Aaron Sarma

"AI can scale. But can we?"

That's how I opened my keynote at @coursera + @udemy FWD this week. 100+ educators, business leaders and government officials in the room.

Everyone there had built something with AI. Far fewer had shipped it. The burden has moved beyond mere adoption to outcomes.

Three ideas on what we do with these new tools:

The day the AirAsia board decided to invest in Touristly, they asked me a question that still sticks with me.

"Can your servers take the load?"

I thought it was kind of a weird question.

Ten years on, after working on both sides of the table with corporates and startups,I get it.

Here are four S's for pitching corporates:

The last few days on this topic has been intense and I’m genuinely sad with how things are playing out in Malaysia.

It seems that both sides took very hard stands and it’s hard to back away from that. And I do think the video @balajis released made it hard for the government to react in any other way than they way they did - though I get the instinct to communicate NS’s point of view.

Here’s the thing - I’ve been to @ns and met @balaji himself. The team was great and the facilities really make this something special. I even said that if I were 20 younger without a family, I’d love to have had the chance to build a startup in at Network School.

It really felt like Silicon Valley in Asia. I think the idea of a startup society that brings the best minds, latest technology and great culture together in one place is exactly what Malaysia needs.

In any case, I’m rooting for @ns to find a way to make their model work. Congratulations on the deal in Kazakhstan.

Exporting Silicon Valley culture, and hopefully outcomes, is a novel concept. Selfishly, I hope we can find a way to keep it in Malaysia.

So the issue isn’t that the startup scammed them or that KWAP didn’t do diligence.

The issue is the principle of the investments made.

KWAP is a Malaysian pension fund. Imagine if this RM200m was invested in Malaysian startups. Sure most may have failed and there may have been a scam or two.

But imagine what the impact an injection of RM200m would have made to the ecosystem. The jobs created. The exports facilitated. The local heroes it would have built. The snowball impact to the economy would be meaningful.

We really need to rethink how our large funds invest in tech.

@bevel_health need some help here. Updated to iOS 27 beta. The app basically does not work. Read some stuff in Reddit that the update only comes in September. What should I do?