Recent Thoughts

In the past month, I was involved in the renovation of our new home. Though it was not a big project, it did draw quite some attention from the family, as many small renovation decisions need to be discussed before consolidation. Indeed, I acted more like the project lead and coordinated between the contractors and the family members. Yesterday morning, my wife and I went there together to inspect the current status. She is quite satisfied with the result. 

(Image of trees from a lounge room of my new apartment)

Wifey loves to summarize and improve with feedback. As it's close to CNY,  she asks how my company is doing and what the plan is for next year. I shared besides the multimodal video AI agent, I am also working on two other AI initiatives. 

• One is related to prudent AI for more constrained industries such as manufacturing, finance, and healthcare. This initiative is primarily led by a Singaporean partner, who has deep business connections and foresees a potential for the team to be part of the AI transformation initiatives in these organisations.
• The other is related to a project with an Italian-based lifestyle/travel tech company, to empower their AI ambition.

As these two new initiatives were raised/consolidated only recently, she lowered the expectation on them as they may not be generating revenues so fast.

Sometimes, my wife knows me better than myself.  She shared her view on my strengths and weaknesses.

1. My strength lies in the fact that I have been in Singapore for years and understand the culture well. Similar to other Singapreans, my strength lies on managing expectations and finding common ground for people/companies from different backgrounds. This is a nontrivial skill and that's a differentiation with teams/people from other places, such as the entrepenreneurs who have been rooted in a homogeneous culture. This drew positive feedbacks in a few business occasions.

• One of the local musuem chose our company for a mini program development instead of a cheaper option elsewhere because they would like to establish more long term partnership, and don't want to just create something in short term and then abandon.
• A UAE-based government agency chose to consult and work with me while I can understand their pain point and try to solve problems for them.
• An Italian startup backed by fund from Macau tries to work with me on AI initiative because I shared my insights and comments which they find practical.

My wife find it a merit. Instead of playing greedy and being self centric, this mentality focuses more on value creation for mutual benefits. However, this approach will be more costly in operation, and could lose some short-term gains. In an analagy that "watermelon" refers to big cake, and "sesame" refers to small cake. I might not be very competetive in the "watermelon" businesses, but more of "sesame" businesses. The problem is that it may not be easily profitable in the "sesame" business.

(Image from Better Up blog)

2. It looks that I am doing well in lecturing or consultation. Does it make money?

I did get paid for the sharing/consultation sessions. In the past, I only get paid for the solution I deliver and the consultation part usually is not chargable. Since recently, I did get paid for these sessions, including large organizations. AI consulting itself is a business with quite a large market size, to pitch and share ideas/best practices to companies who has little know-hows. However, PhDs/Professors/Researchers will have better stands to be a top consultant, not engineers like me in the long run. 

3. It's important to set your brand that when it comes to a skill/business,you will be jumped as a top list. It doesn't have to be a high tech solutions, niche skills are also fine. I did have good reputations in mini program development and tourism digitalisation. I may not be able establish strong reputation in trending or cutting edge AI, but it could be a hobby. I thought of agree, but AI will also be a general skill. There are many people who may not be good at it and I could be a bridge to help empower them. Same as website development, app development or mini program development, AI will be a tech skill that businesses could acquire but may be too lazy to implement. My team could be the ones helping implementing them.

4. If my dream company is Google, it's okay to take a try to apply. You don't need to develop something first to prove your capabilities. The past experiences will help. I agreed with her. Indeed, I have browsed Google's job posting in SG before, but there were not suitable roles. I'm not interested to join as a sales representative, which is neither my passion nor my key strengths.

What to look for in life?

I recently watched the interview with Peter Steinberger by Lex Fridman. His mindset on life resonates. He chose paths based on the mentality to enrich life experiences. Instead of staying in a nice hotel, experiencing the place through Airbnb & Coachsurfing may bring more experiences.