Happy Sunday! It was a busy week with a few work trips coming up and lots of projects going on, but here’s this week’s list:
Next guest on Before We Get There Podcast
On Thursday, my latest episode with Ariff Zin will go live. Ariff is head chef at Rumah Makan Minang, one of the oldest Nasi Padang restaurants in Singapore, with his grandmother first starting to sell food in the 1950s. Nasi Padang is a style of Indonesian food that originates from the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, where Ariff’s family is from. It is characterized by being a meal that is served with rice and a wide variety of dishes. When you order a single serving, you pick a few dishes that you want, and they are added to your plate of rice. I’m especially excited about this episode because I fell in love with this food when I first moved to Singapore. With dishes like beef rendang, coconut curry tapioca leaves, ikan bilis (dried anchovies), and many more – the food is super flavorful and an amazing mix of spice, sweet, and savory. Ariff’s story of growing up in the family restaurant and then being trained as a professional chef, and how he has integrated those modern techniques into this traditional restaurant, was super interesting.
Marketing AI tool I tried this weekend
An awesome tool by Mack Grenfell popped up on my LinkedIn feed. https://trakkr.ai/ is a free beta site that allows marketers to see how visible they are to people on the 5 most popular LLMs. This is significant because, much like SEO became a cornerstone of our digital strategies, understanding and optimizing our visibility within these AI models is rapidly becoming just as crucial. As more people start to use AI instead of search engines, tracking how our brands are represented and recommended by LLMs will be fundamental to staying ahead. Tools like Trakkr are paving the way for us to monitor these insights, ensuring our messaging remains consistent and impactful across these new, influential channels. It’s definitely one to watch and start experimenting with.
TEDxSingapore open mic night
On Thursday night, we held the first TEDxSingapore open mic of this year, preparing for our annual main stage event. Since this is my second year helping to organize this, I had a lot better idea of what kind of people we wanted to hear from and how to reach out to them. We met 8 potential speakers with a wide variety of backgrounds, like a doctor utilizing AI, a neon artist, an indie game developer, an Olympic swimmer, and a biotech founder. These open mics are a chance for our team to meet these people doing interesting things and hear about what they are working on. We’ll do this a couple of times before we narrow down the list, and then there will be months of working on scripts and rehearsals before their talks are ready for the big stage. It’s awesome how excited people get to learn more about TEDxSingapore and share their stories.
What I read this week
I had an amazing time listening to the audiobook version of Alfian Sa’at’s Malay Sketches read by the author himself. The book is a collection of short stories or vignettes with characters being part of the Malay community in Singapore. The story of this community is interesting to me, in the neighboring countries of Malaysia and Indonesia, they are the majority ethnicity. But in Singapore, there are more people with Chinese ancestry, and in a lot of ways, there are parallels between the Malays in Singapore and the people of color I grew up with in the US. I consider it lucky that the first BJJ gym I joined had a lot of Malay members that I became friends with. Otherwise, since I didn’t grow up here or go through national service, I would have had limited chances to get to know many Malays. This book gave me a more intimate look at this community, and the reading with local accents made it feel like I was standing next to the characters.
Have a great week ahead!