SE Asia had been hit hard for a while. The thing is we never really had a dot com bubble. Unicorns were raising hard, selling $1 stuff for $0.90, outsourcing ev

SE Asia had been hit hard for a while. The thing is we never really had a dot com bubble. Unicorns were raising hard, selling $1 stuff for $0.90, outsourcing everything, skyrocketing growth, raised billions, repeat. VCs would frown on companies that were raising money to use it as a warchest, YC style. It choked out funding for cautious YC style growth especially after Grab acquired Uber operations here. So everyone else did it too, the fake it until you make it mindset became prominent. Eventually everyone runs out of fund sources and have to become profitable, but it's hard when you're now public and used to losing millions every quarter. The costs is often in employees, so waves of layoffs it is. A lot of it isn't American money, but it's bad timing.