"The question to myself is, ‘What is my goal in working in tech?’ Some people want to climb the corporate ladder and be VP of products. Some people want to start companies, but it was very clear to me that I wanted to experience it all. When I looked at the market at the time, it was clear that largely, there are three ways to make money on the internet. One was you build a SaaS product and then you make money through monetizing, like some sort of recurring revenue model. The second thing is that you build a transactions marketplace. Usually it's a double-sided marketplace. What I mean by double-sided is that you have buyers on one side, you have sellers on one side. You have to build up both buyer-seller dynamic in order to create a marketplace and you monetize through taking a transaction fee being a platform. And then the third way to make money online is to sell. What people don't realize about these three things is that the business model pretty much dictates what type of company who you sell to, and the culture of the company." - Jx Lye
"Financial services is the only industry where Singapore truly is a hub that punches above our weight. Everything else, it's still possible, and people are going to come at me for it, but that was my assessment. The question is, where in fintech do you want to play? I analyzed the market and what came to me was that it was very obvious in fintech. There's only eight possibilities and the way I divided market was that you could sell to consumers or to businesses, to B or to C and then there are only four main ways of segmenting the market which is the life cycle of money. First, you spend money, which is PaymentsTech. Two, is you save and invest your money, which is WealthTech. Three, is you protect yourself, which is InsureTech. And then the fourth, is you borrow or lend money, which is lending technology. And back then in 2019, my assessment was WealthTech is the place to be." - Jx Lye
"When people think about financial services, they mostly associate that with, in Android terms, the front end, which is the mobile app or the website. And people think that, oh wow, this is such a sleek user experience, you make it so easy for people to invest money. What people don't realize is that is actually the easiest part because that's classic product management. And as a good product manager, you should be able to do it almost with your two eyes closed, Interview people, hire a good designer, work, obsess about your users. What people don't realize is that the most difficult part about financial services is the platform and infrastructure that support it. So taking any wealthtech company as an example, the two most difficult backend integrations that any WealthTech would have to deal with, one is actually your integration with your broker because you've got to be executing your trades, and two is integration with the banks for money movement, because ultimately, as a wealth matchman or any broker, your job is to exchange a security for an underlying amount of money. And that's when you invest, and then when you withdraw or redeem, it's going the other way around." - Jx Lye
In this episode, Jeremy Au speaks on China versus US tech culture, career decisions (Bytedance, Dropbox, Lyft and EDB), and making bank integrations fast and simple with Acme.
Keywords: JX Lye, China vs US Tech Culture, Career Decisions Bytedance Dropbox Lyft EDB, Acme Bank Integrations, Singapore, China, USA, Founder Story
