Some notes below (for personal reference only, so any mistakes in transcription are my own):

Raymond Zage, formerly of Farallon, shared his perspective as an investor in the space. He thinks the story has gotten considerably more interesting not just because of growth economies in the region but also the type of growth. Just looking at some simple statistics – smartphone penetration in Indonesia was probably 50m in 2015 and Gojek now has 110m customers and their product is only for smartphones. Tells you a bit about the transition taking place and is one of the main reasons we have seen a big uplift across the whole digital economy. Taking Indonesia specifically (but can be applied to the rest of the region), there have been some unseen things like the creation of tower companies that have funded a bunch of the capex. China has benefited from a lot of government spending across all the infrastructure needed to make this work, but the rest of Asia doesn’t have that – it is all private sector-funded for the most part.

One area he thinks is particularly interesting is the ecommerce revolution. Most ecommerce in the US is not Amazon, it is still big box retail. Same in China as well. Those retailers that want to survive will have to invest a lot in different types of technologies to figure out who their customers are because they don’t actually know. If you go to a Walmart store in the US, chances are that Amazon or Google probably know more about the people in that store than Walmart. That just doesn’t work, so this revolution is happening by necessity. Something like precision location is interesting – it could be an app like Gojek where if you are trying to deliver food to a customer, you want to know exactly where they are and not generally. Same with someone walking through a store, for example. If someone stops to look at some diapers, and you don’t know that information, how are you going to figure out how to market your product? 

On the topic of challenges relating to the access, flow and regulation of data, this is a super important consideration. If you take the European vs. Chinese view as opposite ends of the spectrum broadly speaking, with the latter, people already assume that all the information is available to the government, it doesn’t really bother them. Makes it a lot easier to create value where all the data is available and you can use it. The complexity happens in the middle if you are obsessed with trying to protect data. Some of that is fundamentally unrealistic because you are carrying around a radio that can send and receive signals. It perhaps used to be just the telcos that had that data, but it is now probably easier to assume that it is out there. The countries that keeping trying to hammer it down do make him a little nervous. If you look at Indonesia, for example, there was an attempt to force everyone to keep the data onshore, but a company like Gojek uses the cloud for everything. The government doesn’t have enough data centers yet to provide an alternative solution.

In a perfect world, every individual would have total ownership and privacy over their own data. They would also have the ability to transact and offer it out to companies in exchange for services. But the whole tech development didn’t happen that way. Everyone wanted free stuff, so the only way to provide a free product was to collect a bunch of data and then get value out of it. To shift to the other extreme might be a great objective, but he has a hard time seeing how that happens. Transition is too big an undertaking, we are going to be in a complicated world for a long time. Reality is that most of the data that you generate probably doesn’t matter. Way to create the most value and growth is to shift the world to the mindset that it’s not necessarily a bad thing to give people information about yourself if their objective is to try and offer you product and services that make your life better.