The Rice People Podcast Rice People Podcast

Hsu Ken is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Iterative , a YC-style accelerator focused on Southeast Asia. Hsu Ken and his co-founder Brian Ma started Iterative in 2021 and are already about to begin their 4th accelerator batch. As part of the accelerator startups receive anywhere between US $150,000 to US $ 500,000 along with 3 months of working together with the Iterative team and fellow batch mates on growth, product, pitch etc. Prior to founding Iterative, Hsu Ken also co-founded Decide (acquired by eBay) and Weave.

Alan Wong is the CTO and one of the Co-Founders of Ula. Ula is fast growing Indonesian startup looking to digitize and empower mom and pop retailers, also known as warungs in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia. The company also recently raised a $100 Million Series B round from prominent investors such as Bezos Expeditions, Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global, Tencent and more. We cover how Ula's journey, how customer obsession is their North Star and also get Alan's point of view of when is the right time to progress from being an individual contributor in an organisation.

Albert Ho is the Chief Strategy Officer as RateS, which is a social commerce platform that enables small businesses and individuals to start their online business via social channels.

We dove deep to understand social commerce, how it works in different geographies, why its taking hold in Southeast Asia today and also the nuances in the varying social commerce models adopted by a variety of startups in the region today. We also talked about Rate S' evolution from a financial platform into a social commerce startup, challenges they've faced and also touch on how Albert's newsletter and telegram community journey.

On this episode, we had a chat with Grehg Yeo, the host of the 1 Foot In Podcast which aims to help you get into the doors of teh top and fastest growing companies in the world. The podcast introduces you to the individuals who have done just that and you get to know who they are, what are their value systems and what worked to get them in.

This was a loose and fun conversation where we discussed why he even decided to start a podcast focused on careers, his own personal experience as an undergraduate, looking for internships and a job. We also talked about the nitty gritty parts of running a podcast as well the various highs and lows he's had with 1 Foot In after 1 season of the podcast. At the end of the pod, you also get a sneak peek into what Gregh and 1 Foot In has in store for you in Season 2!

On this episode, we had a chat with Neelesh Bhatia, the founder of Akadasia which is a mission driven startup looking to empower educators everywhere by building the largest global community of educators and providing them resources for continuous professional development. He was also the founding director of SPINOFF, the entrepreneurship centre at Singapore Polytechnic.

This was a wide ranging conversation where we discussed Akadasia's origin story and why Neelesh wanted to build this company, how he made the tough decision to leave his comfortable government jobs to dive back into entrepreneurship, the evolution of teaching and education over the past couple of years, why hunger is more important than passion and so much more!

Our guest today is Justine Win, a Product Designer at Shopify.

In our conversation, we understand her perspective on what makes good design, what a product designer does, how compromise is a key part of the design process and how you can develop your own creative muscle. We also dive deep into understanding her thought process behind moving from the Philippines to Canada, why she was intent on working at a product-led company and how she even got into the design field, having studied IT in college.