Sow and Scale
Interviews with entrepreneurs in SEA to help you build better companies
Sow and Scale
Reimagining Southeast Asia’s Cities Through Data | Cha-Ly Koh, CEO and Founder of UrbanMetry
Cha-Ly is the founder and CEO of UrbanMetry, a data analytics startup based in Malaysia focused on optimizing how cities and governments make decisions (Raised from Monk's Hill Ventures, 500 Global (Previously 500 Startups)). After multiple pivots—from a VR-based property marketplace to a consumer listing site—Cha-Ly discovered her niche in B2B data. Today, UrbanMetry holds one of the most comprehensive data sets for urban planning, property development, and lending decisions in Southeast Asia.
In our conversation, we cover:
• Why Cha-Ly believes entrepreneurs must be a little “mad” to survive
• Early missteps in B2C and how she cut losses quickly
• Building 50+ layers of urban data and tapping into massive enterprise deals
• How motherhood prepared her for navigating startup chaos
• Real frameworks for complex B2B sales (including Miller Heiman’s “New Strategic Selling”)
• The four stages of data-based decision-making—and how governments often stall at stage one
• Staying grounded through cold swims, sleep discipline, and a focus on real-world impact
Watch elsewhere:
• Youtube: https://youtu.be/7GSUR6Sk6uw
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reimagining-southeast-asias-cities-through-data-cha/id1781364637?i=1000690313646
Where to connect with Chaly:
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cha-ly-koh/
• UrbanMetry website: https://www.urbanmetry.com/
Where to find Eric:
• WhatsApp group link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/CM0YQhhFZF0BfdtmAwTFKb
• Substack: https://sowandscale.substack.com/
00:00 The Madness of Entrepreneurship
00:34 Introducing Cha-Ly and UrbanMetry
01:14 The Entrepreneurial Journey Begins
02:37 Challenges and Pivots in Business
07:16 Building Urbanmetry's Data Empire
10:34 Navigating Southeast Asian Markets
16:06 From B2C to B2B: A Strategic Shift
25:37 Scaling and Solving Real-World Problems
41:53 Navigating Early Challenges and Founding Values
43:03 Trust and Difficult Conversations
45:20 Solo Foundership and Team Dynamics
49:39 Scaling Urbanmetry with Venture Funding
52:28 Innovations in Urban Planning and Data Science
01:00:16 Sales Strategies and Client Management
01:03:12 Technological Investments and Decision Making
01:11:43 Reflections on Entrepreneurship and Parenthood
the funniest thing about being an entrepreneur is that you can't be a good entrepreneur if you're not mad. You have to always. Have that ability or that courage to push yourself over the edge. And then see what happens. In order to preserve capital to pivot. I cut half the team and I'm like, nope, not doing this business anymore. It's not gonna make any money. I think the most important thing is that a lot of bosses They are very bad at supporting their team because they're not understanding the juniors problems fast I made a huge mistake. My biggest mistake was
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Hi everyone. Today I have Charlie with me. Charlie is the founder and CEO of UrbanMetry, a data analytics company based in Malaysia, providing geospatial and temporal data to help cities and governments make better decisions. They serve clients like Saim Darby, Sunray Property, and have also raised 2 million in USD in 2022, backed by top tier ventures such as Monkey Ventures. and 500 startups. In 2023, Urban Metri was the only Malaysian company recognized as a tech pioneer by the World Economic Forum. Charlie lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with her family, and she's also an active member of the World Economic Forum's Global Commission for Nature Positive Cities and the Davos Alliance.
In this conversation, we dive into why you need to kind of be crazy to consider entrepreneurship. Pivots from B2C to VR before going all in on government and B2B sales, how she built one of the leading comprehensive data sets. Four cities in Southeast Asia. Leveraging sales frameworks to secure enterprise relationships. How. She leads as a solo founder and manage your stress and family life and much more. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Thanks for being here, Charlie.
Chaly:Most welcome, Eric. Nice to meet you.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:So apart from the typical corporate introductions, how do you view yourself within and outside of business?
Chaly:You've, just done my accolades, so thanks so much for doing that. Generally, people know me as a benevolent tyrant, maybe? I'm also a little bit of a drinker I guess that's the only thing people do remember from, a lady career person. I'm a fan of music. I'm a fan of art. Those are the usual vices, I think, for myself. Yeah, and I spent too little time with my kids and not enough time with my parents. But that's a, That's the life of an entrepreneur.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Just to warm us up. I think Before this if there was one thing that you wanted to leave people with, it was. don't do it, right? If someone wants to go into startups, don't do it. So I'm just wondering what you meant by that and who do you think entrepreneurship really is for?
Chaly:Yeah. I was reflecting about this a little bit in the past few months and I realized that entrepreneurs are a little bit like an artist. So I personally am a fan of the arts. I like a lot of art. I try to play music. And I realized that this journey of mine as an entrepreneur is very similar to being an artist. And really, you can't, the funniest thing about being an entrepreneur is that you can't be a good entrepreneur if you're not mad. It's a bit of a, not mad scientist, but you have to always. Have that ability or that courage to push yourself over the edge. And then see what happens. So is a constant self discovery where you take immense amount of risk just to discover another thing about yourself and your team and what, the world I guess is capable of. People don't tell you this. They all tell you all this like nice and dandy and we have this like nice open bar at the VC but it's not at all. Like it's really, it is literally taking risks all day, every day. And yeah. And the worst part is that it's very addictive. You, you can't, you almost can't. Stop yourself from doing the next risky thing. So the funniest thing is that urban metric is in the risk business. So we are there to inform our clients, to and quantify the risk for them so then they can make better informed decisions. And that theoretically lowers down the risk that they're taking in business. But myself as an entrepreneur It is, like, all day, every day, risk taking. Yeah if you are not mad, don't do it.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:That's really interesting and a good warning for, for those interested who haven't
Chaly:which I find very strange. I find it very strange, because I saw, now that, there are, like, these courses, To be like a founder or like courses to become a tech founder in like leading universities with a certificate and all, it always makes me like crack up because it's like, you can't teach this.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:in my four years of studying finance and HR and psychology, I've never sold anything because of school. Like it always has to come because of my own ambitions, like outside of school. And I wonder why business schools don't teach that. Maybe, maybe it's time to rethink their business models any kind of interesting discoveries you've made in the past 10 years of, of building urban metrics. Mm.
Chaly:Might be counterintuitive while we think like this, whatever that entrepreneurs do cannot be learned. They are, everything can be engineered. So it is interesting because while you think that whatever you do is like the first of its kind is so amazing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Somebody else has thought about it. I can tell you that for sure. Like I think 10 ideas I hear, maybe 9. 8 I've heard it before. So don't think that, you have the most fantastic way of doing something somebody else somewhere has done it before and it is just a lot cheaper to learn from other people than you yourself putting money in and learning your way. I think you can run experiments, but if you can build off other people's experiments, it is just so much cheaper. So try not to think that You are a unicorn. There's no such thing. It doesn't exist. You can work very hard at solving, making the cogs work and then your machine will start turning. And it's a lot of it is resilience. So I, almost like very little of it is, I had this brilliant idea, I'm sorry. It is not, and it's, so I think it's one thing that I've learned. One is cheaper to learn from other people and then build off other people's knowledge. Not to say that you can't experiment. The funniest thing is that you have to experiment, but it's just that when you start the experimentation and deciding what is it that you are doing differently. that could yield a different result. I think that is important.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:I think we'll dive into some of your own personal experiments as well as, you know, some of the experiments you've taken from, from other people's experiences. But maybe I'll just move into some of your early experiences. You've been building Urban Mechie for the past 10 years, could you just give a brief overview of what it does and if you're comfortable sharing some of the revenues, employees, growth figures as well?
Chaly:Yeah. Urban Metri is a city data company. So we collect, we clean and we restructure a lot of public and privately procured data. And with the layers of data, so we don't have 50 plus layers of city data. So city data is includes things like. Where the humans go during the day. Where your water pipes are, how your buses run, how frequent, where the housing is, which is like the layer that we started off with was housing, like where are the houses, and how much do they cost. So that was our first like entry point. And then we realized that was not enough. To understand how, why we pay so much for the, so you go down a rabbit hole, right? Why do people pay so much for this, per square foot here versus another? Sometimes people think of it as a fact. No, there are a lot of factors that goes into it. How people price. A lot of it has to do with the banks, actually. Macro, micro. We started layering and layering, and then now we have this giant database, that we use for Everything that you want to physically put on the city or virtually put on the city if you want to think about it that way. But I think in the virtual world, who can beat Google and Facebook at this point, right? We have the advantage on like the physical stuff. So anything that's physically on the in the city, we have a moat and a big advantage. And largely, I'm ashamed to say this, is because is the government. Yeah, so it's I can move slightly faster. I'm a little bit more nimble. I don't, I'm not succumb to a budget cycle. Yeah, not so proud of it, but really they are. And the only one I can't win against is Singapore government, right? Yeah. I don't even bother. I don't even bother to go to Singapore because the government does everything, right? But everywhere else, thankfully not everybody is Singapore.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm. And whatever layers you've been talking about, I I would that be considered what you call geographic info, information
Chaly:geospatial data. Yeah, geospatial data. But I think the funniest thing is that people think that, Oh, this thing should be free. And then they start to realize, How come the government doesn't have it? How come the government doesn't even know where my land title ends? Why is it in paper? Why do we not know where all our bus stops are? Why? They start to question these things because, actually, the physical space is very hard. A little bit, the analogy I would use is like AI, right? To build a robot, we always thought about robot as in that da moving thing, right? That is a zillion times harder to build. Anything physically moving is a zillion times harder to build. Then, I'm not saying chat GPT is not hard to build. No, I'm not saying LLMs is not hard to build. It is, but the physical robot that actually does a lifting thing, it's a lot harder. Very similar types of, challenge. You're trying to digitize the physical world, it's a lot harder than digitizing, your sales. That's digital to digital it's like writing to writing, right? But, like, when you are physically trying to digitize something, it's very hard.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Yeah, I was just speaking to a robotics founder and I think he's taking a few years before even launching his first Product to market even though there's been a lot of Charles Going back to your journey before starting urban metri, you, you studied abroad, you've you've been to MIT doing city planning, architecture, urban planning, and then you went into some of the urban planning works in Malaysia. So when you connect the dots backwards, were there a few moments or experiences you think that shaped you for starting urban metri?
Chaly:Yeah, generally I've done project management. I think I would call it project management, for lack of a better word, right? Where I'm like jack of all trades, for private and public projects. Public projects that I had to coordinate, I had to get people to say understand the vision, just decide as a team what to do together. Just decision making as a team, right? And it was so hard both in government and in private, both in hundreds organizations that are, like, hundreds and hundreds of people, and organizations that are, like, five people. It didn't matter to, so I went from government. To government linked company, like Gleeks investment companies. To private companies, like really small private companies. And, it was surprising, but I thought the shrinking of the numbers would reduce the friction around communication. But it didn't as much as I thought, primarily because, Southeast Asia, but also the way the industry works is the experience or the louder voice Trump's like, how many years have you been in this industry? So the funniest thing is that when you do that, you keep doing the same thing. So I've done this for 30 years, right? Okay. And then do we continue doing this for the next 30 years? And they're like, yeah, It's a very strange phenomenon to me when you know it doesn't work. So in my head, doing something over and over again an expecting a different result is insanity, right? But it was very difficult to convince people to agree, like on something that is, they know generally like what they should do. But you end up having the chairman just, go to Switzerland, come back and say I saw this really nice river and we should do it. It's, really? No. So because of those kind of experiences, I think I got a little I was young and then I was very frustrated. So I just realized that if you guys keep saying there's no data, I'm just gonna give you the data. I'm just gonna get it. And then now you can say, I have no data right to make this decision. I think that was the main sort of motivation, and then it went down into this rabbit hole. And then now I have a company with 50 people in it and all kinds of scaling challenges and, ups and downs, right? Yeah, so I kept digging this hole, it gets deeper and deeper.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Wow.
Chaly:yeah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:I see. That's, that's really interesting. And if, if you don't mind sharing, is there a ballpark figure of like the kind of revenues
Chaly:so I think for us, we definitely have it in the millions last. Both us dollars and otherwise. The good thing is that we are profitable. So I'll be, to be business is strong profit margins and profitable. So it is really a function of, how do we Look at the chimera of Southeast Asia because we are not one country for the longest time. People keep telling people like Southeast Asia is like large, like it's like United States, right? It's not, it's like a total lie, right? So it's, yeah, seven. Have you watched Raya? The Disney movie you should
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:cartoon. No,
Chaly:Yeah, it's a cartoon. So it's actually about Southeast Asia. And it's about like how. The countries are, like, broken down to the heart of the dragon, and the head of the dragon, I don't know, whatever, and the tail of the dragon. We are like that. We speak different languages, we have different cultures, we have different nuances. And I think, it is hard for B to C, but in B to C world, you have a good. I'm gonna sell you this thing I don't know Fashion. I'm gonna sell you, this T shirt, right? You get a T shirt. The communication is different, but generally people buy about the same things. But when you do enterprise, I can tell you they are very different. The way you enter the enterprise, the things that they value as an enterprise partner is completely different. And even when they tell you no or yes, They can mean the other way around. Yes, but actually they mean no. Or no, they actually mean yes, but. So it's, yeah, so it's very different.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:It sounds hard, I mean, for B2C, and even harder for B2B, if I'm hearing you correctly. How many, how many markets are you in?
Chaly:We are now in Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam. Singapore, if you count. And rural Japan. Why we say Singapore is because a lot of people in Johor targeting Singaporeans, like to purchase houses in Johor. So we know a lot about Singapore, we have a big database of it, but yeah the land generally is in Johor.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:I see. As a Singaporean, I've been hearing people wanting to buy land in Chor Hoa, you know, even people my age wanting to go there and relocate
Chaly:If you're running a podcast, it sounds pretty possible, right? Yeah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:maybe moving on to how you founded UrbanMetri. Yeah, you've had so many years in, in the industry, not having data to back up your assumptions and to back up your decisions. So walk me through the ideation to validation phase on before you went all in, right? Do you hold off the idea for a while, speak to people, work on it on the side? How do you find the conviction to go all in?
Chaly:Honestly, it's been a while, so I'm just going to speak from memory. Some of this is maybe made up, just disclaimer, but no, I didn't make it up. I was running, so I left corporate work, and I started a consultancy, actually, before I, dump money into doing this. I basically started a consultancy, called Urban Matters Solutions, actually. So basically city, which is urban matters, right? And it's a solution. So anyway, it was like a one woman show. I consulted, for very boutique, property developers, right? And I was just doing everything from like land acquisition to marketing to sales package, sales training, everything like from. Going to the council. That experience actually helped me actually fill up quite a lot of gaps. And at some point, I was even helping them do sales. Just to get the experience of why their goods moved. After doing all that while I was doing all that, actually, I started this consultancy, this little consultancy of mine, which is a one person. Then I started what we used to be called property price tag. So probably price tag was supposed to be the data cause I didn't have data, right? So I wanted to get the data and then we wanted to just make it democratic. So we wanted to give out. So the first business model was, it's very dumb, but the first business model was, give out all the data, as many data as you can find, just give it out. And then we make money out of advertisement. So it's very similar to. It was very similar to Zillow in the US, right? So we were going to like, give out all these houses, if you're a real estate agent, you can claim the house and la. So it's like data drives eyeballs and then we sell advertisement. Okay. Completely died just to let you guys know, like it didn't work at all. I spent quite a lot of money doing it and fell flat in my face. I think the. The blessing in disguise was, I am very good at cutting loss. And I'm
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:do you burn, actually?
Chaly:I can't remember honestly, but it was painful. It was painful, it was a lesson learned. And honestly, maybe it wasn't such a bad idea at that time, because everybody was doing it. Everybody was doing marketplaces, platforms, like it wasn't so bad, right? But I think my biggest mistake at the time was I kept asking people in the industry. Oh, do you want this? Do you want data? Of course, they all want data, right? But wanting it and paying for it is not the same thing.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm hm. Mm.
Chaly:in Southeast Asia, the only people, the number of people who are willing to pay for it was very small. Because they were all property people. Because it was also intangible as data, the kind of audience is It's just not very large, right? Yeah. So the good thing about me is that I'm not very afraid of admitting that I made a mistake or I just, people make mistakes. I did this calculation wrong. And then in order to preserve capital to pivot. I cut half the team and I'm like, nope, not doing this business anymore. It's not gonna make any money. And I went out a rabbit hole actually. At first, I, when the advertisement thing didn't work, I was the first to do VR property sales. I even have, I even had those VR goggles. I don't know if I should say this on a podcast, but we had this VR goggles and we filmed all these houses walk through Of these houses in 360. So if you Google property price, there's a panda that basically showcase how you can see the whole house with VR. VR, like
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:very
Chaly:see the whole house. Yeah, this was in 20 like 15 or 16, I can't remember. But it's 10 years ago and we had all this, like we even had a mascot of a panda and he was like watching the, we filmed all these houses and we started selling advertisements to direct to home buyer, a home seller. So if you own the house we would film your whole house. We would put it on our platform. People can walk through, dah. And you can keep, you don't have to pay an agent. You sell directly. And we even had a concierge and a concierge had like, Was able to answer phone calls, blah, blah, blah. So I went down this rabbit hole, right? I was like, yeah, I'm going to sell I had these eyeballs. I'm going to sell advertisement packages. People were willing to pay us a thousand ringgit, I think, which is like 250 for one advertisement. And I was like, wow! This is amazing, right? People are willing to pay me that. And then But then I realized that I made a huge mistake. My biggest mistake was everybody who paid me was selling this million dollar houses and million dollar houses. It's very hard to move, right? So they like the novelty of, they like the novelty of you can see the whole house. I don't have to open up the door, but who buys a million dollar house on VR?
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:at it. Wow.
Chaly:funny because we had a few properties that was like 300,000, like really low level ones, like cheaper ones. And those flew off the shelf like we advertised. And they got sold. We advertised, got school. It was really cool. Homeowners were sending us flowers. They were so happy with us. They, because they paid us so little money and they saved like thousands, right? We saved like 9,000 ringette or something. And they paid us like hundreds, like maybe 500 ringette. So they were like, they just cashed in, send us flowers, chocolates, right? But. I had five of those. Everybody else was million dollars. Because our business model was, you have to pay us up front. You pay us, we do the job, and it's not on success basis. We do the work and then, and it's like advertisement, right? You pay, but a lot of the people wasn't willing to pay. If you think about the real estate agents, right? They get paid only when they successfully sell. So the homeowner who actually listed never had to pay anything up front. So this actually, psychology is you procure the service and then you pay later, was something that I completely missed out. Anyway, completely
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:you end up pivoting into, from a very consumer fun That sounds like a property guru or like an A& I co idea. How do you pivot all the way to what you are today?
Chaly:No okay, so then, at that time I went down this rabbit hole, right?
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Yeah.
Chaly:And I realized it was a huge mistake, because, That was not my mission. My mission was to build better cities. My mission was to get these people to stop building this nonsense and really use the data to build better, right? But I went down this rabbit hole because I built a platform. Because remember, I wanted to give out the data for free and people are more informed, so they would demand better things, like free information flow. And then because I, because people wanted something else I went down the rabbit hole and said, okay, this is what you want. And so I keep coming up with products that, what they wanted, but it's not really what I wanted to do.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Yeah.
Chaly:And then I was like, wait, I don't really want to do this. And so I like cut and then I said, okay, no, no more B2C whatever remaining capital, I'm just going to go back to what I really want. I need to move the needle. I need to influence how these things gets built and the B2C route was just very like obscure, not very direct. So yeah, so we then instead of investing in like building a B2C platform, we invested very heavily on building a database. So all the engineers. For like the, you are like the consumer, the front end stuff got fired. I'm sorry if you are one of the people who got fired, but basically gone and everybody was a data engineer or dev ops, like really like strong engineering guys. And we paid like for, like we retained or grew that engine, the data engine and just got it. So then we went down okay, this data is not clean enough, this data is not clean enough, I want this data, I want this. So we started to accumulate using the tech talent that we had, to accumulate the data. And because I already, I was one of those guys who wanted this thing anyway, so it was very easy for me to be immediately getting revenue. I go to a person, I go to a property developer, I go to a bank, I go to the government, and I'm like, I have this database. And they're like, yeah! Let's do this, right? Because I was on the other side and I wanted it. So it was very easy, but of course it's not as sexy or it's Oh, my user is I don't know, 10, 000, whatever. But it is very long cycle. The immediate hanging fruits was the, so there are people who would immediately adopt, but then enterprises who are not so educated. Then you have to spend time and effort to go and educate them da. So the sales cycle is completely different for an enterprise.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Well, I'm very interested to hear how you started building the first few data sets with your data team, but maybe before that, how much money did you put into this business and how long were you going at it already? Do you think to get a more stable job or were you, I'm just wondering how you made those kind of financial trade offs and how long that journey was before you? Pivoted into what it is today.
Chaly:Okay, it's very difficult to answer. I think at that point, when we were properly price tagged we were quite fortunate to have really good angel investors
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm
Chaly:who didn't actually give me a lot of pressure. They just wanted me around, to, they, they like my work anyway. So a lot of times the trade off is I have to do some consultancy work for them for free on the side. Pick up the phone call when they call and say, Charlie, what do you think about this piece of land? That was the thing. And they make a lot of money out of that anyway while I go crazy. So there was that. And then, I think the debt part, the money part was intense, but it was not like I didn't pay myself like for a long time. And I think there's two factors here. One, I am a woman, so I have the fortunate ability to leech off my husband for a while. He has a stable job. He has a stable, he has a stable outfit. I don't spend very much. I'm not a big spender.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm-hmm. Mm.
Chaly:I have sins, but my sins are generally consumables. Some of the people hearing is going to say her consumers are a bit expensive, but yes, some of them are, but I think I, I have an option. So it is optional. It's not I have all this like debt or so it was okay. Lifestyle was something I never really upgraded. So it was not a big deal. But the obsession was very real. So the obsession was, I need to make it work. And I think the hard part, if you say that, was there temptations to go back to corporate work? Of course there's always going to be like those down moments and you go what am I doing? But I think it was not the money.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Hmm,
Chaly:think a lot of it was It's too hard, right? This is a really easy one. This is a very easy route. That is I just have to agree. And then the year end holidays in Hokkaido, The flying around the world, The C suites perks and the driver and la like all those is just you just have to agree and then it's yours. So psychologically it is seen as a refuge. So I think resisting the, that refuge is hard, but I don't think it was like a I'm lucky that it was not it was not one of those things. If I don't do it, I, I'll run out of money to feed my family. So it's not, it's never one of those. But that's a function of the fact that don't upgrade your lifestyle, sit in economy class. Yeah. If the moment you convert, you're done. Don't do it. Yeah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Wow, how long do you go without salary for?
Chaly:I can't really remember, but it's it's, it's a while yeah. And then I had to site hustle, like not from the company. So I had to site hustle and do other like stuff, but more consultancy work to make sure that I can survive. But then I think, yeah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Always knew you wanted to be an entrepreneur like during your corporate life or You were just really just frustrated by this and decided to try it yourself
Chaly:No, I'm not sure if I've always done. I've tried attempts. I've done Pitches like before I started and I was working with corporate I have done a lot of pitches and I have done I don't always know this is what I want to do for my life No, but it was more like oh, let's try this. It didn't work. Oh, that's right. It wasn't like so disappointing
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Yeah
Chaly:up the corporate ladder was To me or even being a COO of somebody. So actually my dream job was to be a COO to a very strong CEO. That was my dream job because in my head, you never had to take full accountability of your decisions because somebody else is above you, right? You can always blame him or her. But at the same time, you're like. Number two, right? So you get to do quite a lot of things and you get to make decisions, quite a lot of things, but there's always somebody else to blame, right? That was my job, but yeah. I wanted, yeah, that was my dream job. Yeah. So that, that one you guys could consider, that sounds like a good deal.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Just to recap, you, you started a property price tag. You, you started with ads, you laid off half the team. And then did a VR property, software, but decided to pivot into serving enterprises and governments. So you laid off a bit more of the team as well to focus on data,
Chaly:But we were very small. I won't say laid off. It was like eight people. You cut two or three, so it wasn't very big, but it was, yeah,
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:And
Chaly:was still a decision that I had to make.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:I see. Were you a technical person in, in, in the sense of data, or, or do you, how do you develop the first few data sets given this wasn't a very publicly available,
Chaly:Oh,
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:you, you are probably creating the first data set forPoint of time, you, you are collating all of them, cleaning all of them. How do you manage to create the first models? And, and then how do you manage to bring this to your developers, governments, and banks? And. And get them to even believe in your models. Right. Because they were probably, you know, it still in quite a scrappy stage and
Chaly:Yeah, I think the to be very honest this was done like almost a decade ago, right? Like eight. Seven, eight years ago. I can count, I have a physics degree. But I was not a computer engineer, so I can't code, I can read the code, but I don't think I have the patience to actually sit down and code it. So it's not my character. So I'm my, I'm more of like a theory person. So yeah, I can count, I can math. And I'm actually pretty good at what I do. So I think, one of the things is that because I was in corporate, I was in the industry, I have network. I do have a reputation of what I could do.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:hmm.
Chaly:So a lot of people think that, Oh, I will start elementary too. Yeah, sure. I'm sure, but it's not the data sets. It is the fact that you can. I think it's going to be more and more true, right? Like in the age of A. I. It is the questions that you ask that is important. And I think it's the same with all my math friends like my friends who whose professional job is in mathematics, right? It doesn't matter. The answer. It does matter. But like the answer is easy part. It is the questions that you ask. And it's very difficult. Yeah, but I think it is very difficult to ask questions if you don't even know what you're trying to find out. So when the answer comes back, you actually don't know if it's correct. Industry experience is something that I think people like skip. They think it's irrelevant. AI can do everything. But the problem is, AI actually cannot tell if something is good or, yeah, in the right direction. Because you, sometimes you have to ask a series of questions around the data. I think for me, when I first started, I knew all the questions. I just didn't have the tools to answer them. So it was not hard, in a way, for me to do it. And whenever I couldn't find the perfect data set. For example. The Malaysian government at that time didn't publish racial distribution in a granular level. So one of the maps that Urban Metro is very famous for is our Naslimah Index. So we actually track the halal and non halal food establishment densities to know where the Muslims live, or the non Muslims live. Because we know exactly what we want To find out the path to get there becomes easy, right? Yeah. So I think that's the, that's a problem. I think today, a lot of people like they, they are building technologies and then finding an application for the technology.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:yeah, yeah,
Chaly:We know what the problem in the industry is. And we are helping our clients solve it by. the technical ability to actually answer those questions. So most of the, our customers when our business development meet them, the first thing they ask is what is your problem statement? What you want us, what do you want us to solve for you? What was your, what is it that you want answered? Then we will go and find an answer for you. It's not Hey, these are all the shiny things that we can do because it doesn't give you value. It doesn't actually solve your problem. So we need to understand what is their problem and how can we get the data to answer their question. And then we go and find the information for them. Most of the time, the information is with us already, but we have to layer them together and do it.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:It sounds like the discovery process was more of a collaborative one where you spoke to your your clients and then figured out what they really needed to solve before, going down to create some of these models. Is that, was that kind of the process that you took? Okay,
Chaly:So most of the time, what we will do is the funniest thing is that generally Kinds do have the same questions. So once you answered like for one bank, you will have the answers for many banks. So like it's it does the answers, the questions do repeat themselves sometimes. But the fun part is when they do ask a question that you haven't heard before then,
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:do you hear in the early days, I guess, and what kind of interesting ones do you get to hear and try to discover?
Chaly:so I guess the most recent one that we're really proud of is we did a piece for our bus network. So the question was, how do we increase bus ridership? Something quite so now we know, okay, this is your goal. This is what you want to use the technology for. Then we have to find out the metrics on what does success look like? What does non success look like? What's the range? What's the la. Then we go down the rabbit hole with them of the boundaries of what they can and cannot do. And then we assemble the data to power their model.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Wow,
Chaly:Yeah. It's very fun. It's very fun. When you get a very good problem statement, the team just lights up, we just, yeah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Wow, one thing you you talk about is having a very smart team and and of course a close team as well Because it sounds like your projects are almost little research projects that you're doing Sounds quite academic even I
Chaly:that's the really fun ones, but we have to make money, right? Actually, a lot of the stuff that we do is scalable. So the good thing is that, we solve, like I said, if you solve a problem statement for a bank, they generally have very similar problem statements because they don't actually evolve very fast. You see where I'm coming from? So it's if you have an, if you have an elephant that doesn't have two trunks or three trunks every five days, generally your vaccine or your medicine works for the same elephant, the next elephant, he moves very slowly, they evolve very slowly, so that's our advantage. But if you are giving, B to C is like virus. Today it works, your vaccine works, tomorrow it evolves. Then it doesn't work. So it's a bit like that. That's very high iteration. For us, it's like you solve a very big problem, but then it doesn't change very much over the time, yeah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Do you mind sharing what, what's the kind of scalable problems that you are solving?
Chaly:Okay, so one thing that we like to do is help clients, property developer clients predict their sales.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm,
Chaly:So we predict how many units of houses they can sell and where their land is, given the product that they are selling. So if you want to sell an apartment that's 500 square feet, this price, let's say 500, 000. I'm making stuff up, okay? So let's say this location, 500 square feet, 5, 000 1, 000 a square foot, so 500, 000. We can, we build models to tell you how fast can you sell your 500 units. Is it one month, three months, 12 months? And yeah, so we are judged by how accurate our predictions are.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:I see. So do you have any situations whereby it's not so accurate? Oh, yeah. You're saying,
Chaly:Yeah, so the fun thing is that. For property developers, this means very something very real. If I hold too much inventory, it is interest rate. It's translated to actual dollars and cents. Okay, if I hold this for another 12 months, I might have a cash flow problem. Because I overbuilt. The market can only take 500 units, right? And I thought it could take a thousand. So I went ahead and launched a thousand without market intelligence. And now I have 500 units unsold. That's a very big problem, right? Because the banks will go Hey, you're at least 500 units sitting around. What are you going to do with it, right? And that translates to money. So why do clients pay us so much money? Not because Charlie gives them transaction data it's not oh, she downloaded the data and cleaned it a little bit. It's not. It's the fact that when you use the intelligence properly, you actually save your cash flow.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
Chaly:We're very happy because a lot of our clients, they have very low inventory. We are also very picky with our clients. Yeah, we are very picky with our clients. We are expensive. Because we make sure our data is very accurate. Because, if it's not accurate, you're gonna come and say, You said I could sell a thousand units. I have 800 sitting in my books. What are you gonna do? It's really like that, right? So we do assess our clients, how we assess our clients. Some of our clients actually, we know they're not going to listen to the numbers. Then we say, thank you very much. Because hard to go to a doctor and then the other runs an MRI or like a blood test and tells you, Hey, you have really high sugar level. And then you go ah, I'll take my diabetic medicine sometime. It's the person who you're working with is a relationship, right? So what we do, we are not even a doctor, okay, we are MRI machine or the blood test machine. So I can give you the test result, which is like your blood sugar is high.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm hmm.
Chaly:The doctor will give you the medicine, do this. But if you don't follow, that is, is very difficult. Yeah. Yeah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:creating a vitamin, but once you take it, you realize how good it is. I guess that's how, that's the experience of your, your clients as well. And, and you do serve some of the biggest clients in Malaysia, at least when it comes to the development. So
Chaly:Yeah. Yeah. So we.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:you charge. Yeah.
Chaly:Yeah. Yeah. I think we are like the premium product of data analytics. There are platforms, that's available, but I think what they do is very different from what we do. We predict your sales. They tell you, historically, this is the number of units that were sold. It's different, right?
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Yeah. Were there any playbooks when it came to building a data product that was helpful? Hmm. Hmm.
Chaly:I don't recommend any playbooks primarily because I think the playbook is, definitely an industry specific one. So if you're in property, it's property. If you're in banking, it's banking. So the data play for each of this is more specific to the industry because the problems are different. Okay. Thank you. I really don't recommend harvesting data and processing it. I think you could do that in the early 2000s when it's like the dot com. Everybody, just scrape everything online and then like they have their own database. Yeah. No, we are 20 years down the road already. Sorry.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:yeah, it sounds like it's, it's a real combination of, you know, being in the weeds with your clients, but also creating something scalable alongside that, that, that allows you to deliver such so much value as well. I'm just going to move into a final question on that kind of. You know, the early days of Urban Metri, which is the founding team. So I know you had a few founding team members initially, some were part time and ended up not working on Urban Metri with you. Can you walk me through how you approach those difficult conversations with them? If difficult.
Chaly:So one thing about me is that I am, we, there are five founding values, which we only after eight or nine years wrote it down because we read, we had Stripe CEO scaling people and we were like, Oh shoot, we have to write it down. So like we wrote it down. And one of those
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm. Mm. Yeah.
Chaly:key values that we have is trust. And
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm.
Chaly:Our trust is slightly different from what people think of trust. So we will interview people. So it's one of those things that we use when we interview folks for cultural fit. And they think of it as, Oh, do other people trust me? Am I trustworthy? I'm honest. No. That's not what we mean. when we say trust, it means that we are able to trust. Are you able to trust other people? So I think even in those difficult conversations generally I take on the I take on the perception of no ill intent. Nobody has ill intent. Okay. It is not out of malice. That's where I start. This person, or I myself, Do not go into this conversation in ill intention, but just somehow that our goals or our vision or like what we think is best might not align or doesn't conquer, doesn't fit. So then we are very honest about what is it that we want and then how best to achieve it for all parties. I think that's the, that's a premise that you. Come with, then you can end very quickly, very well. Generally, I will say generally, because I don't think I've achieved this a hundred percent. I'm sure there are people out there who hates my guts, but it does happen when we underperform us and stuff like that. And it's very hard, right? But generally we've had folks who, who left the company, like a lot of our company events, We have ex staff who just shows up yay, hi, so it's like a whether they were founding or not founding, think but yeah, you just have to be very honest about what is it that you want and be very clear about it. And I think generally, if people with no ill intent, they will try to align those. Interest plan.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Yeah. Do you have any stories to share about how you approach some of these conversations with your co-founders? Because it is, it is one of the
Chaly:Heh.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Most frequently, most frequent ways where, where startups die. Right. Is where they are not able to
Chaly:Is it? I don't know.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:align with their,
Chaly:I'm not sure if I'm the best person though. I've lost so many, and then I think I've, I have, I'm a solo founder, right? I'm just left alone. So I don't know about giving advice about
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:And that's difficult, right? I mean, being a solo founder, it's typically not, not easy. Or advise you to have co founders.
Chaly:It's really stupid. And not that I chose it. I guess nobody wants to work with me or could work with me. But whether, some of my core team members like it or not, a lot of them have been around for seven, eight years. So to me, they are as good as a founder. But I think psychologically, sometimes it is very difficult to have that title. Because the responsibility becomes extremely heavy. And I, sometimes I feel like it's not necessary to do that to them. But other than that, I think yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure if the titles do matter, like in terms of commitment to the company, but I think there is like a reverse sort of responsibility that could be very heavy. Yeah. But I don't know.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:if you, you, you would rather not put that kind of responsibility on others. Like I, I know companies who hire, engineers and then promote them to like co founding engineers or even companies out there who just started out and then they hire initial members and just throws around or gives out, gives out the title of co founder just to like motivate people more, but it almost sounds as if. Your approach is slightly different towards that.
Chaly:I don't know. I think if the person really likes titles, they can't work here. I don't think any, the kind of, I don't know, I don't think the challenges and the tenacity that's required is going to be compensated by a title.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Hmm.
Chaly:Yeah, working in Urban Metry is not easy. Everybody tells me that. And I think if you go to our Glassdoor, they'll tell you. This is no easy. It's not the easiest way to, to cruise by right? I don't think anybody who comes to the company and says that, Hey, I want to join because she gave me a co founder title. I don't know. Won't last five minutes, man. I
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:be mission driven and truly care about what you're doing there, regardless of
Chaly:don't know about truly care about what you are doing. I think it's more They need to have the self confidence beyond the title.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Hmm. Hmm.
Chaly:It's not the same thing, right? Yeah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Hmm.
Chaly:The self confidence that's required to do what we do, Goes beyond your title.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Hmm. Wow. Wow. That's, that's very interesting because I think sometimes I hear about how running startups is a way to do things that. you are definitely not really qualified for but you have to do it anyways. I'm not sure if you are kind of touching on that but
Chaly:Yeah. So you need to like, just go and do. And that's every day.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:yeah. I think quite a bit of advice I've been getting as a someone early in my career is don't focus on titles but focus on learning early on in in career because yeah titles are not quite performative in that sense
Chaly:It really depends on what, What are the goals. I think for people, I think for some people, the titles are really important because they use it for, as stepping stones for their next it's like part of their resume oh, I I check this box, and then I check this box, and then I check this box, and then, oh, I fulfilled all my boxes, bingo, and then I go to the next one, right? I think it serves its purpose titles do help when you're trying to assess how much contribution you're making. or how important this person is in the organization.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm
Chaly:And sometimes it's helpful within the organization because people realize in your tribe, where are the key cogs? And these are the people that you rely on to, to keep it moving. Right? And it is a certain level of recognition, of like where they are in the tribe. But I think. Beyond that, it doesn't do very much. So it is quite temporary lah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Moving on to how you've been scaling Urban Metri, you, you raised 2 million in USD in 2022 from Mungsil Ventures for product development and BD. How did you decide to get venture funding and what was that process like?
Chaly:So I've known months here for a number of years. I really like what they do and had several conversations with the general partners part about being a solo founder,
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm.
Chaly:when you're in the risk business is. You swing from overthinking the risk to under thinking the risk, right? So it's hard to gauge because you're literally talking to the mirror and go Charlie, is it a good idea? Yeah, no, the talking to the mirror. So it's not great. So I wanted folks who's on my side who think through things with me and intellectually I have to respect, right? So I think. That combination itself was really hard to find. But of course, Mongsil is one of the smartest VCs you can find in Singapore. That intellectual sort of like chemistry was very hard to find. And when I met them, they basically told me that what we have Is like a chest full of trust that enterprise and government, etc, that we have built a chest full of trust in the data that we have. It is time to see what else it can do. So the scalability of that trust and how do, how we, how do you scale that? My, my previous failure with B2C was not like great. So there is that sort of like shadow already, right? So then you needed to get people who are more experienced and or who understands this space a little bit more to harvest what we have and make it better. So I think a lot of the motivation was there because at that time, urban metric was already profitable, but is it scalable? Yeah, I could go international, I could we were like 20 people, 20 plus people already. So it wasn't like We don't know what we were doing or it's not like that. It was already growing as a enterprise business but we know we could do more we know that there's a lot to unpack but I needed like some help like with thinking through The full potential of the product so yeah, so we decided, that we were ready emotionally and financially to take on the challenge. So that's when we took the VC money.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Yeah. And in a sense, it's, it's kind of like rocket fuel for, to, to scale your company to the next level. You've been scaling into, into things such as home loans and also solving the problems of like vacant homes. Would this be part of that growth ambition? And how do you manage to stay true to your mission at the same time with, with, with these factors in play?
Chaly:So our main mission is to build better cities, right? So we've arguably done quite a lot of it. And a lot of people are very surprised and I remember a mentor telling me that I was crazy and then five years later. She was like, wow, you're really crazy because you actually did it, right? So you actually sold a product that I thought no nobody would buy because a lot of like property developers they pride themselves with That the experience is unique to themselves, right? And then now I've digitized it, I've quantified it, and sometimes people see that as a not it doesn't align with their own self belief and their own self reflection, right? The fact that I sold something like that was already surprising. Then we were like, okay. That moved the needle. We were able to prevent some terrible constructions. We were able to prevent. Or lower down quite a lot of inventory, right? So people will have fewer unsold stock etc. But then if you stare at the numbers, I still have 1. 9 million vacant houses. If you stare across the border from Singapore to Johor, I have like 30, 000 units of empty units, right? So then you start to think, can we do more? And can we do it faster? So that's when we realized that we need to move the needle by having a stick in these vacant houses. We need to have stick in the control, like how this stock moves. So I think that's why we started off dipping our toes again into the B2C segment. And we are basically triangulating three, in a way we are still a data company, right? So we are still collecting data, but we are collecting something a little bit more intimate, right? With the home loans so when I say intimate, no, we are still on the no private data. So no personal data collection. We don't collect any personal data. So we took a long time building a home loan application tool for our bank. That doesn't take your personal data. So we encrypt everything, but we can see a plural trends. We can see are we locking some people out of mortgages? Are we over extending mortgages for some people? So that sort of, market, like the loan market data that we want to see. And truth be told is that even this level of data and detail. Is not visible even to our regulators, right? So we see that as an opportunity to see the macro movements with the biggest slice without actually having your personal data exposed. So we were going for debt level loan level data. Then we also realized that there is a lot that we don't know about the asset class. That's beyond where it's located. Is it near the MRT station? Blah, blah, blah, blah. So a lot of times when people think about how much is an asset worth, they think, oh, this one has how many square feet. Okay. This is in this neighborhood. I compare it with the neighbor. Is it near like the train? Is it near, I don't know, whatever it is. They're like a flood happening. So our 50 data layers is able to assess that asset externally. So I'll know, is there going to be flood? Is there, a train that's going to come by, but I had no, very little about the asset itself, like inside. How, how well is it maintained? Has it been renovated? Is there soil issues? Do they have solar panels? How much energy does it use? That level of data. To us, that data is definitely monetizable. Because, as we move towards climate change, we will have a situation where we need to know how much, how energy efficient our homes. We're not talking about it here in Southeast Asia or Asia yet, but in the US, in Europe, in Australia, people are already rating houses by how energy efficient they are. And we don't have that data today. So I saw it as how can I string these things together on top of all the layers of data that I have. I sound like a data obsessed person. I'm a little bit is so I'm building these things. But trying to also fulfill multiple goals at the same time. I want to fill up this vacant houses at the same time because I'm a co owner. I now have a trust relationship with my co owner to share some of these data around like electricity use, soil conditions, renovation plans that are with me. What we are actually trying to do is translate the data that we have to a trust ecosystem. And that trust ecosystem is something that we are building on top of the trust ecosystem I already have, right? So data is now no longer like a thing, right? Because data depreciates, but it is the continuous flow of that pipe of data and the mechanism of that data that is what we are building. So Yeah, so this is like part, there's another product coming out also, which is part of the trilogy
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:I
Chaly:of what we're doing and yeah, we're very excited because if the pipes flow properly, you will get a really interesting mix that unlocks a lot more potential, I think. So yeah, so we were staying on the surface, now we're trying to go I guess one micro level down onto the asset, was this built in concrete? So some of the houses that we have been financing I won't say finance, but we are co owning with folks, right? They were built in 1960s, 1970s. They have completely already used up all the carbon, right? The carbon emissions is literally zero. You're not pouring in more concrete, no more cement, right? You're spending maybe about like 10 tons of carbon dioxide to fix the roof, the wiring. I want to ask you, do you think two houses, one that's built completely new, okay, you're pouring in structure for the rooms, bricks, da, would it have a low, lower carbon footprint than an old house?
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:No, it'll be much higher for sure.
Chaly:Yeah, it will be much higher, right? Should they enjoy the same interest rate?
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Oh. Hopefully not in the future.
Chaly:Yeah, but it is now. Why is it now? It's now because you can't differentiate them. On the books in the bank, they look exactly the same. We are actually, we all talk about all this like carbon, scope 1, 3,
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:and all.
Chaly:yeah, but actually a lot of it is not really powered by the same thing. Actual measurable data. If you audit them, a lot of them are panic.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:And then a lot of it is still for show, for show today. So that's, that's a really exciting
Chaly:Yeah. I don't want to say that because some of them are my clients, but I'm just saying that there is all this need that there's going to be this like requirement for proof requirement for money to flow. That it takes time to build this data sets.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:I see. Well, that's, that's really interesting and looking forward. Hopefully that works out in the future. Maybe one last thing on scaling up has there been any helpful tactics for scaling up your sales teams reaching out to different markets and different different kind of verticals within, within this industry as well.
Chaly:Yeah, so we used a very old book called by Miller Herman, New Strategic. It's not new anymore. It's the 1980s new strategic sales, framework. It's really good. I recommend reading it if you're doing enterprise sales. I recommend reading it with your team both bosses, everybody in the company that is touching. The sales process including the CEO should read it together with the team. So then you have a common language of how to address different problems. It just makes communication a lot faster. So then you're not every single client is like a new thing. They're not they're easy ways to dice up all your problems and, smoothen out your sales process so that you can support your team better. I think the most important thing is that a lot of bosses They are very bad at supporting their team because they are not understanding. They're not getting they're not understanding the juniors problems fast enough, so I think yeah, a framework such as these will help you with the language using the same languages and helps with speeding things up.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:What, what have you managed to adopt so far? I guess in terms of, I guess communication seems to be a big one as well.
Chaly:Yeah. So definitely now we adopt a framework. I can actually see every single client. If they close, why they close? If they didn't close, why they didn't close? And I don't have the, oh, I don't know.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:mm
Chaly:didn't like us, that's not helpful, right? So we need to actually know exactly what did they not like about us or what did they like about us. Why did we win this job so fast? That is also cause of suspicion. If some, if if it goes too smooth. Yeah. Oh, do you really make sure that the client is saying what they're buying? Cause that's quite important, right?
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Have there, have there been any, I don't know,
Chaly:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Of messed up?
Chaly:no. So we had we had customers who assume that's what they are buying. And then they they get the delivery and it's this is not what I want. And then they refuse to pay. So I think. The fault there lies with the salesperson, right? So the salesperson didn't get the cue that the client didn't understand what he's buying. And yeah, it causes a lot of friction and disappointment, right? Because when you deliver, it's not what you deliver. It's just not people just not happy. So we have to make sure. So when it closes too fast, you have to be very suspicious. If it closes slow, it's okay. If you don't close, it's also okay. But if you close very fast, you have to be very suspicious. Yeah. Yeah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:on like technology. So as a CEO, how do you decide what kind of technologies to invest into to stay competitive?
Chaly:there's two parts of technology. Okay. I'm like the strategic person. So I would understand the basics of certain types of technology. And then I would go. It worth further investigation? Is this I, does this ideas have links, right? So very conceptual type. So automation, switching processes to a new processes, like that kind of not really tech type of understanding. So I participate a lot there. But I don't put in a lot of. I do participate in discussions around ethics, methods integrity around the data. The data side, I do participate quite strongly in. Tech, like dev ops tech, or maintenance of the database etc. Honestly, I just trust the team. They run it. I fortunately, I do have a physics degree. The nice thing is that when they BS. Or they try to like funny not in a non integrative way, but like maybe trying to skip some steps, right? And then you go huh, like really right but one of my proudest moments. What I really like about the team is that they make a really strong argument so they know how I'm How I function and how I work and they generally will come with three options And an option that they really want me to choose
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm hmm.
Chaly:I only check for soundness of reasoning. And if the reasoning sounds sound, then it sounds like the way to go. So I don't micromanage that way.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm. Wow.
Chaly:In a way, they do whatever they want. All I care is that it works. And yeah, and I check for working. It is your math exam. You just check for working and it looks about right. And then, yeah, that's it.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:So it's really about understanding the purpose and the outcomes, rather than so much getting into the actual details of the code and
Chaly:Yeah, just if you, if your communication of what is what is your true north? What is it that you're trying to achieve as a team? It's very clear. These things become something that you have to trust them to decide.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm. Do you have any Northstar metrics that you rely on
Chaly:Sales?
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:*laughs* to say this. I'm not going to say this.
Chaly:is a very important one. I suggest it to interpreters. Yeah, definitely sales. I think general productivity we also measure productivity. And we measure yeah so depending on the product, it's quite product specific. Things that leads to sales are basically and the targets. We determine our targets and then we go, depending on which product, we would we would go. Yeah, but obviously everything has to be aligned to the company's budget in CC, yeah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:yeah, yeah, okay. What kind of, are there any trends or innovations that excite you most in urban planning and data science? And maybe if all goes well, what do you hope for the future of cities and urbanization
Chaly:I think one of the, one of the exciting things is,
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Ok. Ah!
Chaly:I guess there's two things that I'm really excited about. Language was a very big problem, I think, for most of urban planners around the world. And the language barrier and jurisdiction and boundaries and the legal complexities of different countries, makes people nervous about adopting best practices. So for example, if I see, I don't know some sort of financing mechanism in India for buses, right? And then I get really nervous about implementing it here in India. I don't know, in Sarawak, for example, like in Kuching. I have very little understanding of what are the legal differences, what are the clearance, like how possible it is for them to take that, the good thing is, AI can do that now. AI, if you feed the documents, just the legal documents into AI, and then you ask the right questions, it explains to you, It's a very simple thing. Tell me the differences and similarities between these two plans. And ta da! The thing does it. Is it 100 percent correct? Probably not. But it's a lot faster to understand whether you want to invest time to even go to the next two steps. Right now, I think the thinking is, we don't even, it's too hard. I have to invest too much to understand this entire process or entire document. Because government documents are very thick, right? I have to invest all that, then figure out the similarities and differences before I, go a step further. With AI today, you can just do that. And generally, they might not be 100 percent correct, and the good thing is that they are not 100 percent correct, right? you can still, but it gives you like a general judgment on Is it worth my time to further the agenda?
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Yeah.
Chaly:That's very exciting to me, because
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:second one you mentioned? So,
Chaly:So I think the second one is the reduction in cost in gathering data for government sector. So for the longest time the amount of like data that's required to build a lot of these models is so cost prohibitive, that it's only available to developed nations. Things like micro stations micro weather stations, or even understanding road networks, right? People spend millions of dollars, or billions of dollars, sending people onto the ground, and to measure.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm. Who's,
Chaly:You don't have to do that anymore. It's quite amazing,
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:who's doing it?
Chaly:So you can do it in a combination. I don't know if you've seen it, but the remote sensing, like all the amount of details that you can see on satellite. Now you can literally see like elevation down to like point three meters, like a feet. It's really amazing. Like the resolution that you can get and the number, I think the number of satellites that we have combined with. The ability to use AI to actually say, okay, this is a road. This is not a road. This is a what kind of road? You just really reduce the cost of data for developing countries.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Wow.
Chaly:course, data collection cost goes down. Doesn't mean data analytics is going to go down. So the four processes around data, the data, Space is data collection, data analysis, data decision making, and then data actions. So you have to take action at the end, right? Like database actions. Database, so if you think of it as aircon. Okay, let's say temperature of a building. Data collection is like your sensor. Oh, it is 27 degrees. That's data collection. Data analysis is. Oh, 27 degrees is above or below the normal temperature. Is it? Usually we set it at the normal is 24 and now you're above 24. Okay. I know I'm simplifying it, but basically that's what it is. Data analysis. Then data decision making is you decide that you have to do something about it. That means Oh, I need to reduce it to 24 on whatever logic. Okay. Either you decided that I have to go to the median, then you decide I will move it to 24. Then data action is you control the machine, which is your air condition, to change it to 24. So those are the four stages of data decision making. We are nowhere near decision making. We are at data collection and maybe analytics. I say maybe. Because anything after analytics has politics in it. So I'm only focusing on the first two. I
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:in the cabinet. I guess maybe just moving on to to some reflections you've had. What, what keeps you motivated during tough times? I think you mentioned how difficult entrepreneurship can be sometimes as well.
Chaly:think expecting that you're always motivated in itself is wrong. I think you are up sometimes, you're down sometimes.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm
Chaly:And I think the whole point is that there will be really difficult days.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm hmm. Mm
Chaly:So
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm hmm.
Chaly:a lot, About being an entrepreneur is actually self regulation. It's a very sort of meditative process. During really hard days or hard periods, I have resorted to biohacking a bit. When I say biohacking, it doesn't mean that I put like stuff in my body. It means things like forcefully, force myself to wake up at 7 in the morning and jump into the swimming pool and then do a cold swim for an hour or half an hour. It means making myself sleep at 1030 at night. So a lot of these things is just very uncomfortable to do, very difficult to do. And you do them. You
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:guess you don't sleep at 10. 30, like that's considered early, right?
Chaly:Yeah. So you do. So days that it's like really hard. You, for me I try to control the thing that I can control, which is myself. So I start with myself again. And then once I feel like I'm in control, then I start to expand the thing and work on the things that I have control over. So I did, I guess rule one is don't panic. And then rule two is, just keep going and I think I find it very interesting that younger people talk about being motivated as in like it's
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Mm.
Chaly:How do you stay motivated like something like What do you do externally to cause you to be motivated? I find that a very strange concept
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Extrinsic more than intrinsic.
Chaly:No, I just feel like there's always like tipping a little bit too much to the, I am a function of my environment, versus you have agency over, you have actually control and accountability and responsibility of how your day goes, right? And I think it's interesting because I see it as Google searching, how you, when you search, it's intent. I have intent to search for something. But when you're on Facebook, you're being Or you're on Instagram, you're being you're being pushed information, right? So you're
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Yeah.
Chaly:Yeah. So if you're passive, you cannot be an entrepreneur. I'm sorry. Give up.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:That's really helpful, I think, having high agency and, and when you don't, then I, I think that also leaves a lot of room for emotional deterioration. So okay maybe moving on to just being a female entrepreneur and a mother, what kind of difficulties and mother sorry, what kind of difficulties and opportunities have you experienced? And. How have you navigated some of that?
Chaly:Okay. The opportunity is running a company is very much like being a parent. And so if you, no, I just have a lot of kids. No, I'm just kidding. I think running the parenthood thing is, was good. So my kids are older, like 10, 12. I actually started the company after my second one was born, like a few weeks after my second one was born. I think the heart, The heartaches that you have as a parent is very similar to, to running a company. Dealing with HR issues is very similar to the siblings fighting. So there's a lot of anom like, there's a lot of comparables, right? I would say that motherhood was practiced to run a company, almost. Except that you can't fire your kids. So That's slightly different, but other than that, I think, and you don't recruit, I guess you can
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Yeah.
Chaly:Yeah, so I think there are some differences, but I think It has done more for me than otherwise, right?
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:That's very interesting because people my age would think that they want to get their career in check before starting a family because, when you're young, you have no responsibilities. Peace. So it's a lot easier in that sense, but I guess what you're saying is even parenthood teaches you so much
Chaly:Okay, still I think being a parent was the hardest thing I've ever done. But I think like even more than running a company. Yes, I agree. I just think that it is so similar that in my head, it is so similar that if you think that running a company is less responsibility, it is not.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Huh. Yeah.
Chaly:You can be, you can be, completely narcissistic and think of your team as your labor. You can take that approach, I guess. But I'm not very sure how far you can take it. No.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Wow. That's really, that's really food for thought. I mean, I, I just got married this year,
Chaly:Oh.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:but it's very good, very good food for thought. Yeah. Maybe one last question on, on reflections, like what has helped you grow most throughout the year scaling with, with urban metri?
Chaly:Failure.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Action like your own actions and failures.
Chaly:I think in general, failure. You grow the fastest when you fail the fastest. And you fail often.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:I'm just going to move on to our rapid fire round. There's about 10 or 11 questions here that I'm just gonna ask and then you can just feel free to respond however. So the first one is what's your, your favorite piece on the cello? I know you play the cello, so just gonna ask this one.
Chaly:I'm boring. I play all the Ghibli's, themes. So My favourite is Howl's Moving Castle. It's the main theme.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Nice. Have you watched The Boy and the Heron? I mean there's a new Ghibli movie.
Chaly:Yeah. I did watch it.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:yeah. That's nice. What's two or three, yeah, what's two or three books you recommend most to other people?
Chaly:Most ah? Okay,
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:recommended, I guess, in general, yeah.
Chaly:I think my current favourite book is Kaiju Preservation Society. I don't know if you've heard it.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Huh.
Chaly:basically. It's really good. People didn't like it, some of my friends didn't like it, but I quite liked it. It's it's a laugh out loud type of book. Recently I liked The Righteous Mind, I think by Jonathan Haid. If I say his name properly. Interesting I think it's good for marketing. I think generally pretty good book. The third one is I'm a sci fi person as well. So I like the, the Octopus second book. I can't remember the name of the title. But but it's basically about let me just, look it up. It is children of Time. Children of Time.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Huh, okay. Wow, very, diverse
Chaly:of the, one of the best, one of the best evolution sci fi out there.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Oh, wow. Very, very diverse and interesting list. It's interesting. Jonathan Hyde is one of my favorite psychologists, but Righteous Mind is probably more of a moral psychology book than a marketing book,
Chaly:arguable.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:But, okay. Interesting. Give us a film or show that you enjoy, if any.
Chaly:House moving castle?
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Was a podcast maybe that you enjoy or that you
Chaly:Oh! I just recently had one I think it's called What Now? by Trevor Noah. Do you
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Chaly:Yeah, I just heard that. Pretty good, yeah.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Yeah. What's your favorite meal that you have?
Chaly:Favourite meal? Nyonya laksa.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Oh. What's something people often get wrong about you?
Chaly:I don't know, I'm very transparent.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Is there anything you wish people asked you more about often?
Chaly:For help.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:If you weren't an entrepreneur, what would you be doing?
Chaly:Carpenter.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:What's one small everyday moment that brings you joy? Oh, and,
Chaly:Sitting.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:and what's the one thing you're most grateful for right now?
Chaly:My husband.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Oh, that's really nice. So I guess just to wrap it up, how can, how can listeners find you and, you know, be helpful to you?
Chaly:Yeah check out our LinkedIn page. I'm most active on LinkedIn, probably useless anywhere else. Don't check my email, please don't email me. Yeah, LinkedIn. And with LinkedIn, WhatsApp, I guess that's I, that's mode of reaching out.
Riverside Chaly Eric Video 0036:Okay, you don't have to give your WhatsApp number, so yeah. Okay, thanks. Thanks so much for speaking with me, Charlie. Really appreciate it.
Chaly:Most welcome, Eric. Hope this was helpful.
Thanks so much for listening to the soil and scale podcast. I'm your host, Eric tine. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Don't forget to subscribe. Like leave a comment follow it in your favorite podcasting app leave a review and share it with your friends. You can also join our WhatsApp group where you can provide me a feedback and chat with like minded individuals. Or subscribe to my sub stack, where I post about business and entrepreneurship. Thanks so much for listening to this episode. And see you on our next one.