So This Is My Why

Davy Liu is a Chinese Forrest Gump. He’s also a former Disney animator who’s worked on Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Aladdin, Mulan, Atlantis and Star Wars, and is the founder of Kendu Films. Fun Fact: General Shang in Mulan was drawn based off Davy! There's an uncanny likeness between both fo them. Now. Given Davy’s illustrious career, you would’ve thought that he’s had a smooth career...

Devil Wears Prada is the closest thing I have to the world of high fashion. When I asked Francine Ballard how closely it mimicked reality, she said, “There is some truth to that.” And she should know. Francine Ballard has worked in the fashion industry for a while.  She was the American Fashion Director at Time Inc (InStyle), Conde Nast (Lucky magazine), and PaperCity Magazine as Style Editor at L...

Jeremy Au is the Chief of Staff and Head of Strategic Projects at Monk’s Hill Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in early-stage tech companies, primarily Series A, in Southeast Asia. And is also the host of the BRAVE Southeast Asia Tech Podcast! Prior to Monk’s Hill Ventures, Jeremy was CEO & Co-Founder of CozyKin, a VC-backed edtech startup, which was acquired by Higher Ground Educati...

ICYMI: Zeneca 33, prolific NFT investor & thought leader (he has 300k Twitter followers!) was on STIMY. If you've ever seen some of Zeneca 33's works/writings, you'll know that he's very bullish about generative art : a type of NFT where the art is generated entirely from code. A particular generative art project that he loves? Art Blocks. We unpacked all that in Zeneca 33'...

Aaron Tang is a popular Malaysian blogger known as Mr Stingy (on personal finance & career), and the Country Manager of Luno - Malaysia’s first regulated cryptocurrency exchange. In many ways, Aaron’s career has been dictated by his “maximizer personality” & desire to make the greatest use of the resources he had.  This has resulted in some pretty ingenious moves, including a use of multip...

It’s not normal to make yourself redundant, right? 😳 It’s hard enough applying for a job 😩, going through 5-8 rounds of interview 🤢before settling into your new role & figuring out how everything works. And what it takes to reach the top. 🧐 It’s also not normal to work with NASA to launch a new product (Angry Birds Space🐦 !!) & have an astronaut 👨‍🚀 talk about it live from the Inter...

This is an interview where Freda Liu (former STIMY Ep 27 guest!), BFM 89.9 radio TV host turned the tables and interviewed.. me! About my personal journey, particularly with starting this So This Is My Why Podcast. It's still strange to hear myself speak even after publishing 94 episodes, but I do hope you find something interesting out of this interview! E.g. how I went from discovering what...

ICYMI (in case you missed it) features some of my favourite moments from earlier STIMY episodes. Back in Episode 85, Dr Robin Dunbar (Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford) is most known for formulating Dunbar's Number = the cognitive limit of a person in terms of the number of relationships they can handle at any one time. That number if 150. Lots of people...

What does it mean to be the underdogs? One of the economically marginalised? Unable to open a bank account, cash a cheque… all the things that most of us would take for granted? Geoffrey See - World Economic Forum Young Global Leader & serial entrepreneur - knows this well, because of his extensive work as a social entrepreneur in North Korea via Choson Exchange. But after 11 years, Geoffrey k...

North Korean women are entrepreneurs. Not the first thing you might think of, but a reality that STIMY’s latest guest - Geoffrey See - knows very well. So who is Geoffrey See? Here’s a quick run down 👇🏻 Graduated from Yale University & the Wharton Business School;  Worked as a Bain consultant; Co-founded Choson Exchange : a social enterprise that created the largest training program for fema...

How do you get a Deputy Prime Minister* to give you RM 500 million (USD 105M)? By having the guts & conviction of a Tiger General. 👇🏻 Several months ago, I interviewed General Tan Sri (Dr)’ Borhan bin Ahmad (Retired): a retired 4 star General & former Chief of Defence Forces in Malaysia - the highest military rank that one can attain. ⚔️ This was the 82-year-old man who had: Established...

Welcome to a very special STIMY Episode 91 & I'm delighted to see all the new STIMY followers this week! Instead of the normal guest format, this episode will highlight: The reasons behind why I started So This Is My Why; The kind of guests you’ll find featured; A very shocking incident last summer involving the Late Late Show with James Corden; and 4 lessons learned from past STIMY guests...

TM Lee is the co-founder & CEO at Coingecko - one of the world’s largest crypto data aggregators with over 150 million users in 2021 alone!  But before becoming a founder, TM was first influenced by his brother to become a coder. He learned about Reddit and Digg, and even ended up studying computer science at Purdue University, where he was exposed to the likes of Jason Fried (Basecamp) - a hu...

Tibor Mérey is a Managing Director and Partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), global co-lead on the metaverse, and a core member of Boston Consulting Group's Technology, Media & Telecommunications (TMT); and Marketing, Sales & Pricing (MSP) practices. He leads the TMT practice in Austria, where he focuses on digital transformation and technology-enabled growth strategies. Prior to j...

ICYMI: Zeneca 33, prolific NFT investor & thought leader (he has 300k Twitter followers!) was on STIMY. He's a part of some of the most influential NFT projects around, including Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC), Cryptopunks, Goblintown, Art Blocks and more. We've all heard of BAYC/Jimmy Fallon. We hear (seemingly) everyone talk about being part of the Bored Apes community. But... what is...

Diego Borgo is a metaverse & Web3 strategic advisor to Fortune 500 brands like Adidas, Salesforce, Unilever, Boson Protocol and more.  Having featured a number of NFT founders & artists, this STIMY episode showcases how brands have and can enter the metaverse with Diego, who’s been in many Fortune 500 boardrooms & has his finger on the latest alpha: who’s done well, who hasn’t, how imp...

ICYMI (in case you missed it) features some of my favourite moments from earlier STIMY episodes. Back in Episode 85, Dr Robin Dunbar (Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford) shares why he thinks that the only way we can make REAL friends is through physical IRL interactions. Virtual friends? Meh, they're fake. But do you agree? 🤔 Listen to the full episode h...

STIMY 87 features Phil Libin. Some things he’s most known for:  Co-founder and CEO of Evernote, which he grew to become a beloved product for hundreds of millions of users Managing Director at General Catalyst Co-founder and CEO of All Turtles, a globally distributed product studio  Co-founder of mmhmm, an all-in-one platform for making, watching, and talking on videos  This is an episode that’s a...

We’re back with Part 2 of STIMY’s interview with Zeneca 33! ICYMI: Zeneca is a former professional poker player (15 years!) turned NFT founder, investor and educator. He has nearly 300k followers on Twitter, founder of ZenAcademy, an NFT community that aims to create a safe learning environment for people discovering their place in web3, has a newsletter, YouTube channel and 2 podcasts! If you wan...

ICYMI (in case you missed it) features some of our favourite moments from earlier STIMY episodes. Back in Episode 79, we met Nicole Quinn : General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners aka the "Celebrity Whisperer". Nicole led the Series A in Cameo and Lady Gaga's Haus Labs and seed rounds in Girlboss, Illumix and Sagely. She also invested in the Series B in Calm and Series C in Goop...

ICYMI (in case you missed it) features some of my favourite moments from earlier STIMY episodes. Back in Episode 85, Dr Robin Dunbar (Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford) shares why we fall for romantic scams against our better judgment (even when everyone around us is warning us against it!!). Listen to the full episode here : 🎙️Apple Podcast: https://podcast...

If you’ve been following STIMY recently, you’ll have noticed our recent Web 3.0 trend.  Yes, the market is bearish. Crypto is crashing. But more companies & individuals than ever are entering the space. NFT NYC just ended. Soul tokens are coming… To make, hopefully, some sense of it all, STIMY is proud to present its latest guest - one of the most prolific NFT content creators & thought le...

#ICYMI  Back in STIMY Ep 30, we met Dr Finian Tan - Chairman & Co-Founder of Vickers Venture Partners - a $3 billion deep tech venture capital fund based out of Singapore. Some things he’s done:  founder of J.Aron (APAC trading arm of Goldman Sachs) Deputy Secretary of Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry, where he was tasked with creating  Chairman of Singapore’s  $1 billion TIF Fund, t...

How many friends do you have? 50? 100? Now how about close friends? If you’ll recall back in the early days of Facebook, everyone was busy adding every single friend, casual acquaintance and stranger that they came across as a “friend” until it became too much and a “purge” took place. A purging that was partly influenced by a burger chain and this thing called Dunbar’s number: which concerns the...

Eric Toda has built the American Dream. He’s the Global Head of Social Marketing & Head of Meta Prosper at Meta as well as an advisory board member of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. Prior to Meta, Eric was the CMO at Gap Inc, Global Head of Social Marketing and Editorial Content at Airbnb and Global Digital Brand Marketing Director at Nike.  But Eric’s path has hardly been an e...