Was 'Brewster’s Millions' Actually A VC-Backed Strategy Memo for SE Asia Startups?
Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem raised massive VC funds, and somehow spent it faster than Brewster ever could. Here’s how it all fell apart.
Somewhere between a McKinsey slide deck filled with TAM graphs and a Tokopedia Series D announcement, Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem quietly decided that building a business was optional, but burning cash was destiny. Founders didn’t just raise $100 million; they treated it like a challenge to see how fast it could evaporate. Scout’s honor.
Pitch decks promised transformation. What they delivered was closer to a controlled demolition, minus the control.
Innovation became a euphemism for “let’s subsidize ourselves into oblivion”
Disruption meant spending $20 million on free delivery, branding in four countries, and a mascot campaign no one asked for.
The region wasn’t building unicorns; it was minting money incinerators.
If Brewster’s Millions was about how hard it is to spend $30 million responsibly, Southeast Asia’s version is the inverse: how easy it is to torch $300 million recklessly. Monty Brewster at least had constraints. These startups had open-ended funding, zero guardrails, and an entire ecosystem cheering them on.
Now the dust settles. What’s left? Liquidation notices, awkward Medium posts, a box of unused brand swag, and VCs pretending they always had “portfolio-level expectations.”
Rule #1: Spend $30M in 30 Days. Rule #2: Try Not to Build Anything Useful While Doing It
In Brewster’s Millions, Richard Pryor’s Monty Brewster is challenged to spend $30 million in 30 days under a set of brutal restrictions. He can’t just set it on fire. No valuable assets, no generous gifting. He has to spend it responsibly while somehow not ending up with anything to show for it.
It’s a comedy. It’s fiction. It’s meant to be difficult.
And yet, startups in Southeast Asia pulled off something far more improbable: they managed to burn through ten times the money with none of the rules and still ended up bankrupt. No Hollywood script. No time pressure. No constraints. Just venture debt.
Zilingo raised $340 million and disappeared into an accounting fog that required external investigators.
Ula took in over $140 million from top-tier funds, including Jeff Bezos’ checkbook, only to hand back the leftovers in a tidy bow of quiet surrender.
HappyFresh, GoBear, Lummo, HOOQ, iflix… the list of startups that went full Brewster is so long it needs an index.
All touted a familiar gospel: scale fast, spend faster, fix later. But “later” rarely came. The only fixes were PR cleanups and investor write-downs.
Meanwhile, Brewster, a fictional man in a fictional situation, spent his $30 million and walked away with $300 million.
SEA startups? They spent 10x that and walked away with nothing but unpaid bills, and a well-lit “farewell drinks” Instagram story. The final chapter? A founder’s post about “growth through failure,” liked by 112 people, 6 of whom are now updating their CVs.
Monty Brewster got rich. These guys got liquidation preference.
How to Spend $100M Without Even Launching Properly in Kalimantan
You might ask: “How do you actually spend this much money without building something sustainable?” Good question. Here’s the SEA startup playbook:
Raise a Series B like it’s a group-buy on Shopee
No one checks if the product works. All that matters is having a three-letter acronym for your category (B2B, B2C, D2C, Q-Commerce, S-commerce, YOLO-commerce).Subsidize like a maniac
Offer 80% discounts on everything to “build habit.” Translate GMV into press coverage. Accidentally train your users to abandon you the moment promos stop. Profit...?Expand irresponsibly
Because if you’re not in three countries and burning in all of them, are you even a startup?Spend lavishly on branding and billboards no one understands
Slap your logo on the Jakarta MRT and say you’re “winning urban mobility mindshare.” Meanwhile, your core product has an NPS of negative X.Ignore ops, finance, HR, or anything that sounds like ‘adulting’
Who needs internal controls when you’re “blitzscaling”? Just move fast and break things. Like your P&L.
When the house of cards begins to wobble, just pivot to a new vertical. Tell investors you’ve unlocked a “platform play” and start raising Series C.
Congratulations. You’ve spent $100 million without launching properly in Kalimantan. And still managed to have a five-star farewell dinner at SKYE.
Governance Is Optional, But The Party Is Mandatory
In Brewster’s Millions, rules were non-negotiable. Monty had to account for every dollar, every deal, and every decision under the watchful eye of lawyers who seemed genetically engineered to be suspicious. Accountability was the game.
In Southeast Asia’s startup scene? Governance is that thing you vaguely remember discussing during the seed round, right before ordering a second round of cocktails at Potato Head.
For many founders, corporate controls are optional. What matters is:
Have the investors bought into your charisma?
Are the slides pretty?
Is the burn rate dressed up as “strategic deployment of capital”?
Take Zilingo. It wasn’t product failure; it was a swirling mess of board infighting, audit paralysis, and enough unanswered questions to keep an entire MBA cohort busy.
Then there’s Lummo (formerly BukuKas), whose pivots became so frequent you needed a financial compass just to track the latest business model.
GoBear? Raised nearly $100 million. Bet big on travel insurance right before a global travel shutdown. Governance question: did no one have a calendar?
Yet somehow, every founder who presided over these collapses emerges reborn. Their posts drip with pseudo-introspection and vague references to “ecosystem learnings.” You’d think they just returned from a spiritual retreat, not a five-alarm boardroom fire.
And of course, they’re always “grateful for the journey.” Grateful, presumably, to the people who gave them nine figures to play startup roulette with no working brakes.
But no hard feelings. They’ll be back with a new deck. This time, it’s AI. Or climate. Or B2B DeFi. The cycle continues.
Southeast Asia’s True MVP: The Infinite VC Tap That Somehow Believed All of This
We must pay tribute to the unsung heroes of the Southeast Asian startup apocalypse: the venture capitalists who made it all possible. The real MVPs. The tireless champions of “pattern recognition” who somehow saw the next Grab in every Figma prototype and a billion-dollar business in an app that digitized fish stalls.
Without their generosity, we would not have witnessed the spectacle of a company with zero revenue projections receiving a $50 million wire based on a whimsical slide deck.
There was a golden era when every pitch included the phrase “platform play.” No one asked what the platform did. Didn’t matter.
Every warung needed an app.
Every informal worker needed SaaS.
Every wet market needed blockchain, even if most of the fish sellers had never downloaded an app in their life.
And so, money flowed freely. Into:
Hyperlocal groceries that made negative margin on every order.
B2B e-commerce platforms that extended credit like candy.
Streaming startups that burned more on licensing content than their entire target audience could feasibly generate in revenue.
Why? Because the dream was intoxicating. The Next Grab. The Next Sea. The Next Justifying-This-Term-Sheet.
To be fair, some of it worked. Shopee, Tokopedia, Grab are all still standing. But below those headlines is a graveyard paved with oversubscribed rounds, liquidation notices, and investor updates that begin with “given the current macro environment…”
The capital was patient. The expectations weren’t. But the FOMO was louder than due diligence, and everyone wanted in before the next unicorn galloped off into IPO sunset.
Brewster’s Millions showed us that spending money under scrutiny, with limits and consequences, is genuinely difficult. It takes discipline to blow a fortune without accidentally creating value. Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem, on the other hand, proved that if you remove all constraints, oversight, and accountability, burning money becomes child’s play.
Some of these companies didn’t even flinch. They raised like it was a game show, scaled like it was a dare, and collapsed like they were allergic to sustainability. In just a few quarters, they managed to turn real money into marketing stunts, failed regional expansions, and “synergistic” pivots no one asked for.
Which begs the question: was this ever about building anything? Or was the real KPI “rate of cash combustion per month”?
If so, then full marks. You won. You burned through eight figures, trended on LinkedIn for a quarter, and hosted a rooftop mixer in five countries. No customers left, but great drone footage.
Monty Brewster would be stunned. At least he walked away with a moral arc and more money. Here, we just get a founder’s reflection post, a pitch for their “next thing,” and a cap table shaped like a crime scene.
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