everyday transactions, the “mobile multiplier”, the tremendous growth of the middle class in emerging markets which is growing faster than it is in the US, the popularity of super apps, and how infrastructure startups enable more innovation to come. We also talk about how to operate a startup focused on emerging markets and social impact in Silicon Valley and how to craft a narrative that VCs care about.

On this episode, we venture into the Baltics and more specifically, Lithuania. Although the Baltic states are small, what they lack in size they make up in innovation. Even during the Soviet Union era, the Baltics served as the innovation hub. And today countries from this region serve as models for the rest of the world. For example, Estonia is the leader in govtech. Lithuania has become a leading sandbox for fintech companies  given friendly regulations. In our discussion, we're lucky to be joined by Danielius Stasiulius, founder of a edtech startup in Lithuania called BitDegree. Danielius has been a key part of Lithuania's startup ecosystem and shares with us the Lithuanian unicorns, how many of these companies have bootstrapped their way to success, the evolving investment scene and more. 

In this episode, we take you to Thailand, known globally as the ultimate vacation getaway. But did you know it’s also Southeast Asia’s second largest economy by GDP and has a population of 67 million people? These are some factors that prime it to be a key startup ecosystem in the region. We’re joined by Amarit Charoenphan who is probably one of the best known startup ecosystem leaders in Thailand. He cofounded TechSauce, Thailand’s leading technology conference, media and events company and has been pivotal in building Thailand’s startup ecosystem. Join us to learn about angel and venture investing in Thailand, the hot startups coming out of Thailand, and how the private sector has been one of the biggest contributors to the startup ecosystem.

With 55 million people, Myanmar transitioned from 5% to 85% internet penetration in just 7 years. That’s more than 65% of the population that has access to electricity! This transition started 2 years after the country ended its militaristic rule in 2011 to become a democracy. The opening up of the country paired with the population’s latent demand to participate in the international economy meant people quickly adopted the internet and social media. Startups were also popping up as older industries struggled to meet people’s needs. Covid in 2020, served as another push for businesses to move some of their operations online. Join me in a discussion with Jes Kaliebe Petersen, CEO of Phandeeyar, one of the earliest accelerators in Myanmar, as he shares local insights on local business models and challenges in the ecosystem.

With 88M people, Iran’s startup ecosystem is one of the best examples of “constraints breed innovation.” Politically, sanctions have limited Iran’s participation in the global economy including limiting the use of everyday products like the Apple and Google Play store. With limited foreign influence, the usual competition that local tech companies face from the Ubers, and Amazons of the world are non-existent, enabling home grown tech companies to thrive. It’s also forced Iran to build most tech products from scratch including their own app store called CafeBazaar.  
Although these constraints have been hard on people, it has forced Iranian entrepreneurs to be especially resilient and “hacky” to work around the sanctions and the government. We have Neda Golshan, who is the VP of Product at DigiKala, Iran’s largest ecommerce tech company. In this episode, Neda shares stories of Iranian entrepreneurs who’ve hacked their way to success.

You haven't seen city density till you've been to Bangladesh’s capital city, Dhaka. It's one of the densest cities in the world in a country of 165M people. This density presents challenges like terrible traffic, sprawling slums and incomplete infrastructure. Bangladeshi startups have taken advantage of the density to innovate for those unique challenges while leveraging the density’s centralization of demand and supply to scale startups fast. Our guest, Minhaz Anwar, who built Bangladeshi’s startup ecosystem up since 2008, calls this the “density dividend.” This momentum in tech startups has also intersected with another area of innovation Bangladesh is famous for: poverty alleviation. Not only are we seeing the tech sector directly tackling poverty with mobile payment systems like Bkash banking the unbanked, but the sector itself has created 1.5M jobs in the last 5-7 years. Compare this to Bangladeshi’s garment industry which has created 3.5M jobs in the last 40 years.

With 220 million people and 70% of the population under 30 years old, Pakistan is prime for technological innovation with its highly talented developers and tech hungry consumers. This ecosystem transitioned from being an outsourced R&D center for companies like Kayak years ago to building Daraz, the Amazon of Pakistan which sold to Alibaba in 2018. Since then, there’s been tons of talented founders here who are building businesses to tackle social problems in the country. We have Jehan Ara who founded the Nest I/O in Karachi, the leading startup accelerator and community in Pakistan with over 200+ startups accelerated. Jehan gives us the scoop on the best startups from Pakistan, the challenges in the ecosystem and how they’re building momentum, fast.

Indonesia is the world’s 4th most populated country with almost 280 million people. Its enormous size plus strong economy has enabled its exploding tech ecosystem with 6 unicorns in just 4 years. The largest being ride hailing superapp, Go-jek, valued at $10B. No surprise given Indonesians are obsessed with mobile tech and internet penetration stands at 73%. Indonesians are culturally very social and high on trust, driving network effects, and the collection of tons of data enabling better services . Around 50% of the people are under 30 years old with 70% of millennials saying they want to be startup founders. Every year new unicorns spawn bringing along it a healthy venture capital scene with pre-series A rounds starting at $5-10M. Even Jay-Z invested in Indonesian startups! Could Indonesia be the next China in terms of startup tech growth?

We’re joined by Nicole Yap, the managing director of Digitaraya, Indonesia’s leading tech accelerator, to help us explore one of the fastest growing startup ecosystems in the world.

On this week’s episode of our Emerging Markets Startups podcast, we’re joined by Chris Schroeder, venture investor and co-founder of the Next Billion Ventures, board member of several startups, and author of Startup Rising, The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East. We talk about how localizing products is the ultimate competitive advantage and examples of emerging market startups that are already leapfrogging Silicon Valley.

On this episode, we take you to South Africa.  South Africa is one of the richest countries in Africa but also the most unequal country in the world. Marcello Schermer joins us as the Head of Expansion at Yoco, the “Square” of Africa. We discuss how innovations in payments are unlocking entirely new markets while tackling inequality and enabling entrepreneurs to more easily start and scale businesses.

On this episode of the Emerging Markets Tech Startups podcast, we take you to Zambia. Zambia is a country of 18 million people in Southern Africa. The country is famous for the world’s widest and largest waterfall, Victoria Falls. Simunza Muyangana joins us as the co-founder and Director of Bongohive, Zambia’s first technology and innovation hub which started 9 years ago! We discuss how Bongohive was founded with the advent and explosion of Android, the first Zambian startup to receive a $1 million investment and why Prince Harry from the Royal family comes to visit.

Nigeria's population will explode to 400 million people by 2050. Today, Nigeria is the startup epicenter of Africa. Hear from our guest, Kola Aina who founded Ventures Platform to invest in the future of Africa. Kola talks about the most innovative companies from Nigeria, and how he sees the future of the country's startup ecosystem.