About

Why I write these

I grew up in Malaysia and Singapore, and most of the brands I write about were just around. The green oil in my mother's handbag. The blue Mamee packet you crush up before you open it. The bak kut teh place that only takes cash and closes when it closes.

I never thought of any of it as business. It was just the stuff that was there.

Then I started reading about where some of it actually came from, and the stories were not what I expected. The man who made Mamee was a second-hand car dealer with no food experience, whose first product failed so badly that a bank lent to him out of pity. The woman behind one of the biggest chilli sauce brands in the world couldn't read, and turned down the IPO. Singapore Airlines' entire strategy came from not having a domestic market — the thing that should have killed it.

None of these are the stories we get told. What we get told is: work hard, be passionate, scale fast. The real ones are stranger and more useful than that. The interesting part is almost always a decision that looked wrong at the time.

So I started writing them down.

I'm not a journalist, and it's worth saying that up front. I spent about twenty years in performance marketing — the unglamorous end of it, where a bad decision shows up in the numbers by Thursday — and I built and sold an app business. I've been wrong about my own companies often enough to be genuinely interested in why other people's worked.

Some of that work has been written up in Tech in Asia, Vulcan Post and TheNewSavvy. In 2023 I was given the H.K. Lau Award by Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat, for community work that has nothing to do with any of this.

How this is put together

Every story starts as a research brief — usually ten to twenty pages of it. Claims get checked twice, by two independent systems, against at least two sources, before anything goes out. Names, dates, revenue figures, quotes, and anything with the word "first" or "largest" in it get checked hardest, because those are what people get wrong.

It doesn't make me right every time. It makes me wrong less often, and when I am wrong it goes on the corrections page with the date.

Every story gets its own watercolour, made from source photographs. There's no stock photography here.

What you can't buy

Sponsors can buy the slot in the middle of the issue. Nobody can buy the story. If a company I've written about wants to advertise, it won't be in the same issue, and it'll be labelled at the top when it happens.

The numbers, for what they're worth

93 of these have gone out on LinkedIn so far, and about 35,000 people have reacted to them. The most-read was a Malaysian engineer who refunded 200 jars of sambal. There are119 in the archive here, and roughly 260 researched and waiting.

If we've met at something and you're here because I gave you the URL: the fastest way to see what this is, is one story from the archive. It takes six minutes.