The Asia Tech Podcast welcomed Kla Tangsuwan, the CEO of Wisesight. Kla has a really interesting background and in some senses was well ahead of his time in the social media space. After obtaining a B.Sc. in Information Technology and an M.Sc. in Internet System Development, Kla put his knowledge to work in the Financial Services data world at Thomson Reuters. Working as a programmer in Financial Services led Kla to the realization that similar to news about war in the previous generation, financial data could also be sold. Large and growing computational power allowed this data could to have real-time analytics applied to it and hence enhance its value. He also realized as far back as 2008, four years before Facebook’s IPO, that social media data was going to be extremely important and could benefit from some of the same technologies and analytics as financial data. Kla’s entrepreneurial streak kicked in and he began founding the precursor companies that would ultimately turn into Wisesight. A bit later, Kla was inspired by his Mom and Kevin Rose to start a video podcast to help Thai’s understand the world of technology. Based on Kevin Rose’s Digg Nation, Kla spent four years starring in and producing his own show, which early on got picked up by Thai television! Wisesight has so far been quite successful in Thailand and Malaysia. As the leading social-data extraction and communication platform in Southeast Asia, Wisesight uses big-data analytics to provide customer insights to some of the biggest companies in the region. Wisesight has built a non-trivial and robust analytic suite of products that essentially monitors all social media activity and data in the markets in which it operates. In real-time, the infrastructure that Wisesight has built on top of AWS can analyze all of this data and provide actionable insights. Listening to Kla tell his stories about how his own media experience continues to inform his building and running Wisesight was really fascinating. We also talked about building a sustainable business from scratch and what he has learned as the CEO of a company with almost 200 people in it. Kla is extremely insightful and it is definitely with listening to this entire episode. This podcast is powered by Podcast Network Asia. For more information on the shows and the network, visit Podcast Network Asia at their website and follow them on Facebook and Instagram.