There’s just so much noise small businesses tend to ignore. But in Indonesia, that isn’t the case…yet. The software landscape there is similar to the 1990s in the US. It’s harder to piggyback off of existing software infrastructure — whether it’s payments or platforms — but there’s also a lot of obvious opportunity in software that no one is going after. The same could be said about investing elsewhere in Southeast Asia or in LatAm or Africa. There are fewer startups to compete with for attention, and it’s less of a marketing game than building a software company in the US.

As economist Carlotta Perez describes, we are now in the Deployment Phase of the internet in the US — meaning, we are in-process of exhausting all use cases for internet technologies in the US. What has traditionally happened at the end of a technology phase is oversaturation of investment dollars chasing smaller returns. Valuations go up, returns go down, and investors lose their money. (Sound familiar?) On a company level, what this means is, if not careful, a lot of companies will end up wasting marketing dollars in this type of landscape. Companies in the 2020s, unlike in the 1990s, need to really be performance-marketing driven in order to compete. The end of last year certainly showed us many examples of well-funded companies that could not make the unit economics work. The software industry has become a marketing game.