Walter de Oude is the founder and CEO behind Chocolate Finance, the Singaporean fintech company that got swept up in a mass withdrawal debacle in March (check out episode 2 for more details about that!). In this episode, Walter chats with the 60/40 team about lessons learned from March, what keeps him building, and how he's cracked the most important part of any startup journey - scaling.
Hot takes of the week cover the prospects for a merged Grab/GoTo financial services platform and the demise of Skype, the OG video calling service.
Timestamps
00:00 Intros by Prashanth!
03:08 The world’s most exciting actuary?
06:10 The journey of building SingLife
14:02 How to raise $50M
16:00 The joy of building
17:10 Why the Chocolate product works
21:03 There’s no such thing as a free lunch (or chocolate)
24:20 The dark side of super scaling
27:55 What Walter would have done differently
33:00 The power of finfluencers
35:00 Where does Chocolate go from here?
37:00 Ain’t my first rodeo
39:20 Chocolate AI
41:28 Where AI will impact the financial services industry first
42:58 The joy of doing fun stuff
44:30 A blessing in disguise
46:20 Grab/GoTo - how the financial services support each other
50:34 Farewell to Skype, the end of an era
Give us feedback or nominate topics & speakers at 6040podcast@techinasia.com
60/40 is co-hosted by: Prashanth Ranganathan, Peter Bithos, and Maria Li. Special thanks to our guest, Walter de Oude of Chocolate Finance.
A podcast by Tech in Asia, a member of The Business Times.