a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Technology and the Opening of Myanmar

Episode Date: December 8, 2014

After years of being shut off to the world -- Myanmar is opening itself up. Not just across physical borders, but also the digital. What happens when the vast majority of a population suddenly has access to a cell phone, not to mention Facebook? How is technology manifesting itself in the media, in the economy and in the education of a population eager to use the tools it suddenly has access to? What can Myanmar teach the rest of the world about the opportunities that arise, and potential pitfalls, when a wave of new technology crashes down? Joining the discussion is David Madden from non-profit Internews and the founder of the brand-new Phandeeyar: Myanmar Innovation Lab; Aye Moah, founder of Silicon Valley-based startup Baydin (in photo); and Ethan Zuckerman director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT.

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland, and we have a really interesting lineup of folks here today. I'll start with one of our visitors who's come from the farthest away, I think, David Madden, whose internews strategy and advisor in Myanmar. David, welcome. Thanks, Michael. It's great to be here. And joining us also is A. Mo, who's a co-founder of Baden, which is a startup here in Silicon Valley and Mountain View. But you are also originally from Myanmar and an engineer and a technologist. And on the line is Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media

at the MIT Media Lab. Ethan, welcome. Thanks for having me. So, as you can tell, this conversation is sort of focused in Southeast Asia and on technology and other parts of the world. And, you know, interviews, maybe, David, let's start with you. You guys have some news that you guys broke.

Tell us a little bit about that and give us some context for what you're doing in Myanmar. Yeah, well, thanks again for having us, Michael. It's great to be here today. Yeah, so for those of you who don't know about Internews, InterNews, as an international NGO, has been going for a bit over 30 years, works in about 90 different countries around the world,

and its mission really is to empower people through better access to information. and so Indian News has been working in Myanmar for about 12 years now and a lot of the work that it has done in the early part of its time in Myanmar has been focused on what you might refer to as traditional media but there is this incredibly interesting thing happening in Myanmar right now which is a connectivity revolution it's liberalized its telecommunications market and now suddenly there are four well-funded telcos racing to put a smartphone in the hands of Myanmar's 51.4 million people.

So this is creating this really interesting opportunity to use technology in interesting ways. So we have just launched the Myanmar Innovation Greenhouse. This is a physical space that's going to bring technology together, with civil society and independent media to build the kind of technology tools and platforms that are going to accelerate change and development in Myanmar. So it's really exciting. Mo, you come from Myanmar.

So give us a bit of the background. As David mentioned, you know, this is a country that was closed off for a long time and has opened up recently both in terms of its borders, but then, you know, both physically and now digitally. What is the change meant to you? and as you've seen it happen, you know, where are we today and where were we, you know, 10 years ago? Probably 10 years ago, a lot of, you know, information has been restricted, sensor,

everything that you publish, everything that you record, any kinds of distributed information is something that the government approved of, right? So there's this weird gap in the feelings or people where there are. allowed to talk about and write about things that maybe not quite in line with government's official messages. And that's been really strange to see, especially people in our generation that grew up with, you know, no access to outside of the world and no access to written media that may be slightly critical of the government ever.

And then, boom, everything opens up, and you're seeing journalists, bloggers, independent, media that's going out and talking about things and looking into things and something that's never happened before, right? So if you imagine 10 years ago, I always compare it to 1984 George Orwell's book is very close to truth. That's what I grew up with. People have a little bit of a fear of, you know, saying anything slightly wrong. So then it goes from there to now you can talk about a lot of things. And the funny thing is, when you grew up with like everything is controlled by a state meteor and the Burmese have a very big gap between a formal language, like what's written

and what you speak. So if you study Burmese, you'll find this like slightly disconcerting way of expressing their ideas when they are writing versus when they are talking. And now there's a lot of informal meteors and things and like interviews and people are talking about ideas and I'm actually kind of like, I don't actually know how to write this kind of blogging freedom or information and like a lot of, you know, things that people usually say, you kind of use some sort of euphemism or things that are, that will go slightly under the radar for the government sensor. Now you can say explicitly, hey, this is what I think, or hey, this is what's wrong with the country or what's wrong with the system. I think there is actually like adjustment peer for every one of us to get to, hey, you don't have to write so formally. You don't have to be so strict about how you communicate. So I think that's fascinating.

I mean, what's fascinating too, boom sounds like the right word where, you know, all of a sudden, you know, you go from a very sort of close society and technology, very closely held. And I just want to know, and David, please chime in, you know, and Ethan you as well, when that kind of unveiling happens, how does technology manifest itself and how do people adjust? It must be, you know, we have this sort of incremental iOS 6 to iOS 7 to iOS 8, and all of a sudden you go from zero to 5,000. What happens? Well, we're discovering it like literally right now. So until about eight weeks ago, there was only the government-owned state telco.

That was the only provider. And just in the last eight weeks, you've had these two new international telcos launch in Myanmar, and one more is coming. And suddenly now a SIM card doesn't cost you $250, which is what it cost when I landed in Myanmar. now you can get one for $1.50. And so you have lines around the block, like you would for the iPhone 6,

but people are lining up to get a SIM card. And it's an incredible thing to see because people are, these are not people who've had landlines. I mean, people basically had no phones in Myanmar, and now they do. And so how does this manifest itself? What does it look like? Well, it's interesting because,

for many people who are connected in Myanmar it's still a small percentage of the population but Facebook is the internet it's almost like it's almost like AOL in the late 90s here in the States whereas you've got this kind of wall garden and everything sort of takes place on Facebook

oh what do you like about the internet I just I use Facebook but it's really interesting because you know Viber is just setting up a country rep actually in Myanmar and they just visited last month and Vibar is a carrier is a

a Viber the the over the top service. Okay. It competes with WhatsApp and line and and with Skype. And with Skype, yeah. Okay. And so Facebook has

I mean Facebook has about 2.2 million people online in Myanmar, Facebook users. But Viber are now just in August that they had 5 million users. And what's the difference? Well, you don't need an email address to sign up for Viber. All you need is your SIM card.

So people don't have an email address to sign up for Facebook. It's actually easier to sign up for a service like Viber. And it works so well for transferring files and making calls and things. So there's all these really interesting things that we're going to see as sort of 51.4 million people suddenly come online. Ethan, you know, have you seen this in other parts of the world and what might, well, what might be we start to see in Myanmar and what might be different? Well, it's interesting.

Myanmar, to a certain extent of unprecedented, which is to say it's hard to think of a society that was as closed as Myanmar opening to technology as much as Christensen. We've had countries that have been as closed, but they've opened up much more slowly. So, for instance, we've watched Cuba have the rise of the mobile internet and the rise of the blogosphere and a really interesting political culture, but they've opened up very, very slowly. We've seen various other developing nations build, but they haven't built an online fear sort of coming out of a space of heavy censorship and then suddenly in the openness. So this idea of sort of starting from scratch and opening up very, very quickly,

this is quite new in the digital age. I do think one interesting thing we can look at is how independent media has already opened up in Myanmar. So Myanmar for many, many years was the place where all the press was state-controlled, and what it meant was if you had an independent publication, you had to have it reviewed by the government before it went out. and that was incredibly time-consuming, and it meant that no one could publish anything more than a weekly. Those regulations changed a little bit more than two years ago,

and we suddenly had an explosion of daily newspapers, at least seven dailies going out, where you once had none, and you've suddenly got many, many dozens of weekly publications coming out. So I think one of the first things to think about is that there's enormous pent-up demand, people who wanted access to different forms of information and are very quickly sort of moving in to take advantage to the market. And David said, though, the Myanmar Internet market is pretty unique and pretty unusual, and the ways in which Facebook has a first-mover advantage

are quite interesting. If you think about this idea of if you join the Internet today, there's a good chance that Facebook would be one of the very, major things you would do. And I found experiences that's sort of going around and talking to journalists in Myanmar. They don't talk in terms of pageers. They don't talk in terms of readers. They talk in terms of life.

And on the one hand, it's great that Facebook has been a quick way online for them. On the other hand, it's a closed environment. And so for independent media, tricky because it's hard to make money off of. We're also interested to see what is it going to mean as far as people starting up new tech assistance is, are they going to start them around the web environment that the rest of us are used to, or are they going to start it up more around some of the

close environments? Yeah, I mean, you don't see, again, it's early days, and Moe, jump in here. You don't see it sort of as a mobile-focused kind of app-based push. Is it still kind of the web and the desktop, or

what's, has it leaped over that immediately? I think it just kind of skip over. There would be a lot of Burmese people, who have never had a desktop or a laptop, but only know what internet is through mobile. Like, for them, internet means something on your phone that you can access to information outside of what you can get. So, Moat, tell us a little bit about how, you know, you came to Mountain View. You're an engineer.

How did you end up here? So I started learning to code when I was about that teen back in Burma. And it was like an after-school program. that the school just had. And I was like, of course I want to learn. It was just fun, and I learned how to code in Basic on a 386. Good times, yeah. Right.

Then I was waiting to go to college. I graduated from high school in 1998, and there was an event in 1988 that basically led to complete anarchy and that shut down the universities. So when you graduate from, like around the time when I was graduating from high school, you have to wait about two to three years before you could go to college. So there's just a mandatory gap years for everybody. So I look around and decided I'm going to study more programming and computer science on my own. So I took a lot of private classes and just hang out with a bunch of friends who are into the same thing. Then, interestingly, it was actually a...

journalist who came to United States, to Harvard MPH, and he found out that even if you are a foreign student, you could get a financial aid or a scholarship to go to universities here. Because I never thought about

going out of the country to study, because there's no way my parents could afford the tuition that, you know. So he found out that, hey, you could be a foreign student, you could get financed. He came back, to the, to the, to Burma, and he started holding this private letter seminars and telling

kids like us, hey, if you want to study outside of the country, you could actually apply for financial aid and there are a need-blind admission process. So I apply maybe within, like from the day he told me to the day I got the admission letter from MIT. It was probably a total four months or so. So you went to MIT for college? I did. And I did computer science. Then, mostly for visa reasons and stuff, I started working at big tech companies. I kept going from really big companies to smaller and smaller until I started my own. So we started the company in Boston with two other co-founders, then moved west like so many other startups. So we've been here about four years now and it's been great.

So what was coding as a woman, as a young woman in Myanmar, was that unusual? Were you one of, you know, very few? No, it was not. It was not. The first class that I actually took one of us, that teen was mostly women. And that's one thing that is very interesting to me is, again, Burma has been closer for so long, and historically it's a matriarchal society. So we haven't had a chance to get influenced by a lot of Disney princess phenomena, right? So it seems pretty normal to us to see professors, surgeons, a lot of things are being run by women, and that seems normal.

We never actually had, like, kind of the talk that we see here where women don't really go into engineering or science stuff. Also, in like, you know, Burmese legends and stuff, the princesses. are the ones who teach at university. So that's a kind of interesting contrast for somebody who grew up that way with a very close society and then went straight to the kind of the high-tech environment here.

And as a starter founder, it seems very interesting to hear all kinds of women in tech issue. Well, the princesses who teach and who start companies, that's a Disney movie I would like to see. So, David, the innovation greenhouse what are you setting up there who comes or who will come i should say maybe it's open doors already but explain to us what you guys are building and then how you hope

it sort of gets out there in the world in Myanmar yeah well as i'm sure Ethan will be able to talk about in more detail we've seen around the world how powerful these spaces these ICT hubs can be for harnessing technology. And during the course of this year, through our initiative Code for Change Myanmar, we've run the country's first ever hackathons. And so we've really seen firsthand just how much potential there is to use technology for social change and for development. Can I just ask about those hackathons?

Did you have a problem that you presented to folks? Did you have a theme? Or is it just sort of like, okay, guys, let's go. Yeah, no, absolutely. So the first hackathon, which we were told by, told by everyone was the first ever hackathon in Myanmar, so we called it Myanmar's first ever hackathon. We actually went out to the NGO community, to the civil society community, and we told them we were going to hold this event, and we asked them to submit the challenges and the problems for the event. And so we had everything from how would you use new technology to reach, hard to reach, sex workers through to how might you use technology to inform farmers about the outbreak of pests or diseases and so we had eight problems submitted by NGOs and we gathered together 76 designers and developers to work on these and I think we really saw it at that at that hackathon in March wow you know for any naysayer out there like it's clear that there is real potential here

for doing this kind of work in Myanmar. And so that really is the genesis of the innovation greenhouse. And I think the idea behind the innovation greenhouse is that we're going to actually create a space that's going to be a permanent physical home for this kind of collaboration between different parts of Myanmar society that are critical to its change in development. So talking specifically about the technology community,

coming together with civil society, and with independent media, to create the kind of products that we know can increase the impact that these change agents are engaged in. Ethan, you know, can you tell us what evidence there is that these hubs, these kinds of kind of focused locations work? Where else are we seeing it? And what happens?

Sure. Well, there's a pretty terrific success story in Nairobi, a random incubator called the iHub. and the iHub was put together sort of as the home office and then sort of public events space for a company called Ushahidi which is a Kenyan open source software company

that I share the board of and the folks in Ushahidi quickly figured out that they wanted to be able to convene as many of the folks working on technology in Kenya as possible create sort of a full form. point for people who wanted to work on technology in Kenya

create a place where people could come together into a physical space and share ideas and sort of find the ability to make teams. And that project has now spun out over 50 startups. It's become the hub of

not just sort of desktop development but service web software development, mobile phone development, and a lot of other types of tech hacking, with in, not just Kenya, but really sort of East Africa as a whole. And in fact, that whole neighborhood of Nairobi has sort of now turned into the cool place to run a startup.

So it turns out that when you are just starting out the technical economy in a country, it's great to have a cool, open space that brings in people from the outside. It's really useful for people visiting from outside the country to have a place where they can go meet people involved in the startup space. So all of that said, it doesn't work everywhere. And the folks behind the IHub

have been asked to go out and sort of expand the idea across the African continent. And they've done it mostly in partnership. And in some countries that's gone very, very well. Some countries have had a harder time. It turns out that what you really need

is a strong pre-existing tech community that was looking for a seed crystal. And I think Myanmar does have that, as evidenced by how much turnout there has been for the hackathon. There's clearly a lot of content need. I think the second piece that is essential, and this is going to be really interesting,

you know, for the Innovation Greenhouse, is that these things do need to be locally owned and won eventually. And I think, as I understand it, the plan around the greenhouse, It's to start it with international support, it's to start it with coaching from groups like engineers and some of the other funders behind it, but really quickly get to the point where this is a project coming out of Myanmar, really run by people in Myanmar. And I think that's probably the best path to success. What role does government play then in kind of pursuing this or, I guess, advancing this

in Myanmar. Well, that's a really interesting question, Michael. I mean, I think that, you know, the sort of activity that we're seeing now in Myanmar, frankly, wouldn't have been possible without the kind of policy reforms that this quasi-civilian government has undertaken. you know they conducted this process to issue these new telco licenses and and they did it they did it pretty thoroughly and pretty professionally and as a result of that you now have a much much more competitive telecommunications market which is really enabling there to actually be a market for these new tech startups and others to go after so that's pretty fundamental

Like, there wouldn't have been any of this without that. You know, as Moe said, there's been pretty dramatic changes in the kind of censorship laws and the restrictions that there's been on the media in the past. Now, that's not to say all is rosy, and it's a done deal, and I want to be really clear about that. There are really serious challenges ahead. Independent media, for example, now needs to figure out how do we survive, how do we make money, How do we get our product distributed around this country? It's a big country, geographically a big country, with pretty poor infrastructure.

And their product is critical to the future of the country. But how do they get it out there? How do they take advantage of this connectivity revolution without it further undercutting their business model? So I think, you know, some of these changes that the government have made in these last couple of years are just absolutely critical to creating this opportunity. And there is a very important, like, regulatory framework here. that has to operate in. I mean, the next critical piece here is going to be about payments and mobile money and things.

And, you know, the decisions that the government makes in the next few months about the regulatory environment for mobile payments and money, absolutely critical to whether or not we're going to have a flourishing tech ecosystem or not. I mean, it's going to be a long way and there's a lot of work to be done. Just rule of law and business contracts and things that are, you know, taken for granted in everywhere else in the world, we still have to figure those outs, right? Like, I think the two things, the distribution,

speaking as a starter founder, founder, distribution and marketplaces are going to be so essential. But at the same time, how do you... Meaning it has to go beyond the sort of boundaries of Myanmar, or... Both, just even within Myanmar, right? Like, if you build an app for a firmer, and the firmer doesn't really get to a bigger city, maybe not more than once a year so how do you get all these information out there

without a marketplace like google play store i don't know if you can actually list a burmese app as a burmese developer it's open now it is open that must be very new it came just um i think like the day before eric smit arrived in the country last year beautiful and like you know apple store coincidence i wonder apple the it's store still don't have you can't actually do you know business as a developer with a Burmese address so I'm hearing all kinds of scheme to like actually have Burmese developer

listing their apps in Play Store and iTunes store with a friend from outside of the country listing on behalf of them interesting so I wonder and Ethan I want to hear your perspective on this but like you know we talked about how for everyone in Myanmar the internet is the mobile internet you know, journalism flourishes by sharing and by likes. It's a world that in some ways we're headed toward here, but we haven't even reached that yet.

Are there things that we can learn, you know, as this greenhouse, as this experiment, and as it gathers momentum, are there things that we can learn here in the United States and in other parts of the world from folks like, you all? Well, absolutely. I do think there's a long history, of technology in the developing world

leap-frogging technology elsewhere. And so, you know, for those of us who've been following this for a while, Africa was a great introduction to what a mobile phone-only world would look like because we had so many countries in which there were no landlines and we could watch what happened when everyone sort of simultaneously moved to mobile, and it was a very interesting shift. Myanmar is now going to have this experience of never really having dealt with the desktop internet. And so there are going to be these interesting questions.

The app model where people are paying modest amounts of money, maybe that captures the market rather than an ad-supported Internet market. The ad market is still pretty early, pretty young in Myanmar. maybe, particularly if payment systems catch on really quickly, maybe we simply end up with entirely different revenue model. It's going to be really interesting to think about how people are building and programming. It's not going to be people building on desktops for desktop. It may be a small group of people building software and building content for that mobile market.

One of the things I'm really interested in is making sure that phenomena like citizen journalism and citizen media catch on in Myanmar because the media environment is really complicated. There's not pre-press censorship in the way that was before, but the government is clearly watching the press very, very closely, and it's far from a completely open press. So, in some cases, it may be watching things that fall more quickly in Myanmar because there needs no legacy to build on top of, and in some cases, it may be sort of consciously looking in and saying, how can we make sure that we end up with the Internet as a digital public sphere and sort of ensuring that it's the space where Myanmar can really sort of work out public issues going forward. If I could just add to that, Michael, I think one of the things that,

that makes what is happening in Myanmar right now interesting to folks in more developed markets here in the Bay Area and elsewhere is that it is Myanmar is not just sort of mobile only but very specifically it's going straight to smartphones. The difference between when Africa experiences connectivity revolution and now when Myanmar has experienced its connectivity revolution is that the

cost of an Android-based smartphone has fallen so much. It's now cheaper to get an Android-based smartphone, you know, made in China or elsewhere, than it was to buy a candy bar phone in Africa back when they were coming online. And so basically Myanmar is going more or less straight, not just to mobile, but straight to smart phone. And you're going to have 51.4 million people experiencing internet and engaging with the internet for the first time through smartphones and that is that's incredible so when people talk about you know mobile first and smartphone first that is that's Myanmar you know any any any any tech startup that is serious about Myanmar is the building for smartphones uh I'll ask a last question here of you guys

how how can people help how can we all help well we are really lucky that Omidyar Network and the Open Society Foundation have provided some of the critical seed funding to the Myanmar Innovation Greenhouse to get it up and going, and that's enabled us to get this great space at a great price and to start building a team and start conducting some of the activities. But we're definitely looking for more help. And if any of your listeners, Michael, would love to support innovation in Myanmar. We have a little place online where people can go. It's www.gofundme.com forward slash MI Greenhouse. So that's gofundme.com forward slash MI Greenhouse. That's one way they could help. You know, another important way is

there's obviously enormous amounts of talent, you know, here in the States and in other developed markets. And there's a lot of talk about digital leapfrogging. But in order to do that, you need to avoid reinventing the wheel, to mix my metaphors. And to do that, you need to have an understanding of other things that have worked in other markets or failed in other markets. And so I guess one of the things that we want to do with the innovation greenhouse is that we want to create a global network of folks who are interested in innovation in Myanmar who can offer their time or their experiences or their resources in other ways to help

make sure that Myanmar has access to the kind of knowledge. and experiences necessary to actually perform this digital leapfrog. That's going to be really important. Mo, when you go back, what do you hope to see the next time you visit? Next time I visit, I should probably stop by and hope to maybe help run a hackathon. Please. Our company has been fortunate enough to be profitable, and we've been able to donate money to projects,

educational projects in Burma and that was part of our foundational thesis is when we do make profit we would so I'm looking forward to doing something like an education theme hackathon just also just helping out any startup entrepreneurs and static communities that are out there that wants to start and want to you know kind of like a digital bridge to Silicon Valley I'm trying to get a lot of you know Burmese nationals in Bay Area who are in the startup seen to figure out how can we be off use in any way from what we have seen what we have learned either as startup employees startup founders great well um Ethan David and Mo I want to thank you guys incredibly interesting and and very exciting as well thank you guys

thanks for having us Michael thank you thank you thank you very much good thanks for a lot