Reaching Out to the SEA

My wife is right. I need to get out of China in order to make meaningful changes to my work and our life. So we did it within a 10-days visit to Malaysia and Singapore.

KL, July 29 ~ Aug 1st ​

Initially, OffChain Global Conference and Malaysia Blockchain Week 2024 are the two conferences I planned to join. And yet, with friends from ChangeMaker and Malaysia IoT Association joining me and taking me around the city of Kuala Lumpur, my conference hopping quickly became a full-blown business trip, meeting new friends, such as Joseph from RMAICT International while catching up with old friends,such as John Tay and his partner Leon.

My key take-aways,

• Malaysia is an incredibly approachable country, from grass-root industrial circles to gov agencies, such as MDEC (Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation)
• People around the world are flying over to KL joining the conferences and making new connection to SEA countries, with Malaysia being one of the key proxy country. It impressed me that the new tech trends of AI/LLM, blockchain tech, and their combination will inspire more startups in Web3 economies
• I was amazed to learn that how Halal Certification has been pushed to embrace more high tech such as blockchain and IoT, by startups or companies like Masverse. People are not only talking about how Digital Track & Trace solution is used in food supply chain auditing, but also talking about how blockchains are being applied to extend Halal Certification categories!
• I am honored to be invited by Malaysia IoT Association to host a talk, Maylaysia Blockchain Week, the China Perspectives, during which I shared my general impression, thoughts and new ideas on what's possible in AI, blockchain, and sustainable tech between Malaysia and China partners. We're surely obliged to work together to bridge more gaps between the industries in both countries.

Melaka to Johor Bahru, Aug 2nd ~ Aug 4th ​

Boy, Melaka has such a rich Chinese tradition. I love the word, Nyongya, and the rich cultrual heritage behind it. So many tourist sites in the city are dedicated to everything Nyongya. Touring around them, the buildings, such as the Baba & Nyonya Heritage Museum, felt myself like a time-traveler,and the food, eaters serving different flavors of Nyongya cuisine.

My Chinese ancesotors/settlers who first came to Melaka must have found this a nicer place to live than the ancient mainland China back then. They did not just marry the locals, but also brought in craftsmanship, trading, and technologies to the Kelaka natives.

Walking around the Melaka streets and sites, I felt the tropical heat a bit unbearable, since I was born and raised in sub-tropical cities all my life. Luckily, Melaka is located by the sea, we always felt the breeze from the Melaka Strait.

The funnest part is the Melaka Sultanate Palace Museum, where I looked at the hair-style of a Sultan king and my 13yo boy's long hair style...LOL. I was literally blown away by how similar they both look. So I joked with my boy saying, 'hey, your hair-style reminds me of that of the Malacca Sultan king's waxwork figure in the museum'!

After Melaka, we went on a 3 hours car trip south to Johor and the city of Johor Bahru boardering Singapore. We visited the Sultan Abu Bakar Mosque, where we spend a day to explore places in this vibrant region of Malaysia, where data centers are being build and planned, from Singaporean and other investors / tech giants around the world. It's interesting to keep watching how the Johor province's economy is going to be in next 5 or 10 years, given the current booming demands for AI data centers.

Singapore, Aug 4th ~ Aug 7th ​

My Singapore stay turned out to be more like a productive business scout than a family trip, LOL.

My family visited the typical Singaporean sites, had dinner with my friend and partner Patrick Khor, and ended the trip with the giant tropical garden inside the Changyi Airport compound.

On my business side, with kind referral from a friend of my business partner Phillip, I connected with a Web3 startup founders' team who's been active in crypto-trading businesses. They're looking for a CTO/Product Lead to build a PaaS service around GPU cloud and AI/LLM compute, to make it easy to launch AI agent startups / products, so that they can tokenize the underlying services, spark innovation around AI agents/human-doubles, and build app hosting platforms offering more vertical values than platforms like io.net.

We met a few times, and even visited A-star Singapore together, to explore the startup ideas and seek more partnerships. The partnership turned out to be a good start for an exciting AI startup! For the first time after I built my 1st successful startup in 2012, I felt similar passion and intellectual curiosity as on what and how to implement a hosting service for AI agents, by leveraging both tokenized resource accounting, on-demand GPU compute and generic cloud compute, via a serverless architecture.

This startup partnership is surely something valuable to follow up and see if we have a chance to pull things off.