A lot can change in 12 years. When I first joined TechCrunch in 2012, I was the only writer it had based out of Asia. For several years, it often felt like I was writing to correct misperceptions I saw in my articles’ comments or on Twitter.
Even though Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent were innovating rapidly, they were frequently presented as copies of Western companies (“Alibaba, the Amazon of China,” etc). Despite being home to one-sixth of the world’s population, India was seen as a homogenous mass. People didn’t even bother paying attention to Southeast Asia outside of…
