Claure, Lee & Mnuchin on Growth in a Complex Economy

Hi, everyone. I'm Jenny. It's great to be here. You know, as we were coming on stage, I realized that if you want to be an investor, you should be wearing running shoes, because part of being an investor is you got to just run faster than most people. You want to get ahead of the trend. So again, Asia, where our global investor, early venture and early growth. And so what we do is we look for the best entrepreneurs, help to grow them as they grow from 0 to 1 to IPO and, you know, to public. That's what we do on a globally global basis.

So I'm going to answer your question separately. I think we saw for early stage venture and growth venture, so it's very hard for us to pick one company and you have to spread your bets. Right? Exactly. So for us, it's not us spreading the bet. It's really about looking at ecosystem. And so when you are solving for early stage, early growth, what's very important for us, I think the key criteria, and this criteria has changed, is, number one, talent. And whether that talent is having played globally and invested globally for the last 25 years, today, for sure, I think Asia is the place to be. So if you look at Asia broadly and the level of STEM talent from China to India to Middle East to Southeast Asia, we are talking about 6 to 7 million of STEM talent being groomed here on an annual basis. So that's a lot of, and I know we are talking about ever talking about replacing talent. At the end of the day, businesses are still built initially by humans. And so I think the level of talent is very important. So this talent is hungry. And I want to add that with the world order being restructured, that's also an inflow of new talent coming back home, whether it's back to the Middle East, whether it's back to Southeast Asia, whether it's back to China or to India. I think that's happening as well. With hyperscalers cutting off headcount in the U.S., there's also a lot of skilled talent, the likes of those who have experience from, you know, at Microsoft to Apple, actually coming back. So I think, number one, Tyler, we're seeing enormous talent flow back to this region, which gets us excited. And this is across the board, number one.

Number two, markets are being reconstructed. In the past, you know, U.S., China, homogeneous market, huge market, growth markets. That's where a lot of the innovation is happening. But today, you know, the markets, whether it's building bridges from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, China to the Middle East, those bridges are being reconstructed in a very cohesive, friendly manner as well. And so I think we are starting to see the appearance of huge emerging growth markets other than the huge markets that we know. And I think that's a very important part. But where's the capital now? While a lot of capital has been flowing back to the U.S., whether you are overweight U.S. or trying to diversify, I think for sure, I think U.S. is going to be, you know, benefiting from a lot of the capital flow. But it's also true that countries are realizing that we have to keep the talents here. The ideas are here. The capital needs to be in line here as well. And therefore, the developmental effort by a lot of countries here in this part of the world is very important. So those are key criteria.

Now, when you put that all together, I want to say that the trends, and I'll just highlight to address not one company. The first trend is this, is that we see from a venture lender that innovation is going back to foundation and fundamental technology. Now, why do I see this, right? We talk a lot about semiconductor now. Now all of a sudden, all countries realize that we better have some semiconductor capabilities. And what's happening? Right. So when I say back to fundamentals, the 28 nanometer process node foundry is best in vogue. You don't have to be 3 nanometer. If you have nothing, you start with 28 now. And so if you track, if you just track, where are the 28 nanometer foundries being built today? You have TSMC in Japan, you have India with the Tata Group coming up with that, keeping up very soon. We've got 28 Nano Malaysia, are now seeing Singapore and using strategies, and I'm sure here in the UK as well, announcing. So what that does is it allows basic fundamental technology that we thought we don't need, that's coming back. And I think that will crystallize the talent in fundamental technology. And so along that stretch, and this is actually clearly the foundation of AI as you talked about. Right? You have basic access to basic chipset. We may not meet the 10 to the 23 compute power, but basic technology that, you know, people are starting to learn. And on top of it is data, right? We have proprietary data here. Every single country has your own specific small language model. We don't need large language model. The NSA open source. You can access compute at a very affordable cost today. So then it's about how do I then build it in front, build the technology, have the data, have the right rules, and then allow the ecosystem. Here you have the talent, we have the talent. So I think that the one theme is around, we are actually going back to fundamental building blocks of the technology stack. So the entire technology set in our view is being reconstructed. That may not sound sexy. You are not going for the moon, but right now I think it's really going from zero to 1 to 2.

And in that construct, one particular area that we as a firm is very focused on is the whole concept of a gigantic AI plus robotics. And I think that this is also one area that Asia as a whole has the right to win, right. First, we have manufacturing capability here that allows us, whether you're building humanoid robots or machine-looking robots at a very good scale, efficient, affordable ecosystem pricing as well. That's number one. Number two, many of the countries here don't have the luxury of being able to put, you know, people back into factories. And therefore, whether it's here in Qatar, 800,000 in terms of population, me, my home country, Singapore, 5 million, we don't have the human power to be able to compete to do everything, but AI plus robotics allows us to build this automation capability that can allow us with 10-hour labor capability in a week. And so being able to now, you know, build our robotics with the right, you know, generative AI or agentic type solution. I think it's actually one way for this region to actually leapfrog. And the second thing is this. The application scenario is here where if you just look at transportation, logistics and land connectivity, this is a diverse region, different countries, different ways and modes of transportation. And if you can combine this together, connecting the regions with the right not just human, but robotics combination, I think this is where the next new amazing companies will be built.

Yeah, I mean, the first 20 years with globalization, it was about finding that one leader, the ultimate, you know, category leader that can take on the world. And that's where you get premium, you get and large companies as economies of scale and therefore they are able to then dominate the world. I think with the new world order, it means that there will be regional clusters of excellence, you'll be regional clusters of great companies. And so it's going to be, it's okay to be number two, because you could be number two in every single region and still command that premium. Because today we talk about, yeah, we talk about data, we talk about processes. That's going to be very specific to industry, specific to countries, specific to regional challenges that needs to be built and addressed. And therefore the good of it is that now it's not just going for that one company and overpaying for that company until the returns go to zero. It's actually about finding regional champions, which could also be huge category leaders for us, as has funds as well. And I think it's actually good for the world to have multiple pots of excellence that can be localized to its own needs.