William Taing (2015 Alumnus) - Director, Beanstalk AgTech

William Taing is part systems thinker, part coalition builder. As a Director at Beanstalk AgTech, a venture building and advisory firm that straddles Australia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific, he works to accelerate the uptake of innovation in Asian agriculture, with a conviction that Australia’s future is bound with the food systems of its neighbours. 

“We bridge the gap between agricultural adoption and emerging technologies. That means working with agribusiness producers and farmers on one side, and innovators on the other, to help them commercialise their technology in the real world,” Taing says. 

Although raised with an Asian perspective gained from his Chinese Cambodian parents, Taing’s formal engagement with Asia began when he went to China on a Victorian government language scholarship in 2013. “I speak a dialect of Chinese at home, but I didn’t speak Mandarin, which I was interested in learning,” he says. That experience opened the door to a role in Shanghai with the Victorian Government’s Commissioner to China, and later with the Victorian Premier’s Department, where Taing helped organise its first China mission. “That was my first engagement in a professional capacity, advising government and bilateral relationships,” he explains. 

Growing up in Australia with roots in Cambodia, he was drawn to international development. Taing went on to turn his policy experience into an impact-driven mission. “A lot of economies in Southeast Asia have an ag focus. That felt like a good direction,” he says. 

That direction has taken Taing to Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, India and beyond. Places where smallholder farmers are grappling with climate change, capital scarcity and highly fragmented supply chains. “Our goal is to work closely with our partners to embed innovation, culture, capability, and capacity,” he says. “It takes a long time, but investment is repaid when you get it right—and the benefits are across the whole agrifood ecosystem.” 

Investing that time has seen Taing immerse himself in Asia’s food systems, operating at the intersection of technology, policy and advanced agronomy. But beyond the spreadsheets and strategy lies a clear sense of purpose. “The Asian lens for me is fascinating,” he says. 

“Because of my cultural background, but also because of the opportunity to generate much greater impact in our work, especially given the different levels of technological adoption between different countries in the region.” 

The economics of Asia also factors into the agricultural equation. “Southeast Asia and South Asia are some of the fastest emerging economies,” he says. “The economic dynamic in the region is shifting significantly.” With that growth comes pressure on food systems, ecosystems and climate resilience—three areas Taing thinks Australia is uniquely positioned to contribute to. “We export 60-70% of our food production. Australia should continue to play a leading role in the region when it comes to food and nutrition security.” 

Despite the ongoing relationship, Taing says that Australian engagement with Asia has often lacked long-term vision, sometimes resembling a trade caravan rather than a partnership. Taing recalls the ‘China dairy boom’ of the early 2000s, which fuelled an opportunistic view of the region as solely a marketplace. But Asia, he argues, is not a monolith and certainly not a passive one—every market in Asia has more consumers than in Australia. 

“There’s a lot of opportunity for Asian collaboration with Australian agribusiness to improve the way food production happens in the regions and build local knowledge and capacity, as opposed to Australia seeing Asia as a pure trade play,” he explains. 

For Taing, the Asialink Leaders Program reinforced the idea that real connection is forged not at the surface layer of one’s CV, but through shared values and deeper understanding. This approach has shaped both his personal and professional relationships, and he says that developing an Asia engagement framework of values and visibility has helped him cultivate more meaningful cross-cultural relationships. 

“Ultimately, that’s what brings people together,” Taing reflects. “I’d rather work with a client who becomes a friend. If you’ve got a shared mission and you appreciate each other’s cultural backgrounds, that can happen.” These lessons are lived out, he says, when local partners invite him into their homes to share a meal with their families, a gesture he embraces wholeheartedly. “That means a lot to them and to me, and I always learn so much from these visits. You realise when you are sharing conversation over a meal, that you are passionate about the same challenges, but see different pathways to solving them—that can be complementary.” 

Beanstalk’s approach, by contrast, is anything but transactional. In Indonesia, for example, it is helping the government craft a ten-year strategy to embed digital agriculture across the country. That means everything from improved access to insurance and weather data to laying the foundations for local ecosystems to thrive. “If they have better infrastructure, then technologies from Australia and other regions can better enter the market and offer new solutions,” he says. Beanstalk’s model relies heavily on partnerships with diverse local actors, and on being embedded in local contexts. 

That, Taing points out, is precisely where many Australian firms falter. “You have to be there on the ground and build those relationships.” Too often, he adds, companies “fly in, have conversations for three nights, and come back.” Instead, he advocates for long-term engagement, ideally starting with local partners. “We learn so much from our amazing local partners and we continue to do so.” 

“If you’re an impact business… you have to accept that no one group is going to do this alone,” reflects Taing. 

The results speak for themselves. One of Beanstalk’s flagship initiatives, a 2022 program dubbed “Graft”—“the agriculture terminology, not corruption,” he clarifies—introduced nine technologies into Vietnam. One of them, a parametric insurance platform, is now backed by more than three major insurance firms, offering typhoon coverage to now tens of thousands of Vietnamese smallholder farmers who previously lacked any safety net. 

Such impact is hard-won. Innovation, Taing notes, is not just a technical challenge, it’s a cultural one. “Among agribusinesses in Vietnam, Cambodia and the Philippines, innovation tends to stay in-house, disconnected from international networks,” he says. Language barriers add complexity, but deeper still is a cultural hesitation to fail. “Implicit in the culture is that failure is a big issue,” he says. “The culture around ‘saving face’ makes it typically harder to innovate, because business leaders can be hesitant to take a risk,” he says. 

What, then, does it take to succeed in Asia? Taing boils it down to two things: convening ability and systems thinking. “Convening is probably the most important thing,” he says. “Because the mission will never be solved by any one person.” Bringing together disparate stakeholders including startups, governments, financiers, and farmers is the only way to move the needle. The second skill is more abstract but no less vital: “Systems thinking, understanding when you make a shift here, how does it flow across financial, human, social capital?” 

Taing is betting that Australia’s influence won’t come from just selling to Asia but learning from and growing with it. In the slow work of systems change, he’s planting seeds that could grow into a blueprint for regional integration. 

William Taing is an agricultural systems, open innovation and ventures practitioner. Prior to Beanstalk AgTech, he worked in government policy roles focused on agriculture development, resource management, climate policy and Asia relations. William completed the Asialink Leaders Program in 2015.