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Some investors traded Future Fit Asia for the Cannes Film Festival last week. Their loss. We had the better red carpet anyway. |
And beyond the entrance drama, many conversations moved the room in different ways. A few, though, stood out for the way they made people pause, disagree, rethink, and occasionally shift in their seats. |
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01. Biodiversity & land rights |
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“If you tell people there are platypus on your land, you lose the right to use it.” |
That line shifted the room. |
The speaker invests in biodiversity and climate projects across Asia, but also runs a farm in Australia. After protected species were identified on his land, he was warned that formal disclosure could trigger restrictions on development and land use. |
The irony landed hard. The panel had spent 20 minutes explaining how AI, satellite monitoring, and MRV systems could unlock more capital for biodiversity. In theory, that is true. In practice, those who hold the most biodiverse land may also have the strongest incentive not to have it measured at all. |
Across Australia and Southeast Asia alike — from wetlands and peatlands to palm oil concessions — there are sometimes deeply non-virtuous incentives embedded in the system: don’t measure, don’t disclose. |
The technology challenge may be solvable. The incentive challenge is much harder. |
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02. Food systems & capital |
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“Is the startup solving the world’s biggest problem or the world’s smallest problem? That’s not really the question for us.” |
The investor who said it was matter-of-fact. His fund operates on a ten-year cycle and is expected to return two or three times its capital in that window. Meanwhile, AI funds are delivering far larger returns on much shorter timelines. |
In that context, whether a startup is tackling an urgent societal problem can become secondary to a simpler question: can it realistically reach a $50–100 million exit within the life of the fund? |
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Then another panelist — a scientist who has spent decades across pharma and food, and now leads one of the world’s largest longevity-focused foundations — offered a different provocation. |
His argument was that the VC model itself is about to be stress-tested by AI in ways nobody has fully priced in yet. The traditional diligence process — weeks of analyst work, consultants, and data-room reviews — is rapidly compressing. What once took months can increasingly be done in days, sometimes hours. New biotech companies are forming leaner, moving faster, and de-risking assets at a fraction of the historical cost. |
The implication hung in the room: if conviction can be reached faster and capital deployed with less friction, does that eventually change what becomes investable? |
No one tried to answer immediately. |
