From Live Shopping to Super Apps - inspiration for new products and platforms is increasing moving from east to west. Where once, products from the Asian markets were derided as copycats, now they're trend setters. In this talk, Tera Ventures GP, Eamonn Carey will talk about how a 2004 trip to Korea was the inspiration for his first company, and how we're seeing more and more innovation from that part of the world making its mark closer to home.
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Late Night Cocktail Lounge Cover Band Limbo - On Inspiration and Imitation
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So thank you all very much for for coming along. My name is Eamon Carey. And, yeah, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit today about inspiration. But to give you some context as to why I'm standing here, I'm a three time founder, two of which, thankfully, were successful, one of which was a gigantic car crash, but we can we can talk about that in the in the or a learning experience, as I prefer to think of it now.
We can talk about that in the Q and A. And now have been an angel investor and and VC investor for the last couple of years. I ran Techstars in London and in New York, invested in a bunch of companies there, ran an angel syndicate with some friends, invested in more, and now I'm a partner at a VC fund in Estonia investing in Estonia and the new Nordics and beyond.
So I've invested in about one hundred companies across U. S, Europe, Africa and Asia and kind of watched a whole bunch of interesting things happen. So I'm going to talk to you today about the talk title. So I think Brian thought it was a little bit like Beckett when I sent it to him.
First, actually, it's from someone who is influential more recently. It's a quote from Kirk O'Bain's journal saying, do your own thing. Others own their own thing. If you copy too much, you'll find yourself in late night cocktail lounge cover band limbo. And so what I want to talk to you about today is, like, ideas and inspiration and where it comes from and looking in places that are maybe a little bit more non obvious than what's in our backyard or to the west of us.
So I'm gonna take you back in time to two thousand and five when a bunch of really interesting things happened for me. So seventeen years ago, I studied journalism in college because computer science was too hard, like too many hours. And so journalism had like ten hours a week, I could work selling guitars and and do a bunch of stuff that I thought was more interesting.
But I'd learned how to code when I was a kid, so I'd always kind of I was the annoying person who built websites for his dad's friends and tried to kind of make money doing various different things like that. And so I was, you know, the first person with broadband on our street, like obsessed with IRC and Usenet and all of these kind of different things.
And so in my day job, I was a producer and presenter on RTE radio, which is like the Irish equivalent of the BBC. And I spent my entire time saying to my bosses, like, we should be taking this Internet thing more seriously. Right? We should be podcasting. We should be putting up blogs.
We should be listing our playlist. We should be doing all of this. And the dominant feedback that I got back then was the Internet was kind of a fad, right? Like everyone thought it was going to be a big deal in ninety nine, two thousand and then it blew it, right?
But newspapers, like, they're solid. They've been around for eighty years. Like, there's no reason to think that they won't be around for another eighty. So I was kind of banging my head against the wall and it was it was pretty frustrating, frankly. But RT was a job for life. Like, I couldn't be fired.
So, you know, it was kinda tempting to, to stay there. But the the catalyst, the the thing that really changed my life was was taking a trip. Does does anyone know what city this is? It's Seoul in in South Korea. It's from an awkward angle.
There's a few more landmarks if you're gonna flip this around. So a couple of friends of mine from college had gone out to Seoul to be English teachers when we when we finished. And they said, hey, come over. I had some time off, so so I went over for two weeks and hung out.
And Seoul is an amazing place. Right? Like, Korean food is incredible. Music is incredible. Architecture, the people, everything was was amazing. It was also in two thousand five, like, the most foreign place I'd ever gone. Right? And I mean that in the context of nothing was in English and no one spoke English.
So to go and and obviously, at the time, I had, a really ****** phone. So you had like, I had a book with a map in it and that's how you found your way around. And you're kinda like, okay. I think I get off at the station where it's like the last character looks like a man wearing a hat.
Right? So you kinda try and navigate your way around like a proto understanding of the the Korean language. But it was incredible. Right? Like, I I I spent a bunch of time over there, and and the moment that really kind of changed things was was on the subway.
So an amazing subway system, and I was sitting on it one day going probably going to a bar, right, to be perfectly honest. But I sat in a lot of subway cars before. And this guy came and he sat next to me, and he took something out of his pocket that in my head is permanently imprinted as like this kind of onyx slab basically.
And he picked it up, he looked at it and he started watching Spider Man, Spider Man two actually, the Tobey Maguire one which dates dates it. And I was kinda sitting there going, is is anyone else anyone else seeing this? So he's watching Spider Man and then so, of course, creepily, I'm like, I I need to kinda see where this goes.
Thankfully, got off the same station as me. And as he got off, he switched off Spider Man and he did something that to me looked like he was sending a text message on the same on the same device. Right? So he had something that was kinda like this. Right?
This is not the the device that he had, but this is one of the Korean devices that were out at the time. Right? They, They had this DMV mobile TV trial that that was running where you had a phone and on the side it could receive terrestrial TV broadcast, but you could also store videos on it and and play it.
Right? And I was like, I was slack jawed. Right? I was like, ******* hell. Like, some bloke has come back from the future just to kind of tease me, like sit next to me and no one else has noticed, like, some Truman Show **** or something like this.
Anyway, so it was it was it was incredible. And now you kind of think, of course, I can, like, send a message and watch Spider Man on the train or whatever. Also, was doing this underground. Right? I still can't do that. If I wanted to watch Spider Man two on a train in London, I can't.
The Internet doesn't go down there. Right? It goes ******* everywhere else. Right? So so it was incredible. What was more incredible was like this was kind of the state of the art that I had in my pocket. Right? It had like seventy two colors, like, you know, predictive text.
Like, oh my god, we're really kind of like at the edge of technological capability. And so and and this phone actually didn't even work. They had a different wireless standard over there, so it totally useless. But I kind of saw this guy and then for the rest of the trip, spent my time kind of creepily looking at people in the subway and just kind of noticing things that were happening.
I went to a mall in Gangnam one day and there were a bunch of people crowded around the TV screen watching something. And in Dublin or in London, normally, that would be a football match. Right? There, it was a bunch of people watching people play StarCraft.
Right? And and I kind of came back from that trip going, the the world is about to change in a very fundamental way. Right? Like and it's not the Internet that I need to think about anymore. Like, Internet ****** out. Had its moment in ninety nine, two thousand.
Like, now it's mobile. Right? Now we should be putting everything on our phones. The challenge was I was going back and telling a market where everyone owned this phone rather than this one, like, oh, let's produce content for a phone. They were like, can't even take a picture.
I'm not gonna watch a TV show on it. They didn't even have WAP probably back then. Right? So it kind of a tough sell. And in the end, I kind of went, you know what? I'm so obsessed with this idea of mobile being the future, and I'm so convinced that it's it it is the case that that I quit my job.
I quit my job for life. I went to my parents and I said I'm gonna be a startup founder. Right? And and in Dublin in the early two thousands, you're either gonna be like a builder, an engineer, a doctor, or a lawyer or a failure.
Right? Like, the kid that no one talks about. I was like, oh, I'm gonna build stuff for mobile. Thankfully, parents were kinda like, Jesus. Here's another harebrained scheme. Like, you know, let's hope it it goes okay. But myself and a friend of mine started a company based mostly actually out of frustration that no one was taking this stuff seriously.
But what we found was when we went and spoke to big companies who who knew a lot more than people in the media industry, actually, they took it really seriously. So we ended up signing contracts with three and o two and Guinness and Captain Morgans and Emirates and a bunch of other people.
And in the space of, you know, kind of three years, we went from being two blokes with a in a like, in a picnic table in in my cofounder's back garden to, like, having offices here. We'd opened an office in Dubai. We we built that business out and, you know, did did quite did quite well just doing stuff on mobile, right, making content, doing podcasts, making videos.
And obviously, we were in a really good position in two thousand seven and two thousand eight when all of our stuff that we've been saying about everything, the future being mobile crystallized when the iPhone and and Android kind of came out and and and came to prominence.
And so we built our own apps and built apps for lots of other people, etcetera, etcetera. But that trip was the catalyst. Like, if that guy hadn't sat next to me on the subway, I'd probably still be presenting, like, you know, the sports news on RTE or something like this.
I mean, probably unlikely, but let's let's just pretend in the multiverse that I'm still doing that somewhere. And subsequently, we sold that business and and but but I've ended up going over and back to Korea and Japan and Hong Kong and Taiwan and and and lots of places in in that part of the world over the the last couple of years and have seen kind of the technology that starts there evolving and coming over to to this neck of the woods increasingly frequently.
I love karaoke. This is when we launched the product in in Taiwan. They brought us to probably the most luxurious karaoke room I've I've ever been to. But it's a fascinating part of the world for a whole bunch of different reasons. The challenge is that actually the kind of dominant narrative about apps coming out of China or Japan or Korea or Vietnam or Indonesia or anywhere else is that everyone always used to talk about them as clones.
Right? Like, they're copycats. Copycat app, they're copying Airbnb, they're copying blah blah blah blah. And so you see all of these think pieces going, oh, WeChat is, you know, China is Facebook, Baidu is is Google, you know, Weibo is is is Twitter, etcetera, etcetera.
What they never kind of took into account was like, yes, there were some similarities between these products and the and the the western counterpart. There were also lots of differences. Right? Like, they'd evolved in in very different ways. That's not to say that there weren't copycats. Right?
If anyone remembers the game Flappy Bird. You know, the second company I started, was in the games industry, and so I saw firsthand how kind of copycatting really works, but, like, Flappy Bird was was was copycatted a bunch of different times. Right? So when IP becomes successful, it's kind of inevitable that that people will be inspired by it.
Like, that's how how things work. But there was a lot of kind of hand wringing. Right? And and kind of think piece like, you know, the the episode of the Simpsons, when someone please think of the children, you know, what are we gonna do about all of these these copycat apps?
And and, you know, the question I was always thinking is like, it is it a copycat or is it a remix? Right? Like, where does this idea come from? And and one of the things I've seen time and time again as a as a and and as a founder is that well, let me ask you question first of all.
How many people in this room have a business idea that is so amazing that if they told anyone else in this room, that person would immediately run off and do it themselves? Right? So I have been that person and I know there are hands down there and you're feeling guilt inside.
I'm an Irish Catholic, I can I can tell? Right? I can sense it like a spidey sense. Everyone has to go to confession. But so so, you know, I think there is this really interesting thing that happens where a bunch of cool stuff happens, ideas kind of accumulate around that, and and similar businesses are born.
The third company that I started, which was a failure, was an EdTech company, which was ironic because I wasn't particularly good in school. I didn't know anything about the US SATs, and maybe you're learning why it failed. I didn't do any customer development or or or do anything else.
But we launched this like super secret idea, we better not tell anyone that we're thinking about like putting phone education on a mobile phone, like, you know, galaxy brain **** there. But we launched it and there were like four companies that we never heard of doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.
And there is this kind of biological idea of of convergent evolution that you see in in ideas as well. Right? So there's this the concept of multiple discovery or or simultaneous invention. Right? So you see it in science where very frequently when they announce a Nobel Prize, it's not just one person who wins anymore.
It's two or three people who've kind of come up with the same theory at roughly the same time, usually independent of of one another. Right? So, you know, calculus, Leibniz, and Newton discovered it roughly the same time. Right? Darwin wasn't the only person who who theorized evolution.
Right? So there's a bunch of kind of ideas that that come out at the same time. So, you know, in in biology, they say it's why insects and birds have wings. Right? And they both evolved at the same time even though they're obviously very different branches of the of of the tree.
So so my thesis is actually, a lot of these ideas, whether it be Weibo or Youku or anything else, kind of would have evolved independent of YouTube starting or or anything else. It's an easy finger to point to say people are are are copycats.
That's not to say that copycats don't exist. If anyone here works for Xerox PARK or knows anyone who does, ask them how they feel about Microsoft and Apple, and graphical user interfaces. I don't think they will be, they will be big fans. But anyway, this stuff happens.
And and I think one of the really interesting things is kind of thinking about the cultural and and how that's been changing over the years. And if you look at nineteen eighties movies, which I spent a lot of time doing in the nineteen eighties, the way that they depicted kind of Japanese culture back then was very, like, automaton and and and kind of robot like.
But culture started to evolve. Right? Like, Sony gave us what I think were still the best, Walkman or Walkmans, however you wanna call the the the the plural. They really started to kind of influence culture. They started to kind of shift the perception of of Japanese products, Japanese manufacturing.
It became very, very cool. Right? In the gaming world, again, this is how I spent a lot of time in the in the nineteen nineties. Sega, Nintendo, Mario, Zelda, like, all of these products, all of these brands kind of starting to come into the come into the home, become kind of, very much part of the kind of cultural cultural zeitgeist.
In fact, it's really in the last ten years that, like, Xbox and Oculus and a couple of others have kind of caught up with with, Japanese console makers and and and game makers. You know, the movie industry like Akira, Spirited Away, like, you know, you can see the kind of influence that that Japan was starting to to have on the world.
And and how much now if you talk to directors or if you read interviews with directors, like, the extent to which they were massively influenced by by these movies. And it's it's a generational thing. Right? Like, where where I had, you know, the the Sony Walkman and and Akira, you know, my brother had a Super Nintendo and Pikachu.
Right? Like, this is kind of continually continually going on. And what's interesting is, in most cases, this was actually government policy. So in Korea, in in ninety seven after the the financial crash, they created this this concept they call Hallyu, which is like the Korean it's a Chinese word for the Korean wave.
But it was a government initiative to go, we want to be the number one exporter of culture in the world within the next thirty years. Right? And so they poured money into all sorts of initiatives. So in South Korea was the first country to have, like, a national broadband plan, so everyone got connected to broadband now.
Everyone is getting connected to, like, ultra high speed fiber over there. They funded movie studios. They funded theatrical academies where bands like BTS and others kind of came came together. And you started to to to see the results in a fairly kind of substantial way.
Right? So almost ten years it's ******* ten years since this happened, by the way. Right? Like, how old am I? So Gangnam Style was the the first I'm not gonna do that. It was the first was the first video to hit a billion views on YouTube became like this total cultural phenomenon.
More recently, I'm sure a lot of people a lot of people watch this. Right? Like, again, Squid Game has spawned. They're making a reality, like an actual version of Squid Game, presumably with fewer machine guns for Netflix, although who knows in the kind of hellscape that society is today.
So, you know, I think the the the really interesting thing is back in the day, never talked about Samsung products. They talked about Samsung products because they were so faulty and ******. The the the view that the Korean government had was that if they can start to influence culture, then people will start to see more Korean product like LG and and Samsung products and various different things in movies and in TV shows and everything else.
And as like, certain Korean soap operas are some of the biggest in in the world and in Turkey, Middle East, Africa, various different places, their view is actually the entire economy will be boosted. So it's not just the the kind of cultural side of the economy, but Samsung would do better LG, all of these companies.
You know, they they made this kind of dream Korean, which is interesting. But but, you know, most of you here are founders or or or products people. Right? So it's not just culture where we see that influence. It's increasingly now in in the products that we're building and in the products that I'm seeing when people are coming to me saying, hey.
I've got an idea or an MVP. I wanna talk about some of the differences between kind of this neck of the woods and that neck of the woods. And some of the biggest ones are in the kind of design. Right? In Europe and the US, people tend to favor very sleek, kind of elegant, minimal design.
Right? You think of the the Google homepage, right, the pale blue calming Facebook homepage, etcetera. And then you look at Baidu, right, like, doing the same thing. It's search engine. There's just way more information on there. If you look at the difference between TripAdvisor on the left and and and Ctrip on on the right, right, they're they're the same products.
Right? It's a travel app that allows you to make bookings and do things. In this part of the world, we've kind of adhered to a view like a U2 guitar line. Right? Less is more. In Asia, increasingly, what we see is actually more is better.
And it's it's interesting to kind of, you know, having launched products over there, which I'll I'll talk about in a minute. You know, some of the feedback that we got from folks in Taiwan and Hong Kong and Japan and Korea is that here we tend to search.
Right? We will go looking for something. There, they prefer that kind of lean back browsing experience, which is why you have this real density of information on the page. I'll touch on the kind of concept of super apps in in a couple of minutes' time, but there again, you have these products that have everything in it.
Right? It's it's like a combination of Skyscanner and Uber Eats and WhatsApp and Revolut and everything else all in in in one place. We tend to have those as kind of discrete apps, although we'll talk about why people want that to change. And it's also this difference in in what they think of as kind of high context and and low context culture and and and language.
So Japanese, Chinese, Korean, they're very formal languages. In many cases, actually extremely complicated languages. And so there's a lot of context that needs to be added in, which is why you have way more text on the pages in in many cases. The stupidest theory I've heard, which I just put these slides up too advanced, is I saw a guy give a talk about this before, and he was like, the reason this is the case is because streets in Europe are wider and less densely packed and streets in Asia look like this.
I was like, mate, you're ******* reaching. Like, that is that is that is crazy. But this is a product called Lingvist, is a language learning app, so powered by AI. So if any hopefully, some of you use it, but similar to kind of Duolingo and Babbel and others.
We raised some money from a Japanese investor a couple of years ago and launched the product in Taiwan and Japan. And as I was saying, we and our head of design John spent so much time like getting the design perfect, like it was beautiful.
Sleeve were kind like this is Apple awards Apple design awards category, like we could win this. And we brought it over to Japan when we were doing some of the user testing, you know, we got this so it it went out. A bunch of people tested the app, they they gave us some feedback.
And we had one of the product managers from from Rakuten sit us down and give us the feedback, and he was so embarrassed. He was like, oh, he's gonna he he had to deliver some real he was like, these people think that your app is a product for idiots.
Like, it's like something that was designed for children. You know, there's no context. There's no additional info. Like, you know, why is why is there nothing on the screen? Like, this product is not fully built yet was was kind of the impression that they got.
And it was a really salutary lesson, and and one that I've taken, like, was a couple of years ago. We've we've subsequently launched a bunch of products that part of the world. But it is interesting when you're localizing products to think not just about like, I need to translate everything.
It's like you also need to think about what's the dominant kind of user experience. How do people like to use products over there? How much are you gonna have to adapt? The answer is like a lot to actually kind of build something that that people are kind of useful or are used to.
And you can see their influence starting to creep in. Right? So, you know, Baidu Maps, WeChat has a mapping function where you can see your friends, like a bunch of the kind of big Chinese products and and Japanese like LINE, Kakao, and others.
They've had these kind of heat maps for for quite a long time showing you where your friends are, where the activity is in cities, etcetera. If anyone does anyone here use Snap? One person. Play that short position. They've been doing it. Now if you've got the most actually, I confess, I do use Snap every so often.
If you look at the new version of Instagram, they're starting to introduce more mapping and more location functionality in in in their products. So you can start to see this kind of user experience and user interface starting to creep into into this part of the world.
Right? I mean, everyone should be aware of this at this stage. Like, I remember using TikTok a couple years ago when it kinda came out first and, my god. It's so busy. Like, my eyes are gonna bleed if I look at this for for too long.
Now it's, like, the biggest thing on Earth. It's probably the biggest cultural influence. Like, if you talk to people in the music industry, they're literally obsessed not with getting their music into the charts, but making sure that influencers use their music in TikTok videos because that's the fastest way to go viral, that's the fastest way to get lots and lots of views.
It's less about PSY and a billion views on on YouTube and much more about how do you influence this. And you can see the kind of influence of of TikTok starting to kind of bleed into other products. This is a company called Heygo that we invested in a while ago, which is a virtual tour company.
Right? So you can you have a guide live streaming this walk in the mountains or a walk along the canals in Venice, etcetera, etcetera. And again, previous versions of this, if if this product had been built five or ten years ago, would have been a sleeker design, would have been less on the screen.
I remember when I looked at this first, was like, it actually feels busy. So on top left, can expand the map, you can see where you're walking, there's kind of photography buttons, gallery buttons that you can go into, a lot of kind of menu options on the top.
And none of this is hidden by default. This is all on screen all the time. So again, for me, the vendors of this business are Canadian, but they spent a lot of time in Hong Kong and you can really see kind of how that influenced the user experience and the user interface of that product.
And it's also kind of starting to, you know, influence how people use products. And I think, again, we'll see an awful lot more of this over the next little while. So how many people agree with this? Depends how long it is. Most of them are ******* long. Right?
Especially the ones I send. So if anyone here has ever gotten one from me, I'm sorry. But, like, we have been waiting for a really long time for the promise of Alexa or Siri or Google Assistant or or anything else to to to start to pay off.
But again, if you go when I I was in Hong Kong a couple years ago, I would say probably thirty or forty percent of the people that I saw when they were using WeChat in particular, they weren't typing, they were talking. Right? They were sending voice messages, particularly older people.
And there's, you know, there are questions around literacy and the complexity of the Chinese language, etcetera, but it's also kind of ease of use. The thing that I noticed and and this, you know, now Baidu say about twenty percent of their searches, total searches, which is a lot, is now coming on voice.
Right? So voice interfaces are hugely popular. You can start to see it bleeding in over here. The the moment that it occurred to me that it was becoming something that I do all the time is when we had a kid. Right? You have a kid, the kid takes most of your arms, but still have you have to time a lot of things, a lot of timers.
Right? Like, this food needs to be on for this long, these soothers need to be sterilized, this other thing, this other thing. And so I started using voice and I increasingly now use it in in other products. And and and again, the companies that I'm seeing coming in and pitching me today that will hopefully be the big companies that we're all talking about in five or ten years' time, loads and loads of them are thinking about voice as an interface.
So I think we'll definitely see an awful lot more in that. In shopping, right, like live shopping on mobile is like the biggest thing since since sliced bread. It's about ten percent. It's more now. It's it's, I think, about fifteen percent of of all ecommerce in in China.
And it's kind of, you know, billions and billions of of dollars being being spent on it. And it's very simple. It's just a real person. It was like QVC. Right? If if anyone's old enough to remember that. It's like QVC, just someone sitting.
And maybe some of you saw the there's a really popular image went on Twitter Twitter a couple days ago of, like, tons of people just sitting in a warehouse with ring lights on them doing this live shopping. Again, societal hellscape, but it is indicative of a of a of a wider trend that that we're starting to see.
McKinsey said it was it was ten percent of the the ecommerce market in in twenty twenty. It was worth one hundred and seventy one billion dollars This is just in China in twenty twenty one and four twenty billion dollars is what the projection is for this year.
So it's like going up at a rapid pace, I promise it's four twenty billion dollars This isn't some Elon weed joke, although I **** it, I like it. But we've invested the last six months in three companies that are doing live shopping in the U.
S, in Sweden and and here in London. Right? Super great. Ended up raising money from Benchmark afterwards. They're doing kind of live streaming of of beauty products. We've a company called Stack End that's powering live shopping for for anyone with a Shopify marketplace and then Skin Days that are that are in the kind of beauty space as well.
Right? And so already super great, their average in app time per day is twenty minutes, right, which is really high. Like if you were an e commerce site and you had people if you were any shop and someone spent twenty minutes in there every day, that's pretty significant.
And and, you know, there's a whole bunch of reasons that we can go into in the Q and A why why that's the case. We'll touch quickly on on super apps because I got four minutes left. So I mentioned it earlier, right, like WeChat is a very busy product.
We don't see so the version of WeChat, if you download it and use it here, you'll think it's kind of a messaging app. What is he talking about? The version of WeChat that you use if you're in China is is very very different because it's not just a messaging app, it is that, but it's also like a supermarket and a travel agent and the place that you can pay your taxes and the place that you can register your kid's birth and, you know, you can do basically you you can run your entire life from
from one product and it's it's huge. Right? Like, basically, everyone in in China uses it. It's it's probably maybe still one of the most dominant kind of payment methods in in in that part of the world as well. And there are a bunch of super apps over there.
And it's interesting to see now these growth stage companies and public companies kind of coming out and going, we're positioning ourselves as a super app. Right? So Revolut has decided that it's going to be a fintech super app. Somewhat unclear exactly what that means, but it's it's the ambition that they have.
This one I love. So PayPal decided that they they don't wanna just be an online checkout button. They wanna be a super app as well. The irony is in the the quote. The idea came to the PayPal CEO during a dinner three years ago with the president of WeChat.
As the two dined, a picture began forming in his head. I wonder how that ******* happened. Copycat. Copycast. That's not inspiration. But Facebook, you know, are obsessed with this. Snap are are obsessed with this as well. Like, there are so many companies trying to know, and Facebook have been trying to do it for for a long time.
And I think now, like the kind of existential threat that TikTok poses and means that they'll focus on that a lot more than than the super app thing, but I think this is definitely something that that Snap are working on pretty pretty heavy.
Some of the industries that are interesting that that I'm now looking at kind of what's happening in that part of the world coming over here just to to kind of wind us down. What is the average salary for a teacher in this country?
Take a guess. Grand. Five grand. Thirty grand. Like, twenty five, thirty when you're starting out, thirty to forty is as you get bigger. This is a guy called Kim Kuhun. He is an English teacher in Korea. How much money do you think he made last year?
Eighty grand? He made four million dollars. Right? Now how many people here would quit their job and become a teacher if I said I'll pay you four million dollars here? Like, ******* A, I'm in. Like, not correcting homework, but I'll do the talk.
So online education is absolutely enormous in in all of these markets, right, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, China, Korea, etcetera, etcetera. One point five million people have taken his courses online, which is a very staggering staggering number. He now has his own publishing company, so not only did he make four million quids, his publishing company made another ten million on top of it, so that's that's nice.
There's a company called MegaStudy in in Korea, where actually the majority of the teachers are making six figures, and the best ones are making into the into the millions of dollars doing this kind of online tutoring, online test prep, etcetera, etcetera. And there's money starting to go into this sector here as well.
So the guys from Preply who went through Techstars in in Berlin when I was mentoring there just raised a bunch of money recently to kinda build out their tutoring marketplace, the growth that they're seeing is astronomical. And I think part of that is COVID fueled.
Right? Like everyone went, oh, actually, you know, online education became a thing again and a useful and viable thing. So we're starting to see an awful lot more happening in that space. I will finish by talking a little bit about robots. Got fifty six seconds.
Intelligent toilets, right, Just because quantified self wasn't enough to track your sleep and your heart rate and everything else. If anyone went to April Dunford's talk yesterday, she talked about buying a total toilet. Well, if she'd waited, she could have bought their intelligent health toilet that will monitor all of your output and give you stats stats and ratings.
Right? Exciting times for humanity. Can't wait to share that one with my doctor and my friend. This has been going on for years. Actually, I saw a company presenting exactly this kind of thesis back in in in two thousand seven. And the other one that's really interesting is robots.
Like, so if you check into a hotel in Japan, a lot of the time there will be a Peppa robot there that will kind of greet you, it will show you useful information about the hotel, etcetera. But in old folks' homes, right, obviously, Japan, Korea, lot of these markets have rapidly aging populations, which is not a problem that's unique to them.
Increasingly in care homes, these are now being used to interact with people on a day to day basis. And I think actually this problem of of aging populations is is one of the biggest ones that's still relatively unsolved from a tech and start up perspective.
So I think there's gonna be massive, massive opportunities in in that part of the world over the next couple of years. What I would close by saying is when you are thinking about ideas or inspiration or anything else, do not be tempted to just go west.
But instead, in the words of Gandalf the White or Grey as he was at the time, look to the east. Thank you very much.