The Intelligence Layer for Asian Founders.FoundersProfile
Within twelve months Monee's loan book passes US$18 billion and Brazil alone crosses US$2 billion, a bet that holds only if Sea keeps underwriting new borrowers off Shopee's own data without breaking the 1 percent delinquency rate the expansion has held so far.
StoicismEssay
Sophrosyne is the Stoic word for knowing how much is enough. Southeast Asia’s venture market, chasing its biggest rounds ever into its fewest companies ever, just forgot it.
FoundersProfile
This column bets Indonesia's Supreme Court upholds Nadiem Makarim's core conviction on cassation review within the year, trimming the sentence again without erasing the verdict, because two lower courts have now read the same procurement file the same way, and cassation corrects law, not fact.
FoundersProfile
DeepSeek will miss its own early-2027 target on a 160,000-chip Huawei training cluster and ship its next reasoning model on Nvidia hardware first, because the interconnect failures that broke R2 live in training a model from nothing, not in the smaller run DeepSeek already proved out.
Operators on the record — how a real SEA business actually makes its money, from the CÈ interview desk.
On the systems being built, and the sovereignty questions they are quietly asking of the region.
Essay
Trump has already rejected Iran's latest Hormuz offer once. This column bets that whatever version of it eventually gets signed breaks the same way the June deal did, inside a season rather than a decade, because nobody has fixed what let Iran break it unnoticed the first time.
Essay
This column bets Beijing lets the Iran-Oman Hormuz fee go into force unchallenged, because a declaration against tolls that cost Washington and Beijing nothing to sign is not one either will spend real leverage enforcing.
Essay
This column bets the tariff terms, rare-earth licences and soybean volumes Trump and Xi announce on Wednesday will match what Bessent and He Lifeng already settled in Manhattan, not a bigger concession Trump extracts from Xi in the room.
Long, unhurried profiles of the operators shaping the region's next decade.
Profile
Within twelve months Monee's loan book passes US$18 billion and Brazil alone crosses US$2 billion, a bet that holds only if Sea keeps underwriting new borrowers off Shopee's own data without breaking the 1 percent delinquency rate the expansion has held so far.
Profile
This column bets Indonesia's Supreme Court upholds Nadiem Makarim's core conviction on cassation review within the year, trimming the sentence again without erasing the verdict, because two lower courts have now read the same procurement file the same way, and cassation corrects law, not fact.
Profile
DeepSeek will miss its own early-2027 target on a 160,000-chip Huawei training cluster and ship its next reasoning model on Nvidia hardware first, because the interconnect failures that broke R2 live in training a model from nothing, not in the smaller run DeepSeek already proved out.
How a real Southeast Asian business actually makes its money — one operator, one model, real numbers.
Reportage
A tenth of the mandate went into market research and consumer surveys in the first month or two. The other nine tenths bought things a player could hold.
Reportage
Every repositioning has a physical floor. At Malaysia’s Souper Tang the number is 2,500 square feet, and finding it cost the group twelve Klang Valley outlets and three years out of the market.
Reportage
Vietnam’s best-known flood-housing programme puts at least half the cost of every home on the household that will live in it, and holds the line when a family cannot pay. The waiting is the design, not the failure.
Modern medicine, longevity, and the limits of optimisation.
Essay
Doctor Anywhere and Halodoc survived by selling to companies, because patients rarely book a doctor on their own. When you quit to build, the company that booked your check-up stays behind.
Essay
Fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan pushed central Singapore to PSI 105. A 302-worker study found indoor PM2.5 slows desk work, and NEA’s purifier rule is a sum you can do tonight.
Essay
Two kinds of AI reliance were measured separately in 1,032 Chinese undergraduates. Handing the model the labour barely moved the needle; handing it the judgement moved it three and a half times as far.
An applied philosophy for people who still have to make decisions, treated as intellectual discipline rather than wellness.
Essay
Sophrosyne is the Stoic word for knowing how much is enough. Southeast Asia’s venture market, chasing its biggest rounds ever into its fewest companies ever, just forgot it.
Essay
On voluntary discomfort, and the two weeks a Jakarta delivery founder paid herself what her lowest-paid rider earns, before her investors could set that number for her.
Essay
On premeditatio malorum, and the single chip that cost Honda US$969 million while two of its rivals, paying yuan into the same blocked factory, lost nothing at all.
CÈ · 1 of 30,000
Read this morning's essayYou don't lose focus when the phone buzzes. You lose it an hour earlier, when you start waiting for it to.
— CÈ
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A daily read for the people building something of their own in Southeast Asia — new founders, solo operators, and the ones still inside a job they intend to leave. Reporting, profiles, and essays across AI, founders, health, and stoicism, each written to hand its reader a mechanism and a next move — plus the morning Market Intel brief.
Tomorrow’s SEA deal ticker, in your inbox — every funding round, exit, and corridor move in the region, structured, daily.
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