In Conversation with Laurent Thevenet, Co-founder of Awan-Awan

A French who successfully sold a startup in his home country before, Laurent is now in Singapore doing yet another startup, RightBrain. Awan-Awan.com is their latest creation that focuses on the Malay community. We sat with Laurent to hear his thoughts on Awan-Awan, his experience in Singapore and why he chose to move here.

What is Awan-Awan.com? What does the name mean?
With awan-awan.com (”clouds” in Malay), we seek to be the pre-eminent rich media online destination targeting the Malay community. However, the site will be presented in English for international appeal. Our first phase of launch is our webtv with self produced bilingual content with subtitles. In the future, we will have a music section and also a webfilm section to feature our local Malay talents and products.

Who’s behind this and what were your backgrounds before doing this?

RightBrain Pte Ltd, the company behind awan-awan.com was founded in April 2008 by my partner, Nina Halim, and me.

Nina (Singapore) is our creative director and has a background in the media industry, having been active on TV as a talent and a producer for a long time while diversifying her skills more recently by doing business development and marketing.

Myself (Laurent Thevenet), I am coming from Marseille (France) and i am the technical director at RightBrain. I have a degree in Software Engineering but have became a Java Engineer, a Database Architect or a UNIX adminstrator through different jobs and companies while being a lecturer at the Marseille University from 2002 to 2006. I suppose I can be considered a geek ;) I created my own startup in France in 2006 before deciding to move in Singapore beginning of 2008.

We do not forget Zac Boon from Thymos Capital. A great guy.

awan-awan.com – Season 1 – Teaser from Laurent Thevenet on Vimeo.

Why did your team start Awan-Awan?

We created RightBrain with the initial ambition of going upfront with etsy.com in the region but we became quickly aware of the i.Jam program and start thinking about an IDM project by mid-june last year. The project was initially named ChopTwist.com and got an approval from MDA by mid-august. We had that simple objective of reaching this large number of Malay viewers who don’t watch TV anymore and are online instead. We are going to catch them where they are on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, iTunes…

As a foreigner, what made you come to Singapore to continue your entrepreneurial pursuits?

Singapore is obviously one of the best countries in the world to create a company. The government has done a lot to promote entrepreneurship via tax reductions, simplified creation, entrepass for foreigners, various grants…

The size of the country is an advantage too. You cannot imagine how difficult it is in a country like France to physically meet people in your industry. Even if LinkedIn or its european counterparts Viadeo and Xing are trying to close the gap there, the size of Singapore is allowing easy networking. Everything and everyone is close.

From your experience, how does the entrepreneurial environment in Singapore compare to that in France?

France is a beautiful country, especially the mediterranean coast where I come from. When I am there, i can go skiing in the French Alps in less than 3 hours in winter or go to the beach in 30 minutes in summer. The quality of life is wonderful.

But there are some shortcomings when it comes to business. I have created a company there in 2006 and i think i was spending about 50% of my time dealing with administrative issues. When it is not about understanding why you are paying so much taxes while you are not making any money, it is about having never ending discussions with the government employees who have no idea for most of them what is it to run a business and who do not understand that i cannot wait 3 months to have my questions answered. That side was a nightmare and my conclusion is that to survive there, you either need a really big paid-up capital or the company to quickly make money.

What France and some countries in Europe lack is this culture of risk and entrepreneurship. You have to be really good to be successful, nobody is really helping you there. The education is of high quality but not giving you any real perspectives about entrepreneurship.

By the way, this bad experience did not prevent the company (or the technology in our case) to be sold at an early stage ;)

If you had to pick, Marketing or Technology? In this case, Marketing or Content?

We first focus on great content. Our technology is simple. There is nothing new in what we are doing. It is about how you are doing it.

Looking back, what has been your moment of greatest euphoria?

Definitely getting the approval for this project from MDA and Thymos Capital. It was giving us perspectives.

Has there been any time that you felt like quitting? How was it like to try to push yourself back up?

Everyday you want to give up, everyday you dream of success, everyday you think that too much has been done to just give up. So you just look forward and you don’t think too much.

Would you have done anything differently?

We can regret hiring the wrong people in some crucial positions and not having the reflex to ask them to quit as quickly as you should have. A startup is too fragile to waste time and money.

Production team.

Where do you see Awan-Awan in one year?

I see us travelling to Indonesia, Malaysia, Europe to create great content. I see us on TV too and why not in your preferred press kiosk too. But to reach this level, we need to grow fast with new investors in addition to our revenues to come.

How much funding are you looking for?

Yes, we are effectively looking for investors as we have 3 short term ambitions:

- The first one is to build a bigger team and produce wonderful content with the best creative people in each position (and switch to HD).
- The second one is to launch the music and films section asap. It means having more people helping us with it.
-The third one is to quickly expand to Malaysia and Indonesia with local teams (as we already have the connections there).

We have mid-long term ambitions too. I think it’s a bit early to talk about it in public but we know where we want to go and it could be huge.

Our current business model is based on exclusive advertisers for the TV Section (pre-roll advertising inside the videos and classic advertising spaces on the website). At this point of time and because we are still young in the eyes of the advertisers, it will not allow us to grow fast enough. The music and films sections with their low distribution costs could help us filling a part of the gap but it would take some time.

So, we are looking for a first investment around 300K with SPRING potentially investing S$1 for every dollar invested.

awan-awan.com is a unique website in south-east Asia with auto-produced broadcast quality content and modern distribution. The only company i know doing the same is revision3.com. They have raised something like US$9M between 2006 and 2007. We don’t intend to be like them but we are doing things the same way. We think as a TV channel.

Top 3 qualities an entrepreneur must have?

(1) Strongly believe you idea/project/product is the best out there. (2) Ready to make personal sacrifices. (3) Build a team with people better than you in their own positions (forget about your ego, we all have ego as entrepreneurs).

Thanks, Laurent. And good luck with Awan-Awan.com!

Contact: Laurent, laurent.thevenet@rightbrain.asia

Disclaimer: Gwen and BL are with Thymos Capital, an investor in RightBrain.

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