I had a super busy week and am enjoying some relaxing time at home tonight, I hope you have a great end to your weekend as well.
Next week’s guest on Before We Get There Podcast
Next week I’m excited to have Yeo Min, the author of Chinese Pastry School and owner of Pastories on the show. She has a fascinating story of leaving her full-time office job in the field she majored in during her university in London, to get a diploma from culinary school. Since then, she has gone on to publish her first book, which came from her love of Chinese pastries. She also co-founded Museum of Food Singapore, which was built to promote and educate people around everything to do with local heritage foods. We had a super interesting conversation about her journey, and even dug into the challenges of how to keep Singapore’s hawker and traditional food culture alive when they are becoming less and less economically viable. Keep an eye out for the episode dropping on Thursday!
Moderating TEDxSingapore panel this weekend
Yesterday we held TEDxSingaporeLive – screening exclusive talks from TED 2025 Humanity Reimagined as well as workshops and live sessions. It was an honor and a pleasure for me to host a panel on the evolving relationship between humans and AI with two fantastic panelists: Asankhaya Sharma, CTO of Patched, and Fatin Sharafana, co-founder of Golden Gamers and winner of Huawei’s Tech4City 2024 competition. Our session took place after two talks from the main TED stage on AI, so it was great to take a look at the topics from a local angle. This was the first time I’ve moderated a panel in person, and it was a pretty big auditorium, so there were definitely some nerves. Both starting my podcast and moderating a couple of our Kyriba APAC webinars helped prepare me for this experience, but it is a lot different in front of a live audience. It would probably take me a few more times before I’m really comfortable, but it was a good start.
Marketing roundtable I attended this week
It was also great to attend a marketing roundtable on Friday, where I got to see some old friends as well as make some new ones. Corinium Global Intelligence held the lunch at the beautiful Artemis Grill, where the views and food were both fantastic. It’s always great to hear insights from other B2B marketers and this session was especially interesting because the other attendees mostly worked for data or security companies. We covered a bunch of topics from AI and personalization to branding vs demand gen and much more. One particularly interesting sharing was from someone who crafted a new process for post-event debriefs and follow-ups that was then adopted globally across her organization. I’ve actually used a very similar process at my last two roles, so it was good to hear that it continues to work at bigger organizations.
What I read this week
It felt like Trade Wars Are Class Wars, by Matthew Klein was a fitting book to read during this time. The core idea is pretty depressing: that trade wars aren’t really about countries duking it out, they’re about the rich getting richer while the rest struggle to keep up. The authors break down how policies that favor the wealthy suppress wages and consumption, leading to massive savings and trade surpluses in countries like China and Germany. What’s stood out to me is how this isn’t a new phenomenon. The patterns of inequality and imbalance have been building for decades, and the book makes a compelling case that without addressing these underlying class disparities, we’re likely to see more of the same.
That’s all for this week!