Thank you Bernard Leong, a friend, fellow entrepreneur & technologist for the kind invitation.
It was an honor to return to my alma mater and speak at National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School for the Master of Science in Venture Creation students about a long-time passion of mine: the open web. In my talk, I covered the inception of the web in the 1990s, the destructive influence of social media algorithms, and the promise of the fediverse and open protocols in shaping the next phase of the web. I also explained why Web3 is not part of that evolution.
Tech companies today should look into integrating open source into their business strategies and contribute to building open protocols. I shared case studies on companies that have successfully done so, Anthropic's Model Context Procol (MCP), Meta's Llama & Singapore's own Menlo Research.
Presentation deck
Fun note: Slide 2 features a screenshot of an early interview Bernard's team did of me back in 2006 on SGEntrepreneur (now Tech in Asia). How time flies.
