radical candour from a deep generalist
I think this will go down as one of my favorite events ever. To this day I have never been to or helped to run a more fun event. Weeks of planning went into this and it was a hardcore multi day event.
But it was so much fun.
This was November, 2009.
Way before the Jakarta Startup scene took off.
It’s funny to go back and look at some posts and realize they captured a moment in time where I made a big decision in my life. While it was happening I probably didn’t quite grok what was going on.
What happened after this was me asking my boss to move me out of the USA. He said give me some time and he would see what was possible.
About six months later he comes back and declared to have two places I could move to and both start with an H.
Guessing Hong Kong was easy but the other one escaped me.
The other one was in Europe but I still could not figure it out.
High Wycombe – no thanks.
Hong Kong it is.
Still in Asia…
Wow, – this one is a doozy. I really loved my BB – I can’t lie. This is why I might be too excited for the Clicks iPhone keyboard.
So what really happened is the market is Android and iPhone. I wasn’t too far off. Nokia got crushed with Blackberry and there really is just Google Android, non-Google Android and iPhone.
I do think we are slowly going to witness some of this unraveling due to the way app stores operate, come on Apple, and how AI might turn into the new interface.
bring the future I say!
I am going through my old posts and grabbing some as I go and writing about them.
This one is kind of interesting at the moment because I have been thinking a lot about doing some sort of podcast/video show focused on the region to some extent.
This is Jan 2010. You could say I was involved with doing some form of this over 13 years ago.
This format was fun. Talk about current events, some global stuff, some local stuff, pontificate about tech and just have a bit of fun. I consider this format to be kind of cool and something that is missing unless there is some local podcast out there that.I am not aware of.
Soon we will be having a cool place in Singapore to do something like this and stay tuned for more updates.
I am not using ChatGPT to write stuff but I am using it more and more to research things, play with the plugins and get a better handle on how to make it useful for how I work. I do find that feeding it data and asking it to add to it or format it to be quite positive. I am pretty sure when all this Copilot stuff is integrated into Office, I will be using it a fair bit.
I tried to use the Webpilot plug-in to read my LinkedIn profile and organize it but it wasn’t allowed to read the page. I cut and pasted it and asked it to grab the Technology Eras by years according to Bill Gates: 10 Breakthrough Technologies with Bill Gates | MIT Technology Review
Roughly it is explained as:
Breaking it down specific to my roles:
1970s-80s with the PC Revolution: I was playing with my Radio Shack TRS-80, Vic 20, Commodore 64, Apple IIe and eventually some Intel clone computers.
1990s-2000s was the Internet Era and largely when I started working: I was on Wintel stuff mostly but also got into Unix and Mac’s. I was coding then as well and worked with Perl, C, Visual Basic and did some sysadmin stuff on Sun.
2000s-2010s was the rise of Mobile: To kick-off this era I was not working in tech for a lot of it so maybe missed really being a part of it for work but such is life.
2010s to Present brings the cloud and now AI: This section directly maps to my time as a VC (Cloud), my time at AWS (Cloud) and now my current job at MSFT (Cloud and AI). I feel like this was all timed pretty well but also not planned. Luck plays a big role along with just being around certain people.
It’s fascinating to look at the roles and titles by Era especially knowing a lot of my moves were not well thought out. However that path led me to where I am today and I am very fortunate to be working where I am during this AI Era. I also know that all the experiences and people I crossed paths with were instrumental in getting here.
Here are the job role groupings by Era:
Internet and the World Wide Web (1990s-2000s):
Mobile Computing (2000s-2010s):
Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence (2010s-Present):
SEO’ing that title a bit.
I am still doing my best to remain accessible and trying to help.
Here is the Calendly link for ASEAN Startup Coaching: https://calendly.com/dreampipe/asean-startup-coaching
For those that want to book that please let me know in the booking what you would like to discuss. I have NO set agenda for the call so the idea is you have questions and I will use the time to try and answer or discuss. If you book time with no agenda then it won’t be super useful for either of us.
Here is the Calendly link for a face to face Coffee: https://calendly.com/dreampipe/coffee
For this one I don’t need an agenda but still helps to know the purpose and what you hope to get out of it. Then I try to come prepared as much as possible.
If you want to connect on https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelsmithsgp/ and just DM me that also works.
There was a time back in my Spuul days where I got a call from a guy at Google who wanted to help us with our ad stack. We were a small company and usually Google wouldn’t return our calls or spend much time with us. However, Parin somehow come across our site and offered to help. And help us he did.
What started then was a great relationship that has lasted across many of my gigs as I am always bugging Parin for advice. We usually meet for a coffee, a bagel or we go for a walk. I have probably been getting “coached” without realising it and it has become an important method for me to bounce ideas or just admit where I am stuck and ask for help.
But hey – for a while now Parin has also been running a newsletter with weekly coaching questions that prompt a bit of self-reflection. During my peak COVID low points while working at home and just overthinking everything – his weekly emails and prompts have been a nice way to get back on track.
https://coachparin.substack.com
Give it a whirl…
Interesting way to view the growth of Web3 – how many devs are working on it?
I won’t claim to be an expert so when I write about any of this it is for my learning and sharing and discussions with rationale people. First off – it is early yet. We have a long ways to go.
Read this one to see how some of this stuff works, how hard it is and how centralized a lot of it it still is:
https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html
This twitter thread kicked off my Matt, of WordPress, is really good. There is a tendency to slam all old stuff in favour of new stuff but we all know everything inherits from the old. So Web3 is building new stuff but a lot of it is built on Web2. I am still struggling with how centralized a lot of Web3 is. Sure there are ways to go really de-centralized but it is not easy and takes a certain level of expertise that most people don’t have.
Best to read the whole thread – I won’t unroll it in the post as it is very long.
Love reading stuff by Jeremy as he is a writer and deeply researches his stances.
In this article he takes a stab at predicting what Apple is working on or where it might be going:
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