Ray Cao: belief

Transcript context

…The algorithm is definitely helping because it is basically the machine is doing a lot of heavy lifting. That's actually I think across the board on a technology company today. The difference is actually how much you are willing to take the heavy lifting over there in the market. By that I mean really sending your troops into the market, hiring your local talent, understanding the culture and really understanding the behavior from those users. I understand the machine can do things, but also at the same time that we need to actually get local talent to fine tune the machine. So there are a lot of conversations about how I would say technology is able to change our life, but I do think that at the end of the day, I do believe technology is a tool. So if we do have a ambition to go global, you have to do one more thing is actually take your step into global. Rather than having the machine do the heavy lifting, you have to really understand in local culture. I had a fun background for my first job is to really doing go-to market research in the Southeast Asia area. I think there was only one thing opened my eyes after a year and a half in this career path is different market have totally different, I would say, culture and these market behaviors are actually coming out of this culture. One of the fun example I always been using was I was doing market research for one of the suppliers for toner and also these ink cartridges for Thailand as a go-to market research. One of the things is always concern to my, at that point, the client was they cannot figure out why their premium product cannot sell in Thailand and then we just figure out because the quality of their printing machine and also their ink cartridges are premium and the quality of the paper and everything is very good. But when you actually do talk to those consumers in those market, the answer is very eye-opening. They literally told me at that time is I don't care. I don't care if your ink cartridges or your printer is at the premium quality, maybe the printer I can use, but I can use compatible ink cartridges or toner for that because my consumer won't care about your printing quality or the majority of my consumer won't care. So in that case you should not necessarily worried about if you are a premium product, it's actually more about how durable, how reliable you're able to print things and people can read. So I think these are the insights I think a lot of times it will be neglected from some of clients or the manufacturers or even the owner of the business because they think that we want to serve this segmentation, but, however, this segmentation is that big in this area. So that's reason why the culture is really the key part from the market. If you don't understand the culture, you won't be able to understand the behavior over there. ntation is that big in this area. So that's reason why the culture is really the key part from the market. If you don't understand the culture, you won't be able to understand the behavior over there. It's more about that, I think, when we say about globalization or take the product go to market in a global scheme or even build it apart, you have to get your hands dirty and to really understand the local culture so that you can understand local behavior. I love that advice, the way you described it, which I love also is that you kind of have to fine-tune the algorithm and the product to work in different cultures. Is there an example of how that was done with TikTok, like a tweak that had to be made or some kind of fine-tuning that happened for it to work in a different market?…

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