"When we first started, we had one integration, which was Airbnb, but along the way, we integrated multiple different solutions onto our platform, similar to how Apple created the App Store for their phone. With one lock, we now have an app store called Igloo Connect featuring more than 500 integrations. Once you install the smart lock, you can remotely connect to Airbnb to rent your property, an elderly care provider to deliver medicine, or a handyman service to repair your air conditioning. You can choose any of these connected solutions already integrated into our platform, which creates a flywheel for growth and provides the best value to every device owner." - Anthony Chow, Co-founder and CEO of Igloo


"With every challenge, there's a bit of opportunity, and in 2021, the silver lining was receiving numerous inbound inquiries from the US. We realized there was a massive shift due to the work-from-home trend, with people moving from the East and West Coasts to the Sunbelt areas like Texas, Georgia, and Phoenix to rent single-family homes. This created a surge in the long-term rental market, and property managers reached out because many of their properties lacked Wi-Fi, asking how our product could work for them. Because of this demand, we found the opportunity to reboot the business; in late 2021, my founding partners and I bought one-way tickets and moved to the US during COVID to set up our operations." - Anthony Chow, Co-founder and CEO of Igloo


"One of the challenges of running an Airbnb side hustle was the logistical hurdle of passing keys to guests, which led us to leverage our technology backgrounds to design our own smart locks. However, when the Singapore government regulated the industry and made Airbnb illegal, we were forced to shut down our business and incur a loss as we were subletting rather than owning the properties. Despite this setback, our experience managing a portfolio of properties revealed that the smart home system we had 'hacked together' for ourselves held significant value for property managers operating at scale. Consequently, we pivoted away from property management to become a smart home solution provider for Airbnb hosts, marking the true genesis of Igloo." - Anthony Chow, Co-founder and CEO of Igloo

Anthony Chow, Co-founder and CEO of Igloo, joins Jeremy Au to discuss how a side hustle managing Airbnb properties turned into a global proptech company. Anthony explains how operational pain points like guest check-ins led him to build smart lock technology designed for short-term rentals. They explore how early hardware failures forced product redesign, why focusing on a narrow customer segment helped the company stand out, and how a partnership with Airbnb accelerated global growth. Anthony also shares how Igloo expanded from vacation rentals into the broader rental and asset sharing economy, how COVID nearly collapsed the company, and how relocating to the United States helped reboot the business. Finally, he reflects on the leadership shifts required to scale a company across cultures, teams, and global markets.

02:15 Airbnb hosting exposed the real problem: Managing multiple Airbnb units while working full-time made guest check-ins and key handovers painful, which pushed Anthony to build a remote smart lock solution.

03:54 Singapore’s Airbnb ban forced a startup pivot: When short-term rentals became illegal in Singapore, the Airbnb business shut down and the founders turned their internal tool into a product for global hosts.

11:40 Offline smart lock technology unlocked product market fit: Igloo redesigned the product to generate time-based access codes that worked without WiFi, solving reliability problems for remote properties.

12:31 Airbnb partnership accelerated global adoption: Airbnb promoted Igloo to hosts worldwide, helping the company gain distribution partners and manufacturing scale.

18:45 COVID destroyed the core market but revealed a new one: Global lockdowns collapsed vacation rentals while demand from US long-term rental operators started rising.

19:26 The founding team moved to Texas to save the company: Anthony and his partners bought one-way tickets to the United States during COVID to rebuild the business around rental housing.

28:21 Leadership evolved as the company scaled globally: Anthony shifted from working with friends to building a structured organization and managing teams across Asia and the United States.

Hey, I'm so excited to have you on the show. You are such an inspiring founder to be pushing out a property tech in Southeast Asia and now globally. So really excited to have you on the show.  Could you introduce yourself?

Anthony Chow: Thank you, Jeremy, for having me on the show. My name is Anthony.  I'm the co-founder and CEO of Igloo in Singapore. Sometimes we are known as Igloo Home.  That's kind of the name that we started from. The journey for Igloo actually started about 10 years ago.  So I had just graduated from the US in Stanford. I came back to Singapore. I was working for Singtel—so Singtel is this large telco over in Southeast Asia—and I was a data scientist for them, basically helping them analyze their data records and helping generate insights to improve their digital portfolios within the company.

But the interesting thing was on the side, me and my buddy, we were actually running an Airbnb property right here in Singapore. So this was when Airbnb was still kind of gray. But we had one unit and we realized that, you know, as long as you have 40% occupancy, you were breaking even. So we rented property and we sublet it out and we went from, you know, one unit—we generally, on good months, we get like 70, 80% occupancy. So you know, you are making about 50% margins on it.  So we grew from one unit to about 10, 12 units. At one point, I think we had about 20 units. It was making more money than our job as a full-time data scientist,  right? [00:02:00] So that was kind of what we were doing as a side hustle.

But one of the challenges that we found, you know, running this on the side was passing keys to guests. You know, we have full-time jobs, so we were working very hard on our full-time jobs. So, we couldn't meet our guests at 2:00 PM when they wanted to check in. So we started designing—put our own technology background into use—and we started designing our own smart locks and our own smart home ecosystem using Z-Wave at the time to ensure that we are able to check guests in remotely and then when they check out we can switch off the AC and stuff like that.  And that was working kind of well for us. So this entire journey, we ran it for about one or two years.  That was about 2014, 2015, around there.

And what happened around the time was Airbnb became illegal. So the government actually regulated that there's no such thing as Airbnb anymore in Singapore; you can't do it. And so we had to shut down the entire business. Because we were not landlords—we rented and we subletted on it—we made a bit of loss on it. But because of the experience running, you know, this portfolio of Airbnb properties, yeah, we realized that the solution—we hacked together this whole smart home system for ourselves and we realized that this actually has a lot of value for anyone who's running Airbnb property management at scale,  right?

So, while we're running Airbnb we did visit some of our friends who were running Airbnbs in like Thailand, Indonesia and all that to learn best practices. So as we couldn't do our property management anymore in Singapore,  we started to reach out back to them and say, "Look, we have built this for ourselves. Would you like to try it?" And we got a very positive response. So we shut down our Airbnb business and then we started becoming a smart home solution provider for Airbnb hosts.  That was really the genesis of Igloo. So that was kind of how it started.

Jeremy Au: Wow. Incredible. What a journey.

Anthony Chow: You know, something interesting was that I'm always, you know, restless, right? I always wanted to create things and I'm not sure if you know this, actually during junior college, I actually came out with one of our batchmates to start the RJ cyber gaming club.

Jeremy Au: And then basically junior college was like, "Sorry we have too many injuries already from a dual fla." So you, because you know numbers, A's are very important I think; so the number of A's are very important for them.

Anthony Chow: A hundred percent. Yeah.

Jeremy Au: But they rejected the Taekwondo club, but we were brain blown by when you—

Anthony Chow: Yeah.

Jeremy Au: Yes, I remember now. I did not know it was you.

Anthony Chow: and Benjamin. Yeah, so he was the one leading; we went to fundraise. I think we raised, I don't know how much—$1,000, $2,000 straight out of school  to help us buy computers and then buy licenses for Warcraft and stuff like that. Wow, it was fun.  Like we ran it for about two years. We ran like, you know, video gaming contests and all that stuff.  Yeah. So that was, I think, the first stage, right? Of like setting something up.  Yeah. And along the way, as I went to college and also doing my masters, so in the US I also tried to start one or two companies. None of those actually went anywhere, right? So when I think the concept of Igloo

Jeremy Au: —came about?

Anthony Chow: —just kind of went into it and that, that kind of moved along.

Jeremy Au: Wow. So you're already entrepreneurial while you're at Stanford? Yeah.

Anthony Chow: Yeah, because over there, I think everyone walks around with an idea in your mind, right, that can change the world?

Jeremy Au: Silicon Valley, your hair is different.

Anthony Chow: I know. So, everyone's a founder of something. So I started something as well together with some of my batchmates.

Jeremy Au: Or were they just quickly—what were those projects at that time?

Anthony Chow: Yeah, so one was an email, kind of a way to resolve emails a lot quicker. I mean obviously now there's a lot more AI solutions for that. Another one was a travel solution where we help—similar in the Airbnb space. I was a big Airbnb user, so one of the challenges... about... no, it wasn't China. Well, one of the things about Airbnb, right, is that you typically can book something in like New York, San Francisco, Singapore and all that. But when you're looking at like a remote area, like a village in Vietnam, you don't typically find a home on Airbnb on that. So we decided to create an Airbnb for rural tourism.  Yeah, so we designed that. We went to Vietnam, you know, we created a whole experience around it.  Raised a little bit of money but it didn't work well. It just didn't work.  Yeah, it was difficult to scale. Every property is different and I don't know whether it's good to say this on air, but basically the Village Elder—on every property that we leased there's a village tax.  So it was difficult to scale. I mean, we shut it down within nine months.

Jeremy Au: Yeah.

Anthony Chow: Yeah. And then, so when I came back to Singapore—'cause I had to come to Singapore for the scholarship and all that—and then we started to run our own Airbnb property on the side. And then this idea came.

Jeremy Au: Oh, fantastic. And I mean, so you're at Singtel and then you made so... I think it is one thing to be like, "Okay, makes sense. Airbnb is a side hustle while you're at a day job." Very common, actually.  Yeah, very common back then. There were so many YouTube videos.  Yes. And I kind of wish in my head I had done that as well.

Anthony Chow: Well, a lot of people doing it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. People still doing it now.

Anthony Chow: Yeah.

Jeremy Au: But not in Singapore, obviously.  And then you started looking at this technology approach, right? So that shut down, et cetera. You're still at Singtel.

Anthony Chow: Yeah.

Jeremy Au: So what was the inflection point where you're like, "Okay, I can quit Singtel"?

Anthony Chow: There was a point in time where Airbnb, you can't do it anymore. We started to realize that this smart home solutions for Airbnb has value, right? And then we started to talk to a couple of Airbnb hosts within our friend network and they were all excited about it and they're all willing to pay.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, right.

Anthony Chow: We were selling like a small lock that we had hacked together for $500.

Jeremy Au: Yeah.

Anthony Chow: You know, it wasn't even productized yet.  Yeah. And we managed to sell like 10, 20 of those, right? Got like $5,000, $10,000 in and we are like, "Holy... no, this is actually meaningful."  Yeah. Yeah. And then if you think about the total TAM, right? There's like 3 million hosts all around the world. If you sell 500 to all 3 million, you're gonna be rich.  So all right man, this is a billion dollar idea. Let's start.  Yeah. That was, I guess on hindsight, that's how you start  basically.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, yeah. It makes up that start, but it's nothing to be like, "Hey, I'm gonna quit my job," right?  Yeah. Because I mean, I think makes a little sense, right? You de-risk it by working on a day job. You can explore ideas, but you know, it's still scary.

Anthony Chow: Yeah.

Jeremy Au: Or were you very like, "Oh, very easy"?

Anthony Chow: No, I think at that point in time, one of the things that I learned was over the two or three kind of side hustles or like the startups that we tried to run, a lot of times when we were running it, we were actually still running full-time jobs.  Yeah. One of the things I realized was that if you are not a hundred percent focused on the company that you're working on, chances are it's not gonna work.  Yeah. So two or three of those that we started, all we kind of shut down. And a lot of it is because of the different effort you put in with your founding team. Everyone has their own priorities as long as everyone's still having a full-time job. So when this idea came about, we knew that the only way to make this work was to jump right in, a hundred percent. Because I think when you go in with nothing and no backup plan, right, that's when you really give your 120%, because that's the only way out is to make it work.

Jeremy Au: Right.

Anthony Chow: Yeah.

Jeremy Au: And I think what's interesting is that, you know, you're making this set of decisions around this,  right? You have to figure out how to hack the product together, which is hardware. You're also selling, et cetera. So I'm just kind of curious 'cause it's such a—also rare thing just in hardware startups.

Anthony Chow: Yeah.

Jeremy Au: Not very common.

Anthony Chow: Everybody. Yeah.

Jeremy Au: Singapore was like doing like, you know, service or FinTech already. Did you find it like difficult, the hardware side, or was it very straightforward for you?

Anthony Chow: I think at that point in time we were a little bit naive as well, but we thought that locks had been around for hundreds of years, thousands of years.  How difficult can it be? So those are famous last words for us. You know, so when we created our very first lock, I still remember we basically bought parts from China and then we wrote out a little bit of firmware in there so that we can remotely manage it.  Yeah. And then we started selling it.  Yeah, we sold it. I remember the first couple of locks that we started to get to market, we sold it at $99.  We sold about 200–300 units out there. And then we started to ship it.  Yeah. And what happened was that we kind of went and installed the first 10—because, like, doors are different—and then we forgot to ship a certain part in the door lock. And I remember the first installation that we did, right—this was doing a little bit of trials—it took me 11 hours.

Jeremy Au: To install that lock? Oh.

Anthony Chow: Because, like, I mean, the door maybe similar to what you have here, that has a big glass pane inside there. So even the installer didn't really know how to figure it out. So we were very worried at that point in time, right? Initially we thought, "Hey, we just need to sell locks to every Airbnb host and we'll be rich." But once we started getting into them, the execution piece of it, the installation—different doors have different kind of regulations, specifications, and all that. And we started becoming pretty concerned, right? And then even the entire supply chain as well was also very difficult for us because when we have very low volumes only certain manufacturers will work with you.  Right? You can't work with those which are big at scale, where quality and QC is like a hundred percent, with ISO certifications; whereas the smaller ones, many of them tend to maybe ship you one time and that's it. There's not even like a warranty, you know?  Yeah.

So I think the first two, three years were years of pain and learning, figuring out how to manage hardware supply chain at the right scale that we needed to be, and also finding distributors to bring our products to market who actually know a thing about locks that we really didn't know anything about.  Yeah. So I think some of the learning challenges are in the first two, three years of the business. But I think one of the things that really helped us, you know, along this way was the customer point of view, right? Because we were really creating a solution that the customers wanted. No one else, at least at that point in time, was really solving for this niche market.  Think about it, right? There's about 3 million hosts all around the world. But you know, a smaller player from one of the big competitors, they're not gonna care about the 3 million people.  They're gonna care about the billions of people who need smart locks on their doors, right? So that's their market. But we were very laser focused on just this segment.

Jeremy Au: Yeah.

Anthony Chow: So the solution that we created was not just the lock itself, but also the entire software suite. So we were writing scripts according to Airbnb so that we can, you know, once somebody makes a reservation, we can automate the check-in process for all the guests who check in. So it became like a self check-in solution that we were pitching to Airbnb hosts.  And the lock was just one piece of it. And because of the laser focus on this market, one of the unique things that we designed into our locks is that it has to be a non-connected smart lock.

Jeremy Au: It's like a non-connected smart device. Exactly. So what does it mean?

Anthony Chow: Yeah, what does it mean? So, the thing that we learned was that when you actually design a smart lock for an Airbnb property, a lot of times this property—because of vacation—many of them might be on the mountains, by the beach, or like in the basement. Actually if you go to the UK, a lot of Airbnbs are in the basement, right, of the house. Many times the Wi-Fi doesn't actually hit the door. So if you bought like a regular smart lock that is Wi-Fi connected or Z-Wave connected, a lot of times when you want to set the code for the lock, for a temporary code for guest check-in, the Wi-Fi might not hit the lock, it might not work. And when a guest walks up to the door, they punch in a code and because of Murphy's Law, most likely it's just not gonna work. And in our initial first couple of hundred of locks that we shipped out to Airbnb hosts, honestly, more than half of them didn't work just because of Wi-Fi problems. So we had to recall some of these products and it was not really our problem. It was just really that Wi-Fi is a luxury, you know, it doesn't exist in many of these properties.

So what we needed to do was to then go back to the drawing board and say, "How do we make a smart non-connected lock?"  Right? For this market. And the way we went around doing it is that with those banking token technologies, where you can create a one-time password like the Google Authenticator system.  Yeah. So we designed a Google Authenticator platform into our locks itself, right? So remotely you can create a one-time code or like a two-day code that the lock can recognize even though there's no Wi-Fi.

Jeremy Au: Wow.

Anthony Chow: So this was, I think, a very interesting application of the banking token technology into a smart lock with a software suite that's connected to Airbnb.

Jeremy Au: Right.

Anthony Chow: So then we relaunched again to the market with the Airbnb hosts, and we said that, "Look, this product, you can just put it on the door. You don't have to connect to Wi-Fi at all." It's going to change the code every single time for every new guest who checks in. And when they check out, the code automatically expires. When your cleaning staff comes in, a new code can be sent. And all these codes are independent from each other, unique from each other.

Jeremy Au: Yes. That is a good feature.  Yeah. I imagine this became like a great feature, great sell.

Anthony Chow: Exactly. And we actually managed to get Airbnb's attention, right? So Airbnb, I think it was end of 2016, a couple of months after we launched, they gave us a global partnership. And this immediately increased the brand exposure to all the superhosts all around the world. And anyone who owns an Airbnb suddenly got exposed to the Igloo Home brand, right? And so because we had designed very specifically for this sector and we got a good go-to-market partner, we were able to overcome some of these initial challenges. So distributors were interested to work with us, Airbnb hosts because there's just no competition in the market—they were willing to try with us even though things break, you know, we shipped to them again. And then they started testing it and we started to overcome some of those early challenges there.  Yeah. And even suppliers as well—when they learned that we are a partner of Airbnb, they knew that potential volumes would come.  Yeah. We were then able to work with, you know, bigger, better suppliers to go from there.  Yeah. So it was a lot of iteration, I guess.

Jeremy Au: Wow. I can imagine the inflection point, but yeah, it's so painful to get there, right?

Anthony Chow: Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Jeremy Au: I also like—because you must have required funding. In my head it is like the concept of sending out 300 locks, getting into the supply chain, and then having half of it not work. Recall, reiterate... feels like a very painful year at least. Right? So how was that?

Anthony Chow: Yeah. I think maybe when we started the business around the 2016 timeframe, it was probably a good time to start companies because at the time, I think VCs were looking at funding. I think at the end, the whole venture capital world at the time was a lot more vibrant. And the fact that we had a story where we were starting to serve Airbnb hosts and we were looking at this potential partnership that was able to help us scale... there was a story. That helped us raise our first seed round, which was a million dollars that we raised back in 2016, right? So we used some of those money to help us overcome some of these challenges and our earliest learning pain points and help us look at, you know, kind of the Southeast Asian market as our initial go-to-market.

Because if you think about Airbnb hosts, suddenly Singapore at the time, you know, obviously it was getting to be banned, right? But the largest markets were actually over in Australia, in Thailand—these were like large vacation rental markets—and even in Japan as well. So we had to quickly look at distribution in those markets. We were initially very excited to sell direct so we can get the best margins, but we realized that even shipping hardware to these markets, you need import licenses. You need localization of languages, you need all sorts of things. And distributors themselves have their own go-to-market strategy as well; they have their own sales team, so eventually it made a lot more sense to partner.  Right? Yeah. And to be honest, I think many of the distributors that we onboarded in the 2016 to 2018 or 2019 years, actually a lot of them are still with us, right?  Yeah. And obviously as a company, we have moved beyond just the vacation rental market into all the other categories that we are in right now, and we grow together with these distributors now. So yeah, these have been great partners for us over the years.  Yeah.

Jeremy Au: And I think this—you're talking a little bit about the evolution of the company since those days, right?  From 2016 today. So could you share how your company has evolved since, from let's say 2016 earlier segment to today? Can you explain those?

Anthony Chow: Yeah. The first three years of the business we were very focused on the vacation rental market. We basically grew Airbnb across Southeast Asia and we were looking at Europe and the US, and there was a moment in 2019 where we pretty much got to pretty even, you know, within a quarter. And then we raised our Series A, so there was a $15 million round that we raised. And the whole goal at that point in time was to go beyond Southeast Asia, into Europe and the US, and also build up our enterprise access control solution. 'Cause we did realize that, you know, after a couple years of working with Airbnb hosts, many of our customers are not the onesies, twosies Airbnb hosts, but other guys who are professionally managed; they manage 500 units, a thousand units. So we needed a much more scalable platform on the software side to integrate with our hardware to go to market.

So the whole goal then was to build up our enterprise platform. Because if you think about the offline smart access and the positioning that we have, right, there are many other sectors in the world that have similar characteristics. So if you think about fleet management, if you think about like large warehouses or like train tracks, you know, kind of cell tower management, critical infrastructure. Many of these locations might not have Wi-Fi as well, but yet they have a lot of operational hazards where people need to go in, change keys to unlock something to go do something, maintain like a facility.

Jeremy Au: Yeah.

Anthony Chow: So we started to move beyond just Airbnb into what we generally call the critical infrastructure space. There's another category that came out as well—this was during the COVID period—it was generally what we call the sharing economy. There were a lot of people moving away from owning items to sharing items. So this could be sharing kayaks or like tennis court... unmanned tennis court management, or things like P2P car rental companies.  Anything that you can share. Many of these items or assets are actually in public areas, right?  There's no Wi-Fi there. So we had to create solutions that allow us to go beyond just the home sharing market into all this other asset sharing industry. So that was kind of the thought when we did our Series A back in 2019, and I guess, timing, right? 2019 we raised it, and then 2020 was COVID.  So we had not really gotten into any of this industry. And then in 2020, 2021, the entire market collapsed for us because there was just no vacation rental, right? Lockdowns, right?  Nobody could travel. And then there was generally a property collapse as well, right, across many of the Southeast Asian markets. So the business pretty much collapsed over those two years.

I think, you know, with every challenge there's a bit of opportunity. So in 2021, the silver lining that we received was actually that we were getting a lot of inbound inquiries from the US. So at the time we were already serving some Airbnb hosts in the US, but what we realized at that point in time in 2021 was that there's a general huge shift because of work from home. A lot of people from the coast, East Coast and West Coast, they were actually moving. They were selling houses, right, and then moving to the Sunbelt area—like to Texas, to Georgia, to Phoenix—and rent like a nice big single family and they will work out from there.  Right? So there was a huge rise in rental. This is not short-term rental, but this is a general long-term rental market in the US. A lot of large institutions were basically scaling up their portfolio across the entire North American market, and they were reaching out to us and saying, "Hey, many of our properties have no Wi-Fi. Can we try your product? How does your product work?"

Yeah. So because of these inbound inquiries coming in, we found an opportunity to reboot the business. So in late 2021, myself and some of our founding partners, we basically moved to the US, bought a one-way ticket, basically went there during COVID. And we started the business; we set up our office in Austin, Texas. And over the last four years, we've really been growing the business over in the US.  And you know, sometimes things happen for a reason. And today, what we generally call the single family and the multi-family rental market in the US is now representing probably 60–70% of the business. And of course, the vacation rental market and other sharing economy solutions are starting to pick up again right over the last couple of years.  We'll see.

Yeah, I think one thing that maybe the audience that's out there in Singapore—one thing that's interesting is that while in Singapore, the home ownership is probably like 90-odd percent, right?  Very few people rent in Singapore. Co-living is rising, which is great for us, you know. But on the other hand, in the US about 40% of Americans rent; that's like 50, 60 million homes.  They're all rental. And this, that's just how I think the culture and the lifestyle is for Americans, and this whole shift from ownership to rental, while it's not exactly like a good trend, but it's something that's going to go on for a long time. You know, if you look at other markets like say in Dubai, you know, oversupply of properties, a lot... home ownership is also shifting towards a rental model. Just this morning I was looking at the CNA while we've been talking about Korea as well—South Korea, eight in 10 young adults rent, they don't buy properties. As we think about our business positioning, we are very focused on the rental economy. Whereas our competitors are more on the residential primary home ownership, we are providing solutions for the rental economy or secondary home economy. And we do see this trend moving along, and we will continue to ride the wave in this industry.  Yeah.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. Fantastic. And I think, you know, you're starting to talk about interesting trends, right?  Talking about, I'll say societal demographic trends as it relates to property. And also you're talking a little bit about property tech as well, right?  Yes. Can you talk a little bit more about what the property tech trends or outlook looks like? Because when I look at it, I think of WeWork.

Anthony Chow: Yeah, of course. Yeah, exactly.

Jeremy Au: Everyone's like, "Property tech, WeWork."

Anthony Chow: Yeah.

Jeremy Au: Everyone's like, "Ah," right? I can't think of anything else right now, but so can you talk a little bit more about what that looks like from your perspective?

Anthony Chow: Yeah, definitely. I think in property tech, certainly from our industry, we are very focused on any real estate model or operating model that is very focused on transitory kind of use cases, right?  So, office sharing is definitely one that WeWork has popularized it. Home rental, home sharing. The short-term home sharing will be companies like Airbnb. But long-term home sharing, you see what we generally call the single family and the multi-family rental market in the US, right, where large institutions own a lot of properties and they rent it out for long term.

In Southeast Asia, there's also a general trend rising called co-living, where people stay in like a building and then they might be having a shared kitchen or like a shared common area. And people stay for like three months to a year, you know, at least, right? So that is also rising very quickly in Southeast Asia as a mode of living, as a location to live.  We have additional dwelling units as well in the US where people buy like a container and they put it in their backyard and they rent it out for their parents to stay when they're traveling over, or they rent it on Airbnb, or they just go there to their man cave. It was like their place to escape from like the main house.

And then we have a general asset sharing, general cost of asset sharing, which is typically overlooked. So this could be things like trailer rentals or like tennis court rental, gym rentals. I mean, I think gym rentals—we do see this happening right now where certain cinemas are converting the daytime into like gym rentals, where at night they can be, you know, used for cinema viewing and all that. And a lot of, you know, large companies, they are all shifting towards, like, kind of monetizing some of these spare spaces, right, for certain kind of recreational users.  Yeah. We are also seeing, you know, tennis court rental coming up quite strongly. We are seeing pickleball court rental or even car rental—you know, in the US it is very big on peer-to-peer car rental. So this general entire, you know, kind of rental economy is picking up significantly.

And I do think that COVID had played... you know, during those times, it was very difficult for someone to actually have something that's manned, right? If you wanna run a tennis court, you know, someone needs to go out there, pass your key, you go to a tennis court and play, right? With a solution like Igloo, it can be completely unmanned.  Right? And actually we started to work with the Australia Tennis Association during COVID. And today more than half of the tennis courts in Australia are powered by our solution where it's completely unmanned. And this could be completely out there in a suburban area where there's just no Wi-Fi, right?  And then somebody can just book a court and get a two-hour PIN, open the door, and go and play tennis. Just completely unmanned.

And we do see this trend growing more and more, I think with trends of sustainability. You know, people no longer want to have a lot of operational overheads and especially if you are looking at places like Japan, Australia, or many of the more developed markets, you know, where manpower is expensive. You don't want someone to drive two hours just to pick up a key, and sometimes they forget the key when they're driving to the property to unlock it, or they get the wrong key and then you drive back again. So this is a big waste of time and as a solution, we are trying to champion kind of breaking the physical and digital divide by providing the access solution in a digital form.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. Fantastic. And you know, for me, I think it's so true, like I guess the sharing economy is still growing. Are there other trends? Like, I don't know—in my head it's like... urbanization, demographic trends?

Anthony Chow: Yeah.

Jeremy Au: Quantum?

Anthony Chow: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think maybe one thing is that interest rates are dropping.  Yeah. So when interest rates are dropping, real estate owner operators are starting to leverage and scale out their portfolio. And many of them are thinking of using tech right now because I think one of the things that we see is that the real estate cycle tends to be 10 years.  You know, they talk in terms of decades, right? But tech tends to be like a couple years or a lot quicker these days with AI. So these do kind of run in a not-synchronized manner.  Yeah.

But what we do realize is that once... I think like the whole prop tech market or the tech for the big world has come to a point where there's a lot more awareness that tech helps to directly impact the NOI,  right? Or directly helps to drive return on investment or directly help to increase the cap rates,  right? And I think a lot of, I guess, new owner operators are coming to the market right now that are a lot more, you know, tech savvy and I think they do see the benefit of adopting technology. So there's a shift that's ongoing right now, and I do feel that over the last—now you just look at the funding in PropTech, right? Over the last five years, there was a lot of funding going to PropTech during COVID because of lockdowns, right?  And properties still need to operate. However, I think at the time, as the industries... the valuations were basically inflated a lot, right? And so during 2022 to 2024, everything came down significantly. But in the last six months we do see, you know, PropTech funding growing. I was just looking at some numbers before this, like I think the number of PropTech investment just in the US amounted to close to $10 billion in 2024. Last year it grew by about 50%, right?  So it's starting to pick back up again.

And I think looking at interest rates dropping, kind of the demographics of people moving to new homes, they are also younger. They are more of the Gen Beta, Alpha right now, and they are, I guess, tech native, they're very comfortable. The property manager can ask them to download an app rather than like, you know, write a check to pay for your rent. So this demographic change as well is also driving the adoption. I mean, it's starting to get to a point where property managers are thinking about how can they be tech-first, right? Because their tenants, their users... the whole tenant experience, resident experience behind it—their customers are all tech-savvy people right now.  Yeah. Yeah.

And then I think on the other end that we are starting to see shifting is also the aging population.  Right? So, aging in place is one big thing right now, but, you know, you need to start creating an environment where many of these people who are aging in place can also get supported.  So of course you have robotics. But one of the things that as a company we are serving is the whole care delivery to the property. So in case anything goes wrong with the elderly, you know, you send an alert and emergency services can just come right out the door. They don't need to kick down the door, destroy the lock. They can just get a code and they get the right code and go in to rescue the elderly or deliver medicine or whatever it may be. And so this whole trend is also... you know, I do think that there are a lot of use cases by securing the door itself  and providing access to multiple different service providers. And so the way we have thought about scaling all this up is because of this platform what we call Igloo Connect, right? When we first started, we had one integration, which was Airbnb. Along the way, we have integrated multiple different kind of solutions onto our platform. So the way we thought about it, it's just like how Apple has created the App Store for their phone,  right?

Jeremy Au: Right.

Anthony Chow: The way we've done it is one lock. We have an app store called Igloo Connect, and today we have more than 500 apps or integrations on it. So as a door... I mean once you install the smart lock on your door, if you're not around, you can connect to Airbnb, rent it out. Or you can connect to an elderly care service provider so they can deliver medicine to you in the same lock, or you can connect to like a handyman service; they can come into repair things when you're not around and you can choose any of these connected solutions that are already integrated into our platform. And so this is where we think is the flywheel for growth, and ultimately it creates the best value to anybody who owns the device.

Jeremy Au: And talking about this evolution as well, how have you changed as a leader from 2016 to August, you know, 2026—10 years?  Wow.

Anthony Chow: Yeah. I think... I guess so much has changed as a business; the company has gone through multiple different cycles and phases. You know, we have kind of grown well in the first couple of years riding on the back of Airbnb. We have downsized during COVID and then we have shifted our focus into the North American market. So, as a team, with the management team as well, as a company, we have restructured two, three times, right, just to support what is the best path forward as a strategy that we are implementing.

Suddenly, when I first started, we were friends; we were all great friends just left college, left work, and, you know, tinkering with solutions and then just designing it and shipping it. I guess as a team, you know, we were young, energetic and blue-eyed, right? Just to show—or white-eyed—just trying to figure out how to design solutions for the market. But as we went along and we started to scale, we needed to professionalize the management team.  That was for me one of the biggest things as we thought about: How do we create structures? How do we think about OKRs? How do you think about the culture in our organization? How do you be more intentional about creating all this and building middle management in? For me, I do basically bring on professional coaches to help me think through what's the best structure for me myself to fit into this organization and think about how do I deliver messages in a better way. I mean, at the start, I was very open. I just shared anything that was on top of my mind. But once you start having an organization, there are certain things that maybe... while we still are very transparent in the things that we do, but there are certain comments that I might not need to make,  right? And certain messages that need to be shared with the management team, certain messages to share with the bigger team. And I think there was one transition that I had to make along the way.

And also transitioning from working with friends to working with colleagues, there are also certain boundaries that we need to put in place. I think the one shift for me was the way I thought about building teams at the beginning was really, you know, family, friends and all that,  right? But eventually, you know, the whole energy of like building a football team rather than having a family, right,  that anyone is not indispensable. Even the manager, which is me as the CEO, can always be changed and everyone has their own role to play within our organization. I think that shift was something that I learned along the way and not just myself, also my management team as well as we thought about this shift.  Yeah.

Jeremy Au: Yeah, no. I really agree with you about that. And I'm just curious, like, could you share, you know, a personal story about a time that you have been brave?

Anthony Chow: I think one of the... probably there have been multiple pivots in the organization as we were building it up. I think probably the most challenging time for me was during the COVID period, where the company was, you know, facing kind of the brink of going downwards actually, right?  Yeah. And with this opportunity in the US, it was like a Hail Mary, like a do-or-die situation. And it was difficult to get to the US at that point in time because, yeah, there were no vaccinated travel lanes. You needed to make sure you had vaccinations before you could travel and stuff like that. So, in the end, some of our partners... we said we're gonna do it. We bought a one-way ticket, not knowing when the flight coming back to Singapore would be, and we just went. That was a time to really rescue the business. But I'm just very glad that and actually, you know, thankful that, you know, our core team really stayed together and stuck through many of these challenging times.  This is just one example, right? Multiple challenging times. The core team stuck together because ultimately... I think, you know, the business will change. The global environment will change this—I think they're out of control. But if you have a very strong core team that will weather the storms together, you have a way to always get out from any challenges that come your way.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. Yeah. What was it like moving from Singapore to the US? Was there... I mean, obviously a culture shift?  Yeah. But I mean, how did you have to accommodate a change here?

Anthony Chow: Yeah, I think certainly a big culture shift. I mean, I have experience living in the US before but it's different running a company, right?  Yeah. And at the same time, the organization that we have to build, right, is that we have manufacturing over in China, in Korea; we have engineers over in Asia; we have our HQ over in Singapore; we're selling in the US, right? So it is really like a melting pot of different kind of cultures, mindsets together to make something work.  Right? And the initial part of setting this up in the US, it was very difficult because of just cultural differences, just language differences.  Our entire Chinese team, they hardly speak English. Our American team hardly speaks Chinese. When you put them on the same call, it's already different time zones. One of them is at night, one of them is in the morning. People are tired and they don't speak the same language. And to get things done in alignment, that was very difficult.

Jeremy Au: Yeah.

Anthony Chow: Yeah. And in fact, I think the first one, two years of just making this team come together, we had to spend a lot of time on the culture side.  Certain people couldn't fit in, they leave. And then we had to rebuild again. So this has been one of the biggest, I think, things out there—the things that really put in place... and honestly I do realize that nothing beats being in person so that they know what the Chinese people have on their plate and how do they think and how do they work.  They won't really have like a 996 kind of thing. On weekends they're back.  They need to turn on the OT. They are there working, right?  The US team is working very hard as well. They're going to every trade show, you know, flying overnight flights just to get to the customer location because the US is such a big place. You wanna do sales, you gotta fly, right? And you've gotta have dinners, you have to go drink with them and all that stuff. It's a lot of work that the US team is doing and they don't see this happening on both sides, right?  And it's very easy there, misunderstanding. So it's always important for management to share, right,  and create empathy between the two of them. And ultimately I do think that after four years of doing this right now, if you attend some of our meetings, some of our Chinese folks actually speak English—proper English—but they get the message across. Our American team... they sometimes they open with a "Ni Hao," you know, Chinese words, right? So it builds that culture and builds that bond together along the way, and also our Indonesia team as well and our corporate team, right,  coming together for this. But it took a while. It took a while to get this done.  Yeah.

Jeremy Au: Any tips or tricks for how you get the culture going across geographies and languages?

Anthony Chow: Yeah, I think one of the important things that I always say is that it's important that we are a core team, right? The core team we talked about needs to be in these markets as well,  right? Because they bring the culture there.  Right. So, our core team eventually... you know, our COO from here moved to China, right? One of our founding members who was based here moved to the US for two years before coming back to set up the culture. So because it's easier for the core team to communicate, right? Just one text away, you kind of know what's being done. And once this is built up a lot more stable, then the culture propagates and builds up from that.  It has to be intentional. You have to build it from, I think, day one.  Then we have our core values. It is called H-E-A-R-T. So we actually, you know, kind of put it together during COVID.

And this stands for: H stands for Have fun. So no matter what situation, always look at it and be happy, you know, there's always a way out.  So it's better to be, you know, happy. So you're in a good positive mindset than in a negative mindset.  That's one. E is to have empathy, to understand the other person before you say your opinion. A is always bias towards action, right? It is very easy to get into analysis paralysis; in situations it's better to do things than not at all.  Yeah. Or you know, we were debating being resilient and resourceful. 'Cause a lot of times you are resource-constrained, right? So it's important to do more with less, you know, sometimes it's better that way. And to be resilient... you know, you meet 10 "no's" before you get your "yes." But that's how it is, whether you're engaging suppliers, customers, so on and so forth. And then last one is T for teamwork and then it spells our HEART.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. So, but R is resilient or resourceful? We put both inside, basically.

Anthony Chow: Both two R's. Yeah, two R's there. Exactly.  Yeah. I feel that our culture needs to be intentionally built top-down at the same time it needs to be authentic.  Yeah. So that people will know that this is really what the team stands for.

Jeremy Au: Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. On that note thank you so much. I love to summarize the two big takeaways.

Anthony Chow: Okay.

Jeremy Au: First is thanks so much for sharing about, I think, your founding journey.  I thought it was just so fascinating to hear. To some extent a common story of somebody who discovers a problem that they are facing, but also I think such a wonderful Southeast Asian story, a personal story of you at Singtel, you know, kind of going through the Airbnb ban, but also pivoting and figuring things out. So thank you so much for sharing about how and why you went about founding this business.

Secondly, thanks so much for sharing about the product-market fit pivots. I thought that's really interesting to hear about the initial one where you're targeting Airbnb, you know, as laser-focused, but also having to iterate because Wi-Fi didn't work. So you had to keep doing product-market fit pivots and iterations, and then also on the US, figuring out different homes, different corporate buyers. So I really love this product-market fit experimentation iteration story. I think it's a great lesson for many people who are founders and have to go through that.

And last is thanks for sharing about your own personal experience, kind of learning and growing as a leader. I thought it was fantastic to hear about how you had a do-or-die situation during COVID and you chose not to die. And I thought it is fantastic to hear that you just took that one-way ticket, one way back to push the US market and it's paid off for you.  So thank you so much for sharing your experience. So inspiring for so many folks.

Anthony Chow: Thank you, Jeremy. Appreciate you for doing this.