"Well, to me, I think the graduate unemployment issue is going to get really bad really quickly. I mean, if you just look at the Graduate Employment Survey, which I think the Ministry of Education releases every year, this year is probably the lowest—it dipped under 80%. Usually, it's somewhere around 85%. You can attribute this to many different things: uncertainty around MNC hiring due to trade wars and Asia-Pacific budget cuts, or AI eradicating a lot of jobs. But I also think there's a cultural disposition among the younger generation toward wanting to work at recognizable brand-name companies." - Adriel Yong, Orvel Venture Partner

Adriel Yong, Orvel Venture Partner, joins Jeremy Au to reflect on five years of career transitions from investing to building startups across Southeast Asia and the US. They unpack how American venture capital has turned inward, the unintended consequences of remote work, and why AI is upending both work and relationships. Through candid stories from fundraising dinners in San Francisco to AI-generated breakup scripts they explore how technology is transforming how we build companies, make decisions, and stay human.

03:12 American and Asian startup growth models differ: In San Francisco, startups often grow fast by selling to other startups and riding internal network effects, while Southeast Asian startups focus on capturing value chains and relationship-based sales.

06:05 Revenue in SF isn’t always real: Founders in SF can reach $10 million ARR by selling to friendly peers, but in LA or Southeast Asia, sales are slower and relationship-driven, especially in industries like entertainment.

08:53 US venture capital is becoming protectionist: Where American VCs once backed global founders, they now prioritize companies based in or from the US, making it harder for Southeast Asian startups to access funding.

11:49 AI is replacing VC advisory work: Founders now use large language models to flag red flags in term sheets before reaching out to VCs, shifting the VC’s role from explainer to final verifier and negotiation coach.

14:59 AI is eroding help-based relationships: As people ask ChatGPT instead of friends for advice, the everyday opportunities for give-and-take shrink, which could weaken social bonds especially in task-focused societies like Singapore.

18:13 Generative AI amplifies Western perspectives: Tools like ChatGPT default to American individualist values unless prompted otherwise, meaning users across Asia may unconsciously adopt Americanized ways of thinking and problem-solving.

20:53 Graduate employment in Singapore is dropping: Unemployment dipped below 80 percent as MNCs cut back due to trade wars and AI displaces entry-level roles. Many graduates prefer brand-name firms, leaving SME jobs overlooked despite being the bulk of local employment.

Jeremy Au (01:22)

Hey, Adriel! How's life?

Adriel Yong (01:23)

Well, my back is breaking from numerous transatlantic flights and many many late nights over the last six months. So yes, definitely been very tiring like building a company but we're to be in Singapore and Asia for a quick bit and just like remember all the good parts of Singapore that you can very easily take for granted until you live somewhere else like the US or like, the Philippines.

Jeremy Au (01:48)

So I'm interested because when we first met, effectively five years ago, the biggest question that you asked me before you started helping me at Brave and as an intern back then was you always ask me, it's like, 'Hey, what's the difference between being a founder versus being a VC? And what's the difference between America versus Singapore?' Right? Yeah. Now, you're finally got to express for yourself because now you're a co-founder, you're busy building at cloud kitchen. You also try to meet the U S and the Philippines.

So, I guess to some extent, instead of you asking me, I guess it's a bit of a conversation now that we're to have.

Adriel Yong (02:21)

Yeah,

and I feel like the view of the differences change like, every few years, right? Depending on the, I guess, politics is big part of life in the US, and it shapes the texture of American life and the economy. And then consequently, things also happen in Asia that also like, react, reflect to what happened to America. I think my view as a

very bright-eyed freshman college student in Singapore five years ago, like, 'wow, I want to explore life outside of Singapore, go to America, see what the Silicon Valley is all about, see how people create unicorns out of thin air.' And I think there's just a lot of optimism around startups in 2020. I think as a Singaporean, you would have

been seeing the rise of Grab, like the super apps and massive funding rounds for apps like Ninja Van or Carousell, Glints platforms that I guess my generation grew up very familiar with and wanted to be part of that internet economy. And then I guess Silicon Valley was like that "holy grail" of startups in the internet economy. I think that's sort of like

made me go down this path and career of building startups and investing in startups. And over the years, I got to do a bunch of different things. I got to invest with you, Milan and Mohan and Orvo. I think we met so many interesting founders across Southeast Asia. And we also got to back some founders building in the US. And I think after three years of deploying the fund,

we sort of see different trajectories for different buckets of companies, you know? There's the very built for like Southeast Asia, local mini conglomerate type of companies that capture the value chain of like, say inputs, financing, output. We invested in some like B2B SaaS companies from like Singapore, Malaysia that want to build for the global markets. And then we've also like invested in like some moonshot companies, right? Out in the US

building in space tech for instance. And then finally, I hopped off to one of our portfolio companies that was building AI tools for content creators in gaming and the music industry. So, it's been super eye - opening to just get that entire survey of the land. So, six months ago, when I was thinking about moving to the US, I felt like a similar level of optimism about

startups and tech was coming back, like, you know, the sense of optimism that I felt in like early 2020 when I was like first learning about startups and like seeing how things were blowing up. And I was like, okay, let's try and like, get to the U S and like, see things firsthand, right? Whether it's from like the capital markets or like, how interesting people are like really trying to build like category defining companies

especially when AI was like, sort of going on the upswing and everything could be an AI company, right? And massive funding rounds are happening and all that kind of stuff. And I think a big part of that was like people's assumption that the Trump presidency is going to be like super pro tech and super pro economy. I guess, people like me forgot about the first Trump presidency for a hot minute, right?

All the tariffs that he leveled in his first presidency. Think my history friends will always say, history always repeats itself." So, look at history to figure out what will happen in the future. I'm like, damn it, I should have looked at the first Trump presidency much more closely. I guess if you did that, you would probably not be surprised by the sort of trade wars that he has leveled against the rest of the world. Or if you have seen

the level of unpredictability in his would not be surprised by the sort of outburst he has with his buddy, Elon Musk and all the tech people that were big supporters of his campaign. And I think, consequently, that mood has probably also shifted in the last six months on the ground. I had a friend who was visiting SF for a bit and wanted to drink out of the SF water fountain cool aid.

Um, and then he was telling me like, first week he gets there, It's like, excited. It's like, Oh, I'm meeting like all this legendary investors at dinner, like getting invited to poker games. Like, I'm out partying and at the rape of like, a bunch of cool and recent bag founders. And then next week it's like, trade war happening, week after it's like some wall breaks out somewhere. And then you just like, okay, this is too much in one month for me. I'm like, going to head back to like Tokyo.

So I'm like, yeah, that feels like me. I'm like, it would be nice to be back in Singapore where it's so calm and peaceful. And you don't have to deal with that much volatility on a day-to-day basis. I think what was also interesting is that when you start to build companies in the US, you start to realize that the growth, the startup growth curve is not uniform.

I think a lot of the growth that people see in like SF is very much contained in SF. One of the CROs at like the Fortune 500 company was like sharing that your first 10 million ARR in SF is not real revenue. Whereas, your first 10 million ARR like any other part of the world is real hard earned revenue. And the reason for that is because in SF, everyone has sort of like that

pay it forward mindset. Everyone's like really happy to help each other give like a pilot, a demo. There's always a joke about YC startup selling to the entire YC cohort, right? And that's how you get the hockey stick. And yeah, like talking to people in SF, it's just like, I can see, I can see that happening like day- to- day. But then, when I go to LA where, I think where the team spends most of our time in, because we are like trying to sell to the entertainment industry,

you realize that sales cycle is not as fast as selling to other startups, right? It mimics more of the relationship driven nature you see very much in like Southeast Asia. So, that has been like one of the interesting like switches and like mental models there. I mean, the other funny thing is that in LA, every random person you bump into the street is a content creator. So it's like, it's the land of customers for us, right? And I guess just figuring out like, what exactly to build?

What sort of AI tools would actually be useful for creators has been a big question mark for us over the last couple of months. But yeah, being close to the end customer, having conversations with them day in, day out, I think has really accelerated the understanding and the thesis about what tools to build, what matters to them most, and what they don't want to change in their workflows?

Jeremy Au (08:51)

Yeah. I think there's a very interesting set of reflections because you give me flashbacks to when you used to ask me these questions and I'm like, wow, you've really matured as a person, I think it's once. Oh, you got to see for yourself. But I would like to have like maybe distill it into like a few like bullet points. I think first of all is America is a big market, right? And I think America is the number one economy in the world.

And America is not one country. Although it is one country, but when a of people in tech from outside America look at it, it's actually San Francisco. And then actually Boston, LA, actually quite similar to Singapore in some ways, in the sense that there are real economies outside tech, which is, for example, in Boston, the biotech, life sciences,

R &D right? In LA obviously, be the entertainment industry. In New York is the finance industry, In Singapore is the finance industry and the biotech industry. So I think there's that dynamic where people have this starry eyes like America, this is a Cartoon I can't remember what's it called. But it's like this is sounds like that no cats in America. Yeah It's like there's somewhere out there. there's a, I'll find a song It's about a bunch of mice leaving Europe

singing a song about how to know cats in America. So, it's kind of like founders in Southeast Asia is like, oh, America is great for founders. Like, oh, you mean SF, right? So I think it's one. Two, I think another thing that comes up to me is that I think 2020, there was an overblown hype cycle that SF was dead. And I think there were some serious issues, right? One, obviously, was the pandemic. So nobody was in SF and city centers. And then two, of course,

there was also a zero interest rate era which became supercharged in 2021, which pushed a lot of the capital that was already in San Francisco, it pushed it even more astronomically high on one end, but also it pushed a lot of capital into Southeast Asia and frontier markets like Latin America and Middle East. So everybody else, the gap wasn't as large because, you know, America was still number one and it went up like that, but

Southeast Asia went from here to there, right? The gap seems smaller. And of course, the virtualization of stuff where Silicon Valley VCs were busy investing in Southeast Asia at hashtag cheap valuations from their perspective, cheaper than Silicon Valley, meant that it felt like South San Francisco is dead. And also, I think San Francisco also had a huge crime problem around that time frame. But now, I think those trends are in reverse.

So, that ties into the last point, is that America as a whole has been turning towards protectionism over the past 10 years. And I think this latest administration is actually just

you know, kind of continuing that trajectory. And I think looking ahead, I think I'm quite doubtful that other administrations will really reverse it. Maybe they'll maintain it. Maybe they'll keep the trajectory going. But I think the direction travels, and there's a good example of that was that I was watching the Daily Show. John Stewart was a short clip and as a journalist called Patrick McGee, and they were criticizing Apple

for building in China, which was actually really interesting. And the crux of that debate and the anger that they had, we were discussing, and they felt it was ridiculous, was that Apple was building factories in China and training the assembly line how to make iPhones. And they were flying engineers from America to train engineers in China. And they felt that if Apple had built those factories in America,

then the American workforce would be upscale, then upgraded, and so forth. And I thought that was a really interesting debate because basically, if you think about what their face value, what they're saying is, Apple should have built those factories in America, Cupertino, et cetera. It's interesting because five years ago, 10 years ago, everybody was happy buying iPhones. I mean, I don't think the modern Silicon Valley would exist if it wasn't for cheap Apple and Android phones,

smartphones. I don't remember like, remember there was this time when people were trying to do this $99 laptops, one laptop a child. And turns out that initiative died because everybody got a $50 smartphone, right? From a Chinese assembly line and people learned they can literate, they got their internet, they got micro financing. Every SaaS company has a mobile app because Apple phones cost a couple hundred bucks, right? Because these factories are

China or Vietnam or whatever it is. But I think it was just interesting where there's that criticism and I was like, wow, this is a very big shift especially the way they were discussing it and I think that's the part that I think is I would say the first two were like things that you and I discussed and I think you and I have both learned and both are still true in both our experiences in America and Southeast Asia. I think this last point is the new point, this is a new point which is that

10, 20 years ago as America, was very much like America is a beacon for the world. America is going to lead FDI across the world and America is going to westernize and Americanize everybody's music, factories, standards, democracies. And now, it's very much like, okay, no, Apple phone should be made in America.

Adriel Yong (13:56)

I think 10, 20 years ago, it's about growth expansion, right? And I think that was like the driver of the American economy. And 10, 20 years ago, I think it was more unfathomable that China, Asia, every other part of the world could

replicate, duplicate like, you know, IP or technology at a very high fidelity, right? Because I think the subtext to the criticism is also, well, now the rest of the world has also figured out how to great technology and they're great companies in their own countries and employing their own people, not Americans. So I guess, there's a net loss in American jobs, right? Because in the past, as long as you provide more affordable goods, it's great. You know, everyone saves like

10, 20 % on whatever expenditure they make. But then now, the problem is not even about making things more affordable. That's like massive unemployment, right? So, then people sort of think, okay, where did the American jobs go? Why are people in other countries having way higher employment rates than us where we sort of created a lot of the technology that the world is using and replicating today? And with AI, right?

That problem is just going to get worse. Like, you know, in the past, you're trying to figure out how to like replicate the hardware. And then I guess on the software side, it's a bit harder, more like amorphous, but I know if AI like, you know, replicating apps and great products or websites, it's no longer hard anymore. Like, you know, the commodification of code and intelligence, right? It's just like increased so much because of that. So, I think the jobs crisis, whether in America

or even in other developed parts of the world, we just get worse and worse because of that. And I think whatever unhappiness that we see in America today, we should expect it in other developed countries around the world, whether in Europe or even in Singapore at some point.

Jeremy Au (15:49)

Yeah. I think there's an interesting sense that historically, I would say that between 2000 to 2021, I think there's a sense that American venture capital was for global businesses, right? And that if you're a global company, as long as you're going to have a chance to be a unicorn, then American venture capital is there. I think the sense that we're getting is that

you have maybe, you have to be in America in order to access American venture capital because there's that permeability is now becoming no longer permeable. And I think there's some similarities actually to India from my perspective because India has a lot of similar dynamics where historically they have lot of like

protectionism, right? They call it a license Raj. So, there's a license where a lot of apps are not allowed to be in India for national security or domestic or economic reasons. But also capital controls, meant that domestic capital must be used for domestic purposes. So, there's an interesting dynamic where I think you see some shadows of that

Adriel Yong (16:51)

Hmm.

Jeremy Au (16:58)

direction or travel is do you had to be in Silicon Valley to access Silicon Valley capital? Or do you at least have to be American, you know, as a company to access that capital?

Adriel Yong (17:07)

It's interesting you brought that up. Besides, spending a lot of time in the US, I also now spend a lot of time in Manila. Even when we're investing in all four, I'll go around Indonesia, Vietnam and all that. And to me, protectionism, amazing amount of licenses you have to get to do even the most

mundane thing like open an ice cream shop in Manila. It's more a function of lining certain wallets, protecting the interests of dominant economic stakeholders in the different emerging markets, right? I guess it's what made America different. It's like

everyone can be anything. I mean, that was the land of opportunity, right? You could go there as an immigrant, you could raise venture capital, could set up a business that easily, and then just sell to customers all over, right? Until you became really, really large. Then, you know, the different regulators start to clamp down on you and ask you to submit shit. But by then, hopefully you have a well, you know, built out legal team to protect you from that.

So yeah, I think going back to your point, right, like that sense of like protectionism, you know, I think that's sad because that sort of goes against what made America like beautiful and I guess enabling for like a lot of like immigrants or entrepreneurs who are really just trying to strike it out with no real natural advantages on their own.

Jeremy Au (18:27)

I think one interesting debate that I think is really at the crux of this is what does the future hold, right? And to me, I think we're describing the world as it is, right? So, if I was to make a guess in the next 10 years, I'll start with easy one first, then we will take turns. At some point, we'll just step out and say, can't think of anything else.

Adriel Yong (18:39)

Hmm.

Jeremy Au (18:52)

I think that in 10 years, I think Singapore will still be a pretty chill place. Don't get me wrong, touch wood, nothing goes wrong. But I think that Singapore will continue to be like, you know, stable, politically stable. I think it'll continue to figure out how to be a social democracy in terms of redistribution and the right mixture. But I think it will still continue to be seen as a Switzerland in Southeast Asia, if not,

East Asia as well. So I think that's going to cause and continue to be a source of attraction for both Singaporean diaspora who want to shelter and come place to raise their kids and eat ice cream outside and go cycling late at night. But also I think continues to be a pool for global talent

either in terms of high-net-worth individuals because they're looking for a place that's i.e. Chinese diaspora who don't feel comfortable in America education system or just global people who Americans who want to be in Asia but don't want to be in Hong Kong or Shanghai in case something goes bad. So think that's, I think that'll be one thing that I think would be true in 10 years. Yeah. How about you?

Adriel Yong (19:56)

Well, to me, I think the graduate unemployment issue is going to get really bad really quickly. I mean, like, if you just look at the graduate employment survey, which I think the Ministry of Education releases every year, right? I think this year is probably like the lowest, it dipped under like 80%. Usually it's like somewhere I think around 85%.

Jeremy Au (20:02)

Ooh, that's a spicy wild-ass.

Adriel Yong (20:18)

And you can attribute this to many different things where you can attribute it to like uncertainty of MNCs employing because of trade wars, budgets being cut in Asia-Pacific. You can also attribute it to like, you know, AI for instance, like eradicating a lot of like jobs. But then I think there's also a certain like, you know, probably like cultural disposition towards, you know, I guess

younger generation wanting to work in recognizable brand name companies. one. I think the jobs in those types of companies like Google and Facebook are increasingly thinning out as well because they came here when the boom and the public markets were happening and they needed to expand aggressively all across the world. Now they don't really need to. So you will not see that amount of fat that they used to have

anytime soon again. I think there's also some level of incompatibility between the skills of what a fresh graduate has versus the sort of starting salary you want to command and what is realistic for a company in Singapore. I think on some level, one remote work further worsens that tension and having distributed teams also worsens that tension.

Because in the past, when everyone needed to be in the office five days a week, you have to hire a Singaporean if you have a H.U. here, right? But now when you just incorporate here, you hire maybe one GM here, maybe one head of sales here, marketing, finance, ops, HR, even engineering can be all over Southeast Asia, same time zone, people work synchronously. Communication

Jeremy Au (21:36)

Right.

Adriel Yong (21:57)

might have been a barrier like five years ago, like with AI today, like transcription, texting, team communication has become so much more fluid. The region, I think, has also become a lot more interconnected on many levels. And I think that will fundamentally shift the sort of jobs that are available to Singapore University graduates. But what's the solution here? Is the solution here to trim the number of university graduates in Singapore?

Is it to try and diversify jobs in the economy? I think EDB has always worked very hard to bring all sorts of MNCs from the rest of the world to Singapore for jobs, especially the white collar professional jobs. In this sort of global economy climate, is that a realistic view? I think they will still try, but I don't think we'll get that many, that amount of jobs anymore.

It will continue shrinking over the years, I suspect. And then I think the other reality people don't often think about is that most people in Singapore are employed by SMEs. And when you have a generation that is so attuned to social media or LinkedIn, and they want to chase after brands and logos, then there is a question of why would a SME job be attractive?

So I think that there is actually still a lot of SME jobs that want to hire but they're not attractive or they're not visible to like the average like, you know, university graduate, right? I mean, it would be interesting actually to ask university graduates like what sort of employment portals do they even look at these days? I remember like many years ago, I would like be flipping newspapers or like going to those like really shitty like job platforms like what, Orange Tree or something. I think today everyone's like

LinkedIn jobs, university job portal, what else? Indeed. Indeed. Right? Like very recognizable platforms. And I'm not sure the SMEs of Singapore are like listing jobs there. Yeah. That's also an issue. I think the other economic issue is that, you know, in like last 50 years, it was about building Singapore Inc, right? Like, know, sovereign wealth funds built out literally like conglomerates across like

tailcoals, waste management, real estate, basically your Singtel capital land and all that. And I think it was easy to do that when all these entities were managed by the Singapore government under the MASIC. And you could do a lot of G2G projects to drive the growth of a lot of these entities. But then now the question is, OK, how do you lift up all your SMEs with the Singapore Inc that you have built as a NICS?

I guess, driver or lever of economic growth and jobs for the economy. From my perspective, I haven't really seen anyone figure that out. I think that's a tough problem to crack.

Jeremy Au (24:37)

Yeah, and I actually agree with you about that. And I think the tension that you mentioned about remote work and Singapore talent is actually super key because I mean, I remember there was this LinkedIn post that was complaining about Singapore pushing for remote work.

And the criticism that he had was that the moment you allow some people in Singapore go remote work, then the SME owner is basically saying, I might as well hire somebody remotely. since Philippines GDP per capita is literally at 10 times magnitude difference from Singapore to Philippines. So, you you could hire one Singaporean or 10 Filipinos and move off remote.

Then, someone's going to hire 10. So I think that's going to be a dimension. I mean, obviously that's good for Philippines. And I think it has been good for Philippines. I think that we just have been going up steadily because everybody's hiring them globally. Americans are hiring them, Singaporeans are hiring them, everybody's hiring them. To a lower extent, Vietnamese as well are also seeing the benefit from this one, the engineering side.

So I would add another point so now my turn I'll say a point is I think that AI will continue to get better. Mm-hmm and that feels Maybe people are gonna complain and be like Jerry, that's not very Shocking inside. Yeah, like duh, but I mean I'm trying to say is like,

like some things haven't really improved dramatically, right? So I'm just example like the pair of jeans that were hasn't changed dramatically over the past 50 years, right? You know, I have a massage chair and yeah, they've gotten cheaper and a little bit fancier over time, but they haven't really fundamentally rewritten how they've made massage chairs. I think Apple phones obviously and iPhones obviously have gone through a lot, the processing speeds has gone through a huge amount of

But I mean, just think about the fact that, you know, like this in three years ago, AI just didn't even exist as a form of life. It's like, is this literally like there's a bunch of engineers who are using it, maybe like machine learning. now, you know, I was just in a social gathering recently and then this lady was like, hey, you know, I'm in a relationship Yeah.

Adriel Yong (26:21)

Yeah.

Jeremy Au (26:37)

with my AI, right? You know, and you know, I was just like, you know, all kind of like, oh, interesting. Right. But the truth is, that's not the only person who's told me this, right? This was actually, I know two other people who told me that they're in a, like, kind of like a very like therapeutic, like a therapist or life coach relationship. And then if I look at my side, yeah, I mean, I also use AI and I use it as a kind of like a business partner in a sense, like, okay, this is what the website

text looks like, can you brainstorm a few more? I mean, transition has been dramatically, a big shift, right? And I don't know if you know, but there's this movie called Her, and you know, there's like, I can't remember who was the actor, but Her was the idea of like, Scarlett Johansson's voice. And this guy was always talking to

and then to the phone. then everyone, and the movie put him as a loser, basically. He's a loser and then eventually he gets dumped by his AI because his AI transcends and goes to AI heaven, right? So he gets abandoned and then he has to learn how to live without his AI companion. But I'm like, that was like literally like a movie that was like 10 plus years ago. And now everybody is using AI, right?

So the speed of velocity was almost binary. I think we are literally going to look at the difference between 2022 to 2023 when Apple AI launched. And started using it. It's literally like a binary switch from zero adoption to effectively everybody has access to it. My mom uses it to discuss nutrition. So because it's such an easy interface of just typing, texting

and speaking into it. They really unhack that growth curve. So they already have the distribution play, and think AI is only going to get better, right? And like, if you think about it, you know, I'm just thinking about like 20 years ago, not even 20 years ago, but I'm just thinking about 15 years ago, people were still using

Nokia phones and BlackBerry's 15 to 20 years ago. And now it's like totally dead. And everybody uses iPhones, right? Just think about it, like today everybody just got access to AI. What is in 15 years to 20 years time, what things are gonna get killed entirely because of AI? Like I think call centers will get entirely killed as an industry. Yeah, like there'll be some humans to do the super special age cases. But you're like

in 50, 20 years time, if AI continues improving the same way Apple does, whole industries will be wiped out. And I think people just underestimate the fact that, again, genes have not changed for the past 50, 20 years. Massage chairs have not really changed. My bowl of noodles has not really changed. But AI can really has that frontier where it doesn't have a ceiling to how much better it can get.

Adriel Yong (29:14)

I mean, beyond the material changes, think the real fractures probably will come on the relationships front. I think we were having this conversation yesterday. It's like, instead of texting your friend for a random question, now we are all texting chat GPT. And then I think that reduces the propensity for giving relationship. Because you think about, I guess, relationships that give and take, you

give someone something and then at some point you go back and you collect back the favor, right? But then now that the opportunities of giving and taking are just dramatically reduced because like people are asking each other less and less and asking AI, chat, GPT like more and more. So I think relationships are gonna be like massively fractured, especially for societies where so much of the relationships, friendships are built on like

work or like knowledge related things right Singapore for instance it was like all the times you go to your friends for help because you need help on like homework instead of you know where you do a lot more like summer camp stuff and you hang out with them in nature you go on expeditions with them right so I think that recalibration of the education system to be like more social in nature to preserve relationships I think is going to be like so important

for societies like Singapore in the next five, 10 years. And I think actually the demand for entertainment and social activities or new ways to meet people in real life to do things together, we just increase with AI factoring relationships.

Jeremy Au (30:45)

That's actually a really good, and maybe I like to kind of bifurcated this in two ways, right? One is the business side and one is a societal side. And both are really interesting. But I'll quickly talk about the business side because I think there's the less interesting one, but you know, I have a better anecdote. Yeah. But.

I would say that as a VC, I used to get a lot of questions about term sheets all the time. so all these like VCs will play these like really cute games with their term sheets, legal term sheets. And then these startup founders will be very clueless and then they will come to me with questions and I'll be very frustrated because first of all, I don't have a lot of time. And so I'm not a lawyer, I can't go into a super deep, I have the time. And I also get frustrated because the clauses are actually quite tricky. it's very difficult to explain it.

And more importantly, also at that point of time, the founders don't necessarily accept it because they don't understand. So for example, I would say like, this VC is taking advantage of you. And the founder would be like, no, but he's very nice to me. And then I'll be like, no, no, this is totally a clause that takes advantage of you. And then I suddenly end up in a one hour legal explanation explaining debt, equity, interest rates, clause. Yeah, I mean like, there's a lot of like, and then obviously,

that makes it tricky and then sometimes the founder doesn't believe me anyway and just walks away. But more recently, last week, somebody just messaged me and he was on LinkedIn and he basically said, hey Jeremy, I got this term sheet and there's this clause that all the large language models have flagged to me is a red flag, right? Because of all these different dimensions of it, this paragraph, right? Can I get your opinion on it?

So then I looked at it, I agreed with the agreement, and as I said, just call me, right? I didn't want to write it out. Because I also felt like if me writing ending up, I might end up using ChetGPT to write it, because I don't have time to write in depth. So I said, give me a call, and I did a call with him, and I just said, And then I just said, your ChetGPT is correct in the sense of this is an issue for you as a founder. I really understand the context of why this guy is doing it.

And the reason why he's doing it is because Asia's startup death rate is much higher than American death rates. So he's trying to protect his safe note and he's trying to keep it longer as debt and only converted a later period of time to protect himself in a short term. So what was my value at? So like night and day difference, right? It's like last time I didn't have to convince the guy that there's a problem. Now,

he already knows there's a problem because he uses ChatGPT. Number two is I am no longer the first person that's being asked, I'm the last person being asked because he asked multiple language models like ChatGPT and Grok and Cloud. And now I am the last person. I'm the, I don't know to call it, the verifier, the sense check to make sure that the approver, man in the loop.

And then the third thing is my value add was no longer the whole thing, which I also didn't have time to do in the past. But now it's really like the last step, more of the nuance and the human relationship. then there's a little bit of a query to help him understand. like, okay, you should be thinking less about what the cause is, but how do you negotiate and get to a point? Because at the end of the day, unfortunately, his status is very small. There's no money. And so it's less about

whether a is bad, is, think it's reasonably, I wouldn't say, is this more pro investor than pro founder? Yes, it's a red flag from American perspective. But from his perspective, if you have no money, don't launch a product. It's not a horrible clause. It's not bad behavior, right? It's this, you know, so that was a normalization. I was acting as a normalization, what's the word? Interactive coach

to help him improve his prompting, guess. Because I'm after the call, he went back home and prompted, he's like, this guy told me that I need to think about it from a negotiation perspective. So I was more like a prompt, helping him improve his prompting skills. Prompt

Adriel Yong (34:33)

from coach. Someone

should launch a course on like asking questions.

Jeremy Au (34:37)

Yeah, how to ask better questions. Yeah. So there's this interesting, yeah, yeah. Dimension to it. Yeah.

Adriel Yong (34:45)

Yeah, I think that's so true. It's like, at the end of the day, I think relationships are built on trust. And in this case, guess, maybe this founder has seen you in your podcast on content and your career history over a long period of time, and therefore would wait your opinion

much heavier than I guess, ChatGPT, which is today still currently a source of aggregated information, right? And you don't know where the aggregated information comes from. It could be random Reddit threads of people who are just content farming, or could be actually LinkedIn content from really smart, intelligent people. And I guess the interesting inflection point probably becomes when you start using chat GPT for five, six years.

and you trust it so much more than like a normal human being in your life, right? Then I think you would see a lot of like flipped like relationships in the social world. What that means for society and for human to human relationships, I have actually no

Jeremy Au (35:44)

No, we should go into this. We should go into this because I'm very interested about this, right? So I have two young girls that are three years and five years old. Generation Alpha, Generation Z. I'm a millennial. So we're all living with this AI dream. So we should talk about it. And okay, so let's talk about a simple example, right? In my scenario of the business world, I think there's very little value for junior VC. So a junior VC would normally be the front line of the startup.

Yeah. To give that frontline advice to be like, Hey, this is how you should improve your pitch. This is how you should be thinking about stuff. Um, and so I don't see how a founder will ever ask a junior VC for advice and how do you fundraise or how do you improve your sales? And a lot of VCs also have built this giant functions to help founders supposedly recruit better. Yeah. Right. To help founders learn how to do go to market.

Right. And I think all those functions are effectively have been virtualized and deleted by ChatGPT. So why should a founder go to a VC to learn go-to-market advice in a workshop format? The answer is zero. Now, I think there is value from a coaching format because as of now, nobody, you know, for go-to-market sales, you need somebody to watch you sell and see whether how you can improve your in-person skills for now.

Yeah, of course. think there's a big issue which is I think AI will get better and better. Yeah, and I think I would not be surprised in 10 to 15 years AI that can do sales coaching through video calls. Yeah, I would not be surprised by that. so this knowledge piece is like this getting deleted, right? And I think obviously it's an issue for consultancies, I think, where you can't just provide advice or benchmarks. Yeah.

Adriel Yong (37:14)

percent.

Jeremy Au (37:26)

I mean, is this...

Adriel Yong (37:27)

Well,

again, goes back to trust, right? Like, yes, the junior VC has very little usefulness, at least to, I guess, the outside world. But I think the junior VC probably plays a pretty trusted role internally because the partners trust this guy to know whatever stuff they are looking out for has been covered. Maybe you can make the argument that over time that changes. The partner trusts this guy to ban, like, filter.

A thousand startups to like three startups that they know will match their taste and preferences the most. The partner trust this guy to then talk to all the other junior VCs or founders to figure out and triangulate the reputation of the founder that's pitching in France. And I guess I would say like if you are a junior VC that's only doing a very specific task, like just pure outbound lead gen for deals.

Very replaceable. But if you're doing a range of tasks, I feel like AI probably augments your job more than replaces you.

Jeremy Au (38:22)

I And I think that's the crux of it, which is that I think for a junior VC, let's just say a person who's not a partner at VC, the crux of it is the VC's job is to pick great startups. So if you on a team has the partner's trust to pick great startups, or you can pick great startups,

you will not be replaced by AI, right? Because you use AI to help you pick, test, pressure test. But at the end of the day, the final choice is can you be a proxy of the will of the general partner in selecting and judging that piece. So if you're a junior associate consultant, associate in venture capital whose job is this, like you said, doing lead gen, I think your job is going to replaced. But if you are a principal who's trusted by the partner,

then that value is good. So, and maybe it's even better because now you don't get bombarded by founders asking you for advice on how to go to market, right? But I think this is a really good example of a industry that's going to get transformed by it, right? So I think that's one side of it. I think the other side of it, which I enjoy talking about is the societal implications of it, right? And that's not easy because

I mean, example would be like, I don't know, I'm just thinking in my head like therapy, right? I'm just an example, right? So therapy is a job that lots of people do, better help and all these other folks. And therapy is just a form of coaching and role modeling, right? Which is, you, okay, you know, in my context is I went for counseling after my girlfriend passed away in junior college. Then after many years where I acted as a

highly productive, highly optimized person who threw myself into work, I kind of realized that, you know what, I should probably relearn relationships. And I went to the counselor and I'll be like, oh, is it normal to feel very scared of relationships? And then the therapist effectively is like, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you're a teenager, first love passed away suddenly, traumatically.

Between then and now, for the past 10 years, you never talked about it. So you just fossilized in the bed of bad thinking habits about relationships. yeah, it's totally normal in the sense of whatever, we can get used to it. But I mean, there's the values I think that's have, right? And so imagine a world where everybody has like, try GPT, their first relationship is in try GPT. Try GPT is trained on Western, educated, industrialized, you know,

very like Western material, right? And actually you can test it out for yourself actually. you ask, actually one fun way to test it out is actually if you ask it for a personal issue, just ask it and say, when you ask it for its opinion on anything, it will always give the Western opinion, which is a very American centric because most of the internet training material it had was American. But what is interesting to do is you should ask it and say, please take the point of view from

Confucius perspective. Confucius. I know a super aggro, but I'll take it from a communitarian, a family perspective. And it's answers are totally different. So the first answer I gave you is always by default, like Americanized, individualist, I'll say libertarian. But this is by nature the first response. Yeah. And that's why, and so if you asked it to give, please give me a California. Yeah.

You know, individualist, productivity oriented person's answer. It would be the same answer as the first answer he gave you, right? But you can only get a different answer when you it with different philosophies. Or maybe ask, please take it from the perspective of an Indonesian philosopher. Or from Lee Kuan Yew's perspective, how would he have dealt with this problem, right? And it's just a different answer. So by nature, I'm just saying like, everyone's getting westernized in sense that

we all listened to Britney Spears back then because we all listened to And now we all listen to Lady Gaga. now we all... We previously talked about stories like some... We know somebody who broke up with somebody and he generated a breakout script using CharGPT which obviously, breaks it up in a competent but Americanized way, which is not new to me.

you he uses a of therapy language to do a conscious uncoupling. So I think it is true, like you said, that society would not necessarily fracture, but I would say like everybody would become even more bubbled. Yeah. Does it make sense? Because they're talking to themselves and they're talking to... Yeah.

You know, the ChatGPT law, right?

Adriel Yong (42:37)

I mean, that's so fascinating. It's like In the past, Western propaganda was in the form of like movies or music, right? You you portray history from a very Western point of view through like your war movies or your spy movies and whatever, right? And you don't really think about the perspectives until like, you know, you grow older, you talk to your friends, like film critics. Now, there's like a almost like

omniscient westernization of thought with the use of generative AI to figure out day-to-day problems. It's almost like you're now training on daily basis on how to be an American problem solver. Not an Asian problem solver, an American problem solver. And when you think about how some random person in West or East Java is going to use ChatGPT on a day-to-day basis,

five to 10 years, they will probably be very American in how they work and operate. Same for probably the rest of Asia as well, given that sort of like inclination and trajectory. What does that mean for the world actually? I think that's an interesting question in itself, right? Like, will everyone operate and have like the same, I guess, unspoken language of working together in a very American way? Because one of the challenges of, you know, working in Asia is that

you often have all sorts of different working cultures and styles because everyone just had so many different backgrounds of school, like past jobs and companies. And that's usually a big chaos of company and team building. So solving that, actually, is probably going to be an interesting challenge in the years to come.

Jeremy Au (44:07)

On that note, let's wrap things up and see you next time.