CEO Conversations Installment XLVI: Gogolook, World’s Leading TrustTech company, Gogolook - Insights from Alex Lee, Founder of QIC, and Jeff Kuo, CEO and Co-Founder
Photo: TaiwanPlus
This episode of CEO Conversations is edited and republished with permission from TaiwanPlus Point.
When people talk about Taiwan's business leaders and industry, semiconductors always come to mind. Let's change the gear to young business leaders in young, software-based companies in Taiwan. Starting from 2010, a new wave of entrepreneurs in Taiwan started building up their business as software-based instead of hardware-based. Through all different kinds of strategies, these entrepreneurs built business models that extended beyond Taiwan to many other markets. The world’s leading TrustTech company, Gogolook is one of the outstanding companies among its peers. On July 13th, 2023, Gogolook went public on the Taiwan Innovation Board (TIB) of TWSE.
In this episode of CEO Conversations, Jeff Kuo, co-founder and CEO of Gogolook, shares what Trust Technology is all about and his journey of building up a company from scratch to one of the largest Trust Technology companies in the world. The following is our interview content:
Alex: Welcome to our show, Jeff. All my friends use your well-known app, “Whoscall” in Taiwan; an increasing number of people in Taiwan and other markets are getting aware of your app, “Whoscall”, but your company’s name is “Gogolook”. Could you introduce yourself and Gogolook? Very few people outside of Taiwan can build up the connection between your app and the company's name.
Jeff: My name is Jeff. I'm the CEO of Gogolook, and we are a cutting-edge technology company which provides “TrustTech”. To be more specific, we help the enterprise to help their consumers using our anti-fraud technologies. If you live in East Asia or Southeast Asia, you are probably one of our Whoscall users. Gogolook is also the creator of Caller ID app “Call Defender”, text-based fraud protection app “Message Checker”, and fact-checking chatbot “Auntie Meiyu”.
Alex: Tell us about why you built up the company and developed Whoscall. What was the background there?
Jeff: Before I answer your questions, let me show you something interesting. These days, generative AI is very popular. Let's listen and see if you know who is calling.
(Recording with fake Alex’s voice: Hi, Jeff. This is Alex from QIC. Recently, I've been looking into a company named “Lie Down and Make Money Co. Limited” with the stock code “16888” from what I've observed… )
Jeff: Okay, let me stop here.
Alex: For sure. That's not me. I won’t recommend any stock like that.
Jeff: Exactly, If it were real you, you would only recommend a good company like Gogolook, not a shitty name like “Lie Down and Make Money”. No way. What I demo to you is using generative AI to deepfake a very famous CEO like you, and to give suggestions for people to buy something like a shitty stock. Imagine getting this kind of call from a famous CEO. Probably you will believe it. Let me come back and answer your question, “ Why did we start Gogolook?” It was about ten years ago. I almost fell into a very serious phone scam. Instead of going to the police to report this case, we built out the company and then built an app. Years later, we came back to work with the police to fight against this scam. Because we created Whoscall, we have the chance to engage with a lot of victims. And it's really sad to hear stories like these where people get scammed. They have very, very serious mental trauma as well. We are also lucky to know more about someone who avoids being scammed because of Whoscall. These kinds of feedback from users have encouraged us working very hard since then.
Alex: Can you show us some numbers like downloads or users in Taiwan and outside of Taiwan? What is the latest update?
Jeff: We have B2C and also B2B service. One of our flagship apps is Whoscall. Whoscall has already been on the market for ten years, and until today, we have over 100 million downloads and users in eight markets. We deal with billions of phone calls. We help people to identify phone numbers from scammers and spammers, which you shouldn't pick up.
Alex: Great. I do remember many years back, you have ever talked about how you wanted to build “trust” among strangers. Could you share with us what exactly “trust technology” is all about, as well as the future and opportunities?
Jeff: When we started Gogolook, it was about ten years ago. At that time, no one really took anti-scam and anti-fraud seriously. We didn’t look at it as an industry. However, today, a lot of international institutions even have reports mentioning this is a market. In 2030, the market size would probably be 250 billion USD with a CAGR of around 20%. This is a pretty huge market. When we had this report, no one knew about ChatGPT, generative AI, or a deepfake phone call. I would say probably this is an even bigger market. By the way, I just came back from Europe. I was there to join the anti-fraud and anti-scam event. There were around 250 people, who are experts from 70 countries all joined together to discuss how to deal with this global anti-scam topic. Before, it was just numbers, but now I can literally see the market. All countries are facing very similar problems and discussing how to solve them, so I would say this is a growing market.
Alex: Let’s go back to “Trust Technology” and its market size. Gogolook has demonstrated stunning revenue growth. Year to date, it is already up 90% compared to last year. You must be doing something really good. Can you tell us what you have done that help the company generate that kind of strong growth?
Jeff: You mentioned a keyword “TrustTech”. In the event I just mentioned, people all talk about we are losing “trust” in this digital era because the truth is when people create the Internet, they create this kind of virtual wall. Trust is not the default setting when we created it at the beginning. We just thought about connecting everyone. No one thought about evil things would go into it. I have to say when we started our business, we didn't know we are touching these kinds of very big issues when everyone communicates with each other, like a default virtually and digitally. Everyone is talking about digital transformation, but everyone forgets one thing that trust is not the default built on the internet. So that's why today you can still see this kind of compound growth at a very high speed. I still believe this is just the very beginning to build up all the trust elements on the Internet. It requires a lot of people, even the whole industry, to dedicate and to invest in technology to build trust.
Alex: Can you share with us some real examples? Soon after I downloaded your app Whoscall, at least I can identify who is calling me with a name. And I try to avoid those with a red flag or someone I don't know. Can you give us some other examples where people might get set up?
Jeff: I think ten years ago, there were only phone scams. But today we have those kinds of generative AI, which can deepfake someone like your boss or your beloved family to call you. Not only voice scams but also these days, I would say, especially after the pandemic, everyone is living their life digitally. We started having scammers go into SMS. They will send you a short message and say, “Go check this website because you have some problem about logging your name and passwords,” and then they get all your personal information. Therefore, these days, there are not only phone scams but also SMS scams, and then we have scammers on all kinds of social networks and social media. Now people can get scammed on dating apps like Tinder. People can get scams from Facebook, Messenger, and Line, the most popular messenger in Asia. There are all kinds of scams, like a fake URL, fake websites, and fake e-commerce. These days, we cannot trust someone on the Internet but we want to rebuild this trust.
Alex: You really scare me. The story sounds pretty spooky. Literally everybody is living in this kind of scary environment. I guess that's why this organization, GASA, was set up. Can you explain a little bit what GASA is for? And, of course, you are one of the very active members. Can you talk about this organization?
Jeff: The full name of GASA is "Global Anti-Scam Alliance". We know that in order to beat the scam network, we need to have another network. So we have GASA. GASA was founded in the Netherlands. This organization is an NPO. In order to build an alliance not only in Europe, we participate as we are the anti-fraud experts and enthusiastic in solving this problem in Asia. If you look at GASA’s website, they have very, very bold visions. They talk about how they want to create a world where people are safe from financial and even emotional trauma caused by online scams. I think this is very bold but very practical and a very human vision—we kind of share the same vision as why we created Gogolook. Now, Gogolook is a foundation member of GASA, and we are also the board member of GASA. The mission here is to bring more Asian countries and more Asian friends to join together to meet each other, to talk, to discuss, and more importantly, to collaborate together.
Alex: Great. I bet you met people from all different countries and their representatives and talked about everything. You can share a lot of what happened in Asia and anything you learn or are worth mentioning to our audience. Any cases that are particularly interesting?
Jeff: This event was hosted in Lisbon, Portugal. Before I visited Europe, I saw anti-scam or anti-fraud issues only in Asia. When I was in Europe, I figured out that everyone talks about this topic from 70 countries. Government representatives, NPOs, NGOs, and private sectors, everyone joined together talking about what they were facing in their countries. The first takeaway I had was this is a global phenomenon. The 250 billion market is just in front of me.
The second thing I learned is that no one knows how to deal with it. We are in the very beginning. I still remember one of the speakers asked us a very interesting question because he saw people describe this kind of issue as “anti-scam” and others describe it as “anti-fraud”. And then he just asked, “anyone like me who is confused: what is a scam? What is fraud?” And all the audience raised their hands. Therefore, he said we are in the very, very beginning. Do we need to figure out what the whole taxonomy is? Then, there is the entire topology of describing scams and fraud. Then, we know how to collaborate using the same language and standard to exchange valuable information across the globe.
Alex: I have to say that even though this sounds pretty bad, but it sounds like a great business for you guys. I know soon after you finish this GASA event in Portugal, you will have another event here in Taiwan. Can you talk about this particular event?
Jeff: Yes. This November is the first time we have a GASA summit in Asia. You can see we intentionally put it into Taiwan. This is also the very first time they have this kind of event outside of Europe. It is very, very difficult to bring everyone to Taiwan to have these kinds of international summits, especially we are rookies in hosting events. However, we successfully gathered government representatives and the private sector representatives from ten countries, and more than 300 people (Note: Calculated after the event—close to 1,000 people) joined together in Taipei online and offline to talk about current situation, global fraud and also how to face this kind of AI risk.
Alex: Save the seat for me. I want to be there. It sounds like a lot of interesting things are happening there. Let's change the gear a little bit to talk about the journey. You built up Gogolook in the last ten years. I heard a lot of interesting things, and seriously, we are also part of the journey when you built up the company. I remember there's a very well-known news coverage. The ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt spotted your company. As far as I know, that was in 2011, even before you started the company. Tell me a little bit about what happened and what sort of interesting milestones you have experienced since then.
Jeff: The most interesting thing was when Google's ex-CEO, Eric Schmidt, mentioned our app, Whoscall. We didn’t even set up our company. We're just a team. We built a lot of apps and tried to solve people's problems. This is a really cool milestone as the most high-level guy mentioned our app. It sped up, or just kicked off the whole venture. And then we started a company, and we had a very, very, difficult two start-up years. We tried to promote our service to global users, but we didn't know how to make money. We only knew what the user experiences were, how many problems we solved, and how many users we served. At that moment, we accidentally met Naver, the internet giant in Asia. They own LINE and a bunch of different services, and in the end, they acquired Gogolook. It was really cool to work with Naver. They showed us what is the global standard to build internet services. They also shared what management is and how to build a sustainable and scalable business. Then five years ago, we met you, Alex, and then we met a bunch of very genuine investors, and we put on a crazy show. We did a management buyout. We bought shares from Naver and then made it become our own company again. Why do we want to…
Alex: Yes. Why? I wanna know. I still want to know how dare you guys want to buy the company back, even with investors’ support. It is still a very gutsy call.
Jeff: I think it's because we have a much bigger vision to this company. And the truth is we proved this is right this year. We succeeded in the IPO for Gogolook in Taiwan. This is, of course, not the end. We have a lot of plans thinking about how to enlarge the impact of this company.
Alex: It looked like a great journey all the way to IPO. But I can't help but cutting back to the point that even when I look back, I have to confess nothing concrete happened there, right? The revenue, the number of users, didn't really take off that quickly, right? Can you explain if there is an internal call? That costs you money, with your own money, your personal asset. Can you tell us what was the call? Anything we don't know? You and the other two co-founders have decided to go ahead. What was the real motivation then?
Jeff: I would say two things actually drive us. One is, I would say, the team. In order to build a team like what we have today, I would say it takes a lot of patience and also passion. I love to share one saying I hear from others, “patience these days is not just a virtue; it’s a weapon.” These days, not a lot of people have patience but we took our time, and we cultivated every employee. We cultivate in very, very detail about the culture of the company. Therefore, when we have a very good company, I don't want to sell it to others when we have the chance, like a timing we can grab back the whole team, right? And then I think I will stick to it then to make it happen. The other thing is the future we believed in. I think today, most people look at the numbers. They look at the facts, but they forget that the true superpower of a human is their curiosity, their imagination. If we looked at the user base, the data, the tractions, everything we had at that time, I would say, good, but not super good. However, when we look at ourselves, we saw a great team with a very strong growth mindset. We also have curiosity and imagination about the company's future. We lived in the future, and we actually saw that happen. We know how big the market is.
Alex: That was very well said. When I look back, these are the only two reasons, as an investor, to try to support your very successful career. Gogolook went public early this year at TIB, the Taiwan Innovation Board. I believe this is just the beginning of another chapter. With more financial resources, I believe you are going to another chapter of expansion. Can you talk about your expansion plan, particularly about the global expansion plan?
Jeff: We have anti-fraud services from Taiwan to Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia and Brazil. In probably the coming year, our Thailand business is going to exceed Taiwan and become one of the major financial contributors to the whole Gogolook. It shows that our biggest market is not in Taiwan. So, it shows how we can penetrate the border and how we can even turn it into a real business. Then it's about what we're going to do in the future. We have B2C markets. We provide Whoscall, Call Defender, Message Checker to the consumer directly. Since we have already had initial success in Thailand, we're going to use Bangkok as the Southeast Asia hub and then enlarge our penetration in the whole Southeast Asia. This is one growth plan, and the other is that we also have a B2B business plan, which you can think of as an OEM. We use OEM, this kind of strategy in bigger markets, such as Japan, even the countries in Europe and the US. You can imagine we're going to go there and help their local governments, their telecoms, their banks to build up anti-fraud capability to help them protect their end customers.
Alex: Let's talk about Thailand. Can you share some interesting cases with us? What really brought you to Thailand? Any interesting experience you ever have in that particular market?
Jeff: Our Thailand market is getting bigger and bigger. Before the COVID, before the pandemic, we already sensed that the whole Thailand market is growing. People started to be connected to the Internet, so that means in the meantime, they would start to be vulnerable to all these kinds of digital attacks. And then COVID hit us around the world. In Thailand particularly, back to that time, there was a very serious online scam, and we just saw a bunch of KOLs just spontaneously shared that people should download Whoscall. I think at that time, like one week, more than almost a million posts just spontaneously happened. People even think, are we paying for that? And I said, No, no, no one can pay for that phenomenal sharing on social media. It's like unusual luck. Before that, we saw this is a global trend, and COVID kicked off these phenomenal downloads of Whoscall in Thailand because people really needed it. Then, we prepared the best user experience and database in Thailand. So when people used it, they were willing to recommend it to their friends. So that became all those spontaneous shares on social media and speeded up everything that we were doing in Thailand. If there was no pandemic, we probably would need to take five years to get the current MAU we have in Thailand. Because of the pandemic, we just made it short. The user base in Thailand will probably exceed Taiwan next year.
Alex: When I look back to all of the software SaaS, no matter it is B2B or B2C, companies, during the course of the pandemic, there's a huge surge, but those kinds of demand or usage came off very quickly soon after COVID. It looks like your revenue and your market share are still expanding at a very fast rate. You've got to be doing something quite differently versus the rest of the pandemic beneficiaries. Can you share with us some cases of what you have done right?
Jeff: I think the first was that we chose the right topic. The topic is a very, very fundamental need. I would say even when the pandemic goes by, this is still needed. A lot of time, people cannot grab those kinds of needs and keep growing. You can see that after the pandemic, we still have very high growth in Thailand. To be honest, it is quite easy to see that we must have done something different. You cannot recreate those kinds of spontaneous sharing on social media, even if you have a bunch of money and a very deep pocket. It is impossible. Our strategy is we work with institutions. We work with the police. We work with telecom companies. We work with banks. For example, this year, we collaborated with the biggest telecom company in Thailand, called True, and we work with one of the biggest commercial banks, called SBC, and we work with the biggest digital bank, called LINE BK. We provide anti-fraud tools for them to share with their customers. We even work together to educate all of their customers to raise awareness about anti-fraud situations. This is the strategy we took instead of using money to acquire users directly. We work with organizations because this is an issue that all companies need to solve, and we help them with all the tools, technologies, and knowledge we accumulate.
Alex: Great. Outside of Thailand and Taiwan, I bet you have some other future goals, no matter it is for the market or product. Can you share with us a little?
Jeff: Every year, I rewrite our vision for the coming year. Let me share some drafts I have right now for 2024. Let me pick up some narrative in 2024 visions and avoid talking about some confidential or commitment to numbers. And I’d say in 2024, we saw Gogolook become; I use the past tense because this shows we live in the future, and we desire for it to happen. In 2024, Gogolook became Asia's leading trust tech company by providing our flagship services in communication, fintech, and financial areas. When I say communication area, that means we don’t just deal with phone call fraud, but also we deal with SMS fraud, social media fraud, and all the websites, like online fraud, and also financial fraud. We want to help banks avoid frauds like financial scams, and we want to be the leading company in Asia. Talking about the territories, these days, we’re already seeing the capability in not only business but also social impact in Southeast Asia or Asian countries. We have more capability to expand our service to Europe and the US. I would say in 2024, we will make some performance out of Southeast Asia, even going to Europe and the US. This is something we're going to do. Moreover, in 2024, we're going to build a much stronger company which has very good attractions to global talent and also to global capital markets.
Alex: I think investors couldn't help but touch on competition, right? Or your biggest concern even though you are a pioneer in trust technology and then you create such a great business. I think people are going to ask, what's your concern? Anything can make you have a nightmare and wake up. Are you concerned about that at all?
Jeff: I wouldn't say it is a nightmare. But we always see a lot of challenges. As a founder, we love challenges because they help us to break our ceiling and drag us out of our comfort zones. I enjoy those, you call, nightmares; to me, challenges. There is a big player. I don't want to mention their name on TV to make them even more famous. They are already IPO in Europe. They have big markets in India, which I think is the country with the biggest population right now, and they also have a good user base in Africa. So you can see they talk about emerging countries and also there is a competitor in Japan. Unlike the competitor from Europe, they provide B2B, just like what I said, OEM services to the telecoms. They use this kind of strategy in Japan. We are seeing each other currently, and we even know each other. We met several times. I would say in different markets, there's a unique way to cultivate users and business models. We are kind of in the middle. We have two different kinds of strategies. We’re using B2C strategies in Southeast Asia, just like our competitor from Europe, and we separate the territory to avoid competing with each other. This is a good thing. And then, in Japan, we know that it is not very smart to use all the money to acquire the customer by ourselves. We learn from our competitor in Japan. We also use an OEM model. Because Japan is a huge country with over 120 million population in Japan, although they are already successful, even IPO in Japan, their penetration is only 10 to 20% of the whole population. It's a huge market. I would say in those kinds of big countries, we can use the same strategies and then serve other telecoms, banks, and big enterprises and share the market together. Because we have this kind of both-hands strategy, it gives us an anti-fragile capability. If I go to places where the European competitor is super strong, I can use the B2B strategy, and if I go to some countries where there is no competitor, I can use the B2C strategy. I would say that our DNA base is much bigger than our competitors. We have a more flexible strategy to use.
Alex: I bet that your shareholders will be very pleased to hear that, even though they don't know the detail. At least you know what your competitors are doing. Let’s talk about broader things about Taiwan. In various kinds of conversations you and I have been talking about, Taiwan can be the birthplace of future unicorns. Can you share with us why you are such a strong believer that Taiwan can generate a lot of unicorns in the future, including potentially you guys?
Jeff: I think what I was going to share with you now is actually the logic you told me before. If we look at the whole market size of SaaS companies, software as a service just like us. If you look at Taiwan's SaaS companies’ market valuations among Taiwan's whole capital markets, it is only 0.3%. If you look at the US, they have over 11%. looking at Japan and Southeast Asia, this number is 2 to 3%. You can see here it's a huge gap. These numbers also tell us there's huge potential for us to cultivate unicorns in Taiwan. There's a very big room for us to grow. And when you ask that question, I'm more interested in the other way. If not, then why not? Let me show you something that I like talking with our employees. I said since this market, in 2030, it will have become 250 billion. Let’s take 1% from it. And how big is it? It’s a hundred times compared with our current size of revenues. And then people say, “what? What are you talking about? Are you crazy? And say, come on one hundred times?” If you grow every year 1.6 times, which means a 60% YoY, you power it ten times, and it becomes 109. That means it is not impossible. But what you require to grow a company in those kinds of high speed would be vert different. Just imagine you are a person who wants to strengthen your muscle power by 60% every year. What would you do? You definitely will train yourself very differently, and you are going to eat some supplements and then maybe try some DNA treatment. I would say, most importantly, you need an environment that encourages you to dream bigger and act bolder, and then to have those curiosity and passions mentally and physically. I would be more worried that these days Taiwanese lose the capability to dream bigger and to act bolder.
Alex: That’s the power law. I wish the power law could be applied to Taiwan, particularly to the younger-generation business leaders. Lastly, can you give young founders some of your lifetime recommendations?
Jeff: I keep reminding myself this every day so I want to share this with you. Please remember and remind yourself of the state like you were on the first day you started your business. What's the state like? That is the state that you have all the curiosity about the future. That's the state you work and act extremely fast. That's the state in which you embrace the experiments every day. Even now we have started our company for ten something year. Every day when I wake up, I refresh myself and then tell myself, this is the first day we start Gogolook. There are still a lot of problems that need us to solve. We need to live in the future, keep experimenting and work very fast.
Alex: Thank you for your very inspirational sharing, particularly for the younger generation and the younger founders. Hopefully, the unusual luck will come along with you. You are a hard-working and very good-spirited team. Thank you for joining us today.
If you would like to arrange a meeting with Jeff Kuo, CEO and Co-Founder of Gogolook, please contact yvonnehuang@qtumic.com.
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