Is Singapore The Future Of Global Innovation? - Magnus Grimeland (CEO & Founder Of Antler)

Magnus is the founder and CEO of Antler.

Before Antler, Magnus co-founded Zalora, taking the company from zero to Asia’s leading fashion e-commerce platform, and then helped scale Global Fashion Group across 26 markets.

His former colleagues have gone on to found leading Southeast Asian startups such as Gojek and Stashaway.

He is a Harvard graduate, a former McKinsey partner, and served in the Norwegian Naval Special Forces.

Today, PitchBook ranks Antler as the most active VC globally, and Dealroom recognizes the firm as the most active investor in AI startups.

In this episode, Magnus breaks down the biggest lessons he learnt from Zalora and how Antler is changing the world through Day Zero investments.

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
00:59 Early Days of Zalora
01:47 Early E-commerce in Southeast Asia
04:40 Lessons from Building Zalora
07:21 Navigating Southeast Asia's Market Challenges
12:35 The Importance Of Talent in Founders
16:51 Antler vs YC
20:13 What Makes A Founder Great?
27:22 Screening for Founders
32:02 Building A Strong Global Network
37:23 When Hierarchical Leadership Can Fail
40:46 The Case For Singapore As A Global Startup Hub
47:49 Closing Questions

Keith Yap 00:59

I wanted to ask you, when you first started Zalora in 2012, what was the market failure that you were trying to address back then?

Magnus Grimeland 01:09

If you looked at the general state of the e-commerce market in Southeast Asia at the time, it was less developed than when I was in college a decade earlier. In the early 2000s in the US, you could order almost anything online. It would arrive in a few days. You'd know exactly when it arrived, exactly what you would pay, and exactly the quality of the product. So you had access, price, and a great customer experience.

Go back to 2012 in the region, most of the stuff that you wanted to order would either be shipped in from Japan, Korea, China, or Europe. For example, if you wanted to buy fashion, the biggest seller of premium brands into Southeast Asia was ASOS out of the UK. If you were a customer in Indonesia ordering something, you wouldn't know whether it would get stopped in customs. If it did get stuck, you didn't know how much you would pay.

You didn't know when it would arrive or what the final price would be. Certain types of products weren't allowed to be sold into the region. All these things that you need for a great e-commerce customer experience just didn't exist. So we were very excited about that.

In the region, depending on how you define it, our target market was 700-800 million people. Fastest digitalization the world has ever seen. It's very exciting to look at the digitalization of Southeast Asian markets versus European markets. It started a bit later, but then literally in a matter of a few years, it overtook a bunch of European countries in terms of people who were online and the amount of e-commerce that was done.

We got very excited about having 700-800 million people without a real e-commerce customer experience. There were a lot of great products out there that couldn't be accessed. I think those are the major shifts you see in technologies - you discover these opportunities where clearly something would happen. It's just a matter of time. And then it comes down to less business model risk and more about execution risk.

Keith Yap 03:52

It's interesting that when we look back at 2012 and the past decade, there was a lot of push towards trying to integrate the region better through digitalization and e-commerce. But what were the lessons that you abstracted away that you felt indicated another solution was needed for the region, this time in terms of startups and funding?

Magnus Grimeland 04:18

A few lessons were around how to build a business in general, a few were about how to build a very successful business in Southeast Asia, and then there were general learnings about the type of people who build companies, which is what we're doing with Antler now.

Looking at bucket one, some of the mistakes we made in the early days was putting a lot of money into building a brand and marketing. We did massive pan-Southeast Asian TV campaigns before our product was quite there. When you build an e-commerce company, unless you have really good products and a seamless customer experience, if you present that value proposition to a ton of customers and they try it, they're just going to be disappointed and it's very hard to get them back. So product first, then let the product lead the marketing. When the product is great, you should always be slightly ahead with the product compared to the brand you're trying to create. Then you'll save a lot of money.

Number two is to figure out the structural weaknesses early where you can build a real competitive edge. For example, one of the interesting things in Southeast Asia in the early days of e-commerce was the number one payment method. What do you think it was back then?

Keith Yap 05:53

I think back in the early days it was primarily cash.

Magnus Grimeland 05:56

Yeah, but you couldn't even do cash in most places. Perhaps in Singapore you could, but in Indonesia, there wasn't the logistics network set up to handle cash. So most e-commerce companies operated through something called bank transfer. Literally you would go on the website, buy something, check out, get a code, and then go to a local bank or retailer to pay. Then you'd get a call back, go back to your computer, and finish checkout.

It's a horrible customer experience. Anyone who builds a company knows that whatever additional friction you put into the process of making a sale will lead to cancellations and abandoned carts. Amazon's one-click process is famous - you can literally look at a product, click once, and you've bought it. They remove all barriers. Most e-commerce companies require five or six clicks to check out. In the early days here in the region, you actually had to spend hours checking out because you had to physically go somewhere else to pay.

Keith Yap 06:58

Yeah.

Magnus Grimeland 07:21

When you identify these types of barriers and solve them, suddenly you have a competitive edge that nobody else has. Now, obviously the solution today is all the wallets like GoPay, GrabPay and so on, but that was further ahead. We actually launched cash on delivery pan-Southeast Asia, where people could just pay our delivery personnel with cash. Suddenly we opened up a much bigger market - people could buy whatever they wanted and just pay when it arrived.

But then you create another problem: how do you get the cash back? You have tens of millions of packages across the region, tens of thousands of delivery people, and a lot of money floating around. We solved that through technology by integrating with logistics providers so they could recognize the sale when they got the cash, then they could pay us and became responsible for the cash, not us.

Most great startups have found a way to resolve barriers like this. When Grab started, it quickly became evident that would be a tremendous business model for the region, and many competitors popped up everywhere. But a few people win, and they're typically the best at resolving these issues that make the customer experience much better. Or in some cases, if the sellers have a better experience on your site, you get more of them.

We looked at these challenges, made some mistakes, and quickly resolved them. In the beginning, we had four competitors, then by year two we had 134 competitors. Slowly the field narrowed as competitors became smaller, and we resolved more issues than anyone else to become the dominating player.

Number three, you learn a lot about how to operate across Southeast Asia. The region is amazing if you use the strengths of all the countries to your advantage. If you don't, then you're dealing with very different countries with very different cultures and regulations, and it becomes an issue instead of a strength.

For example, we built an insane tech team in Vietnam where you have incredible computer scientists who build amazing products, and the cost versus quality is incredible. In the Philippines, you can find incredible talent for any back-office tasks or business processing at cost and quality better than anywhere else. Many Filipinos speak English better than most Europeans. In Malaysia, you can hire incredible expertise across many areas. Singapore is a hub for attracting capital and some of the world's best talent. Indonesia is going to be one of the world's largest markets.

If you use the whole region as a strength and build your company around that, instead of facing challenges, you use the region to your advantage. Look at Europe - the biggest e-commerce companies are American. The biggest last-mile delivery companies are American. But in Southeast Asia, they're homegrown companies. The Chinese and Americans did not win e-commerce, mobility, or payments in Southeast Asia. That's because when companies figure out how to use the region and its various cultures and talent in the best possible way, they'll win against anyone trying to apply their home market approach.

Keith Yap 12:07

The interesting thing about Southeast Asia as a fragmented market is that whoever can integrate them best wins. If you're from a big market, you're used to thinking about economies of scale that you assume can easily be replicated. Whereas if you're from a small market and understand reality as a bunch of fragmented markets, you probably have to piece them together and figure out how to exploit the various comparative advantages.

Magnus Grimeland 12:34

Yeah, exactly.

Keith Yap 12:35

The throughline across those three lessons - product leading marketing, identifying and solving structural problems, and exploiting the region's different capabilities - at the core is the talent question. All startups know this in the abstract, but when it comes to implementing it, that's where the devil's in the details.

Now you've moved on to try to solve that talent question. Why does Day-Zero investing from your perspective seem to be the optimal or best solution to assemble talent?

Magnus Grimeland 13:20

The entire value chain is always important. You can do incredibly well as an investor at any stage. If you're a public market investor or private equity investor, you look at the business much more as a business. The people are still insanely important - it's one of the metrics you look at - but you also look at unit economics, growth rate, and how the P&L looks.

The earlier you go in the ecosystem, the more it becomes about the people. To a certain extent, it's always about people, but the earlier you go, the more important that becomes. If you look at why startups fail, the number one reason is always the founders - they break up or it wasn't the right team. The second reason is they never got product-market fit. Third is they couldn't raise capital. Fourth is they couldn't get their first customer.

As you go down the list, you realize that every reason except the first ultimately comes down to who the founders were. The founders decide what to build, they raise the capital, they get the first customers. In the early days, all failure comes down to whether you have the right founder in the right co-founding team. Unless you have that, it doesn't matter if you have the best idea or insane access to capital - if you're not the right team, you won't win.

We were quite lucky in the Zalora days to work with a lot of great people. Nadiem and Kevin who built Gojek used to work at Zalora. Chris Feng who built Shopee used to work at Zalora. Michele Ferrario built StashAway. The ShopBack crew, Lokal, ORA - a ton of great companies in the region have been built by Zalora people. I think it's because we created an environment where great people came and learned a lot, then used that to build their next great thing.

This happens everywhere. The PayPal mafia in the US is famous with Tesla, LinkedIn, SpaceX, Palantir - lots of great companies from one source. We saw that at a smaller but still significant scale with Zalora. With Antler, we got excited about identifying these people and working with them as early as possible to build great companies solving important problems.

Since then we've scaled globally. Now we're in thirty locations, looking at about 160,000 founders a year. We work with 3-4,000 founders annually and helped build 410 new companies last year. I think we're the most selective investor in the world, the most active investor in the world, and the most active AI investor in the world. But it all comes down to one thing: have we found an exceptional founder?

Keith Yap 16:51

The follow-up question would be: why do you put founders together as opposed to the YC model where people apply as pre-selected founder groups? Why is combining founders your preferred model?

Magnus Grimeland 17:12

It's not necessarily preferred. Sometimes we find teams that are already established with a company going. Sometimes there are two people who know each other and have been working together on something for a long time. Maybe you and I were working at Grab and on weekends and evenings we've been tinkering with something exciting, and now we've decided to quit and build this company. That's an interesting time for us to start talking.

Sometimes it's an individual who's on that path. We're agnostic to whether it's already a team or company, a couple of people who've been working on something, or someone who's excited about doing something. We just want to ensure they as individuals are exceptional founder material. And we like to come in as early as possible.

Sometimes we don't find them until later and then we invest when we have the opportunity. We can invest all the way to Series C. A great example is a team in Korea called Wrtn that we found recently. They're a fast-growing company that provides a layer on top of all the AI models - they're linked into Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI, and have a layer that customizes to Korean culture and language. They're doing the same now for Japan. That's an example where they already had a company, and we came in as early as possible. Within six months, they announced a $60 million round.

Another example is Airalo, built out of Singapore by Bahadhir. He had built a scratch card business for long-distance calling that got killed by WhatsApp. He wanted to build something in the same space but technology-enabled. We worked with him, and he built Airalo, now the world's largest E-Sim marketplace, probably worth a few billion dollars.

We just want to come in as early as possible and back incredible people. They might already have a company or one or two team members, or it might just be one person. We just want to back great people building great businesses.

Keith Yap 20:09

What are the ingredients of the great people that you're looking for?

Magnus Grimeland 20:13

It's interesting because historically, a lot of people have tried to research this. Traditionally, many focused on where people went to school or what company they worked for before. In our experience, having made this our focus for over seven years, looking at more than half a million founders, examining all the publicly available data, and backing 1,500 portfolio companies, it comes down to three things.

Number one is you need a spike. You need to be better than most people at something. You're obviously very good with people, good at getting insights, good at identifying trends - probably better at that than most other people. You might have other spikes as well.

If you look at people who achieve great things, they tend to have something they're just better at than most people. You don't need to be great at everything. Look at Elon Musk - probably the most successful founder in the world, but he clearly has weaknesses. In most founders, you can identify something they're just better at than most people.

Two, grit. A lot of people start a company, are onto something good, hit a wall, and give up. I think the vast majority of startup failures come down to the team giving up, not because they couldn't have succeeded eventually. Any great startup will reach a point where it seems like it won't work.

In the early days of Zalora, we had the bank transfer payment method, it was hard to get brands on our website, the customer experience wasn't great, we had high customer acquisition costs, the product wasn't quite there, the delivery method wasn't there - things looked dire. You're on this fast train moving toward a wall, and unless you manage to move the wall, you run out of money and fail. A lot of people just give up. Often it's not the best team that wins, but the team that didn't give up.

So we look for grittiness. Is this a person who, if given capital to solve a hard problem, will give everything to make it a success?

Number three is drive. Drive is sometimes confused with passion. Passion is important and can drive people forward, but I have many passionate friends who never get anything done. I have friends who've been talking about the same problem they're excited about for 20 years without doing anything about it.

Drive is more about raw ambition combined with the ability to execute - can you move things forward? Your podcast is a great example. I probably know hundreds of people who say they'll start a podcast, do five or six episodes, then you never hear about it again. To make a podcast or any new media successful, you really need to stick with it.

The difference between passion and drive is setting a high target for what you want to achieve, then executing and moving forward, instead of just talking about things. In founders, we clearly see those three things: grit (not giving up), drive (ambition and ability to execute), and a spike. When you find those three, it's super exciting.

The good thing is, while some people are born with strengths or more drive than others, you can work on all three. You can develop mental resilience and grit. You can enhance your drive. Everyone is pretty good at something, and if you leverage that spike and become better at it, then use it to solve an important problem, you can make an incredible difference. You're not born with these qualities - if you don't have them now but want to build something in the future, look at how to develop them over the next few years.

Keith Yap 25:56

Yes, spike, grit, and drive. Those are common characteristics even in people I've interviewed. They highlight this almost illogical obsession that you need to have - you must be able to look past social signals or continue when others would stop.

A good example I recall was from Professor John Van Wyhe, the world's leading expert on Charles Darwin. He explained that when Darwin was a young man in med school, the track in England was either becoming clergy or a doctor. But Darwin was obsessed with collecting bugs. There was a story where he saw three bugs, caught two with his hand, and because he wanted the third, he put it in his mouth. The bug spit acid and burned his tongue, so he had to spit it out. He recounted this in his autobiography 30-40 years later, expressing regret about not catching that bug.

It's an interesting parallel to what you're saying - you can't always think logically. You have to develop competency but also follow through rather than giving up when times get tough.

How do you screen for these criteria in your onboarding process? When filtering from hundreds of thousands of people down to your final 3,000, what do you look for?

Magnus Grimeland 27:35

I'll get to that, but it's interesting what you mentioned. I saw on your website you did a session on Lee Kuan Yew's book "The Hard Truths." Lee Kuan Yew obviously had clear spikes, ton of drive, ton of grit.

Singapore itself is almost like a startup story - bringing together incredible people from very different cultures and building this insane hub. It's one of the most remarkable stories in the world.

Sometimes you can quickly see these qualities in individuals, sometimes you need to go deeper. With founders, it's important to dig deep because some of the best people are introverts. If you're more extroverted, it's easier to spot your spike, drive, and grit. But sometimes the Mark Zuckerberg in the room will sit in the back and not participate much in conversation.

What we do then is look at what they've been doing, the products they've built, to identify their spike. Sometimes with grit, you can see it from the CV. If I came asking for a million-dollar investment, and you saw I'd built eight failed startups in three years, or jumped between jobs every 3-6 months, you'd be concerned that if you gave me money, I might move on to something else quickly.

For grittiness, we examine those transitions. When people tried something and changed direction, what happened? Sometimes it's for good reason - I'm not saying people shouldn't change jobs or that they shouldn't fail. Many of the best founders have failed at some point. But what effort was put in before that decision? What milestones were hit?

We try to determine if this person, backed with capital to solve a hard problem, will give everything to make it succeed. Much of this happens through personal interaction.

Since we look at thousands of people yearly, we can't meet everyone in person. Typically we combine self-assessment and application information with outbound headhunting and referrals, then select people to meet in person. We go deep on those three areas. It's a combination of analyzing large data sets and in-person interactions.

At some point, you feel it - you see an exciting spike, real drive, and know they won't give up. When early investors feel that, they get very excited about backing someone and want to support them until they're successful. That's what we're trying to do with Antler - if we back you in round one, we want to back you in rounds two, three, four, and five. We want to put hundreds of millions into your company, starting from the very beginning. That's how we create an edge.

Keith Yap 32:02

That's counterintuitive because I have friends in finance who look at the opposite - the hard numbers. For you, it's about getting a qualitative sense of the people building companies.

Magnus Grimeland 32:21

As an investor, you can earn money either way. Obviously algorithms and computers now handle most public market trading - pure numbers, never talking to individuals. Or you can go all the way to where we are, where the individual matters most.

Keith Yap 32:45

You're building that talent stack at the founder level, but you also need a talent stack with partners across different regions. How did you assemble your founding cohort of partners to help build Antler?

Magnus Grimeland 33:07

It's interesting how different companies scale. With Zalora, as an e-commerce platform, we needed scale quickly. We had to hire a lot of people fast because that's the only way to make the machinery work - you can't have an empty warehouse. So you find the best possible person and hire them. If it doesn't work out, you make a replacement.

In certain industries, you don't have a choice - you just have to hire. With Antler, we need strong partners for the best founders in each ecosystem. We can't just hire anyone in Korea and expect them to have access to the best founders. We need someone who can attract the best people, assess them properly, and partner with them as they grow.

Our approach starts with picking locations we're excited about - the ecosystem needs to be big enough to find great founders to work with from day zero. Then we need to find the first and second partners who can lead that location and be great partners to the best founders.

Take India as an example. We wanted to launch there in 2018 when we were just starting. We talked to 148 candidates, spending significant time with many of them. Only at the 148th did we find our fit - Rajiv Srivatsa, who built Urban Ladder, one of India's most successful tech companies, which sold to Reliance Industries. We knew this person had great founding experience, was great with people, could assess founder talent, and the best founders in India would want to work with him. That's when we knew we'd have an amazing operation.

We just hired a partner to run our San Francisco office (not public yet). For years we've been talking to people, and finally found someone who's built amazing companies and made excellent angel investments in the region. It comes from talking to hundreds of people across the globe, but once you find the fit, you know it. Then that person will attract and assess the best people in their region.

That's how you grow a company like Antler, where the quality of all locations needs to be better than the original node. Preferably, all the people running Antler globally are better than me. Some businesses need this approach - consulting firms like McKinsey or BCG are similar. You can't have the New York headquarters team be more senior and better than the rest of the world. The person in Singapore needs to be better and more senior than counterparts in other cities because they're serving the biggest companies in Southeast Asia.

Antler is very much the same. A lot of people have tried to grow this type of business hierarchically, but it never works. You need to grow it non-hierarchically, with each node stronger than the original, improving the whole.

Keith Yap 37:23

That's almost counterintuitive to how most people think of businesses, especially in our part of the world where everyone thinks hierarchically. What inspired that thinking for you?

Magnus Grimeland 37:38

Some businesses are better with hierarchy. I was in the Norwegian Special Forces where somebody needs to give commands - you need fast decision-making to move quickly. E-commerce is similar, you need a hierarchical ecosystem.

For this type of business, hierarchy would never succeed. If I hire someone to lead Asia who's slightly junior to me, and they hire someone more junior to lead Korea, who then hires someone even more junior for founder scouting, you end up with the person talking to the best founders being four layers less experienced than you were originally. It just doesn't work.

It's like consultancies - if you're the CEO of TSMC in Taiwan or Sony in Japan, you want your consultant to be equally good or better than McKinsey's managing partner in New York. Some have tried the hierarchical approach, and it just doesn't work.

It's evident from what you're trying to build. As a founder, CEO, or aspiring leader, think about your industry and how to best organize your team. If you're at D-Day in Normandy with half a million soldiers storming a beach, you need a hierarchical structure. But if you're trying to find the best founders in the world and be close to the ecosystem, you need that person to be equal to or better than you, with an appropriate structure around them.

Keith Yap 40:14

You've built this impressive network across the globe - I read you even have an office in Nairobi.

Magnus Grimeland 40:23

We're just setting up Lagos in Nigeria too. We'll have two African offices.

Keith Yap 40:27

The spread is insane - I haven't seen such comprehensive geographical coverage from an early-stage investing firm. Yet you continue to base yourself primarily in Singapore. What makes Singapore the draw for you?

Magnus Grimeland 40:46

Most people don't know this, but Antler started eight years ago as a two-person office on Cecil Street, and we built this whole thing from here. We're now the most active investor in the world by certain metrics, one of the biggest VCs, and we built it globally out of Singapore.

That's quite different from most VCs. Historically, the biggest VCs have either come from the US to the rest of the world, or in some cases from China. We're probably the only one built out of Southeast Asia that expanded globally, and likely the only one built outside the US and China to do so.

We were excited about this opportunity because I'd been in this ecosystem since the early days. In 2012, there were some great tech companies here like Razer, but the entire Southeast Asia region only saw $200 million a year in venture capital. Fast forward to 2022, it was $33 billion. I'd lived through that growth, so we had access to tremendous talent and ecosystem players.

Instead of moving to London or San Francisco, where you're not in an economy growing 6-8% annually, don't have the same ecosystem access, and where our new model wouldn't benefit from being close to the government (which you can do in Singapore in a way you can't elsewhere), Singapore became the natural launch place.

We considered launching the HQ in all major global ecosystems and moving there, but decided Singapore was the best fit for those three reasons. It's been amazing. Now we're truly global, but the company is still based here with headquarters still here. It's just a great place to live.

Keith Yap 43:15

Where do you think Singapore and the region's comparative advantages lie now?

Magnus Grimeland 43:21

It's layered. Looking at Singapore alone first, I think the biggest companies being built out of Singapore going forward will be true global companies. Previously, the biggest tech companies in Southeast Asia were built for Southeast Asia, not really for the world. But that's happening now.

Look at the biggest successes from founders we've backed out of Singapore, like Airalo - they're truly global. Companies have shown they can win against the rest of the world from tiny places. Spotify, from Stockholm (population 800,000 to 1 million), won against Apple in music. Atlassian from Sydney won against Microsoft in productivity software. Airalo from Singapore won against the biggest telcos and Google in the E-Sim marketplace. You can build incredible global businesses from anywhere, and Singapore is one of those places where that will be the biggest opportunity for the next decade.

For the region overall, the dynamics show we're in the only region consistently growing 6-8% annually. Sure, there are issues - horrible situations in Myanmar, overthrown governments, eccentric leaders - but throughout all that, you have a region stably growing with a middle class expanding faster than anywhere else and the most rapid digitalization. Whether you're B2B or B2C, this will be the most exciting market in the world.

Looking beyond Southeast Asia to surrounding regions: India, with 1.4 billion people, is now the most populous country and the fastest growing large economy. China, on a real basis, is already the world's largest economy and leads in many technologies - robotics, drones, manufacturing - clearly world-leading and overtaking the US. The US needs to examine this, as they've lost the hardware and robotics game so far due to regulatory reasons.

Japan - I was just there recently where we have a great office. The Japanese government has decided they want to be the world's biggest startup hub, and when the Japanese decide to do something, they're serious. That space will grow very fast. Korea is winning in so many segments - heavy industry, leading technology, entertainment, fashion, skincare - they've built global brands across many dimensions.

So that's the region we're in, with Singapore in the middle: build global businesses in Singapore, be in the fastest growing market in Southeast Asia, surrounded by giants with tremendous offerings. I'm very excited about the next decades.

Keith Yap 47:31

They call this the Asian century, so hopefully we're right, because Singapore as a key node connecting these economies means huge growth coming from us and the region.

I'm mindful of time, so I have two wrap-up questions. First, do you have one book recommendation everyone should read? Second, what advice would you give to a fresh graduate?

Magnus Grimeland 47:58

The book I recommend to everyone is "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl. It's incredible. He was in Auschwitz during the war and later became a psychologist. He talks about how, when facing extremely difficult challenges (and being in Auschwitz is probably the most horrible challenge anyone could face), what makes people outperform?

In this case it was about survival, but in business and life in general, whether you're young or old, his conclusion is that it comes down to having a purpose, a meaning. That could be anything - our meaning at Antler is enabling the world's best people to solve important problems and make progress inevitable. For others, it might be becoming the best violinist, raising children, or running faster than anyone else.

Meaning drives progress and makes people much happier. If you have meaning in your life, you can get through tough times. I really recommend that book.

Keith Yap 49:40

And what piece of advice would you give to a fresh graduate entering the workforce?

Magnus Grimeland 49:44

I have tons of advice, but one I'd really recommend is to think very long-term - whether it's 10, 15, or 20 years. Ten years is a good timeframe. Think about something you would be very excited to achieve - something really ambitious. It doesn't need to be building the world's greatest business or becoming Prime Minister of Singapore. It could be having an amazing family, visiting a hundred countries, or whatever it might be.

Going back to what I talked about earlier, figure out what your meaning is. It should be almost impossible to achieve - I want to go to the moon, or build the first trillion-dollar company out of Singapore, whatever it might be. Then think about how that relates to what you'll do next year. What does that mean for what you want to do in the next three months? The next month? The next week?

I think it's harder than ever today, particularly for young people, because the optionality is so big. You're constantly bombarded by people living their dream through social media, so it's hard to make choices. But if you don't make choices and decisions about your own life, then life will rule you instead of you ruling your life.

Set that audacious goal, figure out your meaning, and then work on what will get you a little closer over the next week. If you want to go to the moon, you won't achieve it next week. If you want to build a trillion-dollar company or find a cure for cancer, you won't do it in a week. But if you aim to do it in 10 years, it's possible. Unless you do something related to achieving that each week, you'll never get there, because achieving something incredibly hard takes time. You want to set the path for your own life and not have life set the path for you.

Keith Yap 52:23

Wow. Thank you, Magnus, for coming on.

Magnus Grimeland 52:26

Thanks for having me.