How Openspace found, helped build and backed Kumu.

This one has been the one I have been waiting to post for sometime. It’s a company that’s close to my heart simply because it’s a media company. I have waited eight years before I can seriously think about a company that in my opinion has surpass the absolute success of what we achieved at Asian food channel almost a decade ago.

We met Kumu in November 2018, almost 3 years ago. At that point of time the company was already executing very well, but nobody had picked them up simply because it was a Filipino company. Whilst a lot of focus was on Indonesia, Openspace was quietly looking at the Filipino market for startups. It’s a market that we sincerely have high conviction for. With more than 100 million people, my experience running Asian Food Channel 10 years ago gave me the intuition that this market was going to be ready for significant disruption in the years to come.?

Rexy and Roland came to my office in Singapore, and when I sat down with them, I was struck me was how much they had achieved in a short period of time. But I had my concerns, call it post traumatic stress disorder perhaps, for I know how challenging it is to start up a media company and then gain market share. But I was astonished at the way they thought about media. They were digital natives, media guerrillas warfare practitioners from the get-go, operators who knew how to capture the attention of the audience and deliver what they wanted.?

But it was the scaling of the business that was my key concern and if the tech stack was not going to be able to cope up with their ambitions and their vision.

So I asked them simply, “who’s running your tech”. They replied, “oh we’ve got one Chinese guy”. One Chinese guy! What does that even mean? how can one Chinese guy handle tens of thousands of concurrent users and scale it up. But what I didn’t realize was that the so-called one Chinese guy, was Tony Wang from Agora. And Tony Wang had been quietly seeding the Agora platform, which powers Clubhouse and many other large platforms globally, to create a media revolution in multiple countries. And the first one that they achieved was in the Philippines, Kumu.

I’ve always talked about investing based on first principles. Many times, you need to understand what is happening from first principles,?or else you’ll never be able to predict the future. What I saw in front of me at that point what is the future of the media business was going to become, and it was hard to swallow as I had done Cable TV for 10 years; but it was very clear that the future belonged to Rexy and Roland and the tens of millions of Filipinos who are using mobile phones to create and consume content.

We quickly lead and raised the series A round, and with that capital, we went fast in acquiring users. We helped them scale up their architecture with our Openspace internal operations team, we’ve convinced Crystal Wijaya from Gojek to come on board, we’ve helped them find a CFO, and we’ve been quietly working to raise the growth round they deserve.

Last year the team asked me a simple question. Should they spend a seven figure sum to acquire the format Pinoy Big Brother? They were concerned as this was the biggest deal that they’ve ever done and they wanted to check whether it was for okay them to spend that kind of money. My response was a resolute yes, I told them that this would put them on the map and I said, "go now before you lose the deal."

Well, the rest as they say is history. I think Kumu is now sewn into the public consciousness of Philippines and from that point on we knew that we had a team of people whom we could build a billion business.

So back to our first meeting. I remember after listening to them for 30 minutes I said,

"you do realise that you control a $10 billion asset".

Rexy and Roland said, "what do you mean?"

And I said, ”you have about 6 billion of assets because 100 million Filipinos have bought mobile phones and the 4 billion is in the 4G network, but everybody’s using Kumu. You have hijacked the asset and you are leveraging a $10 Billion asset which someone else paid for."

I don’t think the boys really understood what I meant in those days, but I’m sure they do now.

Active intelligence to find build and back companies. That’s the Openspace way.?

Congrats Rexy and Roland. I’m so proud of you guys. (Tear.)