What I did at TIA

15 May 2026

Another common question: what did you actually do at TIA?

Short answer: I ran it end-to-end for 16 years, with a lot of help. Special thanks to Maria.

Longer answer below. I stayed closest to product, engineering, design, editorial, and sales.

My top priority was always keeping TIA focused on our core mission: to build and serve the startup community. That required deeply understanding what would actually move the needle for them.

We drew inspiration directly from the community - listening to what they said, reading what they wrote, and watching what they did - to understand their evolving needs. Then we baked those insights into our product roadmap, whether it was through new software, events, or optimizing existing products. We also kept a close eye on evolving market forces, like the drop in startup fundraising activity and the rise of AI, that were impacting our community and business.

But we couldn't do everything. So we prioritized ruthlessly, routinely killing products that weren't working just to free up bandwidth. We watched the P&L closely so the company could keep going.

Below are some of the things we built. It’s not the full list. Most of these I led and again, I get a lot of help from the team.

❤️ Product, engineering, design

• News by AI is a semi-agentic workflow that produces ~1,000 articles a month, with food-for-thought and related context built in. We did not replace the journalists. We freed them to write deeper pieces the model cannot match. Monthly traffic rose 30%. Users love Food for thought. Built with Terence and Haresh.
• We built Daily Toast in 8 weeks. It hit ~15 million views in the first 6 months. We ran 30 or more evals, large and small, and we shipped only after the AI version beat human-written copy in blind tests. Built with Jon and Haresh. I led this one hard. It was fun.
• An AI editor in Google Docs cut the copyeditor's workload. I was more of a cursor on this one. Credits to Terence and Ernie.
• Automated social distribution meant people stopped waiting around. The posts varied more, and impressions and conversions went up a little. Everyone is happier. Credits to Terence.
• A PDF resume parser replaced a tool that cost $20k a year. Yay. Credits to Haresh and Ivan.

🤝 Sales and biz dev

I built the sales function end to end. It covered lead gen, closing, and account servicing. I ran it on numbers. Lead gen stayed with me and brought in about $1M a year, plus or minus, in attributable revenue. I ran lead gen the way I run product, with an AI workflow for finding leads and with content marketing. When we needed it, I sold too and topped the chart. TY Ummi for experimenting lead gen with me. TY Miguel, Jessica, Regina and more for helping with key accounts.

Opened offices in 🇨🇳, 🇯🇵, 🇻🇳, 🇮🇳, and 🇮🇩. For each country, I dedicated time. Spent a year in Beijing and a year in Tokyo. All failed except Indonesia. Many reasons why Indonesia succeeded. One is people, special thanks to Hendri, Glenn, Putra, Minghao, and Willson. And another is that I have personally spent significant time in Jakarta.

✏️ Editorial

This is really is Terence’s territory and I gave him full control. We will, of course, time to time disagree but he has the final say. In rare time, even if we end up in trouble, we were always in it together. No finger pointing. I used to write a lot more often, but less as I got busy with other matters and Terence really way better chief editor than me.

⚠️ Fun experiments that failed

• AI avatars of journalists. Good fun. Poor metric/ROI.
• Outbound sales emails at scale. Fastest way to burn a channel.
• News in brief / AI summaries. No one cared.
• AskTIA. AI-written Q&As based on our articles. Only search engines and bots cared. Not humans. Sad.

Failures are mine. The lessons I keep.

And now, as an advisor, I …

👍 am a friend, cheerleader, and coach to Terence, TIA's new leader.

🛠️ Assist Bernard (TIA's head of engineering) on an agentic product-dev tool → a fleet of agents that ships software (internally, it's called Despicable). Also experimenting with agentic workflows for other functions (i.e. marketing) in sandboxes.

There are lot of hidden heroes -- Melinda, Latha, Celine, Cheng Yong, Ilham, Kelyn, Rizal, alumnus, volunteers, , and so many more. Without them I couldn’t be in my zone of genius and keep building and serving TIA’s mission.