By the time I had met him, my old boss already had a superpower: he could find experienced people, usually traditional Chinese businessmen, and turn t

Business, The Octopus Game

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-17 01:30:37

By the time I had met him, my old boss already had a superpower: he could find experienced people, usually traditional Chinese businessmen, and turn them into his mentors. He told me that when he first landed in Ho Chi Minh City in 2009, he talked his way into the Singapore business association there, and walked away with a directory of their members. Then he called the most interesting ones and took them out to dinner. I knew this to be true because I found the old directory in a stack of books in our office; he grinned when I asked him how he got it.

Sometimes he let me tag along. The meeting that stuck with me the most was one of the first ones. Back then, before we pivoted to making point of sales systems, we were trying to get a mobile games business off the ground. My boss knew a Singaporean entrepreneur who bought games from China, repackaged them for the Vietnamese market, and monetised through in-game purchases. We met up at a bar. Did this entrepreneur know anything about gaming? Of course not! He was in his early 40s, he had moved to Saigon 10 years earlier, and he knew how to make money, never you mind if it was with games or furniture or rice trading or cats. In Vietnam, circa 2014, with credit card penetration in the low single-digit percentages, he couldn’t rely on online purchases for the mobile games business; his company sold credit packs in Circle-Ks and FamilyMarts. I wanted to know how he did this.

“You just make a deal with them, not so hard one lah,” he said, sipping his Tiger. He then proceeded to give us a one-sided running commentary on the relative attractiveness of the waitresses around us, in Singaporean Hokkien, so that only we could understand him.