e27‘s top 27 contributors of 2025!
2025 was a year that tested everyone in tech and venture. Funding tightened, geopolitical shifts entered the boardroom, and hype cycles moved faster than most teams could absorb. The outcome was clarity: founders became more disciplined, investors more selective, and operators more intentional about what they build and why.
At e27, we believe progress is collective. Community-driven knowledge is the backbone of this ecosystem, and our contributors bring insights you don’t find in headlines — grounded in experience, informed by diverse markets, and sharpened through real conversations.
These voices helped make 2025 smarter, clearer, and more connected. They challenged assumptions, shared practical lessons, and gave the ecosystem frameworks to act on. Their ideas travelled across borders, sparked dialogue, and helped founders, operators, and investors navigate a rapidly shifting landscape.
What follows is a snapshot of that community in motion: the top 27 contributors of 2025, presented in alphabetical order. Futurists, founders, strategists, marketers, product leaders, and capital allocators whose thinking shaped the year in meaningful ways. Their generosity in sharing hard-won insights has strengthened the region’s ability to innovate and adapt.
As 2026 approaches, one truth carries forward: this ecosystem grows strongest when it grows together.
Anndy Lian is a seasoned business strategist in Asia who has advised local, international, and publicly listed companies as well as government bodies. An early blockchain adopter and active board member, he is known across the region for his deep involvement in Web3, entrepreneurship, and policy work.
In 2025, he published one article every single day on e27, sharing market insights, tracking on-chain developments, and breaking down the evolving Web3 landscape. Across the year, he observed crypto shifting beyond speculation. Real-world adoption of stablecoins and DeFi began reshaping global finance, showing decentralisation’s viability at scale.
Decentralised AI models, combining blockchain-based data sovereignty with on-chain inference, will empower startups to build transparent, user-controlled applications that resist centralisation and enhance privacy.
Brian Condenanza is an Argentinian venture capitalist and entrepreneur shaping the future of finance in Latin America. As the Founder of Hevea Capital, he backs startups using AI, Web3, and sustainable models to rethink financial systems. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, he brings both credibility and curiosity to his work. His roots at the University of Mississippi and involvement with nonprofits and think tanks reflect his commitment to ethical innovation and financial inclusion in emerging markets.
Casie Millhouse’s path has taken her from the US Air Force to coaching Olympic athletes, building nonprofit movements, and later developing AR products used by millions at Meta. Today, she works as a venture strategist and deeptech scout, drawing on experience in AI, satellite intelligence, and healthtech commercialisation to help founders and investors bridge the gap between innovation and capital.
She also designs executive retreats through The Insider Stay, in partnership with Fora Travel and the Virtuoso network, creating environments where teams align, reflect, and build culture without the usual noise. Her work sits at the intersection of technology, leadership, and human connection, shaped by an operator’s instinct for execution and a clear eye for what helps teams think and grow together.
Chaminda Ranatunga brings more than three decades of investment banking and private equity experience across South and Southeast Asia. As Managing Director of Investrust Capital and Managing Partner at Stratec Partners, he has advised governments, development finance institutions, and corporates on transactions exceeding US$300 million. His work spans capital markets, private capital solutions, and sustainable investment strategies shaped by his ACMA training in the UK and MBA from Trinity University in the United States.
Looking ahead, he expects AI-powered platforms that enable climate resilience and financial inclusion to drive meaningful impact across Asia. This aligns with what he observed in 2025, where the most resilient startups were not the fastest growing but the most focused, grounded in unit economics, capital efficiency, and mission clarity.
Engaging with the e27 community has strengthened my ability to simplify complex financial and strategic concepts for a diverse audience. It has also kept me closely attuned to the real challenges founders face, helping me stay relevant in how I invest, advise, and engage across the ecosystem.
Chervee Ho leads BioChromatographix as CEO and Co-Founder, drawing on years of building healthcare ventures across the Asia Pacific. She has built teams from the ground up, opened new markets, and guided diverse groups through growth and change. Her background in biotechnology from the University of Putra Malaysia, paired with global management training at INSEAD, gives her both scientific depth and business clarity. At the heart of her work is a simple aim: turning healthcare challenges into practical solutions that make a genuine difference.
Damien Kopp lives where AI, geopolitics, and business strategy collide. As Managing Director of RebootUp, he guides enterprises and scale-ups on how to deploy AI that is not just powerful but sovereign and strategic. Through his KoncentriK platform and teaching at SMU, he explores the geopolitics behind cloud and data. With two decades across Europe, North America, and Asia, he turns complex shifts into practical insights leaders can act on.
The trend I am looking forward to is the fragmentation of the tech landscape driven by geopolitics and the growing need for sovereign solutions. Over the past year, my key observation has been how deeply technology, power, and politics are intertwined.
David Kim,Founder and Managing Partner of Opensee, draws from a career that bridges investment banking, narrative filmmaking, and tech journalism. Based in Asia, he has interviewed more than 150 global CEOs and writes for leading outlets while partnering with founders as a growth strategist.
Looking to 2026, he believes the winners will not be companies chasing smarter AI models, but those hiring workflow designers who understand where human judgment must stay central. He points to a deskilling crisis already documented in research and says the real advantage will go to teams that blend AI tools with strategic thinking, cultural awareness, and emotional intelligence.
Clarity beats speed in tech and media. After interviewing more than 150 CEOs across Asia, Africa, and the United States, one pattern stood out. The fastest scalers were not the ones working the longest hours or raising the biggest rounds. They knew what not to do. That shifted my own approach. I stopped chasing volume and doubled down on high-leverage work: deep research, sharper storytelling, and execution systems that turn one insight into outsized results. In short, focus is the new unfair advantage.
Feihong Chen brings a versatile mix of coaching, facilitation, teaching, and AI education through her work at Cafei.Space. She helps people and teams navigate change with clarity and confidence, while writing about human-centred growth, emerging tech, and the emotional side of work. Her belief is that the next big shift will come from how humans and intelligent tools collaborate in everyday workflows. Startups that build confidence, emotional intelligence, and structured adoption will thrive.
Over the past year, she found that clarity is a moving target. When she stopped chasing certainty and focused on building transferable skills, everything from work to writing became more meaningful. For her, the key is staying curious, staying adaptable, and trusting the process.
Contributing within the e27 community has made me bolder. It gave me a reason to step into the light after years of working quietly in the background. It lets my extroverted side show up without feeling intimidating. Along the way, it’s sharpened my thinking and pushed me to keep observing, learning, and growing with the community. It has also strengthened my personal brand — my coachees, students, and future clients now have a clearer sense of my voice and what I stand for.
James Spurway, Co-Founder and CIO of Eco Solutions Capital, comes from an unconventional background and built his career entirely through perseverance and resourcefulness. Without capital, connections, or formal credentials, he went on to create businesses across regions and establish himself as an angel investor. That journey shaped his instinct for identifying founders with depth, resilience, and clarity of purpose.
After twenty-five years of observing innovation cycles, he believes the next major shift is generative AI moving from a tool to a true partner, capable of planning and executing tasks autonomously across platforms. He expects this to transform supply chains, investment strategy, and personalised healthcare. For him, sharing insights on e27 has become a way to structure his thinking, test ideas, and connect with founders who share a similar outlook.
The most pivotal insight that crystallised for me in 2025 has been the critical importance of ‘Conviction Capital’ in an age of algorithmic consensus. For years, the industry has been increasingly driven by data rooms, dashboards, and pattern-matching algorithms. These are powerful tools, but they often lead the crowd to the same ‘obvious’ conclusions. My learning this year is that the greatest alpha in this environment no longer comes from identifying what is collectively deemed a ‘good bet,’ but from having the fortitude to back a ‘non-consensus truth.’ It’s a return to the art of investing, but now in conscious counterbalance to the science. The key has been to use data to identify the crowd’s consensus, and then use judgment to find the exceptional opportunities that lie just outside of it.
Jaslyin Qiyu leads marketing and customer experience for Cigna Healthcare across Singapore and Australia, drawing on more than twenty years in B2B and B2C brand strategy, communications, and performance marketing. She has built and led regional teams across Asia for Citibank, EY, JLL, Kantar, Credit Suisse, and State Street, driving transformation and go-to-market strategies. Before Cigna, she ran her own consultancy, helping companies strengthen brand and customer engagement.
Her experience spans martech strategy, content, change management, and mobile optimisation, always with a focus on customer value. She credits the e27 Contributor Programme for sharpening her writing, her thinking, and positioning her as a credible voice in the community.
The shift from standalone AI tools to integrated platforms where multiple AI agents, powered by different LLMs and data sources, work together seamlessly to complete complex workflows. People are not necessarily intimidated by tech, but more by the lack of understanding of the true impact of tech on their current and future lives.
Kevin Leo has spent more than two decades building and advising startups across sectors as an entrepreneur, investor, and ecosystem strategist. His work focuses on creating strategic environments that help companies scale efficiently, and he shares this thinking widely as a sought-after speaker on innovation and positioning. He also serves as an Adjunct Professor, mentoring founders and future leaders.
This past year reinforced his belief that preemptive strategy and precise positioning are among a company’s most valuable non-monetary assets. In crowded markets, clarity of place and purpose drives capital efficiency, especially when supported by cross-discipline collaboration across finance, behavioural science, and product design. Writing on e27 gives him a way to share these perspectives while helping founders challenge assumptions and execute smarter, more intentional moves.
The defining trend will be the severe pivot from ‘funding-first’ growth to ‘growth and revenue-first’ sustainability. The era of unchecked cash-burning fuelled by easy capital is over. Startups must demonstrate strong unit economics and clear profitability pathways from day one. In parallel, while AI saturation continues, its focus will narrow dramatically. We will move beyond the superficial ‘anything AI’ tag and prioritise AI Relevance, where we adopt only those intelligent solutions that demonstrably bring immediate, quantifiable value, dramatically reducing operational costs, or opening entirely new revenue streams. This focus on verifiable value will be the core survival trait for many tech companies.
Kristen Lim is the Founder of Rockrose, an executive search firm that partners with high-growth companies across Asia to hire senior leaders in AI, technology, fintech, and digital assets. She works directly with founders and CEOs to build mission-critical roles, often on a retained or exclusive basis, helping teams scale with precision rather than excess.
Looking ahead, she believes the era of “grow first and fix the numbers later” has ended. Next year, she expects founders, especially in Asia, to embrace disciplined growth: leaner teams, faster go-to-market, and clearer ROI from the start. That shift will reward startups that hire hands-on, data-driven operators with commercial sharpness. In her view, it’s a healthier direction for the ecosystem and is long overdue.
LingYi Chang is the Co-Founder and CPO of illumi, where she helps teams overcome the limits of siloed AI through a visual platform for collaborative experimentation. A technologist with deep experience in machine learning and AI leadership at Microsoft and AWS across Asia Pacific, she is known for turning complex technology into business-ready solutions. She also advises consulting firms and financial institutions, and speaks at global events such as Nvidia, INSEAD, and UBS.
She believes enterprises will shift from chasing the newest AI models to curating context, recognising that human judgment, alignment, and collaboration drive real impact. Over the past year, she learned that people are more overwhelmed than ever, and forcing adoption backfires. Real traction comes from trust and human connection, because people do not adopt technology; they adopt the relationships behind it.
Writing regularly has forced me to rethink and reorganise my own thoughts, while keeping me sharp on the trends shaping our ecosystem. And as a Founder, having a community that pushes, challenges, and supports you has been surprisingly grounding—and exactly the kind of fuel you don’t get when you build alone.
Marcus Loh leads marketing and public affairs at Temus, a Singapore-based digital services firm, while serving as Chairman of the Public Affairs Group at PRCA Asia Pacific. Previously President of the Institute of Public Relations of Singapore, he has helped strengthen the role of strategic communication amid shifting policy, tech, and geoeconomic dynamics. He is also pursuing his M.A. at King’s College London in War Studies, deepening his understanding of global statecraft.
Looking ahead, he believes geopolitics will become part of everyday business. Decisions in Washington, Beijing, or Brussels can now determine which tech stacks companies can build on. Startups will need to treat diversification and risk monitoring as a core strategy, not an afterthought. This past year reminded him that circumstances don’t define firms; their response does, and he sees Temus becoming more intentional about how geopolitics shapes decisions across AI adoption, talent, and partnerships.
Writing regularly has forced me to pause and make sense of what’s happening around us, both for my firm and for how I see the world. The e27 community has nudged me to connect these broader shifts to what business leaders actually need to act on day to day. It’s also helped me sharpen my voice and turn big, messy trends into something practical for people building in this region, while clarifying my approach and academic research in international relations and war studies.
Muzaffar Zafar approaches every project with one guiding belief: anything is possible. As Co-Founder of FuturByte and Eazio, he blends technical depth with the curiosity to experiment, learn, and take considered risks. Coding has shaped his education, career, and even his downtime, which naturally led him to build solutions that bridge business problems with real technology outcomes. Through his ventures, he applies tech in practical, thoughtful ways while staying tuned to how the digital landscape keeps shifting and opening new possibilities.
As a Senior Product Manager at Microsoft Azure, Nataraj Sindam builds the cloud infrastructure that lets software applications scale to global levels. Beyond product work, he hosts the Startup Project podcast, where he speaks with founders and innovators building the future of technology. His vantage point gives him clarity on where the market is heading.
He believes AI is the most important technological shift of this decade and likely the next. It is hard to imagine a sector that will not be reshaped, and the opportunity lies in creating products that were previously impossible. His takeaway for the ecosystem is that being AI-first is now table stakes. You will not be replaced by AI, he says, but you can be replaced by someone who understands and leverages AI better.
Writing, for me, is thinking; it is about generating ideas and challenging a mental muscle that would otherwise atrophy. In an attention-starved era, writing is also an exercise in focus. My interest mainly revolves around building the future, which involves reviewing and understanding startups, a mutual area of interest for both me and e27.
Osman Ahmed is a venture builder and partnerships specialist who works closely with founders across Asia’s most dynamic emerging markets. With a background spanning sales engineering, startup investing, and ecosystem development, he brings a grounded, practical perspective on what helps young companies grow.
Part of the e27 contributor community, he shares stories and insights shaped by real conversations with founders, investors, and operators from Bangladesh to Singapore. With more than fifteen years across emerging technology and business development in APAC, he has a seasoned understanding of how innovation takes root in the region.
He works with founders, venture capital firms, and corporates to unlock new growth using AI, IoT, and cloud platforms. Ahmed is also co-founder of a smart cities startup and a venture partner at Accelerating Asia, supporting some of the region’s most promising founders.
Patrecia Meliana is the Product Success Manager at ContentGrow, where she blends her technology and business analysis background to enhance the platform and support freelance journalists and brands in creating impactful content. Her writing on ContentGrip explores AI integration, digital marketing, personalisation, and engagement strategies, helping businesses navigate the evolving landscape of B2B marketing.
She believes the next major shift will be moving from AI experimentation to full integration across business functions. Startups will redesign workflows around automation, multimodal search, and AI-assisted decision making, with agentic AI taking action rather than just assisting. That shift will reward teams that understand these systems deeply and embrace faster execution.
Writing consistently keeps her grounded in the ecosystem, sparking conversations and connections that deepen her learning. As she puts it, “The conversations that happen after an article goes live often spark new ideas and connect me with people I would not have met otherwise. It has been a meaningful part of my journey.”
In 2025, I learnt that adaptability and the grit to keep learning new skills are becoming non-negotiable. The idea of “not getting left behind” is not a one-sided coin. As we keep learning new skills, we also expand our perspective and the horizons we can reach. This year taught me that staying curious and flexible is not just a survival strategy. It is a way to unlock new opportunities and new ways of thinking that I would not have discovered otherwise.
Rajesh Rai is the CEO of ExpertOps AI, where he is building the world’s first AI Workforce OS to redefine enterprise operations in an AI-first era. With more than fifteen years in enterprise software, ML, SaaS, and cloud, he has supported Microsoft, Fractal, Oracle, Bosch, and over fifty global enterprises.His view of the future goes beyond chatbots and copilots. He believes enterprises will deploy AI agents that take responsibility for tasks, decisions, and workflows, driving throughput and efficiency without scaling headcount linearly. This shift will reshape org structures, talent strategies, and create a new category altogether: AI-run operations, where work happens around the clock with near-zero marginal cost. He says writing for the e27 community has forced clarity because it pushes him to simplify complex ideas about AI, productivity, and operations into insights leaders can use immediately.
In every industry I’ve worked with, the bottleneck has shifted from tools to people: decision cycles are too slow, information is overwhelming, and re-skilling simply cannot keep up with the pace of change. This reinforced a major insight for me: To unlock the next 10x in productivity, companies must redesign processes around AI-first execution, not try to bolt AI onto old workflows.
Sabrina Princessa Wang is a futurist, brand strategist, and multi-venture founder building the next wave of AI-powered creators and entrepreneurs. Through People’s Inc. 360, Royal Visionary Society, Speakers Society, and Money and AI, she helps founders reclaim time, scale smarter, and build freedom through automation, storytelling, and community.
Her biggest insight from 2025 is that alignment matters more than acceleration. With the right systems, community, and clarity of purpose, growth becomes effortless. AI may give time back, but alignment gives energy and direction, and when both connect, impact compounds fast. She says that sharing her insights on e27 sharpened her thinking, turned lived experiences into actionable frameworks, strengthened her voice as a futurist, and connected her with a regional ecosystem that challenges and inspires her work.
The rise of personal AI twins will reshape how founders build, operate, and communicate. We’re moving from “AI as a tool” to “AI as an extension of human capability” — enabling solopreneurs to scale like teams, creators to automate entire content ecosystems, and companies to build hyper-personalised customer experiences at speed.
Sebastian Tai is a digital transformation and e-commerce leader focused on Southeast Asia, with more than fifteen years scaling businesses at Lazada, Abbott, and Mettler Toledo. He pairs corporate rigour with startup agility, driving commercial transformation while mentoring early-stage founders. Known for his practical, people-first approach, he contributes to e27 as part of his mission to strengthen digital capability and leadership readiness across the region.
He expects 2026 to shift from flashy AI demos to AI delivery. With tighter budgets and clearer expectations, founders will need to prove real improvements in conversion, margins, fulfilment speed, and customer satisfaction. Startups may operate with more corporate discipline, while corporates will feel pressure to move faster. Being part of the e27 community taught him to take complex ideas and shape them into something founders can actually use, while the ongoing dialogue with founders and operators deepened and evolved his perspective.
My biggest learning in 2025 was that growth comes from two directions at the same time: building forward and giving back. Working with early-stage founders and mentoring young professionals taught me that clarity often comes from helping others solve their challenges. At the same time, validating my own startup idea pushed me to question assumptions, simplify aggressively, and be brutally honest about what creates real value. Somewhere between those two worlds, I learned that reinvention is not a sign of uncertainty; it’s a sign of leadership. 2025 taught me to stay adaptable, stay curious, and stay useful to the people and teams around me. That mindset didn’t just shape my work. It sharpened who I am as a leader in the ecosystem.
Shweta Jain is a fintech leader with deep experience in product management, strategy consulting, and cloud operations. As VP for Product Management and the Fintech Ecosystem at Finastra, she oversees strategy, innovation, and operational efficiency across core banking cloud solutions. She has a track record of growing product lines, leading large global teams, and transforming go-to-market models. Based in Hong Kong, she works closely with Finastra’s sales and consulting teams on strategic engagements worldwide.
Her consistency within the e27 community strengthened her voice as both builder and advocate. Translating shifting industry dynamics into clear, practical insights sharpened her perspective, and the conversations that followed widened her understanding of innovation across APAC.
The defining trend of 2026 will be embedded, intelligent finance at scale. Startups will increasingly build AI-driven services directly into industry platforms: retail, health, logistics, making financial capabilities invisible but ever-present. The winners will be those who seamlessly combine cloud-native architectures, real-time data, and ecosystem partnerships to deliver trusted, context-aware financial experiences. It’s got to be the power of co-creation: that true innovation in financial services happens when banks, fintechs, and cloud partners build together, not in silos. This shifted my perspective from ecosystem enablement to ecosystem orchestration. When we align shared outcomes, we accelerate time to value, strengthen trust, and unlock solutions no single player could deliver alone.
Stella Kim is the Co-Founder and COO of CoBALT, the company behind REALIZER, a sales intelligence platform that automates lead capture, enrichment, and follow-up from offline meetings. With more than a decade of leadership experience in SaaS, AI, and digital platforms, she is driving CoBALT’s global go-to-market efforts across Asia.
She expects the ecosystem to shift toward leaner, revenue-first building as capital becomes more selective and teams rely on AI instead of headcount. Startups that prove traction early through efficient GTM, faster pilots, and smaller but repeatable wins will define the next wave more than hyper-growth storytelling. For her, sharing insights through e27 proved that thoughtful content builds relationships far better than cold outreach. Partners and potential customers responded organically, opening conversations she would never have reached otherwise.
2025 taught me that progress often looks less like big wins and more like consistency compounded. Small, boring improvements—faster feedback loops, cleaner data, tighter handoffs—ended up shaping our trajectory more than any single breakthrough.
Svetlana Stotskaya is a global marketing executive and mentor supporting brands of all sizes across France and Singapore. She advises founders through accelerators such as Techstars and Founder Institute, and serves as a jury member for major international programs, including the New York Festivals Advertising Awards, the Internet Advertising Competition, and the BIG Innovation Awards. Recognised as a 2024 Global Young Leader and Global Recognition Award winner, she contributes to sustainability efforts through Green The Bid and engages with the Alan Turing Institute’s AI and Arts Group. A key insight from 2025 for her is the accelerating impact of AI automation. She has tested tools across data analysis and content marketing and seen impressive results across organisations.
AI-powered personalisation across industries is one trend that is going to take the market by storm. This trend spans multiple industries, most notably e-commerce, where AI-driven personalised recommendations are transforming how consumers discover products. Additionally, AI-generated content like images further enhances brand engagement by offering unique, customised experiences. As a marketer, I’ve been observing the growing adoption of AI personalisation tools, which signal significant momentum and innovation ahead in how businesses interact with their customers.
Vincent Tan is the Founder of Elevar Global Consulting, where he helps professionals and leaders navigate transition, clarify identity, and build the meta skills needed in an AI-driven world. Rejecting traditional labels, he focuses on decoding human signals–patterns and internal narratives that shape who we are becoming. Through frameworks like Be An Original, CreativeCode, and Signal OS, he supports reinvention with clarity and grounded confidence.
Looking ahead, he believes 2026 will mark a shift from AI capability to a deeper AI-human relationship. As tasks once tied to competence become automated, people will question value, expertise, and identity. He expects organisations to protect what machines cannot replicate: worldview, judgment, culture, and meaning. For him, contributing to the e27 community was never just about sharing ideas. It helped him notice subtle changes across the ecosystem, understand the struggles and hopes that founders carry, and become much more deliberate about the themes he explores.
AI didn’t fail us–our thinking did. AI made everything faster, but speed without interpretation amplifies confusion. The bottleneck wasn’t technological capability; it was human capacity for interpretation and meaning-making. Technology literacy is no longer what sets people apart–interpretive intelligence is.
Yvan Goudard is a communication strategist who helps startups and enterprises align business strategy with a clear, credible narrative. He often sees ventures communicating around their business rather than from it, creating misalignment between teams, investors, and markets. His work focuses on clarifying what companies do, why it matters, and how it creates value, turning strategy into communication that drives trust, growth, and investor confidence. With decades of experience across aviation, fintech, and venture ecosystems, he now advises early-stage companies and shares his thinking on e27.
Instead of chasing trends, he pays attention to deeper shifts, especially the widening gap between AI’s rapid capabilities and the slower maturity of regulation and governance. He anticipates that AI ethics, compliance, and cybersecurity will become priorities as companies are forced to take them seriously. Being part of the e27 community sharpened his focus and helped him spot meaningful patterns across the ecosystem. The momentum from sharing those insights eventually led him to launch Branch Out, the podcast where he dives into stories and shifts shaping the region.
2025 felt like a rollercoaster, and the ride is still very much in motion. With markets swinging wildly, scams spiking across the region, and a noticeable drop in risk appetite, the year reinforced one simple lesson for me: you survive turbulence by going back to fundamentals. Staying disciplined, consistent, and focused on delivering real value matters more than ever. Another big takeaway was the role of technology. It is essential to use it smartly, not blindly follow whatever is trending. Automate what improves efficiency, but never at the expense of the human relationships that keep a business credible and resilient.
Zijian Khor is a strategic thinker focused on sustainable growth and resilience. His work spans environmental policy, carbon footprinting, waste management, and the geopolitics of climate change, helping organisations navigate sustainability with clarity. He also analyses CBDCs, Web3, NFTs, and DAOs as emerging models for digital finance and community building, giving him a rare vantage point at the intersection of climate strategy and frontier technology.
He brings over a decade of experience shaping climate and sustainability strategy within Singapore’s National Environment Agency and Ministry of Sustainability. He also runs the Geopolitical Action 4 Leaders newsletter and the GeoPol in a Pod podcast, where he surfaces insights on global governance, climate change, and emerging technologies.
Most startups are flying blind in a world of confusion, where technological, regulatory, and geopolitical shifts can upend entire markets overnight. A defining trend next year will be the rapid convergence of AI, regulation, and geopolitics— startups that fail to read these shifts will get blindsided. The real edge will go to founders who treat tech watch and horizon scanning as essential infrastructure: spotting early signals of market fractures, new standards, and emerging power plays. This helps align product roadmaps and fundraising narratives to where the world is actually moving. In short: the startup landscape will reward foresight, not speed alone.
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