Lending corporate business builders a helping hand: A conversation with New Ventures’ Alvin Cai

In this episode of The Venture, we share a conversation with Alvin Cai, vice president of New Ventures, the corporate business-building arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board. Cai talks with McKinsey’s Andrew Roth about his group’s new Corporate Venture Launchpad, a S$10 million pilot program designed to help corporates build Singapore-based start-ups by partnering with established venture studios, and why he believes success depends on agility and autonomy from the mothership. At the close of the interview, McKinsey’s Yishan Lam offers her insights.

An edited transcript of the podcast follows. For more conversations on venture building, subscribe to the series on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Podcast transcript

Andrew Roth: From Leap by McKinsey, our business-building practice, I’m Andrew Roth, and welcome to The Venture, a series featuring conversations with legendary venture builders in Asia about how to design, launch, and scale new businesses. In each episode, we cut through the noise to bring practical advice on how leaders can build successful businesses from scratch.

In this episode, we talk with Alvin Cai, vice president of New Ventures, the corporate business-building arm of Singapore’s Economic Development Board (EDB). You’ll hear Alvin tell us about his group’s new Corporate Venture (CV) Launchpad, a S$10 million pilot program designed to help corporates build Singapore-based start-ups by partnering with established venture studios, and why he believes success depends on agility and autonomy from the mothership. We also discuss how the EDB is helping businesses kick-start new ventures—from ideation to market validation—in six months. At the end of the conversation, Yishan Lam and I discuss the key role that Alvin and the CV Launchpad are playing in Singapore pioneering the space to support corporate venture building, which can be applied for creating long-term growth and successful ventures in the market.

Welcome, Alvin. Great to have you on the show. First of all, for those in our audience who may not be familiar, can you quickly introduce the New Ventures group and the recent announcement of the Corporate Venture Launchpad?

Alvin Cai: The EDB is the economic-planning and industry-development body of Singapore, and within the EDB is the New Ventures group that I’m with, which is relatively new. It was set up about two years ago as the EDB’s corporate venture-building arm to help corporates grow new businesses and catalyze greater growth here in Singapore.

At New Ventures, we believe that corporate venturing should be a tool in every corporate’s innovation and growth toolbox. To be successful, we need to build new businesses that stand apart from the corporate mothership, agile and running autonomously but able to tap the corporate parents’ advantages to scale. We offer various types of support for our portfolio companies, including venture building, co-investments, added value creation, and various community-building efforts to get all of the corporates and ventures here interacting and partnering with each other.

We also just launched the Corporate Venture Launchpad. It’s a S$10 million program with enhanced support to help businesses new to corporate venture building incubate and launch new ventures here in Singapore within a six-month period, from ideation to market validation. And to accomplish that, we have appointed four experienced venture studios to help support corporates on the journey.

Andrew Roth: It’s quite a unique program. When I moved to Singapore about 11 years ago, there were many different productivity-improvement grants for small businesses and venture-backed start-ups. But this is one of the first ones I heard of for corporates aiming to launch start-ups. How is this different?

Alvin Cai: Yes, that’s right. Many governments promote innovation, Singapore included, but not all are actively promoting what we call corporate ventures. So, in many ways, Singapore is first, and we are hoping to pave the way, because it’s really about driving the next wave of growth in our innovation-led economy, where we’ve been sinking a lot of dollars into R&D innovation.

But we’re also hoping that new business creation by the pool of corporates we have here in Singapore can be a new growth driver taking us forward. This is the next frontier, where corporates are building new businesses and taking entrepreneurial risks to grow new global champions here. We believe we have fertile ground with all our large local enterprises and multinational corporations, which gives us corporate advantages.

We’re sitting in a growth region with markedly different needs, and Singapore is a great proving ground to incubate new ventures. So the CV Launchpad is an open invitation to all corporates new to venture building to bring new ideas and opportunities and work with us. I see it as a kickstarter program to signal that Singapore is ready and welcoming to be a base for venture activities in our part of the world.

Andrew Roth: I think it’s important to stress that the CV Launchpad is not about corporate venture capital or partnerships with start-ups in the ecosystem. This involves incumbent corporates that want to build new businesses from the bottom up. I remember when we first met, you said how often corporates struggle with deciding where to play, what type of new business to get into, and how to get started. Based on the last several conversations you’ve had with incumbents, what is holding them back from really investing in business building beyond a minimum viable product (MVP)?

Alvin Cai: I see two types of issues that incumbents face. Incumbents sometimes have too much inertia. Things have been working well, they have market share, but they’re not addressing rapid market shifts, gaps, or new customer demands. And before you know it, a start-up comes along, scales quickly, launches a new service or product, and is now your biggest competitor. And that’s one of the biggest worries for large companies right now.

And on the other end of the spectrum, there are corporates that have a lot of ideas and are chasing all sorts of new areas, but they continue to use existing knowledge, systems, processes, and people to address new problems. The worst thing corporates do is try to push technology or products, and when things don’t work or the market doesn’t respond, they continue to throw money at it. And before you know it, you’ve overinvested in a new business that can’t gain market traction.

There are a lot of pitfalls when it comes to large corporates trying to reimagine themselves, trying to go into a new business area, trying to be agile. And we believe that building successful ventures requires rigorous testing of ideas before launching the new business. And we do so via sprints, which we know are very effective. In fact, of all the sprints that the New Ventures team has been involved in in the last couple of years, at least five ventures have been formed or are being formed as we speak. So, we are quite excited by the initial results and traction we’ve seen.

Andrew Roth: How, specifically, does the CV Launchpad help corporates overcome these challenges?

Alvin Cai: The CV Launchpad aims to take each participating corporate through concept-validation sprints. It’s essentially a time-bomb process to derisk and market-test new venture ideas and opportunities to become validated, investable new businesses. So you know exactly what your customers want before you build the business.

The process reduces uncertainty and gives you a clear sense of go-to-market, the right customer segments to target, the amount of resources needed, and where the key risks are. You can also use the process to burn down some of those risks along the way. And our venture studios have the right experience, methodology, and people to work alongside the corporates for these concept validations.

Andrew Roth: That’s a key point. The CV Launchpad is more than just a grant. You’re bringing in a growing team to participate in the journey to reduce uncertainty, as you mentioned, and helping derisk the design of these new businesses.

Alvin Cai: Absolutely. Corporates also need to be committed to the journey by putting people with founding-team potential into the venture to work alongside our people and the studios, who support and augment the talent pool as needed during a three-to-six-month process to discover the market and build the business.

And it’s not just a consulting project. The studios work alongside corporates to help them build capabilities so they are better prepared when the venture is validated and ready to be spun out as a new business.

Andrew Roth: Let’s shift toward execution, specifically for the CV Launchpad. Tell us a little bit about the initial design of the program and how you’re starting to see some of your own traction.

Alvin Cai: Since the New Ventures group was established, we’ve been engaging with more than 150 corporates to really understand where they are on their journey. We have a group that is actively venture building, and we have another group that is excited to take their first steps but, for various reasons, has not done so. There’s so much untapped potential within that group, so we decided to put together a four-person team to use sprint methodologies to learn from this second group and test out various ways they would like us to support them. And this team eventually became the CV Launchpad.

This group of companies was clearly keen on external expertise because they lacked a playbook for venture building. Oftentimes, they wanted to discover the right market partners to work with. And they really wanted to experiment and learn through a first venture build, so they could think about what’s next and what more to do.

Putting projects through the CV Launchpad can help them build internal buy-in and competence by having the New Ventures team actively working alongside them to support the project.

End to end, the CV Launchpad took us four months from ideation to launch, including an open call for proposals from venture studios that were keen to partner with us. And while selection was based on best-in-class studios, that also provided diverse offerings to our community here. And since launching, the initial response has really been encouraging.

Andrew Roth: So in just over four months, you created your own MVP just to see what the challenges are for this second group and what they needed to do to get over the line to start venture building. And full disclosure, Leap by McKinsey was selected as one of those venture studios. You said you reached out to or evaluated 150 different businesses. When you think back to some of that research, and we often talk about this with our other guests on the podcast, what specific types of capabilities are you seeing incumbents lacking?

Alvin Cai: Talent is a big piece. Oftentimes, we find that we are fortunate here in Singapore, which is a strong operational hub for a lot of large corporates, with a pool of intrapreneurs [innovators operating inside a large organization] they can tap.

That said, as they eventually think about businesses further removed from their core, they need to augment that with external talent, which might mean bringing in founder team members or people on the venture team who have the potential to lead the new business. So that’s an external talent search. And then they struggle with the right way to hire, to structure incentivization, and to give the founding team ownership and agility to run.

Another common struggle for companies is not a lack of ideas but a robust way to validate an idea along with the right go-to-market strategy. Because the last thing you want is to go to market with a preconceived idea and waste two years spending too much cash pivoting before you finally find a winning formula—or never find a formula at all.

So you want to take this small group of founder-like people through a process of time-bound sprints, quickly burning down risks and learning from the market what exactly the venture should be before deciding you have enough data to go out and build the business. This process is fairly new to corporates, which have annual budget cycles, existing systems and ways of working, and different departments with different ideas.

But that whole mothership management process of putting it together into an agile process and agile team often is a struggle. And that’s a key capability that corporates often want to build. Starting off with sprints and the CV Launchpad is one of the ways that has tested really well in our design process for the program.

Andrew Roth: We had Glenn Estrella from Globe Telecom’s 917Ventures on the podcast, and they have a $100 million corporate venture-building fund. So they’re signaling an intent to go way beyond MVPs and prototyping, and taking more of a portfolio approach to business building. Just curious to see if you’re starting to see changes in the appetite for corporate venture building, whether it be in capital being applied or just a greater volume of conversations and interest in general.

Alvin Cai: The momentum is growing strongly. Corporate venturing is a relatively new movement globally, and certainly here in Singapore. And in the last couple of years, we’ve seen more than 40 corporate ventures set up in Singapore. That’s really good traction, and it’s moving from general innovation to a real serious push by corporates to take entrepreneurial risks to enter new spaces.

Since then, we’ve built strong partnerships with corporates like Engie, Bosch, P&G, and Schneider Electric, with the intent to build multiple new ventures here from Singapore. For example, P&G brought in intrapreneurs to build new brands with billion-dollar potential from Singapore through experimentation, which I’ve been fortunate to help them set up. My firsthand experience seeing them put new brands through their own incubation funnel and methodology has been really inspiring.

Engie also has a program focused on bringing in external entrepreneur founders around themes they’ve identified as areas of new business potential. Engie helps run the incubation sprints, and the best ideas get funded and built as corporate ventures. So the venture benefits from both external talent as well as the fact that they can always lean on Engie to bring corporate advantages.

It’s been inspiring working on projects like these, but it’s also good because success always breeds more success, right? They have a strong pull factor. For example, everyone in the region noticed that Sea Group didn’t rest on their laurels after their runaway success with Garena, and also launched Shopee, Sea Money, and other fintech initiatives. So others realized they can also grow new businesses, like Bosch creating AquaEasy to move into aquaculture IoT. And ING Labs just announced a new supply-chain optimization platform, Stemly, which our group invested in.

And that’s the pull factor. But if you look at the push factor, we see players like DBS Bank and Singapore Exchange (SGX) reimagining the marketplace for a trusted and transparent platform for carbon-credit exchange. This is a key growth area for sustainability, but the challenge for carbon credits changing hands has always been the lack of good provenance and traceability. Now, however, the large players in this space have come together to promote lender verification and credibility by creating Climate Impact X, which was recently announced.

So in multiple new spaces, from mobility, sustainability, health and wellness, and consumer, we’re starting to see large corporates taking action.

Andrew Roth: So, more commitment across an array of different industries. And in your opinion, should the new business be operated under a separate entity from a governance perspective? Or should it be structured as a department in the beginning and then, if it scales, push it out as a separate entity? What are you seeing as a trend?

Alvin Cai: We at New Ventures firmly believe that to be successful, you need agility and autonomy. And the best way to achieve that is to launch a start-up-like new agile business. That way, you can build in the same success factors that make start-ups great, while enjoying the corporate advantages, giving you the best of both worlds.

We advocate setting up companies as a separate legal entity and putting in place the right founding team, one incentivized to drive growth, with the autonomy to run the business. They also need the ability to pull from corporate any type of support and resources when needed to go to market quickly and pivot and scale accordingly.

Andrew Roth: It helps with recruiting, right? Because quite often, a good reason to start up as a separate entity is the need for a different brand and different culture just to attract talent.

Alvin Cai: That’s very true. As you go into new spaces, you’re often competing with talent from other large incumbents and start-ups. And the best talent are oftentimes at a stage in their careers where passion drives them, where they want to feel ownership of a new business and the ability to create something meaningful themselves. This motivates them and allows you to attract them.

Secondly, you need to structure incentivization to get them running and growing the business, which certainly helps with continuity and retention as well. These are all good things that corporates can sometimes struggle with, given the number of people and staff changes.

That said, some corporates have identified certain opportunity areas after validating the market that are quite close to their existing business and decide to pursue those as part of their core business. There’s still a lot of value and new revenue growth to be had, so that’s a small success that should be celebrated as well.

Nonetheless, we do believe the best structure is to create an independent new business unit so you can still borrow all the good stuff as a new-venture setup but then empower and let it run within the orbit of your corporate.

Andrew Roth: We’ve talked to a lot of corporate start-ups and other start-ups on the podcast about metrics and how to measure success. The CV Launchpad is obviously a different type of organization, but how do you measure success here beyond the launching of a new business? What is success for the CV Launchpad in the eyes of the EDB, and maybe even for you personally?

Alvin Cai: The CV Launchpad is really a means to an end; it’s a program to kick-start corporates on the journey. The ultimate goal for us is to see more ventures created here in Singapore—ventures that track well and go on to be successful on the global stage, ventures that are born out of corporates and their advantages that can become another growth engine for Singapore. We also want to see more corporates come onboard.

One of the benefits of corporate venturing is the ability for corporates to reinvent themselves, to become more agile, responsive, and entrepreneurial. That’s a great community full of capabilities we can build here in Singapore as well. Our vibrant community works together to build new ventures, and the strong talent flows between the corporate intrepreneur pool to the entrepreneurial talent pool are a big plus.

Andrew Roth: Yes, it’s not as if start-ups are competing with the corporates, and there are enough synergies to make it beneficial for everyone to grow. I know from past conversations that venture capitalists would love to see more corporates jump into venture building, and they see it as an exit opportunity for start-ups in Singapore’s ecosystem as well. Looking further down the road, maybe three to five years from now, what do you want the CV Launchpad to look like? Are there interim checkpoints? Where are you going to be five years from now?

Alvin Cai: We designed the CV Launchpad like any MVP, in the sense that we wanted to think big and start small. We wanted to put in certain milestones along the way to ensure that there’s a pilot program we can continuously improve while keeping an eye on market response and traction. And then we’ll decide to scale up to get more corporates on the journey and invite more partners to work with us and multiply efforts. Ultimately, our goal is to create huge momentum for corporate-launched ventures here in Singapore.

So, I would say, three or five years down the road, the CV Launchpad would have seeded many of the great global ventures that have been set up and are scaling here in Singapore. But that’s also not the end of the CV Launchpad, which is just one program and one way for the New Ventures team at Singapore’s EDB to support corporates on the journey. And so we continue to look at market needs to see whether there are new initiatives that we need to push out to the market.

We’ll also work with our corporate partners to encourage them to build more than just one venture out of the CV Launchpad. We want them to set up their venture engines here in Singapore to create multiple new growth businesses for the future.

Andrew Roth: I think that’s a great way to put it. Hopefully, five years from now, you’ll be seeing cultural change within corporates, where, yes, some definitely will fail, but there will be successes as well. And, hopefully, we’ll also have some new brands and logos that are at massive scale. And like you said, it’s just the beginning. I’m really looking forward to going on this this journey with you.

Alvin Cai: I would love to turn the question back to you, Andrew. What does McKinsey hope to achieve by partnering with the EDB on this program?

Andrew Roth: I think for Leap by McKinsey, we want to see corporate venture building really scale. In the last ten years, we’ve seen lots of innovation centers, prototypes, and MVPs. I think that the future is to really derisk venture building for corporates, and they need to consider three things.

One is that designing a new business doesn’t have to be rocket science. If you look at some other guests that came on this show, like from Carro and ShopBack, they’re localizing existing business models and scaling them. So, I’d encourage corporates to think of it that way. What unicorn doesn’t exist in Southeast Asia? What advantages do you have? And can you execute on an idea faster and leverage those advantages? So, that’s one—don’t overthink the design.

Number two would be to start working on that culture, and, as we said, spinning off the venture-building portfolio as a separate entity might be the way to unlock that so you can attract the right talent.

The third consideration is to see start-ups in the ecosystem as partners rather than competitors. If you really want to accelerate venture building, consider a micro acquisition. If you need to get the talent, try the acquihire method of bringing in the right talent. It will make the ecosystem more robust and better for all. So, for me personally, I’d love to see everyone get beyond what I think of as “innovation theater” and get to scale and results. That would be my take on it.

Alvin Cai: Perfect. I think we think exactly alike, and we hope to work with you and the other studios in the program to drive this.

Andrew Roth: Alvin, thanks so much. It’s been great having you on the show.

Alvin Cai: Thank you. The pleasure was mine, Andrew. We look forward to the future.

Would you like to learn more about Leap, our business-building practice?


Andrew Roth: Now comes a segment where we invite experts from McKinsey to provide more context and to draw practical insights. I’m joined by my colleague Yishan Lam, a design director with a focus on venture building. Yishan, good to have you on the show.

Yishan Lam: Hi, Andrew. Lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.

Andrew Roth: Alvin and I spoke a lot about how Singapore is one of the first to really pioneer and support corporate venture building. What’s your reaction to that and how Singapore is approaching this?

Yishan Lam: I think the Corporate Venture Launchpad really signifies maturity in terms of the landscape to focus on what really matters in venturing. I think what we’ve seen looking back over the past couple of years in Singapore is that you saw a first wave of corporate innovation efforts, really centering around open innovation challenges and hackathons, running accelerators and business-model canvas workshops, or even establishing corporate venture funds and doing acquisitions in adjacencies. But I think what we are seeing right now is corporates launching their own ambitions and accelerating the process of moving toward an investible business and actual ventures going to market.

Andrew Roth: So less hackathons, less rush to just MVP something, but something with more long-term impact.

Yishan Lam: Yes. I think the other aspect of pioneering is the public–private partnership. The Launchpad is an innovation as far as government goes. Rather than being a buyer of services, it’s government as builder, with the EDB team building out capabilities, in sprints, as venture builders themselves. But also on the program standpoint, it’s about attracting investment through not just incentives in your taxes or funding.

It reminds me of what the economist Mariana Mazzucato has described where, historically, the greatest innovations that we’ve seen, like Apple hardware or GPS or even the internet, wouldn’t have existed if not for something called the “entrepreneurial state.” So I see the Corporate Venture Launchpad as kind of a contemporary expression of that, with the learning and testing component to it that Alvin has described.

Andrew Roth: So the vision with the Corporate Venture Launchpad is not just to provide funding, but the EDB wants to get their hands dirty. It’ll be exciting to see how that evolves. Let’s take a step back and look at corporate venture building in general. The start-ups have been taking the lion’s share of market capitalization when it comes to growth in the start-up space, so what are some reasons to believe that incumbents can be successful in venture building?

Yishan Lam: I think there are many good reasons to believe that we will see successful ventures in the market. And I think even this is kind of an innovation in terms of how private equity and venture capital could be working to increase the odds of success of a portfolio company. There are lots of businesses that believe they would be successful, and examples of this have been shared by more than 40 ventures that have been launched in Singapore that are on their way along the journey to getting their beginning scale. But I think if you take a step back, there’s a lot of gateway potential in Singapore, given that we have the whole of Asia in our backyard. We researched the future of Asia and its economies, and what we found was that 36 percent of tech unicorns are based here in Asia, and over 45 percent revenues of tech companies—these are S&P 500 leading tech companies—are from Asian economies.

So I think it’s exciting to stand where we are right now at the top of the funnel. We’ve got a whole bunch of unicorn or near-unicorn successes, like Grab and Carousell, which were founded in 2012, and Shopee by Sea Group, which was founded in 2015. Leaning into the corporate advantages that an incumbent has—the customer base, distribution, access to know-how, et cetera—can tip the odds of success in the favor of the venture, and I think we actually can’t quite fathom yet what we will see in a couple of years. The ultimate aim of the program is to generate a handful of globally leading businesses.

Andrew Roth: I think we’ll see a lot more unicorns coming out of Singapore in the next few years. The question is, will a handful or a good percentage of them be from incumbents? We’ve done a lot of research in this space. Globally, we’ve looked at more than 600 incumbents over the past ten years, and we’ve seen a trend where incumbents that make business building or venture building a strategic priority for growth have almost a two times higher probability of driving more than 50 percent of their revenue from these new ventures, versus companies that look at other methods of driving growth. For the group of companies that did make it a priority, they’re seeing a huge percentage of the revenue come from business building, which at the end of the day is what the incumbents are looking for.

Yishan Lam: That’s right. And I think what we found through that research is that when you build that institutional memory of having done this a couple of times, and take a portfolio approach to ventures, you actually get better answers like this.

Andrew Roth: So far in the program, many incumbents have shown interest—what are some of the initial observations on their appetite for venture building?

Yishan Lam: I think the pandemic has changed the risk profile of venturing as an option for corporates. It upended our personal lives, but it also changed the way we buy things as consumers and how we operate as organizations. The question corporates seem to be asking now is, what is the value that can be created as a result of these new conditions? A lot of corporates are actually reviving venture efforts that had been put on the back burner. In the past they might have been thinking that it was too soon to act, but now it seems more that they are thinking there are enough reasons not to take a wait-and-see approach, because they know that this new normal is somewhat permanent. There’s also a greater maturity to the process of starting now, with programs such as the EDB’s New Ventures team. As a result of these efforts to engage the corporates, we’re seeing venture topics expand to the future of mobility, sustainability initiatives, health and wellness, the new frontiers of consumer businesses, and so forth.

Andrew Roth: So what are some practical tips for corporate venturing in general, and specifically to decide where to play, which seems to be one of the big challenges?

Yishan Lam: There can be a lot of hesitancy to start, especially in terms of convincing management. But the first thing is to not try to have all the questions answered or to be intellectually satisfied about the opportunity before kick-starting the process. You’re going to encounter a lot of ambiguity, and that is the point. You want to get into a state of asking questions around the market you want to serve, with proven business models you want to test, and then move the process forward. You will never be intellectually satisfied at the outset, and that isn’t the point—it’s antithetical to the realities of operating a start-up. Even if you were intellectually satisfied with the answers you develop to those questions, there would just be a lot of bias and assumptions baked into them. You have to get into the active state of discovering and testing and proving ideas by actually taking multiple signals from the market.

And that leads to the second thing about getting started: it’s really important to be exhaustive about customer validation and to do that from a variety of angles. Maybe that means hours of firsthand immersive observation and customer interviews, traditional ethnographic research, finding other signals from existing customer data, or running surveys at scale to understand customer willingness to pay. It’s really about triangulating those signals from multiple places to bring confidence about whether you’ve achieved product–market fit. Or it might be social media testing to understand if people will buy what they say they will buy and to understand their real interests behind the product. You need the customer validation, but you also need to develop a strong view of the commercials from the outset, on down to the unit economics, because ultimately not all pain points are worth solving. A lot of corporate innovation efforts consider too many early-stage ideas that are not really anchored in a business model. Corporates need to accelerate toward a potential business model, but also figure out how it can be monetized. Learn whether there is potential for revenue streams at the same time as you discover unmet customer needs and pain points that lead to a reason to believe in the product and the venture.

Andrew Roth: What are some of the potential pitfalls for venture building?

Yishan Lam: One of the potential pitfalls, even if the parent organization evaluates the merits of the venture idea, is something that we might call “strategy creep,” where the corporate parent muddies the venture priorities and dissipates the focus on product–market fit that the venture is trying to answer in a quite organic way. This is natural, because the venture is trying to lean into the corporate parent’s advantages and broker the resources it needs, while the corporate leaders are thinking, how can the venture benefit the parent? But ultimately what you’re trying to do is create a start-up from the ground up, and it takes a lot of restraint from the executive committee, which is usually comprised of the senior management of the parent, and focus on really evaluating the venture on its own merit and in its own industry.

The other common pitfall is having too short of a runway. Then the venture gets canned before it has a chance to pivot and find its way forward to success. The EDB’s Corporate Venture Launchpad is designed to prevent this, in that it is very much a learning mechanism. What I’m looking forward to is that, as a result our learning and experimenting together as an ecosystem, we make venture building itself more effective. Ultimately, even though there are many corporate innovation playbooks out there, really there are only so many practices that are essential to the process. We are looking to get into that scrappy mode of moving things forward as start-up teams, where we are like the base camp to Mt. Everest, with the ultimate goal that a few global champions will play a significant role in the economy of the region over the next five, ten, 20 years if we’re lucky. And Everest is always there for the climb, so let’s get packing.

Andrew Roth: Yishan, thanks so much for sharing and for joining us today.

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