There are now more people building, shipping, and using software in Asia than anywhere else on earth. That’s a statement of arithmetic, not opinion. And yet, an enormous share of the tools they rely on — the developer platforms, the data infrastructure, the enterprise systems quietly running things behind the scenes — are still designed somewhere else first, and only later adapted for the region.
We think this gets things backwards.
When tools are designed for a different market first, the choices that shape them — the defaults, the metaphors, the assumptions about how teams work, what regulations matter, what “good enough” looks like — bake in a worldview that wasn’t ours to begin with. Sometimes that worldview ages well. Often it doesn’t. Most of the time, the people closest to the work end up routing around it.
Asia is not a single market, of course. The compliance landscape in Hong Kong looks nothing like Seoul’s, which looks nothing like Singapore’s. Engineering teams in Jakarta operate on entirely different cadences than the ones in Tokyo. We’re not arguing for some single “Asia tool” — that would be exactly the kind of flattening we’re pushing back against.
What we’re arguing for is local seriousness. The kind that comes from being close to the problem, knowing what trade-offs are acceptable here and which aren’t, building for the team you can actually see from your desk. Not as a niche play, but as the default mode of operation.
This is the thesis we’re founding FOIGS on. Not that we’ll solve every problem — we obviously won’t. Just that we’re going to start with the tools we wish existed, made the way we think they should be made, for users we already understand. If that turns into something durable, we’ll have done what we set out to do.
There’s plenty of time to be public about specifics. Today, we just wanted to put the why on record.
— The FOIGS team