Episode 30: Billy Naveed- Building Ventures for South-East Asi
About Billy Naveed:
My next guest on The One Percent Project is Billy Naveed. Billy is the Chief Strategy Officer at Smile Group. He has spent 20+ years in finance with Morgan Stanely and Credit Suisse. He was the Head of Strategy at Zilingo, a fast-fashion unicorn, and he is the founder of the Young Founders School.
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In this conversation he talks about:
He talks about his 20+ years in finance, including his roles as a founder, CSO, and a Venture-Builder. He describes his career as a process of continuous self-discovery. The willingness to learn, discover and deeply understand things is what drove him to be the person he is today.
Leadership Vs People management. Leadership is giving people a sense of purpose rather than micromanaging them with a carrot and stick mentality.
His views on disruption in the financial industry. Billy asserts that the financial sector's disruption is much slower in the short term and much faster in the long term than what one would project. That being said, he considers the two most interesting developments to be the mainstream acceptance of cryptocurrencies and the capacity to buy and sell these digital currencies.
Who is a Venture Builder? A venture build helps entrepreneurs focus on building their business by providing them with all the needed resources and removing blockages that might hamper their growth. Venture building is a private equity model in the venture capital space.
Building the Young Founders School and what has he learnt from it? The inspiration came from how difficult it was to find good interns with basic entrepreneurship abilities. Putting roughly 4000 children through the programme helped him realize a lot of what he talks about in the conversation.
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Transcript:
*The transcripts are not 100% accurate.
Billy: The journey for me from finance into entrepreneurship has really, I think, being one of continuous self-discovery, the way that I think about my career path is really building out like a tapestry of skills and kind of experiences. Because I think I don't know if I'm blessed, or I'm cursed with this insatiable curiosity about random things, mainly around technology, I love to learn to love to discover and I have this like, very itchy feet syndrome, where I'm always like, if I'm not learning about new things, or deeply understanding what I think is the next big thing, I get very frustrated. That has driven me to do many things. I love to colour the age of 13 and started, accidentally started my first business at 14, helping write code for people online and actually, the reason I got into finance was my parents when they call this computer thing won't go anywhere and I didn't know any entrepreneurs. I don't even know what an entrepreneur was back then, as a kid growing up in the north of England.
As I'm extremely blessed to have some amazing opportunities internship at Goldman Sachs graduate at Morgan Stanley, it was still something that I never even dreamt would be possible for someone of my background and there were incredible companies to work for absolutely incredible companies. Well, I think each of those steps fed a different part of my personality. So like finance, fed, my AD, as you're always looking at new things, it helps my understanding of how interconnected the world is, give me this amazingly broad outlook on life in the world, and give me a wonderful network that at such a young age to be given the kind of responsibility I had is just unparalleled, I don't think you can get in any industry and then building on founder school was basically scratching my own itch, because I was trying to really solve the reasons I never went into entrepreneurship. So I help high school kids who, like me, were entrepreneurial, but didn't know the first thing about what to do with it and particularly reach these underprivileged communities around the world and then, moving on into the lingo. That was Baptism by fire, going into a company that was scaling, like nothing I'd ever seen before.
You're building businesses that you haven't done. You're building them in a sector in apparel that I had no idea about and like the last person, anyone who ever asked fashion advice. I basically wear the same t-shirt brand every day in the same short brand every day. But I think a lot of that growing up from a professional perspective was amazing. Because when you're thrown into a company like that, you really have to start becoming a leader, not a manager and my entire career, I didn't know the difference and I mean, that was just that one lesson would have made the entire thing cancelin gone, worth it. Now we're a small group. We're doing, I'd say it's more towards almost investment side. It's researching, looking at new business ideas, investing entrepreneurs, and then utilizing and actually really understanding what is your own USP, like how can you help these boundaries and really now it's, I think it's become very clear that I'm using all of my previous knowledge and network and all the things I've built in this tapestry. Now, it's all coming together.
Pritish: Tell us about your DJ gig. Isn't that what got you to Asia?
Billy: Yeah. So when I arrived at university, it was very sad. My dad, he was actually an entrepreneur. He arrived and in the UK, same story is most immigrants very little money. I was working three jobs at the same time to pay his way. He scraped together some savings, built a small shoe shop in town that we brought up in because he was like our shoes, a stable industry. Like everyone needs shoes. That's for dad and so my earliest memories actually wearing a little suit as a black suit with an orange shirt that I chosen. Obviously, you see my fashion sense even then was super terrible and somebody literally I think it might have been three or four years old and working in the shop on the weekend and he then the shop was actually quite successful and he ended up building a shoe factory and then during the kind of late 80s, early 90s, the businessman from doing super well to be doing so badly and just getting killed by Chinese manufacturers and obviously you can't compete with that kind of cost base and yeah, the basically the factory went bankrupt, and everything that he'd worked for his entire life went out window and actually looking at that was one of the reasons why I was like, I'm never gonna be an entrepreneur because I just couldn't.
I saw the pain and the drama the family went through, I was like, I can't have that for my life. Obviously, that's not how it went. That was my intention and then so when I arrived at university, like I literally had no money and I very quickly realized that I needed to find a job, otherwise I won't be able to afford to live and it was very unusual at work, because most of my friends, they're from middle class parents, and they were very privileged in that they needed me to do that. So I was like, trying to recommend brains and hey, what can I do? I can earn money, still, like party with my friends. I then just suddenly struck me like, wow, this DJ thing can be really pretty cool and I love the music. I love house music and when they come out and what was unique about Warwick was we had a campus of 3000 people and nobody was leaving the campus because outside of it was Coventry and they weren't very welcoming of students and so you have this like amazing opportunity to basically DJ to 3000 people is the second largest nightclub in the country at the top and so somehow, I bought a secondhand DJ set. There was no YouTube obviously.
So I taught myself how to DJ. I begging people, they knew who DJ was in the campus to teach me and just practice hard every day, every night actually practicing and then six months later, I auditioned and literally my audition I learned, like where the tracks should be exactly so that it will mix well. Like it was like anything's gone wrong. I don't know what to do and yeah, somehow I got the job and the rest is history. So the reason I came to Asia was because Warwick was such a big university, they actually could afford to hire really big name DJs and I graduated to becoming a DJ and so I'm basically hanging out and DJing before after these, like huge superstars, and the conference because University was very early, right, so you start the night at nine o'clock, whatever and the real DJs they had their nights at 2pm that's when they'd come and play so they'd have to be helicopter after morning player set money and then console do the day job for night job and yeah, through that met awesome. DJs got me like crazy good gigs became residents and Ministry of sound and passionate in London last graduating and then basically through that my agent was like, hey, do you want to go to Asia? I got some people that want some DJs you know, go. So yeah, technically I was on the world war. That sounds way more glamorous. It was basically me with a backpack with a bunch of records and the buddy and the backpacking through Asia, playing DJing in various nightclubs to make money.
Pritish: Brilliant. You touched upon something which was very interesting at lingo. You mentioned there you learnt about or you realize about leadership versus people management? What was that realization?
Billy: You know, I've been brought up in an environment where pretty much like the stick and the carrot is your bonus and that's it, right? That's the people come to work. Like I love, I absolutely love my job and most people in finance do. But here's the reality, would you be getting up at 4:30am every single day and doing what is you know, incredibly intense job. If you got paid $0 and I think the answer for most of you will be like hell now rather than be doing other things and so that was the environment I brought up in like my bosses, you know, who most of them left to bits. But like this concept of having a one on one is just completely alien and I have one brightful bonuses is basically usually the first time they go into their office, unless you like had a compliance breach. Now it's pretty much according to the lingo and I really remember making so many mistakes when I arrived. I had an awesome team but very young before it was four years old. Some of them are three years old and I mean the first time I asked him to do something like a project. He turned around to me and was like, why?
Like, again, in banking, like if somebody asked to do something, he just couldn't do it. Like why and what I realized and this is also honestly from a lot of leadership coaching that lingo gave they every C suite person had a leadership coach that worked with them was these young people one lingo for the money, that definitely would not have been the money, they would have the experience and they were there to be taught and so the most important thing for them was giving them a purpose, and giving them the responsibility and so when they're asking why wasn't in my mind, it was a belligerent why, but it wasn't. It was like, why, what's the impact of this work? How’s this gonna help you and the team? What experience will this give me? And that's a very different thing and it took a while to figure it out, because I just wanted work to be done. But then what you realize is that if you give them a purpose, and give them a direction, you tell them why they're doing something, even if they come up with obstacles on the way, they'll figure it out. Because you know what the endgame is and unlike in banking, 99% of the things we did in lingo was, they had a very ambiguous path and like, I knew I wanted this sale to happen, I didn't know how to get there and so I think empowering the young people around me, watching my team with purpose was how he really started to move from being like a manager to leader because, quite frankly, even if I wanted to, I couldn't manage, because I had teams in three different time zones, all various ages, all healed completely from things like, it's not like him in banking, where it's relatively small teams, you're working next to each other and there's a lot of technical risk to more people do as a manager. So that's why you find people tend to micromanage banks. But that was me not wanting to do it and what I realized is that style of management was actually not helpful at all and so giving people a purpose was actually the best thing you could do with management.
Pritish: That's a brilliant insight. 20 years of experience in finance. Tell us what is the disruption in the financial sector? Is it Elon Musk? Is it a Neo bank? Is it digital currencies, blockchain? What is it?
Billy: You know, disruption always happens much slower than you think in the short term, and much faster than you think in the long term. So I never believe it's gonna be a big bang, that's only gonna suddenly change the way that we bank is the way that we transact in the world. If you think about just how slowly things are moving in the world of finance on the edges, you and I are tracking crypto currency and tracking like meme coins, like, you're so wrapped up in it, that you think that oh, my God, the whole world changes quickly. But actually 99.99% populations have just really don’t know what Dogecoin is, right? Like, they don't care what it is, they don't know what it is. I think, to me, the most the two most exciting things that's happening, that crypto currencies have jumped the shark into mainstream acceptance and you can see that whether it's DBS, or Standard Chartered, allowing their retail customers to buy and sell crypto currencies, through to Goldman, BlackRock, etc, like putting funds or ETFs like, this is a huge deal.
Because once you know, you're jumped the shark, and you actually have just a little bit of acceptance institutionally, then the floodgates can reopen on the possibilities and the thing that I'm most excited about is defy. I've been following from the periphery what's going on. But quite frankly, everyone says innovation, it's not really innovation. It's basically just the world of finance, but on an digital contract. But what I'm excited about is that we can finally break down the silos that have been created by banks and institutions around the world so that effectively all it's doing as much in demand and supply is really online, what's going on. But that is super cool. Because even today, like my single biggest core investments is defy lending and I'm making an interest rate of eight times nine times more than I would in a traditional bank, because somebody else will borrow those US dollars at a much higher rate and good and I want that ability for everyone. Why should that be? Just because I can figure out how to send USDC to some weird platform and there have been a lot of tests, right? Even this recent crash that was arguably exacerbated by the amount of money has been locked up in defy, but broadly, it survived, right? There wasn't any big blow up. There wasn't any big malfunction. So I'm super bullish and I think that now what you're going to have is once you have the ability to buy sell the currencies on my DBS account, why can't I then the next stage go on lend my money to go to a digital platform That's going to hire me multiple times more money than I can before. So, I think these things are gonna happen slowly. But the biggest challenge was that first adoption. Everything else is going to come much easier.
Pritish: You talk about defy whatever use on NFT's.
Billy: I've actually founded a company is doing Bollywood NFT's and early investor advisor to a company called fanatical that's going to allow Bollywood fans, I'm not sure you're a Bollywood fan. Yeah, Bollywood fans to buy NFT's of everything from actual artefacts from famous films, hats, gloves, backpacks, whenever, right through to moment songs, lecture as well. But I think that we're going through an understandable bubble, or frankly, but the just like currencies in 2017, you're gonna have these like crazy Icos and what money raised and bubbles happening for them when the crash happens, things in the (Inaudible) are gonna really, I think help. I'll tell you, NFT's for me, are just blockchain ownership and I think in two ways. Number one, I don't see why digital art is any different to normal martial art. I think it's, in many ways just as skillful by some of the art I'm seeing is incredible, right?
Number two, actually, you can track real ownership, which you can't in real life, I've watched some multiple documentaries now about, there's a recent one on Netflix about how one of the most famous galleries in the US. Basically, were selling fake paintings worth some $18 million, over 20 years and by the way, the people that were scamming were like, charities and institutions and government buildings, etc. which is terrible and the third thing to me is blockchain ownership as a more broad concept. I'm going through a process where I'm selling property in London right now, and it is hands down the most painful process I've been through and the crux of everything is that the ownership of the property is not digitized. It's literally on a piece of paper and so the quicker that if it starts with art, and NFT's and whatever and that concept can then spread to other asset classes and the causes, I think this can be nothing but good for the world.
Pritish: So I was assuming you're gung ho about defy as well as NFTs.
Billy: I'm more gung ho about defy. I love NFT's for specific use cases and obviously, I love bowling with NFT's I think that's gonna be huge. What's the space? It'll be I think we launched the platform in about a month.
Pritish: How do you compare the Southeast Asia ecosystem to the west, given that you have interacted and observed and probably also looked at Western startups?
Billy: I think it's not really like Southeast Asia versus the West. It's more like Silicon Valley versus the world and that's the reality. The great thing that I've seen over the last five years has been, I started going to Silicon Valley from a professional basis, and probably late 2009, 2010 in that region and I still remember like my trips out there would be basically education trips. Like, I have (Inaudible) decks on what is Tencent? What is Alibaba? What are the commerce opportunities that are happening in Asia? It was mind blowing and when I'd set them, I was involved in Alibaba, CBD financing and I pulled up many of these VCs who will remain nameless, with probably one of the best investments ever and so they would invest in literally they would still say, Man, we don't invest anything outside of a 10 kilometers of sand on road and then fast forward to today and it's very different, right? Western two major trends, right? One is the Silicon Valley is now where the heart of all startups is still is don't get me wrong on the periphery. There are awesome, some springing up all over the US. New York to Denver, San Diego, like you name it.
I think the same thing is happening globally and what's happening is that VC investing is becoming more local. So even when I came here to Singapore, you know, kind of dozen, 12 as a team, we were doing our first trips down in Southeast Asia and I was meeting Nadiem from Gojek and William. Last time he was doing $100 million in the UMP. Almost all of the VCs were based out of Singapore, right? Yeah, I'm in Singapore, I'm investing and I think more and more, two things are happening. One is that the VCs become more local. So now, if you're investing in Indonesia, and you don't have an Indonesian office with Indonesian partners, people can look a bit strange. The second thing that's happening is international VCs, not only are paying attention to this part of the world, but are like investing and open offices here. Light speed open up Singapore office. I saw this week, Kleiner made the first investment Pakistan. This is just if you'd asked me five years ago, hey, like Kleiner, let’s make an investment in Pakistan, I'd be like laughing. I think it's changing. So and at the same time, it's becoming more global. It's also becoming much more local.
Pritish: Now your venture builder and tell us what does a venture builder do? And how do you help founders in growth and scaling?
Billy: Venture builder basically finds awesome entrepreneurs, and then helps them scale by providing them with as much resource as they would need to grow their business to make sure they focus on growing the business and anything that is a blocker to that is removed. So I would say, in the traditional sense, it's almost a private equity type of model in a venture capital space. So we take meaningful ownership and then we work extremely closely with the founders and help them think through the challenges and obstacles and business model and business model issues they're gonna face and then leverage our network, our people and resources to help make them a success.
Pritish: Brilliant and you are working with Zupee. Tell us about them? And how are you empowering them?
Billy: Yes, Zupee, Smile group company, run by this amazing entrepreneur. They are doing real money skill based gaming, and started off with a really interesting quiz game and now I've got three games that they've launched, all based on time tested, culturally deep rooted games. So they've got two games based on Ludo, which is something that we all grew up playing, I guess when we're younger, and has an amazing addressable market. Everyone knows how to play it. But they know how has it changed the engineering to make it more fun, more monetizing, then competitive games and the latest one of the launch was snakes and ladders, which has also been a blowout success, traditional game, but danger engineering and the know how in the game to leverage what the company knows about human psychology to make things more financing.
Pritish: Brilliant. Now let's talk about young founders. I think that's a passion project, which has really done well and you have contributed towards it in many ways. What are your learnings from it? And how do you think about it going forward?
Billy: I think when we started young Founders School, it started as a very late night conversation with the head of rise in Hong Kong and it was more me, quite frankly, about how the problems that I'd encountered when I was younger, as a high school kid has not been solved is no mentorship for people that are interested in entrepreneurship. The things that people teach you in school is still the same stuff that I learned when I was in school. Just sounds crazy and I think that day, we'd had a conversation with a teacher and ask them like, hey, because I was very involved with the internship programme at Credit Swisse at the time. Ask them like, hey, these are the kind of skill sets we're looking for and its but we're just not finding them. We find really hard to hire, hire really good quality interns and the skills that we wanted, were basically entrepreneurial skills like creativity, thinking outside the box, being able to pitch, present to be able to understand different types of business models and what the pitfalls are working as a team and they said, oh, no, we don't teach entrepreneurship. Okay. Do you teach business? Oh, no, we don't even teach business. Okay, what do you teach? Oh, we teach accounting.
Billy: Oh, my God. It is like teaching you how to fill a car when you find to drive it, but it's just completely pointless. So this is really where that was kind of the start of it and the reception we got from high school kids were just unbelievable. The passion that they have for wanting to learn about this topic and quite frankly, they know more about entrepreneurship and tech than most adults do these days has just been amazing and I follow some of the graduates that come through the programme and they're studying, you're talking about teaching entrepreneurship, just the sake of being an entrepreneur, you can start an entrepreneur in your professional career, wherever that takes you and yeah, so these kids are gonna do amazing things. We put about 4000 kids through the programme and the biggest lesson, I think, I've learned is two things. One is don't just rely on the generosity of others and the second thing is price your product appropriately.
So the lessons are, don't run the generosity of others is that I thought, because it's such an awesome charity, and I'm so passionate about it, and I can make other people talking about it that would support it, and the dead for many years until COVID hit and then all of a sudden, like money just disappeared and we went from a team of five people having to for every single person as I was tears in my life, supersad, and I didn't want it to die and so we managed to save it. Now it's thriving, and within a six month period where it was like this could be over and I was thinking myself, because I had advice before for people saying you need to have a revenue stream like yeah, but how can I charge for this? This should be gift to the world. I think the mistake I made is that when you have something that's valuable.
Make the people that can afford to pay. Because ultimately if you as a charity, end up dying, then what good are you doing? By then you're doing good to anyone. If you don't have enough revenue that you can wash your own face and the dark breakeven. It's basically a ticking time bomb and so now we unashamedly charge for the product, we go to an international school and whenever the team comes to me, they always show you how to price this and like double it. Because right now the one thing that is absolutely there is still a very big media in here from spending education worldwide is high quality good education with quality experiences and mentorship in an area that is completely underserved by the local school system people pay for and we will then use that money to do good elsewhere and get underprivileged kids through the poll.
Pritish: So on that note, we will be moving on to the exciting part of this conversation which is rapid fire. Three questions. One word or one sentence. Are you ready?
Pritish: The hardest part about your job?
Billy: Uncertainty.
Pritish: One book or a blog that has transformed your life?
Billy: I would say Shoe Dog.
Pritish: Bitcoin or another cryptocurrency?
Billy: Ethereum.
Pritish: Billy, it was a pleasure having you on the One Percent Project.
Billy: Thank you.