"Few months ago, we laughed about the idea of AI companions and that people would fall in love and get married to them. I was at a meeting where we discussed how the newest batch of hottest startups in California are all AI companions. Their job is to create AI-powered waifus so people can finally fall in love with somebody who loves them. Are more people going to fall in love with digital avatars and AI companions? That’s not far away—only 10 or 20 years out. What does a hundred years of that technological evolution look like? And then AI companions don’t just hang out with you—they can hang out with other AI companions." - Jeremy Au, Host of BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast
Jeremy Au explores how exponential tech progress is reshaping the future, why Southeast Asia is positioned for a surge in unicorns, and how venture capitalists evaluate founders. From AI relationships to realistic startup odds, this discussion challenges assumptions about the next 100 years of innovation and entrepreneurship.
01:15 100 Years of Progress: Jeremy compares sampans to reusable rockets to illustrate the speed of change in the last century. He asks if anyone in 1924 could have predicted the internet and cat GIFs in 2024. The message is clear, by 2124, what feels absurd today may become normal.
02:26 AI Companions as Real Startups: Jeremy shares that the latest wave of venture-backed startups in California are focused on building AI-powered romantic partners. What started as a joke has become a funded reality, forcing us to consider how digital relationships could redefine human connection.
04:01 Unicorn Odds and Reality: Many students are surprised to learn that seed-stage startups have a 1 in 40 chance of becoming unicorns. Jeremy emphasizes that while the journey requires effort and resilience, the odds are better than most assume and worth pursuing with intent.
04:34 Southeast Asia’s Golden Era: Asia Partners believes the next 50 years will bring more unicorns in Southeast Asia. Jeremy highlights that local universities like NUS are producing many of these founders, signaling strong homegrown potential in the region.
10:00 VCs as Elite Talent Scouts: Jeremy explains that venture capitalists are not teachers or advisors, but high-performance coaches who are assembling winning teams. They focus on backing the best early, not out of charity, but to generate home runs that deliver massive returns.
(01:08) Jeremy Au: If you were born a hundred thousand years ago, you would be looking for berries right now. You would definitely not be educated or be listening to this on YouTube only in the past 100 years have you seen this tremendous uptake.
(01:19) Every year we expect a new iPhone. Every five years we expect a new technology wave. Every generation, we expect a generational uplift of GDP per capita of energy usage that we have. Right? And so, you know, today we can think about not only going to the moon, we can think about going to Mars.
(01:38) When it comes to our children's generation, they'll probably think about going to another solar system. Because if you go back one generation ago, we were thinking about the Cold War and the world ending, and you go back one generation before that we were in World War II and the world is ending.
(01:51) And you go back one generation before that, it was World War I and the world was ending. Right? So just think about it, every generational change is huge and there's been a huge, (02:00) tremendous increase all the way from, you know. You know, having a sampan rolling your boat by hand to having a ship with wind to clippers across the world, to the telegraph, to Steamboats, to cruise ships right to naval destroyers, to aircraft carriers to.
(02:20) Apollo mission now to reusable rockets, right? And global internet. So all this, has actually only happened in the past 100 years. If you think about that tremendous amount of innovation in the past hundred years, you go the next 100 years, you have to apply that same level of thinking, right?
(02:37) That if you were in 1924, 100 years ago, could you have predicted what was gonna happen in 2024? If so, the is probably your great great grandparents, right? I say at least I think, yeah. 'Cause your grandparents would've been born in 19, sorry. Your parents would be born in 1960, '70, 1980s. Your grandparents were born in 1960s.
(02:59) Your great (03:00) grandparents in nine 1940s, and then your great great grandparents would been born in 1920. So 1920. So they were born around 1924. Could a person in 1924 look at 2024 and say, this is the future where everybody can have internet anywhere in the world at any time. And get a picture of a cute cat GIF with music in the background.
(03:19) Mind blowing, impossible. The concept that anybody could travel in the world for, 500 bucks on a flight, right? To go anywhere in the world would've been mind blowing to somebody in 1924. So now we're in 2024. What's gonna happen in 2124? You are gonna see that you're gonna live longer.
(03:35) Singapore is a blue zone, last few months ago, we laughed about the idea of AI companions and that people will fall in love and get married to the AI companions today. Yesterday, I was at a meeting and we're talking about how the newest batch of hot startups in California are all AI companions.
(03:52) Their job is to create AI powered Waifus, so that people can finally fall in love with somebody who loves (04:00) them. Alright, so, so this is technology, but then all of us laugh. You know, you like your organic, imperfect human that you wanna fall in love with in this generation right now. But you had to ask yourself, can this happen in 2124 are more people going to become in love with digital avatars and AI companions ?
(04:18) But if you think about that, that's actually not that far away. There's only 10 years out, 20 years out. What is a hundred years of that evolution technology look like? And then AI companions only hang out of you. They don't hang out of you. They can hang out with other AI companions.
(04:32) My AI companion can teach this class, and this class could be represented by all your AI companions, and all of us would be somewhere else in the world doing something else, right? The rate of technology progress is very important this is a historical aberration.
(04:44) It has never existed before. The concept that life can change tremendously is key. A lot of us underestimate how much life has changed compared to humanity, but most people are also underestimating how much technology can change over the course of a hundred years. We talked about (05:00) how you know, the world and Southeast Asia, that there's a tremendous gap and difference in the GDP per capita and the workflows and the productivity of countries.
(05:09) And so country and politics does matter. And we're talking about how as a result, these startups that you see today are risky, but is a known amount of risk. And when we did this, we talked about how there's about a one in 40 chance for a company has received seed stage funding to become a unicorn. And most people overestimate how hard it is.
(05:32) A lot of people were surprised that it's actually a one in 40 chance, which is not bad. Obviously it's a lot of work, frustration, blood, sweat and tears. But it is something that you can choose to play.
(05:43) And then we talked about how Southeast Asia from Asia Partners perspective is part of a golden age. There are many companies to be built in the next 10, 20, 50 years. There's gonna be more unicorns in Southeast Asia, not less in the next 50 years, which is the cost of your working life (06:00) career. As we talked about, Singaporean and local universities, like National University of Singapore are the most represented of unicorn founders in Southeast Asia.
(06:08) So one of you could be a unicorn founder in the matter of time. And so what we have to share is we talk about how Markia Valley shared that from our perspective, it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more parallel to conduct or more uncertain in the success.
(06:23) Then to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things because the innovator has for enemies, all those who have done well under the old conditions and lukewarm defenders those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents and partly from the incredulity of men who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience with them.
(06:45) So what this means is that all of us right now are used to the idea of having laptops because we've always had a laptop, but the idea of having an AI companion sounds weird to us because it's a new thing that doesn't exist. Can you legally get married to (07:00) an AI companion and share your assets with them?
(07:02) Sounds like a crazy idea, but people are trying to work towards that future, and if they succeed in that future, then it will always have been normal. That's something for you to be thinking about you have to be very careful 'cause everybody's clear consumers of technology, but may not be natural champions or intuitively glued in to the rate of technology or your personal reaction to how technology changes.
(07:25) And so we talked about how as a result, these startups are really David versus Goliath. Their job is to go for kill shots and create new technologies that will replace traditional approaches. We already saw that with the thanks to the power ChatGPT people can no longer need to think during Q and A sessions and can narrate a set of answers, that was not possible. He would have struggled under the weight of the class, unable to answer the question, and figured it out himself. But today he was able to narrate because of technology. David created something that (08:00) changed global behavior immediately, right? Imagine that piece where these Davids are creating technologies that can change hundreds of years of societal behavior and transform how you and I operate as people. And so these Davids, they are small, but they're not weak because they pay to their strengths and they work on the early adopters, and they work on these asymmetrical technologies that work.
(08:22) And so we talk about how every startup must go through the jungle, the dirt road, and the highway. They need to figure out what to build, where to go, how to think about things. Then they start to gather those early supporters, and then they start pushing a lot of volume and throughput through what they need to do.
(08:39) These startups are always focused on the number one problem that people have. They figure out when those problems happen and then they try to create a 10 x solution that is far superior to what is the alternative being able to identify the target approach to attack this problem is super key because if you can create a 10 X better, a 10 x faster, a 10 x (09:00) cheaper product, then you're really, really going for the kill shot.
(09:04) Because if you are better on any of these dimensions, you will, be able to win. We talked about the things that power the unfair advantages, the first move effect, network effects, economies of scale, having the IP patterns, the regulatory support, as well as having a great team.
(09:18) Those are things that power the unfair advantage. And we talked about how these companies can be valued based on their customer lifetime value how long these customers are available to us over the lifetime of the customer, not the immediate price, but a lifetime of transactions they'll do with us if we'll do a good job.
(09:35) And also, we're talking about making sure that we have a full understanding of the total expenditure to acquire them for the life of this transaction. VCs are looking for founders that will eventually build unicorns in the next 10 years. That's important because the people that you meet that are tremendous, Jeff Bezos, mark Zuckerberg, et cetera, these are famous people, but they used to be undergraduate students.
(09:56) They used to be young. They used to be inexperienced and they used to be (10:00) naive, right? And so they were able to get stronger over time. The job of a VC is that we are talent scouts looking for people who will be able to grow and build these companies over time. Great founders who know this will always try to prioritize and say, I want to build a great business.
(10:15) With a great fundamental understanding of product market fit, I wanna build trust so that they feel comfortable providing money to me. They work on a pitch deck that's able to address all those points. The difference between private equity and venture capital is that venture capital is really focused on high risk bets that will generate 20 to a hundred X returns, and they leave that control for the founders because they say that the founder knows best.
(10:36) Which is different from private equity, which tends to take majority control and look for medium-sized risk, but also medium-sized returns as a result, these VCs are looking for power law bets, looking for companies that will generate a 10 X team, 10 X product, 10 X economics, and that will unlock a tremendous amount of value,
(10:56) so they are not school coaches, they're not (11:00) university lecturers, they're not doing this for goodness of their heart. They are Olympic level coaches. They are Manchester United football managers. They want the people who are the best, to assemble the best possible portfolio team that they think can crack that future.
(11:14) And so as a result, if they're able to find and identify these people, and if they're able to come in early at a cheap price they're able to generate, humongous returns of 50 X hundred X returns that they call home runs. And as a result, every VC at every stage is making a decision.
(11:32) Is this gonna be a home run or not? At the earliest stages when you are a single solo founder that has an idea. Last night somebody pitched me an idea, he was like, Jeremy, I only have an idea. My idea is to build this for regulatory affairs, and he doesn't have anything.
(11:47) He just has an idea. He told it to me and I said, maybe you should zoom out your idea because I see the problem. He's getting that perspective that we have here. He is by himself in a jungle trying to figure out what the product market fit is. But (12:00) as all these VCs, all these incubators, all these accelerators, they are collaborating as a syndicate over the course of a lifetime to build and nurture home runs, but also the prune and let go of companies that would not become home runs.
(12:16) And so they compete within bands of time, but they collaborate across stages. And as a result, it has created these clusters or known stages from pre-seed, to seed, to series A, series B, series C, with relatively fuzzy boundaries. And so what we see is that in the course of a startup at Instacart, that from the seed days when they were very small team, very basic product market fit, all the way to the IPO, there were multiple VCs on a cap table that led multiple stages now, obviously Instacart is a success today because the billion dollar company, but of course, supporting those companies can create different stages and the individual stages of these may not be economically
(12:57) profitable from a VC perspective, But (13:00) the net effect is that these VCs all work together to create a positive outcome.
