Everyone’s jazzed after a successful meetup on 27.Feb.2025! The crowd wasn’t limited to tech peeps, and it expanded to fintech, real estate, business administration, and event planners – thanks to all for coming!
Higlights
- Thursday night Pattaya traffic factored into start time – the event started at 19:30, with people trickling in from before 19:00
- Not everyone in the RBT staff was aware of our meeting and some peeps had a hard time finding us
- We started a round table style conversation at 19:30, finished around 20:15
- Most people hung out and split into “interest groups” until around 22:30, half of us stayed to talk shop until almost midnight
- 17 people signed up, 14 made it, not everyone is in the photo
- 5 women
- More than half of attendees are well-established in Pattaya / Chon Buri / Thailand
- Three Thai, not limited to expats
- TH, US, UK, FR, AU, RO, AE
- Local press showed up to eavesdrop on the event, that was a nice surprise – rocking!
Takeaways
- There is a purposeful small and medium tech business expansion from Bangkok to Pattaya / Chon Buri thanks to the Eastern Economic Corridor and Board of Investment (BOI)
- B2B and B2C startups are leading the push; many are Australian, UK, NZ collaborations with Thai groups through the various chambers of commerce
- The US-Thailand Treaty of Amity and Economic Relations, which eliminates business ownership and management restrictions for American-owned companies, gives American-owned businesses a huge competitive advantage over AU, UK, NZ, CN
- The peeps represented a good cross section of the areas of opportunity: AI, automation, automotive, and fintech; other attendees covered general business operations and administration
- While the large domestic and transnational conglomerates have a short-term talent attraction advantage, there’s a great window of opportunity for establishing a software Center of Excellence that leverages EEC, BOI, Digital City, and other incentives
- A Center of Excellence is positioned as an alternative to current Thai programs for nurturing high-tech startups, which focus on hackathons with two undesirable side-effects:
- Hackathons take place a limited number of times/year and have very narrow focus
- Talent nurturing becomes the organizer’s sole responsibility, who can’t hire all possible hackathon winners
- The hackathon-style talent attraction stifles innovation because of its narrow focus and alignment with the organizer’s tactical or strategic problem domains
- A Center of Excellence with incubator characteristics and traditional venture funding pipelines is positioned as a credible and desirable alternative
- Not everything is pink clouds and rainbows: there is a significant cultural difference when it comes to startup funding, a gap between seed/family round/BOI/grants funding and large institutional funding, because there’s no established venture funding in Thailand, even in Bangkok, aligned with rest-of-the-world venture style funding
- Three peeps have a solid track record in successful startups and funding, and believe that the cultural issues around venture-style funding can be overcome
We discussed successful case studies in fintech and healthcare:
- Mobile-based payday loans at scale
- On-demand/on-site one-click healthcare verticals, from offshore oil rig platforms to busy city neighborhoods
- Technology enables these, both are successful startups with high YRR, and established customer bases
- CRM for Thai companies, Australian founders, fantastic YRR over 2 years of existence
- In some areas, like fintech, Thailand has leapfrogged Western capabilities thanks to a combination of technology, regulatory climate, and business chutzpah
- Many of these businesses were started by expats
What happens next?
We are planning another biz dev peeps meetup within 60 days. The next one will focus on the Center of Excellence and how it will work, the startup venture approval process, and funding. Also, various in-person and on-line meetings sprouted throughout Pattaya over the next week between peeps who met at this event and share business objectives. Success!
Thanks again to everyone who helped make this a successful evening. Special shoutout to Max and his team at The Robin Hood Tavern for making us feel at home. See y’all around Pattaya!