Archive
Everything CÈ has published.
July 2026
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Health Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Founders Interview
BeLive’s founder on the pivot, the takeover, and the number he skipped
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.
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AI Reportage
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Events Essay
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.
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Health Essay
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.
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Founders Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Founders Interview
Repricing after ten years (the advisers never looked at his results)
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.
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Health Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Health Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Founders Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Events Essay
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.
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Tech Reportage
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.
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Founders Essay
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.
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Tech Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Events Essay
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.
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Tech Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Founders Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Events Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Health Essay
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.
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Tech Reportage
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.
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Events Essay
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.
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Health Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Events Reportage
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.
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Tech Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Health Essay
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.
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Events Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Tech Essay
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
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Events Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Tech Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Founders Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Events Essay
Bank Indonesia hiked twice in nine days. Your prices moved too.
Bank Indonesia hiked twice in nine days to hold the rupiah up; for a Singapore operator with regional buyers, the decision is a quiet pricing signal, not foreign news.
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AI Essay
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.
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Health Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
The View From Above
On the view from above, and the weekend a founder spent refreshing a status page.
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Founders Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Health Essay
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.
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Events Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Tech Dispatch
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.
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Stoicism Essay
What You Owe the Room You Built
On dikaiosyne, and the team you cannot afford to keep.
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Health Essay
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.
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AI Essay
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.
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Events Essay
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
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AI Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Tech Dispatch
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.
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AI Dispatch
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.
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Tech Essay
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.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Tech Dispatch
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.
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Health Essay
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.
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Founders Essay
Late-stage SEA funding is up 140 percent in 2026. Seed is down 50.
Late-stage funding in Southeast Asia surged 140 percent in 2026; seed-stage funding fell by half over the same period. The two figures describe one ecosystem, and the description is unkind.
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AI Essay
Malaysia is becoming a jurisdiction. The question is which kind.
Microsoft's $2.2 billion AI commitment to Malaysia is past the half-time mark. The certifications are the visible part of the deal. The data centres are the load-bearing part. Only one wins the strategic ledger.
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Founders Essay
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.
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Founders Essay
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.
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Events Essay
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.
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AI Reportage
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.
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Tech Dispatch
Mistral's biggest SEA deployment skips the consumer market entirely.
Singtel and Mistral announced their AI-compute partnership at DC Tuas this week. The deployment targets Singapore's banks, government, healthcare, and telco workloads. The geography is the deal.
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Stoicism Essay
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.
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Health Field 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.