Author Archives → Ridz

Ridzuan is a Technologist who has spent a good part of the past 20 years in various engineering-related roles in the startup scene across multiple industries - communications, marketing & advertising, digital currencies, security(OSINT surveillance and counter surveillance) and sports. He is especially adept in helping young startups and SMEs set up their initial engineering teams, cross-divisional processes and engineering culture. At present, he spends his time advising companies on both software engineering and technical architecture related subjects while working on a gaming startup.

The Ship Is Pulling Away. Don’t Get Left Ashore.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been hearing some things on repeat from across many conversations when it comes to why someone hasn’t developed their AI usage skills beyond just prompting the chatbots:

  • I don’t have time
  • I don’t know where to start
  • I don’t know where I can use AI in my workflow
  • I don’t like that AI wastes water/energy/etc
  • I don’t want to support the work of artists being stolen
  • I would just be training my replacement

If you find yourself saying one of these things, you have to get over it.

I think the divide between the winners and losers will be very large… so we have to make sure we’re on the winning side lol

– something I said in a chat some months ago

In these past two weeks, I’ve been able to immerse myself more into AI tools/frameworks/harnesses/etc and I’m more convinced that the performance gap between the people who leverage AI and the people who don’t is only going to widen over time.

This is especially so if a person embraces agentic workflows resulting in free-ed up time and attention that can be redeployed to other problems that might also benefit from an agentic solution. It’s almost like spending time to write functions in code – you write it once, then you get to use it over and over again. While the setup might take longer, you benefit from the time savings in boatloads over time. In short, the advantage compounds.

We are, of course, in the somewhat early days still but if I were to visualise an analogy, it’s kind of like a ship that’s pulling away from the shore… and it’s pulling away fast. There’s going to be a point afterwhich you’re just stuck ashore.

So do whatever it takes to get a seat.
Because whatever your issue is with the use of AI, you’re powerless if you miss the boat.

Forming The Borg Collective

TLDR: I’m starting The Borg Collective — an invite-only group of founders and operators who are serious about building AI into their businesses. Different specializations, shared ambition, no spectators. If that sounds interesting to you, ping me.

I am trying to build a company with as few people as possible to deliver the maximum amount of value to society. Not new I know. But I think the productivity ratios are changing and fully leveraging it is going to require us all to figure out how the new workstreams of a company should look like.

Through an AI-first lens and as a software engineer/product developer who is oscillating between builder and founder modes, I find myself grappling with a few questions:

(tap to expand) 

1. How do I learn about about the specializations that I don’t have depth in faster?

Without sufficient appreciation for domain knowledge, I wouldn’t be able to craft an effective workstream – much less build and insert the necessary AI Agents in the right place. I could take the time to research and study of course but I need it done yesterday because we’re all in a race.

2. How do I structure the AI harness to be effective at what it needs to do?

There’s no one best way to do this and there’s not enough time to always go out there to find out how everyone in the world is doing it. How can I find out how others are doing it effectively in a time-efficient manner instead of reinventing things myself all the time?

3. How do I keep up with the frequency with which the space evolves?

Again, time is the constraint here. Things move so fast in the space that things change while you’re in mid-experiment. There needs to be a more efficient way of filtering the noise and sharing findings

4. How do I operationalize things?

All the knowledge in the world isn’t going to make an impact unless it’s put into operation. Depending on the workstream, this can look very different… but how?

As I thought about it, I became more certain that I can’t be the only one who’s asking themselves these questions. Perhaps, there’s value in bringing together a group of people with different specializations and interested in a similar outcome.

Introducing The Borg Collective

The Borg is a collective of individuals who run their own projects/businesses and are actively looking to operationalise AI into various aspects of their company. 

The collective is invite-only and aims to constrain representation for each specialisation to, at most, 2 people. For example, there might be a maximum of 2 people who specialise in sales, 2 in software engineering, 2 in HR, etc… 

The intent is for everyone to be able to tap on each other’s domain expertise, ingest it and learn how to implement agentic AI into their business workflows from each other. Over time it should help everyone build their own lean company that highly leverages the use of AI.

“From each other” is the operative phrase here – it’s not meant to be a group where people come to listen to talks. Everyone would be expected to share and be running their own experiments.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested to explore, ping me!

Most People Go Where The Current Takes them. Don’t Be Most People.

In recent months, I’ve been thinking a lot about the make-up of my social circles and the impact they have on me – how does it influence the way I behave, how I feel, what I think about? And I’ve come to a broader reminder that you can either be passive and be swept by the current of the circles around you or you can swim to where the current takes you to be where you intend to go.

They’re both kind of the same really.

The difference is in the intent – the knowing of where you want to go and how badly you want to get there. In the former, you give power to the current to decide where you land. In the latter, you’re willing to move between and maybe even against it to be in the part of the current that moves you in the right direction.

Problem is, it’s difficult to do the latter.

Navigating the current

First, you have to spend time and energy figuring out your destination. This alone makes many feel uncomfortable. Initially, some of us are forced to face the fact that we don’t know where we want to go. This inadequacy might be enough to turn some people off from continuing the exercise. But assuming you dare to give yourself some room, daring to set a destination opens up many more questions.

  • Is it a reasonable goal?
  • Am I good enough to get there?
  • What do I need to know and have to be able to get there?
  • Who can support me?
  • What if no one supports me?
  • What if I fail?
  • What else do I not know?

If one hadn’t already dropped out earlier, this subsequent list of questions tends to overwhelm many and they drop out here.

And this is where being resolute/stubborn/stupid/naive/etc (choose whatever combination of words that allows a person to ignore reason and move through uncertainty) moves you along.

Moving through the current is uncomfortable

Ok so now that you know where you want to go, the really hard part actually begins.

If you’re lucky, you look around you and realise you’re in the company of exactly the right kind of people and supported by the right resources and systems to get you where you wanted to go. Lucky you. Go live your good and happy life.

For everyone else, you’ll realise that you’re in the part of the current that’s probably working against you in both small and big ways (the people are self-limiting, want different things from you, your environment is geared towards something else, etc). And the only way to change this, is to move and leave behind what feels familiar and isn’t aligned. And this is hard because it means finding a different group of people to spend time with (and make the current group feel like you’ve abandoned them). It means disagreeing with the ideas and thoughts of the current people around you. It means functioning differently from how you’ve always been validated to function. Sometimes, it even means physically moving to a different place – losing everything that felt like home.

Is it worth it?

So why does it matter that we get to a destination of our choosing?

The reasons probably differ from person to person so I can only say this for myself – It matters because, to me, a thoughtful and intentional choice of one’s destination should reflect a place where a person believes they would thrive – to be impactful, authentic and happy.

And if so, this would be a position from where a person could most maximally impact the lives of the people they care about while feeling the satisfaction and joy for their own lives.

On Personal CRMs

When I tell people that I have a CRM system to make sure I keep in touch with my friends and family on a regular basis, people either look at me weird or they give me a smirk thinking that it makes the relationships cold and transactional.

But I never understood this sentiment. To me, all of us implement and work through systems at work so as to ‘guarantee’ outcomes – outcomes that have been determined to be important for the business we work in.

And so if we’re constantly told that work isn’t the most important thing, why is it that we ‘work hard’ at maximising outcomes for our workplace but choose to be ok with taking a laissez-faire approach towards the outcomes of the more important relationships in our lives?

Are we getting our priorities wrong?
Should we not at least shoot for parity?

—
For anyone who’s curious, I have a system that I’ve set up for myself using a combination of ClickUp and Obsidian. I used to use a self-hosted instance of Monica CRM but I’ve been trying to move more of my data into Obsidian since it makes it easier for me to then use the vault files as a knowledgebase with Claude CLI.

Earning The Right to Beautify The Page

Before blogging was even a word, I had already started my site to keep as an open journal of sorts. It had memories from when I was in JC all the way till… whenever it was that I lost the site and had no backup of it. Since then, I had very little motivation to re-start the site and on the rare moments when I had a flash of inspiration, it would quickly die down as I realised how self-conscious I had become – 15 completed drafts but never being able to click Publish.

But here I am, trying it one more time as I try to execute a transitionary phase of my Life. I set up the account rather quickly and found myself wanting to get a nice template before a part of me went,

“You sure you want to spend close to $100 on something you might abandon in the next 2 weeks?”

So… Here’s what I’m going to do – If I can keep up a frequency of at least twice a week for the next 2 weeks, I’ll let myself buy a template to beautify things a little.

Until then, I’ll just stick to the default WordPress template.

(and because of the era we’re living in, I want to say, “No. I won’t be using AI to write anything.” Reasons for that shall be a post of its own)