Archive
Everything CÈ has published.
October 2026
AIEssay
20 million followers, a US$96,000 course, a frozen bank account: the fall of China’s all-in guru
A coach who sold the same ladder of ever-pricier courses had a life sentence for fraud upheld in 2025, and this column bets Chinese authorities name Zhou Wenqiang in a fraud case by June 2027.
FoundersProfile
Garena's profits built Shopee, so why is Shopee now the one funding Forrest Li's next bet?
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
Handed a term sheet at 40 times revenue? Price what the extra money costs before you sign.
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
Picked one vendor and moved fast? Nadiem Makarim did too, and a court just gave him nine years
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’s Huawei chip bet broke R2, so why did Liang Wenfeng just order 160,000 more Ascend chips?
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.
AIEssay
Iran's June Hormuz truce lasted twenty-one days, so why is Tehran offering Washington the same trade again?
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.
StoicismEssay
Down round cutting your draw? Pay yourself a rider’s US$7.10 wage first
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.
HealthEssay
Southeast Asia orders dinner by phone, so why has only 1 in 5 used telehealth?
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.
FoundersProfile
Wang Chuanfu built BYD to make its own parts. Why did that habit cost a fifth of profit?
BYD’s board asks shareholders on 29 September to approve a new asset-pool financing arm it has not explained. Within twelve months it will be funding the group’s Southeast Asian plants apart from a China balance sheet already absorbing a battery-driven profit drop, on the assumption that the shortfall proves temporary.
AIEssay
Trump and Xi just banned tolls on international waterways, so why is the Hormuz fee still moving forward?
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.
September 2026
AIEssay
Bessent and He Lifeng wrote China’s trade deal in New York. Trump and Xi sign it Wednesday.
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.
StoicismEssay
Nexperia’s chip ban hit every carmaker the same way, so why did only Honda lose US$969 million?
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.
StoicismEssay
Indonesia’s capital rule hit every P2P lender the same way, so why did twelve fold?
On the dichotomy of control, and the year Indonesia’s regulator rewrote what a Jakarta lender could charge and how much capital she needed to keep lending it.
FoundersProfile
Posting a loss? Tony Fernandes borrowed US$1 billion for AirAsia and let the Philippines unit fund itself
AirAsia Philippines landed a new investor on 21 September to pay for more planes, five days after Reuters reported Malaysia’s government was asking rival airlines whether they could take over AirAsia’s routes. Within twelve months AirAsia Group Berhad repeats that split at the next unit that needs growth money, because the group’s own stock, down roughly 75 percent since fuel prices spiked, is too cheap for Fernandes to sell without losing the company a second time.
FoundersEssay
Betting on AI? Mekong Capital passed, and the pawnshop chain it backed went from 11 shops to 972
Tech in Asia reported on 9 September that Vietnam's best-known private equity firm shuns AI-native bets. What sits on its books instead is F88, the first lender outside Vietnam's banks to be cleared for public markets, whose loan book has grown three hundred times since 2016.
FoundersProfile
Anthony Tan controls Grab on votes, not shares. He just spent US$1.49 billion buying Atome.
Tan is due to keep selling down the little Grab stock he holds directly before September 2027, on the same pre-set trading plan that took him from 400,000 shares to 28,498 in one afternoon in July, because votes, not shares, are what keep him in the chair, and the US$1.49 billion for Atome came from Grab’s account, not his.
StoicismEssay
Eighteen months into a raise budgeted for six? Zoom out to the decade.
On the view from above, and the Series A that ran eighteen months past the six she budgeted.
StoicismEssay
Cambodia’s US tariff swung from a threatened 49 percent to a negotiated 19 percent, then to a new decree entirely (twice more since).
On amor fati, and the sixteen months in which Washington rewrote the cost of shipping out of Cambodia five separate times.
StoicismEssay
Trusted the founder’s numbers? Four Jakarta venture executives went to prison for the US$25 million they never checked.
MDI Ventures and BRI Ventures, the venture arms of Indonesia’s state telecom and state bank, put US$25 million into TaniHub on numbers nobody independently checked. In June 2026, a Jakarta court convicted four of their executives for exactly that omission.
FoundersProfile
Betting the house again? Masayoshi Son borrowed US$11.87 billion this week to avoid selling a single OpenAI share
SoftBank just borrowed US$11.87 billion rather than sell a single share of its winning OpenAI bet. It is the same instinct that turned a US$20 million wager on Jack Ma into Alibaba and floated Grab into Southeast Asia’s biggest ride-hailing company, and Sam Altman just pushed the payout past the year Son’s new debt assumed it would land.
StoicismEssay
Bank froze your account with suppliers waiting? Call each one with the truth, not a promise
On apatheia, and the bank de-risking sweep that froze a Southeast Asian founder’s account mid-invoice, with three Guangzhou suppliers waiting on the money.
FoundersProfile
Funding your own losses? Vietnam’s richest man is pledging factories to cover VinFast’s US$1.12 billion quarterly loss
Vingroup has promised VinFast will break even by the end of 2026. Its Q1 net loss widened to US$1.12 billion instead, and Vuong is covering the gap by pledging Vingroup’s own factories against new loans, the same move he made with a personal US$2.1 billion pledge in 2024.
AIEssay
China to Trump: drop the US$14 billion Taiwan arms sale or no summit. He has folded before.
This column bets Washington defers the US$14 billion Taiwan arms package again, as it did in May, because Trump needs the September 24 summit more than he needs to spend the sale before it.
FoundersInterview
Jonathan Por left his award-winning flooring firm. His IPO school cleared US$780,000 a year in its first three years.
Jonathan Por, founder of Singapore’s PIF Capital, has spent a decade readying owners for the stock exchange, and his first screen is the owner’s appetite for answering to shareholders, ahead of revenue and structure.
StoicismEssay
Got a will? A Malaysian tycoon had one, and nobody could sign in his name for 634 days
On memento mori, and the 634 days between a Malaysian tycoon’s death and the morning a court let anybody sign in his name.
StoicismEssay
Would you borrow for 20 years on a 5-year licence? Five solar firms said no, and Singapore waits.
On phronesis, and the five companies that judged Jakarta’s five-year solar export permit unfit to carry a twenty-year loan to Singapore.
HealthEssay
Shut your windows against the haze? You still breathe it, and a 302-worker study says you work slower.
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.
FoundersProfile
Robert Kuok told his negotiators to give in three times. It made him Malaysia’s richest man at 102.
Kuok Meng Xiong took over PPB on 1 September. Within twelve months PPB puts listed money behind K2 Strategic’s Johor data centres, because a US$9 billion build cannot come out of a private family vehicle whose listed arm just wrote down RM4.17 billion.
FoundersProfile
CATL spent US$6 billion on a nickel mine. Then 150,000 people ordered a BYD with no nickel.
Karawang’s cell line is due to report first commercial output before 2026 closes, the one date in the chain CATL has already promised, because Zeng cannot survive a second slip while BMW, Volkswagen and Volvo are pricing an exit from the very nickel supply chain he just spent US$6 billion building.
AIEssay
Solo founders are told to hire or stall. China registered 2.86m companies of one in six months.
China’s one-person companies run on software, and three in four of their founders have no technical background. CÈ names the job behind the number: the AI-desk founder keeps three tasks and hands the desk to machines.
HealthEssay
AI use volume did not predict the damage. What 1,032 students handed the model did.
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.
AIEssay
Washington’s chip wall built China a market in Southeast Asia instead
China’s August customs data show Southeast Asia buying 30.2 percent more Chinese chips than a year ago, inside a record US$119 billion surplus, and this column bets the relationship survives whatever Washington does to the wall that built it.
AIEssay
Germany’s firewall held. It also left an 83-seat parliament with no majority in it.
The AfD took 39 of the Landtag’s 83 seats on 6 September, and every majority that excludes it runs through the one partner the CDU also refuses.
FoundersEssay
In Vietnam a terminated distributor is owed nothing. Hold the supply contract.
Vietnamese law does not recognise a distribution agreement as its own kind of contract, and it awards nothing automatically when one ends. That makes the clause the wrong place to look for protection.
StoicismEssay
Grade A warehouse rent in Ho Chi Minh City runs about US$5.30 a metre. One founder paid herself as if she already owed triple that.
On voluntary discomfort, and the warehouse lease a Ho Chi Minh City founder tested before she agreed to sign it.
PlaybookReportage
One tenth on research, nine tenths on hooks: Sonic Song’s NTD 30m split
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.
FoundersEssay
Why most Asian family firms cannot replace their founder
The succession gap in Asian family business reads as missing paperwork, and behaves like a founder who never built anyone able to replace him.
AIEssay
The US sank three Iranian tankers. Malaysia’s relay kept running the rest.
CENTCOM will keep sinking ships in the open Gulf, and Iran’s shadow fleet will keep landing its cargo through Malaysia’s ship-to-ship relay at an undiminished pace, because a warship can cross a line at sea that it cannot cross in another country’s waters.
FoundersInterview
What CÈ's interview machine asked the man who built it
CÈ’s interview tool ran for the first time and questioned the publication’s own founder, who built both the masthead and the interviewer. Five questions, one thesis, and a disclosure stated at the top.
StoicismEssay
Indonesia halved e-commerce platform fees. Cross-border sellers got none.
On the inner citadel, and the week Jakarta decided which e-commerce sellers count as local enough for a fifty percent discount.
AIEssay
Singapore opens its copyright and patent law to public comment on AI, closing 22 October
MinLaw and IPOS opened the country’s copyright and patent regimes to anyone with a view on 26 August. The copyright half will draw the submissions; the patent half will decide what a Singapore filing is worth.
FoundersEssay
How to show pain without losing your audience: Ah Lok's three questions
Every organisation that has to communicate hardship, from donor films to restructuring notices, is guessing where the audience stops following. The Hong Kong illustrator behind Nalok Lok has a tested answer, and he paid for it in readers.
AIDispatch
China is Thailand’s largest annual investor and its sixth largest by what has actually been built
The Board of Investment released its electronics tally as Thailand Electronics Circuit Asia opened in Bangkok. The workforce line under it is the one that decides whether Rayong keeps the value or just hosts it.
AIEssay
Trump’s Kharg Island video was fake. The strike hit Larak Island instead.
Washington faked one strike on Iran’s oil lifeline this week, and left the real terminal standing on purpose: expect it to fake another before it ever aims for real.
FoundersEssay
When to split co-founder equity: weeks in — not day one, not months
Founders are told to settle ownership on day one. The OpenMinds founder waited a few weeks, used a paying client to reveal who was really contributing, and draws the line at the point where the delay turns dangerous.
FoundersEssay
Training your first hires? This property agent says 18 months ahead beats a 10-year veteran
Around 40 percent of Singapore’s registered property agents do not close a deal in a year, and the industry hands training to its veterans. Christian Oh’s counter-position is that the useful trainer is the one who still remembers earning nothing.
FoundersInterview
Christian Oh paid US$93,000 to quit teaching. Now he collects US$80,000 a month in rent.
Christian Oh had written permission to sell property on his teaching scholarship and still paid US$93,000 to leave it, and the rule he would hand you before your own jump comes from pole vaulting: set the bar before you run.
EventsEssay
Indosat and Arsari launched RAIA Grid on 26 August with a footprint Indosat already owned
PT Infra Fiber Teknologi launched an open-access fibre platform with no map, no capital number and no first customers. All three were published eight months earlier, in a filing nobody quoted.
StoicismEssay
Singapore fintech raised US$499 million in six months. One June round was two-thirds of it.
On the dichotomy of control, and the six months Singapore fintech spent raising US$499 million while the money went to Jakarta and Shanghai.
PlaybookReportage
Every rebrand has a physical floor. Souper Tang's is 2,500 sq ft.
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.
StoicismEssay
Courage in a down market is a speech act, and most founders spend it a quarter too late
On andreia, and the six months in which Southeast Asian founders raised less than the year before while one data-centre round made the tape look fine.
FoundersInterview
Why every leader needs to name the five people who lead them
The Jubilation International founder built an emotional-intelligence practice on the one rule he refuses to waive for himself: every trainer needs a trainer. He names the five people who hold that job for him.
HealthEssay
Nineteen of 51 longevity interventions lowered an epigenetic clock. Five raised it.
A harmonised database of 51 intervention studies grades the epigenetic clocks against each other, and the grading lands awkwardly on the biological age panel you are being sold.
AIEssay
Washington’s 25-year Venezuelan oil agreement repeats the 1954 Iranian formula almost exactly
A 25-year agreement over 17 fields and 65 billion barrels, signed by a transitional government, on the one structure that lets a state concede operation without conceding title.
StoicismEssay
Fed hike odds went 35 to 57 percent in an afternoon. Your loan still floats.
Premeditatio malorum, applied to a floating-rate facility and a Fed chairman who will not tell you what he is going to do.
PlaybookReportage
Nhà Chống Lũ makes each family fund half its own house. Then it waits.
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.
August 2026
HealthEssay
Britain’s sugar ration ended in 1953. Those babies have 69% less liver cancer.
The end of British sugar rationing handed researchers 64,761 people and a two-year window, and the finding that lasts is what that cohort was still eating at fifty.
StoicismEssay
Jane Ng paid one company to learn who to build with
On amor fati, and the December a co-founder walked out.
StoicismEssay
1982 Ventures says early stage. It bought into a $5.4 billion Series B.
On sophrosyne, and the Singapore seed fund that wrote into a $400 million Series B led by DST Global.
FoundersInterview
Why Ah Lok reserves a third of his week for work nobody pays for
The Hong Kong illustrator behind Nalok Lok built a commercial studio around a fixed reservation of unpaid time, then learned the hard way how much weight a story can carry before readers leave.
FoundersEssay
How to know if you are raising a round one stage too early
Southeast Asian founders are taught to treat a round as the proof. The OpenMinds founder, who has never taken one, names the threshold that decides whether capital accelerates a business or holds it up.
HealthEssay
Fermented food moved 19 inflammatory markers in 10 weeks. Fibre moved none.
A Stanford trial got a measurable immune result out of the supermarket aisle, while US$706 million went into reprogramming rounds that have not reached a clinic.
AIEssay
Washington banned the chips. Chinese labs rent them in Thailand instead.
Washington will license the wire rather than the chip, and Commerce will do it by rule before the Senate ever votes.
FoundersEssay
The four checks that catch a bad co-founder before you sign
Sixty-five percent of startup failures are people problems. After Zilingo, and after paying that tax herself, a Singapore founder runs a four-part audit that fits inside a courtship.
HealthEssay
A breast-cancer drug approved in 2015 cut frailty in old mice. Palbociclib’s asset is its 11 years of side-effect data.
Palbociclib and an anti-RANKL antibody both posted ageing results in one August week, and the strongest thing either has going is a decade of human safety filings.
AIEssay
Washington asked Canada to stop signing trade deals with anyone else. Ottawa walked.
Canada finishes its ASEAN agreement early, because Washington has just told Ottawa what that agreement is worth.
FoundersInterview
Jang Kều wins accounts by doing the job her customer is afraid of
Jang Kều has built a distribution company, a brand agency, a Singapore ingredients group and Vietnam’s best-known flood-housing programme on one move: take the part of the deal the other side cannot face. Where that move stops working is the useful part.
StoicismEssay
Two days after a Cat A COE closed at S$128,501, Jardine agreed to sell Cycle & Carriage to an Indonesian petrochemical group.
On amor fati, and the S$265 million a 127-year-old Singapore car business fetched from an Indonesian petrochemical group.
HealthEssay
Job insecurity raises coronary risk 19 percent. Your runway is the same exposure.
Uncertainty is metabolically expensive, and the brain bills the body. What the founders holding an undated question are actually paying.
HealthEssay
NUS’s Dean Ho fasted 20 hours a day for a year. Resting heart rate fell 19 bpm.
DELTA put his estimated biological age at 31.8 against a chronological 45. The authors say that number lacks external validation, and the two markers underneath it do not.
AIEssay
Indonesia will set food and courier delivery fees by decree in September.
Perpres 27/2026 took the ojol commission from 20 percent to 8 on 1 July. The regulation due in September prices delivery, turns seven million drivers into MSMEs, and splits enforcement between two ministries.
StoicismEssay
Three lenders put up S$60m to buy Singapore SMEs off founders with no successor.
On dikaiosyne, and the August week three lenders priced your exit above your growth.
AIEssay
Washington can cut Chinese banks off dollar clearing. Iran won’t be the reason.
Bessent promised the greatest coordinated economic isolation in history. The one measure that reaches Iran’s last buyer is the one that spends the rail everything else runs on.
AIEssay
Hamas agreed to hand over its weapons. Aceh handed over 840 rifles in four months.
The Cairo roadmap asks Hamas to give up its arsenal for a political settlement nobody has yet written down, which is the one variable that decided Aceh and stalled Mindanao.
HealthEssay
Metformin, DCA and low-dose navitoclax extended old mice’s survival by 41.7 percent.
A UC Berkeley combination called DMA cleared senescent cells by starving them of ATP, and two of its three components already sit on a pharmacy shelf.
AIEssay
Ooredoo bought 49 percent of Zankore for US$800 million. Indonesia supplies the power.
Ooredoo, Nokia and NVIDIA put a gigawatt of AI compute into Indonesia, and the terms of the deal say plainly who collects on it.
StoicismEssay
The Philippines’ AI hub starts digging in 2028. Your plan runs three years.
The view from above, applied to a 1,620-hectare AI zone in Tarlac and to the three-year plan you built on top of it.
FoundersEssay
Kling AI sits in Beijing. Its round is 68% of Southeast Asia's AI year.
The region's AI total doubled on the strength of one Series D belonging to a Beijing company. It is the second time this year a Southeast Asian headline has described a single balance sheet.
FoundersInterview
Short-staffed, Sonic Song turned down a US$610,000 project. How does he now pick partners in five minutes?
The Taiwanese brand operator lost a NTD 20 million mandate to a staffing gap, then built a filter short enough to run in five minutes: one minute of introduction, three achievements, three failures.
FoundersEssay
Sonic Song carries Naoki Takizawa’s name in Taiwan. He owns the designs.
Every agency growing a name it does not own is working inside a termination clause. Song’s answer is to stop reaching for the brand and take title to the specific designs instead.
AIEssay
DeepSeek’s API price quadruples Sunday. Peak hours are Singapore’s working day.
V4-Pro-0813 shipped on 13 August with a one-million-token context and an MIT-licensed agent harness. Three days later the promotional rate that put it into OCBC’s toolset and Indosat’s Indonesian stack expires.
StoicismEssay
Google’s SEA accelerator gives 25 founders $350,000 in credits and takes three months.
Memento mori, applied to an acceptance email: the cohort takes no equity, and the one thing it does take is the only asset you cannot raise more of.
AIEssay
Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a defence pact that leaves out the nuclear line.
Pakistan holds the only nuclear arsenal in the Muslim world and the Mecca agreement does not mention it. De Gaulle drew his conclusion from the same silence in 1960.
FoundersInterview
How Nevinn Leow decided what to keep when he rebranded his parents' company
The second-generation chief executive of Malaysia’s Souper Tang spent two years rebranding his parents’ herbal-soup company and three more rebuilding its footprint. His test for what to protect is the part a reader can use.
FoundersEssay
The fixed cost of entering another country — and how Souper Tang zeroed it
The administrative cost of being a company in another country is fixed. Souper Tang carried it on a single Orchard Road restaurant until 2019, and its return to Singapore is built to never carry it again.
FoundersEssay
Robot training data fell from $340 an hour to $118 in two years
JD.com wants ten million hours of human demonstration footage and China has stood up more than forty centres to collect it, which leaves the Southeast Asian firms selling into that demand running a business with a visible expiry date.
AIEssay
Acrab raised US$130m for custom AI silicon, and expects its first revenue only later this year
Vertex led the round in a region where venture money has stayed scarce for three years, and it went to the slowest, most capital-hungry layer on the menu: silicon a competitor cannot re-price by press release.
HealthEssay
A Nature Aging screen flagged 14 approved drugs as pro-longevity, and 14 more that may do the reverse
A network-medicine screen out of Northeastern and Harvard put 6,442 existing compounds against the genetics of aging, and the half of the result that will never be marketed is the half worth reading.
AIEssay
Italy suspended Schengen free movement with Spain for one month, and six states have run the same temporary checks since 2015
Rome notified Brussels on 30 July, cited Ceuta, and set an expiry of 1 September. The 1920 conference that met to abolish the wartime passport standardised it instead, and the reason was the same one operating now.
StoicismEssay
Singapore opened 200MW to new data centres. One Batam campus contracted 450.
On apatheia, and the compute money landing across the strait from a business it is never going to touch.
AIEssay
Iran wants 7 percent of cargo value to cross Hormuz. Turkey charges $6.70 a ton
Iran and Oman are negotiating a charge of 3 to 7 percent of declared cargo value to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and eight shipowner associations have already gone to the United Nations to stop it.
HealthEssay
NMN has no human lifespan data. Three of 18 Singapore bottles held none.
The lab that measured what Singapore’s longevity supplements actually contain also published the year’s largest read on physical activity and biological age, and the two papers point in opposite directions.
AIEssay
Alibaba will publish Qwen3.8-Max’s weights next week. Intelligence stops being the scarce input.
Alibaba shipped a 2.4-trillion-parameter model on 3 August and promised the weights for the week of 10 August, which reprices every Southeast Asian AI project around the one input nobody can download.
StoicismEssay
Vietnam pays 12.5 percent to the US now. Malaysia pays 10.
The inner citadel, and the morning a Vietnam assembly line found out its cost advantage was a number Washington had rewritten three times in twelve months.
FoundersInterview
Jan Wong's first client paid under US$250 a month. How did his firm reach US$1 million in yearly sales?
No investors meant no one to referee ownership and authority. Jan Wong decided both on evidence — a chocolate manufacturer's account under RM1,000 a month that ran four years.
July 2026
StoicismEssay
Absorbing Singapore’s 12.5 percent tariff keeps the customer and moves the loss onto you.
On andreia, and the phone call a Singapore founder owes an American buyer three days after MAS steepened the dollar band.
AIEssay
Saudi Arabia struck inside Iraq on 28 July, five months after refusing the war
Thirty IRGC-directed drone attacks in 72 hours on Saudi oil facilities converted the one Gulf state that had denied Washington overflight rights into a co-belligerent.
AIEssay
Thailand took the data centres. Singapore filed 82 percent of the applications.
Singapore-domiciled entities filed US$33.2 billion of Thailand’s US$40.5 billion in first-half foreign applications, in the same half that only 20 megawatts of new data-centre capacity went under construction at home.
HealthEssay
Three hours a week erased half of muscle ageing’s molecular signature
A Nature Aging cohort found 55.9 percent of the age-related upregulation in trained older muscle absent, and named the genes that training never touched.
AIEssay
China just made a chipmaker its most valuable company. It is three years behind where the war is.
China’s record IPO put a US$488 billion valuation on catching up in memory. Japan’s own catch-up took a decade, and the part that decides AI is the part money moves slowest.
StoicismEssay
Anthropic prices what you sell at $15 a million tokens. You get no vote.
On the dichotomy of control, and the founder whose gross margin is reset each morning by a price she gets no vote in.
FoundersInterview
Nobody took Kenneth Tan’s calls after he quit his job. How did he raise US$10 million on Nasdaq?
The BeLive founder tests every large call against arithmetic, which explains the platform he killed, the takeover he refused, and the one question he would not answer.
AIReportage
Live commerce reaches US$186 billion by 2030 (and still pays the creator before the platform)
BeLive shut a million-user consumer platform because it cost more to run than it collected. The region’s largest platforms are answering the same arithmetic from the seller’s side.
StoicismEssay
Kenneth Tan left DeNA and learned how much of his judgement was the job title.
On phronesis, and the month a Singapore founder found out how much of his judgement had been his job title.
AIEssay
Sovereign AI in Southeast Asia (running on Hangzhou’s open weights)
Google says close to seven in ten Southeast Asian prompts now arrive in a local language, and the region has its own models to match; read the model cards and the sovereign part turns out to be the last layer.
EventsEssay
Cambodia got the cheaper forced-labour tariff. Singapore did not.
Washington began charging sixty economies on 24 July for failing to ban imports made with forced labour, at two rates two and a half points apart, and the thing separating the two is a signature rather than a factory.
HealthEssay
Semaglutide slowed four epigenetic clocks in a randomised trial, and left a fifth unmoved
A 32-week randomised trial moved DunedinPACE, PhenoAge and two GrimAge clocks on weekly semaglutide; the Intrinsic Capacity clock, built to track how well a body still works, did not shift.
FoundersEssay
Temasek is moving up to S$78 billion into AI, and four of its five targets are businesses a startup cannot become
Temasek will take AI-related exposure from six percent of a S$518 billion book to as much as fifteen by 2031; read the five segments it named and the founder’s market turns out to be on the buyer’s side of the ledger.
StoicismEssay
The Network School lost its licence on the 21st, and moved to a new country by the 22nd
On amor fati, and the day an Iskandar Puteri council pulled the licence of the loudest build-your-own-country experiment in the region.
AIEssay
Beijing will keep buying Iranian crude (and will still not send Iran weapons)
Trump says Xi pledged not to arm Iran under any circumstances. The pledge was cheap to give, and the reason is the same one that sank King Cotton diplomacy in 1861.
StoicismEssay
A Singapore consultant never asked what happens if his old clients pause.
On premeditatio malorum, and the year a Singapore consultant spent building new business without once asking what happens if the old business pauses.
FoundersInterview
Allan Ling's US$1,600 fee came with late-night client calls. Now he sells strategy and others do the work.
Allan Ling built two agencies on execution, burned out on both, and is now trying to sell judgement instead. The interesting part is what he did when he was contradicted.
HealthEssay
Burnout as a pricing problem (n=1, anecdotal, and the mechanism is still worth reading)
The WHO’s three burnout dimensions describe a relationship to the work, not a quantity of it. One Singapore operator’s decade is a clean, if uncontrolled, illustration.
AIEssay
Beijing Will Not Wall Off Its AI (Even Now That It Leads)
Days after an open-weight Chinese model took the top of the coding charts, Beijing began consulting its champions on export-controlling AI, the same weapon it called economic bullying when Washington aimed it the other way.
HealthEssay
The highest-return longevity move is free (and beats the S$18,000 reset)
A 30-year Harvard study of 147,374 health professionals found strength training’s longevity benefit plateaus fast, which reframes the five- and six-figure ‘biological reset’ packages Singapore’s longevity clinics now sell founders.
StoicismEssay
The Fed held rates in June. A Singapore founder had timed her raise to a cut.
On the dichotomy of control, and the rate path you cannot vote on.
FoundersEssay
Harry Stebbings turned 2,750 podcast interviews into a US$400m fund.
A podcast just financed a US$400 million venture fund. In a region where trust outranks capital, the case for founders owning their own press writes itself.
AIEssay
China’s Pacific missile test is a coercion shield, not a warfighting threat
On 6 July a Chinese submarine put a ballistic missile into the open Pacific for the first time in public, over the top of Luzon. The demonstration’s worth is political, and a demonstrated second strike is a shield that frees the hand beneath it, exactly as the superpower top did once before.
EventsEssay
The Fed held rates but signalled a possible hike, and the firmer dollar is the part that lands on Southeast Asian margins
Nine of eighteen Fed officials now pencil in a 2026 hike and the median dot has climbed to 3.8 percent; for any Southeast Asian business with dollar costs or dollar debt, the firmer dollar arrives long before the rate does.
TechReportage
Malaysia’s draft AI law treats your training data and your model’s output as property
The National AI Office’s consultation closes 31 July, and the clause the Prime Minister calls the heart of the bill would let Kuala Lumpur, rather than your terms of service, decide who owns what a model trains on and what it generates.
FoundersEssay
Why SEA founders are building their own models (a worse one that answers beats a better one that can be switched off)
Indosat and GoTo just shipped Sahabat-AI, a small open model built for Bahasa Indonesia. The reason has less to do with performance than with who can switch the rented alternative off.
TechEssay
BNP Paribas, Temasek and Rockefeller just put US$31m into mud
Rize just raised US$31m from BNP Paribas, Temasek, Rockefeller and Breakthrough Energy to bolt AI onto Vietnamese rice paddies, and the boring part is the whole point.
AIEssay
China launched a 29-nation AI governance body in Shanghai; it does not own the frontier it wants to govern
China launched WAICO in Shanghai this week with twenty-nine mostly Global-South members and a mandate to govern artificial intelligence. The 1974 New International Economic Order is the rhyme: a numerically large coalition can pass a declaration and still fail to bind an order, because standards follow whoever holds the frontier, and this coalition does not yet hold it.
StoicismEssay
Four frontier models shipped in ten weeks. From high enough, not one of them happened.
On the view from above, and the summer four frontier models shipped while a founder built nothing.
AIEssay
xAI will now run your phone line for five US cents a minute.
xAI’s new no-code builder stands up a production voice agent in under two minutes at five US cents a minute; the move that makes money is deciding which calls it never gets to touch.
AIEssay
The US put a 20 percent toll on the Strait of Hormuz and withdrew it within a day
The twenty percent Hormuz fee was gone within a day of being announced. What it spent, in the four centuries of law that made an American fleet look like weather rather than a service with an invoice, does not come back on the same clock.
EventsEssay
ASEAN budgeted for a 26 percent tariff and closed at 19. The difference is sitting in your landed cost.
Southeast Asia braced for a tariff wall through early 2026 and finished the year exporting more to the United States than before it started; the relief is real, largely unpriced, and borrowed against a framework that is still half-built.
TechEssay
Southeast Asia raised US$7.4 billion in H1. One data-centre operator took US$4.5 billion of it.
Of the US$7.4 billion the region raised in six months, US$4.5 billion went to one Singapore-domiciled data-centre operator heading for a US$20 billion listing, and almost everything it is building sits across the Causeway.
AIEssay
Singapore’s 400 percent AI deduction (and why a year of subscription receipts will not survive the assessor)
February’s Budget put four dollars of deduction behind every dollar of AI spending, capped at S$50,000 a year. The claim lands in 2027; the money has to be spent before the tax office says what qualifies.
StoicismEssay
Southeast Asian funding doubled to US$7.4 billion. One company took US$4.5 billion of it.
On voluntary discomfort, and the run rate you tighten while a boom that isn’t yours tempts you to loosen it.
FoundersEssay
Indonesia sentenced Gojek’s co-founder to ten years over a laptop procurement
On 30 June a Jakarta court sent Nadiem Makarim to prison for ten years without finding he took a cent, and the part every Southeast Asian founder should study is how a lawful call became a crime.
StoicismEssay
Venture funding in Southeast Asia fell almost 80 percent. Keep deciding anyway.
On apatheia, and the Southeast Asian funding winter that has run long enough to become a climate.
AIEssay
Grok 4.5 cut coding-AI prices by roughly 80 percent. Where to point it first.
xAI, OpenAI, and Meta all cut inference prices in the same week, and the cheapest coding model is now roughly twice as willing to make things up as the one it replaced.
EventsEssay
A profitable coworking operator, marked down almost 18 percent on its SGX debut
JustCo runs 54 flexible-workspace centres across 12 cities and made under US$3 million last year; the Singapore Exchange marked it down almost 18 percent on debut, and it was not the only scale-first listing the market repriced this summer.
StoicismEssay
Indonesia capped ride-hailing commission at 8 percent. Founders got no vote.
The inner citadel, and the Labour Day speech in Jakarta that repriced a founder’s business between one morning and the next.
HealthEssay
The mice ate more and lost fat. The lesson everyone will buy is the wrong one
A USC lab fed old mice a low-protein, plant-and-fish diet with just enough methionine; they ate more, carried less fat, and grew less frail, and the honest read points back at the meal the molecule keeps getting sold as.
TechReportage
While the region argued about chatbots, Singapore quietly funded the robots
The largest Southeast Asian AI cheque of the season went to a company that teaches machines to see where satellites cannot, and the moat is exactly how unglamorous that is.
EventsEssay
The commission cap barely dents Grab’s revenue. The market still cut it a third.
Days after Indonesia’s 8 percent cap took effect, Barclays cut Grab’s target to $5 from $7 and Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi left its board; the number that moved was a belief about who sets the take rate.
HealthEssay
Social isolation raises death risk 29 percent. The fix is a room of people.
The peptide-and-cold-plunge internet skips the intervention with the hardest evidence behind it, because a room full of people on a Tuesday cannot be turned into a product.
StoicismEssay
SenseTime’s co-founder died at 55. Three more Chinese AI figures died under 50.
On memento mori, and the founders who die with the company still open on the desk.
StoicismEssay
Thinking Machines raised $2bn before shipping a product. Some rounds you refuse.
On sophrosyne, and the AI mega-round whose valuation would set your pace for you.
EventsReportage
The tariff came back (yes, the Supreme Court killed the first one), and it lands on your invoice on July 24
In February the Supreme Court took the president’s emergency tariff away; by July 24 the Trade Representative means to have replaced it with a Section 301 version that has no expiry, and the first place it shows up is your landed cost.
TechEssay
TikTok Builds the Servers, Cuts the People
ByteDance is pouring billions into Johor and Thai server halls the same month it cut trust-and-safety and commerce teams across three Southeast Asian capitals, and the swap has a name.
AIEssay
The biggest customer the AI labs have is quietly building their replacement
Microsoft began routing tens of thousands of Excel and Outlook prompts a week to its in-house MAI models this month. The question that leaves for anyone building on AI is not which lab to trust.
AIEssay
What an AI agent can actually run in an SME back office right now
Two frontier models shipped in five weeks and the real product is admin, not code. The workflows an agent finishes alone are the ones that never leave the ledger; the ones that break are the ones that touch a person.
HealthEssay
Singapore bet S$350m on longevity. The scalable part is the coaching call.
The 2026 senolytics results are real and early; the wealth in a fast-ageing Singapore accrues to whoever gets a 55-year-old to comply.
EventsEssay
Vietnam just graduated to upper-middle-income. That is the bill, not the prize.
The World Bank moved Vietnam up a tier on 1 July, everyone cheered the growth rate, and the actual news is that the cheap-build advantage now has a visible expiry stamped on it.
AIEssay
92 percent of Indonesian knowledge workers use AI. That is the floor, not the moat.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index made Indonesia the region’s adoption champion, then quietly reported the finding that undoes the boast.
StoicismEssay
The WTO put 2026 trade growth at 1.9 percent. Make the cut before it makes you.
On andreia, and the cut a founder keeps postponing until a thinner second half of 2026 makes it for him.
TechEssay
Southeast Asia now holds 2,000 data centres. It captures almost none of the margin.
The land, power and water are local; the models, the margin and the IP are almost entirely foreign, which makes the operator question simple: own a customer, not a GPU.
June 2026
EventsEssay
Two of the region’s biggest tech firms just had their margin set by a president
From 1 July, Grab and Gojek take 8 percent of an ojek fare instead of 20, because Prabowo asked them to in a room they could not say no in. The lesson for everyone whose model is a cut of someone else’s transaction is the same.
AIEssay
The deal Iran will breach the way Pyongyang did
An interim freeze-for-relief deal is collapsing in its first month. The 1994 Agreed Framework says what a cornered, post-leadership regime does next.
TechEssay
Indonesia is selling dirt, not software (which is exactly the point)
While the region argues over which model shipped this week, Jakarta is quietly trying to own a physical chokepoint in the energy transition, and the strategy lesson runs all the way down to the smallest operator.
StoicismEssay
Your whole company runs on one input. A memo can delete it by morning.
On premeditatio malorum, and the founder whose single dependency a regulator can delete with one memo overnight.
FoundersEssay
What Singapore’s S$1 billion deep tech top-up actually changes
Budget 2026 puts a billion dollars behind Singapore’s deep tech founders through a scheme that only moves when private investors move. The math it changes, and the math it leaves exactly where it was.
AIEssay
The best AI model in the world is now off-limits to everyone in Southeast Asia
On 12 June Washington ordered Claude Fable 5 disabled for every foreign national; the outage was narrow, but the precedent is a supply-chain lesson every operator already knows.
EventsEssay
Bank Indonesia hiked twice in nine days. Your prices moved too.
Bank Indonesia hiked twice in nine days, then held at 5.75 percent through its governor's resignation; for a Singapore operator with regional buyers, the rate is a quiet pricing signal.
AIEssay
The chokepoint Iran cannot afford to shut
The Strait of Hormuz is reopening and oil is falling; read as a game, the chokepoint Iran threatened to close is the one it can least afford to shut.
HealthEssay
The most-studied longevity drug is a cheap 1970s generic
Rapamycin, a 1970s transplant generic, has more human data behind it than any longevity compound, and the trial authors still call the case unestablished.
StoicismEssay
The View From Above
On the view from above, and the weekend a founder spent refreshing a status page.
FoundersEssay
The four-person company that does thirty people’s work (and rents the difference)
The same subsidised AI operators are warned not to lean on is, from the founder’s chair, the thing that lets four people do the work of thirty; in a region that has always starved origin, that moves the binding constraint.
AIEssay
The cheap AI on your desk is priced below cost
Four giants are losing money on every token to win the market, the bill for the buildout runs to US$5.5 trillion, and Singapore’s own forecasters have started naming the morning the subsidy stops.
StoicismEssay
The term sheet expires Friday. The macro will not be clear by then.
On phronesis, and the term sheet that expires before the facts come in.
HealthEssay
Life Biosciences put age reversal in a human eye. Results are five years out.
Life Biosciences has put the first partial-reprogramming therapy into a human eye. Strip away the science fiction and what is left is a lesson about the kind of bet you make when you cannot undo it and cannot check the result for years.
EventsEssay
Two apps, one landlord (the merger might even help you, briefly)
Grab’s roughly US$7 billion move on GoTo is being read as a stock story and an antitrust story. For the merchant on the platform, it is a story about who owns the channel.
StoicismEssay
The best month just happened since 2023 and the boom that isn’t yours
On amor fati, and the boom that isn’t yours: Singapore’s May export print, and the founder locked out of it.
AIEssay
From a Singapore HQ on a Monday: what Shopee’s cuts say about knowledge work
Sea cut roughly 8 percent of Shopee’s developers and blamed AI by name. The number that actually moved was the cost of shipping the next thing, and headcount followed it down.
TechDispatch
Singapore took 99 percent of the AI-infrastructure money
Tracxn counts US$1.2 bn of disclosed Southeast Asian AI-infrastructure funding since 2019. One city banked nearly all of it, and that tells you who builds and who rents.
StoicismEssay
What You Owe the Room You Built
On dikaiosyne, and the team you cannot afford to keep.
HealthEssay
NewLimit raised US$435m to reverse cell age. Sleep is the asset you own today.
NewLimit just raised US$435 million to reverse cell age in a lab. The only longevity asset an operator actually controls today is still sleep, training, and what time the kitchen closes.
AIEssay
What it means when an LLM becomes the gatekeeper of brand discovery in Southeast Asia
Across APAC, more than half of consumers now run purchase decisions through an AI assistant, and the assistant defaults to whoever is most legible to it. That is a strategic problem dressed as a marketing one.
EventsEssay
The 1.4 million deleted accounts that won’t fix the thing they were deleted for
The June 4 disruption removed a million accounts and froze a few million dollars, and the durable casualty, the one no warrant reaches, is that everyone in a regional chat now half-assumes the other side is running a script.
May 2026
AIEssay
OpenAI’s APAC headquarters is in Singapore. The hires are deployment engineers, not researchers.
OpenAI launched a four-billion-dollar Deployment Company on May 12 and made the Tomoro APAC office in Singapore the regional point of contact. The beachhead is in the buyer’s office, not its own.
StoicismEssay
Seneca was the richest man in Rome. He still set aside three days a month to eat dry bread.
On voluntary discomfort, and the two weeks a Singapore founder spends paying for her own coffee.
TechDispatch
MTI raised the 2026 forecast. Manufacturing had its worst quarter since 2023.
Singapore posted Q1 GDP up 4.6 percent year on year. Manufacturing fell 4.9 percent quarter on quarter, the steepest single-quarter drop since 2023. The AI hardware tailwind has rolled off.
AIDispatch
What a ten-person Singapore startup will pay Microsoft to govern its AI agents.
Microsoft moved Agent 365 to general availability on May 1, priced at fifteen US dollars per user per month. The governance layer is the small number. The compute it brackets is the large one.
TechEssay
Novo Nordisk handed OpenAI its full operation. Singapore's contract labs are next.
Novo Nordisk's deal with OpenAI is being read as a drug-discovery story. The part that resets Singapore's biotech cluster is the supply chain, the manufacturing schedule, and the corporate operation.
StoicismEssay
A Singapore founder ran the AGM and the oncology ward off one calendar.
On memento mori, and the week a Singapore founder ran the AGM and the oncology ward off the same calendar.
TechDispatch
The humanoid robot moment landed in Shenzhen. The first SEA buyers are warehouses in Johor.
Unitree opened UniStore on May 7, the first developer marketplace for humanoid robots, with 1,200 developers and 237 apps at launch. The R1 retails at US$4,900. The math works first in regional logistics, not in CBD towers.
HealthEssay
Thymic health predicts adult mortality. AI now reads it from routine CT scans.
Hugo Aerts’s group scored 28,500 CT scans through an AI model that reads thymic involution; the top-quintile gap was 50 percent on all-cause mortality, 63 percent on cardiovascular death, 36 percent on lung-cancer incidence. Whether any intervention moves the marker is the unanswered question.
FoundersEssay
Late-stage SEA funding rose 140 percent in H1 2025. Seed fell 50 percent.
Late-stage funding in Southeast Asia surged 140 percent in H1 2025 to $1.4 billion; seed-stage funding fell by half to $50.7 million. A year on, the funds that write seed cheques have stopped forming.
FoundersEssay
Southeast Asia’s biggest rounds are no longer the companies worth studying.
Funding measures one thing about a company. Whether the company is worth studying is a different question. The answers have stopped overlapping in Southeast Asia.
FoundersEssay
Singapore now funds 92 percent of regional startups.
The number reads like a triumph for Singapore's industrial policy. Read more closely, it is the visible measurement of a regional ecosystem that has narrowed under pressure, with Jakarta dropping to eight percent.
EventsEssay
Singapore Grand Prix, without the conference (and a quarter of a million still buys the suite).
The eighteenth running of the night-race comes in 2026 without the Bloomberg New Economy Forum that used to bracket it. The suite economics still hold; the calendar arithmetic does not.
AIReportage
The year the Singapore middle stopped working.
Beijing blocked the Meta-Manus acquisition this month. The architecture of cross-border AI deals built around Singapore neutrality is being read again, by founders who built around it.
StoicismEssay
Stockdale at Hỏa Lò.
James Stockdale spent seven and a half years in a Hanoi prison cell. The discipline he came home with has a name now. The discipline still works.
HealthField note
ApoB moves first. Biological age moves less than the clinics claim.
Three Singapore principals, ages 47 to 53, six months on structured longevity protocols, paying $38,000 to $94,000 a year. The biomarkers that moved are below. The ones the clinics oversold are below.