This week’s guest is Kevin McSpadden, who is the Southeast Asia editor for e27. E27 is one of the largest media companies in Asia with a specific focus on tech. Kevin is very much involved in the grand vision and strategic planning of the company. Not only that, he also rolls up his sleeves and gets deeply involved with the day to day. We talk about a lot of interesting things today, including what the startup scene is like in Singapore versus Hong Kong, what the future of media is, as he sees it, and his brand new initiative that was just launched this week at e27 called the e27 Podcast Network. Alright, let’s get on to the show.

Jay: Hey, Kevin. What’s going on, man? Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Kevin: Hey, Jay. Thanks for inviting me. I’m looking forward to this. I’ve been listening to you for about a year now.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. I actually owe you a debt of gratitude because, for the listeners that are listening in, and if you haven’t followed me from the beginning, I launched the Jay Kim Show, literally, a year ago. It was January of 2017, and Kevin was one of the first people that actually helped me promote my podcast over at e27. I still distinctly remember having a couple of Skype calls with you before launch, and we were kind of brainstorming on how we would work it all out. I have to thank you for helping me in the early days, get the word out and just kind of doing the syndication that you guys have helped me with. So thank you, Kevin. I really appreciate it. And here we are one year later. It’s come full circle.

Kevin: I was living vicariously through you because I love podcasts. I don’t always have time for them.

Jay: That was another thing that I remember. You were literally one of like five people that would talk to that wasn’t like, “What’s a podcast?”

Why don’t you just introduce yourself to the audience and tell us who you are, what you do for a living and what your background is. That sort of thing.

Kevin: My job — I’m the editor at e27. For people that know, e27 is a startup tech company based in Singapore. We cover mostly Southeast Asia. We cover startups ranging from series A all the way up to the big well-known companies like Grab, Carousell. We tend to avoid bigger ones like Apple and Samsung. So it’s startups and the startup industry in Southeast Asia, based out of Singapore.

Jay: And what exactly does e27 stand for?

Kevin: E27 is Entrepreneurs 27. It actually has a pretty interesting founding story, which is our two co-founders went on this thing called NUS Overseas Colleges, which is an exchange program, basically, from one of the Singapore universities here, and they send students to Silicon Valley to learn about startups and technology. These two went to that, and they hatched this idea. It started as a grassroots movement. There were a lot of events. There’s legendary stories within the company about the first couple of events that they ran. They ran one for fun, basically, to kind on bring the community together and do the startups. It was such a success that they started to build a business off of it. So now we run one of the biggest tech startup conferences in Southeast Asia. For your Western readers, you might consider it like Techcrunch Disrupt of Southeast Asia.

We do the media stuff too. So my job is to steer the ship of the editorial staff of e27. Again, I’m not 100% sure of where all your listeners are coming from, but for Westerners, my job would be kind of to run the Techcrunch website and what our writers write about every day, who they talk to, topics that are going on. When you’re in the job, you end up getting a lot of inbound stuff, so I do my own writing too, at least once I day, I think, on average. It’s a fun job. It’s a fast job, which is why it’s fun.

Jay: I’m sure. Give us some background of before. Were you a journalist before you joined there?

Kevin: I grew up in Montana, so I don’t really come from a typical background in terms of Silicon Valley, New York City, anything like that. I did end up moving to Silicon Valley for two-plus years. About two years, I lived in Oakland, but I was actually teaching. I was one of the many Millennials who graduated college right after the financial crisis. So I ended up taking my university degree and getting a nice job at a restaurant for a little while and then eventually got into AmeriCorps, which was kind of my real professional start, I guess you would say. I spent a year teaching at a poor public preschool in Daly City, California, which is one of the — I don’t know how you describe the area — but one of the suburbs, I guess, of San Francisco. It was a really great experience.

But I always laugh because when I tell people that, they assume I know stuff about Silicon Valley, and I don’t know anything about Silicon Valley. I had a long journey into the tech world, in general. And I’m more of a media guy, to be perfectly honest. So I guess you’re wondering what brought me to Asia.

Jay: Yeah. And so after that one year, how did you progress?

Kevin: So coming to Asia was a mix of opportunity and a girl, as is typical of these things.

Jay: Nice.

Kevin: So I was in a long-term relationship for… We were together, and then long-term for about a year, and I decided to make the leap, and I got an opportunity at the University of Hong Kong to enter their journalism program, which, frankly, was a really good school by my standards in terms of the equivalent of what I was getting in the US. And it was amazing. My life kind of took a 90-degree right turn after attending that university.

I met a whole bunch of people from all over Asia. I randomly have a lot of really good Nepalese friends. So when I go there, I can hang out with my actual friends, which is a pretty cool thing.

So then I got into Reuters after HKU, and that’s where I got my training. Unfortunately, we had come cuts — layoffs — and about half my office got fired, and I was one of those because I was low level, basically an intern for entry-level position.

I was searching for a job, and e27 came calling about two and a half years ago, and I took the leap of faith and moved to Singapore for e27. That was also kind of another leap of faith that has worked out wonderfully, frankly.

Jay: For sure. So what year was e27 founded?

Kevin: 2007. Most of our readers consider us a startup, although, frankly, I don’t know if that counts because we’ve been around for over 10 years, which is crazy. I think there’s two iterations. There’s the beginning, and then there’s the second iteration. I think we consider the second iteration as the e27 as you see it today, which would be more like seven or eight years. It’s lasted beyond a certain amount of time. I guess it’s an SME with a startup culture. Because after a while, you stop becoming a startup if you’ve been around for eight years.

Jay: Sure. As you grow up, things get smoother, and hopefully the revenue is working, and so you grow more mature. Let me ask you… At the beginning, the first couple of years before getting over that hurdle where it was like true startup, pre-seed stage, what was the business model? And how has it evolved to where it is now?

Kevin: So our business model has been… Events is a core part of our business. Some people don’t actually know that Echelon and e27 are the same company. So that’s how big the Echelon brand is by itself. That’s the core part of our business model. And frankly, it’s not that exciting. It’s the typical media. So we’re lucky to have the events revenue, and then we sell media advertising, as all media companies do. The events is definitely the core part.

Actually, an interesting thing that just popped into my mind is we’re running this top 100 program right now. We’re getting it kick-started, and we’re doing a whole bunch of little events all over Southeast Asia, Hong Kong included. Sorry. Not Southeast Asia, all over Asia. And so it’s going to be like a one-day, few hundred people at the most type of thing. And we’re going to go to 20 countries, if we’re lucky. And we’re going to evangelize startups around it and run events and have mentors and speakers and have a pitching competition and all that kind of stuff. We’re kind of expanding — expanding is the wrong word. Going roadshow. A roadshow maybe is a better word. And it’s kind of exciting.

Jay: That sounds pretty exciting. It’s a great way to bring an event, a startup type event, into a city that might not have a mature ecosystem in place that offers this sort of thing. And so you’re bringing a more mature brand in that knows how to run this sort of thing, and people get exposure, and investors can come see the startups. So I think it’s a win-win all around. Would that be run under the Echelon brand or just a separate product altogether?

Kevin: We’re calling it Echelon Top 100. There is a prize. We do have the pitching competition, and you’ll pitch, and let’s say you’re in Brunei, even, or Cambodia — some of the countries that you might not think of for startups. And if you win the pitching competition, one of the rewards is to come to Singapore to our big event and pitch for that one. And a lot of those companies that pitch end up getting follow-on investment, even if they don’t win. That’s the open secret about most demo days and pitching competitions. Winning is nice, because there’s usually a bit of a cash prize, but it’s just about pitching in front of the investors. And frankly, if you get 5th, you might have some guy come up to you and be like, “Hey, I really liked your pitch. I really like your business model. This seems interesting. Let’s talk.”  And it can lead to… For our companies, it would lead to maybe a seed or a series A investment, depending on how far along they are.

Jay: Yeah, totally. I think that’s absolutely right. It’s just marketing. Right? It’s marketing your idea in front of a huge, big stage, large audience. That can only help if you’re working on a startup.

So we were talking a little bit briefly before I hit the record button about news aggregators versus just straight up media companies. And you made the distinction that e27 is not an aggregator because you guys actually produce mostly original content. Is that right?

Kevin: Yeah. So news aggregators are common. They’re actually one of the common ways even young journalists start out. And if they can do it for a little while, they can meet people and make connections and hopefully don’t start making bad habits. I actually kind of worked as an aggregator for a pretty big media company when I had a little internship. It’s boring, but you get your name out there.

But basically, what aggregators do is they troll around other media companies, and they find the popular news. They might use social media to see what’s trending, or they might try to pull out headlines from local news stations that they think the headline is sexy, and it will blow up and they’ll get traffic. So you’ll see, “According to the New York Times” kind of sneakily thrown in there. And then the quote with be, “According to the article…” And then later on, if they’re feeling guilty, they’ll write, “As said in the New York Times…” So they’re basically reading the article and then rewriting it.

And we don’t do that. We get out leads from press releases, interviews, talking to people. And then we like to do features and interview stuff too. So sometimes we have to sacrifice hard news just for bandwidth reasons, so we can write our features and interviews.

And I think that’s how us and our competitors operate.

Jay: Speaking of which, one of your largest other competitors that people probably are aware of is Tech in Asia. Do you guys share similar business models on the events side as being the core and the media side as the other part of it?

Kevin: Yes. We measure ourselves up against each other. Our revenue models are quite similar. They just recently raised a big round. People saw on the news. I look at Tech in Asia every day. I probably contribute a decent amount of their traffic, and I bet you they contribute a decent amount to our traffic.

Frankly, I don’t know that much about Tech in Asia. I’m the last person Tech in Asia would ever tell about their stuff.

Jay: That’s pretty interesting.

Kevin: I know them as a competitor on the outside, but they’re not telling me any secrets.

Jay: Yeah, absolutely. Let’s switch gears a little bit. I want to talk about Singapore and the startup scene there, because I think it’s up and coming. Or actually, it’s been around for a while, and it’s always been successful, and there are a number of hot startups there now. Some of them that I’ve tried to profile on my podcast or written about before. Give us just a quick, broad overview of… You’re on the ground there, and you’re in the space. So what’s the startup scene like there? How does it compare to Hong Kong, where you also used to live? There’s always sort of this measuring context between the two — which place is better, which place has more support, and which place should you launch your startup in? So maybe you could talk about that for a bit.

Kevin: To compare Singapore to Hong Kong, it’s actually not really that close, at least from my perspective. Singapore is quite a bit ahead of Hong Kong from the startup scene. The startup scene here is, if not a giant percentage of the actual economy in Singapore, it is at least a massive percentage of the government public policy, the culture, and just where the country is heading over the next 10 to 15 years. I think Hong Kong is there, but Hong Kong doesn’t have the support. A lot of that isn’t really a feature or a bug. Hong Kong is defined by being one of the most capitalist countries or cities in the whole world. And Singapore is defined by pretty heavy-handed, you would say, government relationship with its people. And so, naturally, they’ve developed a bit differently.

How Singapore developed, which is an interesting test case in how to build something, is seven years ago or so now — maybe five — the government just decided to throw money at the problem, as one does. And then they made it fairly easy to get funding, to get grants. And people kind of criticized them, saying, look, you’re funding these terrible companies. But in hindsight — and they probably knew it at the time, but now they’re willing to admit it publicly — they said, yeah, we know we’re funding these pretty bad companies, but we’re also funding the one to four to five companies that really take off and help grow this thing.

And then Singapore has always been good at attracting people to re-incorporate in Singapore. So that’s all a lot of companies do. So the famous test case, to give an example of that, is Grab, which is now a global ride-sharing company that competes with Uber fairly directly. Technically, they’re a Malaysian company called Grab Taxi. No, they were mytaxi first. Sorry. Mytaxi. And they grew up in Malaysia. But by the time they started to really become a global player, they re-incorporated the entire thing into Singapore. So now they are a Singaporean company. Those kind of things help Singapore as a startup scene.

So that was about five years ago. So now, five years later, I kind of was using the metaphor — if your listeners are familiar with startup terms — we’ve kind of already gone through the seed round, and now we’re trying to raise our series A, and we’re trying to take the next step into a growth market. Whereas, I still think Hong Kong is on the seed stage.

Hong Kong is coming up though. And Hong Kong, every now and then, flexes its billionaires’ muscles and financial muscles. All the biggest rounds last year came out of Hong Kong, which isn’t that surprising considering it’s close to China and it has the billionaire class. I don’t live there. If I lived there, maybe I would have a better idea. But my biases of living there a couple of years ago was that if you raise money in Hong Kong, you raise a lot of money. But I think a lot of the smaller people are still struggling. I think real estate, I think that’s the biggest problem in Hong Kong, to be blunt about it.

Jay: Yeah. You hit the nail on the head there. It’s like two separate ways to get to the end point. If you’re just at seed stage and you just want to come in and get your thing up and running, then Hong Kong is definitely not the best place to do it. The cost of living here is just ridiculous, and it’s impossible to open a bank account and government provides very little support and this sort of thing. They’re trying. It’s a very intentional healthy competition to have with Singapore. They look down at — look over at Singapore. Sorry. I don’t mean to look down. I was thinking geographically. You look down towards to equator, and Singapore is doing a pretty good job of attracting talent, like you said, because they are kind of throwing money at the problem, or it is easier. So it’s just a numbers game there. And I think eventually, the best companies weed out — whether they’re here or there. The best business models will survive.

I’m excited to see how it all plays out because there are a couple of unicorns in the making here as well that will certainly put Hong Kong on the map, just the very same way that Grab did with Singapore.

So another question that I wanted to ask you was… I’m going to switch gears again on you here, but being someone in media… I’m kind of half in media. I’m a hybrid because I do a podcast, and I kind of blog and this sort of thing. But with the way that the internet has brought down the barriers and has democratized access to information, you’re seeing these things like, Facebook recently, Mark Zuckerberg came back, and he’s taken a step back on the content because there seems to be just this flood of news flow and this sort of thing. I personally feel it any time I go on any of my social media channels, which is not very often. I just can’t keep with it, so I just give up. Coming from a place like e27 where you guys are content producers and you manage this stuff, what’s the next big step? I know that video was a big thing maybe 18 months ago that a lot of people were pushing. By looking at numbers or data or just from your experience as a media company, are there certain things that you feel pack more punch pound for pound, so to speak, when you’re trying to be effective on the internet or on various media channels?

Kevin: Frankly, I’m biased for podcasts, so that’s one.

Jay: Hear, hear.

Kevin: I’m also a super biased source when it comes to that. But I think, though, the video point is good. The problem with video is while it’s useful, it takes so much money and resources to create a decent video stream and video community that it can cost so much money, and the returns just aren’t there for a lot of companies.

Jay: Yeah. We went through this thing of content marketing — just articles — and now it’s gone to different formats — audio, video.

Kevin: I think the most interesting thing that I’ve been — not just at e27 but other media — maybe I’m naive. I might be naive. But I think just hard news, I think, is actually coming back up again. Hard news, as in the ABCs of journalism 101, which is company A or person A did this. This is why it’s important, and this is what happened. I’m actually thinking of sports. So I have this bad habit of making sports metaphors.

There’s this NBA writer called Adrian Wojnarowski. He doesn’t write interesting thought pieces or opinion pieces or anything like that. His features are minimal. He just breaks news, and he breaks all sorts of news, from the minor contracts to the 15th player on some team getting traded for a pair of basketball sneakers, and, eventually, when LeBron James goes to the Lakers, he’s the guy who breaks that stuff.

And you kind of mix it with other stuff to read, but I think that’s the stuff that hits. And that’s still a core part of what we do. Let’s say we do 12 stories in a day or so. At least half of them are just — I’m looking at the website right now. Netflix is now a US $100 billion company. So this article doesn’t have any opinions about what it means that Netflix is a $100 billion company. It’s just “Netflix is a $100 billion company.”

I think a lot of, because of social media, even in Asia, some of that 2016 nastiness in the US kind of bled over, and people kind of got sick of it. Now they just want the news, and they can make their own opinions on it.

I also think my opinion might be fairly naive.

Jay: No, no, actually, I think that there’s something to that because it’s almost like we’ve gone full circle where it’s like, news got fluffed up with opinions. And then it got too blown out of proportion because that’s what was selling, and people wanted that. And now it’s kind of like there’s so much noise out there. Just give me the damn news. Right? So that might be the most effective.

Interesting thoughts, Kevin. Thanks for sharing. I just have a couple more questions here. Obviously, you guys are always, being a more progressive company, you’re always on the forefront of trying to — and you particularly with your role there managing the editorial process there — I know that you guys are always looking for new ways to expand and promote. Just this week, I think, you announced something that I was very excited to hear, which is your podcast network. So maybe you can tell the audience a little bit about your exciting new project.

Kevin: We’re calling it the e27 Podcast Network, and we’re basing it off of two companies. One is called the Ringer in the US. They’re both US companies. I’m American, so I do listen to a decent amount of American media to keep up to date. And there’s one called the Ringer, which is sports and entertainment. And there’s another called Slate, which is politics and news.

What they do is they create these feeds. One’s the Ringer feed; one’s the Slate feed. And they have 10 or 12 shoes that are coming in every day. They’re different people, different interviews, different entertainment, news updates. There’s one guy who does a one-person show because he’s just a really fantastic radio host.

So I’m trying to build this and copy it for e27. The Jay Kim Show will be on it. So listeners can listen to it there. The goal is to, over the next quarter, to build it up so we have maybe 12 shows coming in that are not generated by me personally but generated from outside sources, other people in e27. I’ll probably have one because I like doing it. And for listeners, hopefully what they get is a daily update of shows coming in, because while the show that I make only gets produced once a week, Jay Kim only gets his once a week, when you add it up to 12 to 14 people, you suddenly get a show every day. And that’s the model that I’m trying to build here.

The general themes will be tech, entrepreneurship in Asia, but I’m also willing to be loose and experiment and talk to startups. I talked to a startup founder today because I bumped into him. He’s doing a webinar, and we’re thinking, let’s see if that works.

The cool thing about podcasts is it’s in the wild-west phase. So a lot of stuff… There’s no rules yet. It’s not like ethics. I mean, there’s no rules in terms of form. You can hear where you think podcasts is going, and then suddenly a show like S-Town, which dropped last year — gets out, and it breaks the entire form, and it explodes, and it becomes a national phenomenon and changes how people view podcasts.

And that’s the exciting part. So maybe a webinar does work. Maybe we can start transforming YouTube videos and see if that translates to audio. It probably won’t. It might not, but you don’t know until you try. And so I’m kind of excited to get that going and grow the network. It will have an Asian tilt. It will have a tech tilt. But if you’re an entrepreneur and not in a tech field, I’m open to listening and all that kind of stuff.

Jay: I think it’s a great idea, man. And I’m not just saying that because I’m on your network. I think that if you could have… I listen to a handful of different podcasts, and sometimes I get burnt out with just listening to Tim Ferriss every single day. So I want a variety, but I also don’t want to have to go into Stitcher and just keep searching for the different ones. Sometimes I forget. So if I could have one that is kind of central to the themes that I like, I think that that’s a great idea.

And you’re absolutely right. It’s very nascent right now — podcasting — particularly in Asia. And I think that it’s just going to explode. I think over the next decade, you’re just going to see it massively take over. So we are still early adopters, and I’m very happy that you’re getting involved.

Give us two or three of your personal podcast recommendations, just for the listeners out there. I’m always curious.

Kevin: So one of my idols is Sam Sanders, and he’s an NPR guy. So I tend to listen to NPR stuff, which can be a bit dry, but I just love how they approach politics and news. So Bill Simmons is fantastic. You have to like sports. You have to like American sports, but he’s my favorite. I decided I had a love-hate relationship, and I decided that I love him, because I listen every week. And I suddenly realized I was listening every week.

Jay: He’s an interesting one because before his podcast, it was all just the sport’s guy — right? — on ESPN or whatever.

Kevin: Sorry. If I can jump in really quick. The interesting thing about the Ringer, which I brought up, is actually his podcast network that he built with the Bill Simmons brand. He created a news site based on the podcast, which is basically… I don’t think anybody has really ever done that before, and it’s the reverse of what you would expect. It’s the reverse of what we’re doing because e27 has been around for so long. So we have the e27 brand, and then I build the podcast off of the e27 brand. He actually built the podcast first and then built his own news website based on the podcast. It worked too.

Jay: Interesting. I did not know that. That’s fascinating. I guess if you’re good enough, you could do it whichever way you want.

Kevin: It’s funny because they’re all so personal. It gives you an insight into what I like.

So The Starters are amazing for NBA, and there’s one called The Watch, which is good for pop culture. I think The Watch is probably the one I’d recommend for a broader audience. They cover American television and Hollywood movies. So if you watch movies and you watch Netflix, they’re—

Jay: Awesome. I’ll have to check that out myself.

Kevin: The news junkies, The Daily from the New York Times is very good, although sometimes kind of depressing.

Jay: News can go both ways. Dude, thanks so much, man. It’s been such a pleasure having you on. Really cool hearing about what you’re working on there at e27 and obviously the Podcast Network is exciting. What’s the best place that people can find you, follow you, learn a little bit more about what you’re doing this?

Kevin: You can follow us on all the… For the podcast, it’s all the iTune, Stitcher, Overcast, all that stuff. Visit e27.co for our news that’s right there on the front page. And if you click the Echelon tab, which is fairly obvious, you can get into the conferences. We have our top 100 right there. And then if you’re interested in our Asia Summit, it’s all pretty easy to navigate.

Personally, I think for social media, I’m the most honest, I guess, on Twitter. That’s where, if you’re interested in who I am as a person, I tend to tweet more openly than Facebook or LinkedIn.

Jay: Cool. Awesome, man. Well, thanks again and best of luck on the podcast network, man. Looking forward to seeing how that goes.

Kevin: Thanks. We appreciate everything you do for the entrepreneurs in Asia. It helps a lot. You might not notice, but it helps build up an ecosystem and startups are not easy, so it helps when we have people participating.

Jay: Absolutely, man. I love doing it as well. Alright, man, take care. We’ll talk soon.

Kevin: Alright. Thanks.

Jay: Alright. Bye.