Author
Elton Chan
Co-Founder at Second Talent
Elton Chan is the Co-Founder of Second Talent, a solution that connects global tech leaders with top-tier tech talent across Asia. He specializes in talent solutions and has led Second Talent’s rapid growth since 2024, helping scale its network to over 100,000 pre-vetted developers and earning industry recognition as the #1 in the Global Hiring category on G2. A long-time entrepreneur with deep roots in digital transformation, Elton previously co-founded Branch8, a Y Combinator–backed e-commerce technology firm, and served as the Founding Chairman of HKEBA, a leading Asia-focused business association driving innovation, digital education, and cross-border collaboration. His work bridges technology, talent, and business strategy to shape how companies scale in an increasingly remote and digital world.
How to Source & Hire Developers in Southeast Asia
Updated for 2026: where to source engineers across Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, what senior talent now costs…
Top 5 Chinese Open-Source LLMs Dominating 2026
Ranked on July 2026 benchmarks: Kimi K3 is the largest open-weight model ever released, DeepSeek V4-Pro ties closed frontier models…
Software Engineering Talent in the Philippines: Worth Hiring?
Most companies misunderstand Filipino engineering talent. The real 2026 data on salaries, English, timezone overlap, where the pool is deep…
Employer of Record in APAC: Statutory Costs and Compliance Guide (2026)
Employer contributions run from about 5% of salary in Thailand and Hong Kong to roughly 31% in China. A data-backed…
Every Kimi AI Model Explained and Compared (Sep, 2026)
Moonshot's Kimi K2.6 is a 1T-parameter open-weight MoE (32B active) at $0.60/$2.50, 256K context, with K2.7 Code and K2 Thinking…
Every Mistral AI Model Explained and Compared (Sep, 2026)
Mistral is France's open + API family: flagship Large 3 ($2/$6), open Apache models (Small, Nemo, Ministral), plus Codestral, Pixtral,…
Philippines vs India Software Engineers: Cost and Fit (2026)
A Filipino engineer with 5 to 9 years' experience costs about $14,300 a year with statutory costs; an Indian one…
Every DeepSeek AI Model Explained and Compared (Sep, 2026)
DeepSeek makes the cheapest strong models: V4-Flash at $0.14/$0.28, V4-Pro, 1M context, a thinking mode (the old R1), and MIT…
Every Llama AI Model Explained and Compared (Sep, 2026)
Meta's Llama 4 is open-weight: Scout with 10M context, the 400B Maverick, and Behemoth still in training. Self-host free or…
Every Grok AI Model Explained and Compared (Sep, 2026)
xAI's Grok in 2026: Grok 4.3 flagship at $1.25/$2.50, Grok 4.1 Fast, agentic 4.20 variants, plus coding and media models.…
Every Qwen AI Model Explained and Compared (Sep, 2026)
Qwen is Alibaba's model family: free Apache 2.0 open weights you self-host, or a cheap paid API with Max, Plus,…
Every OpenAI Model Explained and Compared (Sep, 2026)
OpenAI has GPT-5 general models, the o-series for reasoning, and specialized code, voice, and image models in 2026. Compare prices,…
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