Start Me Up: My Time as CTO for Startups at Microsoft, Asia Pacific

From October 2021 to June 2023 I was CTO for Startups, Asia Pacific at Microsoft, based in Singapore. It sat right at the intersection of the two things I care about most: building with frontier technology, and backing the people brave enough to bet their lives on an idea.

My job, put simply, was to be a technologist in the founder's corner. I led the C-level technology relationships across the region and directed a team of CTOs spanning Southeast Asia, working hand in hand with the founders and technical leaders of scale-ups and emerging unicorns. We'd start where most transformation really starts, in a room, at a whiteboard, with a hard question about the business, and work through to something real: cloud and AI roadmaps taken from ideation, through migration, into production on Azure. I spent a lot of those two years translating board-level ambition into funded, shippable initiatives, and turning what one founder learned into something the next one didn't have to learn the hard way.

What I loved most was the human side of it. Founders in this region don't want a vendor; they want someone who's built things, who'll be straight with them, and who genuinely wants them to win. Meeting them where they were, across markets, cultures and stages that are all wonderfully different from one another, was a masterclass in itself. Every one of those markets taught me something, and every founder reminded me why I do this work: technology is only as good as the change it lets people create.

Start Me Up

Somewhere in the middle of all of it, we decided the stories deserved a bigger stage. So we created Start Me Up, a podcast to put the founders, the builders and the ideas shaping Asia Pacific in front of the people who needed to hear them. It was equal parts celebration and playbook: real conversations about what it actually takes to build, to raise, to scale, and to keep going when it's hard.

The episode below is the series introduction: the team behind Start Me Up, and what we set out to do. I'm sharing it here because it captures the spirit of what those years were about better than any bullet point on a CV ever could.

Watch the introduction on YouTube.

Looking back

I left Microsoft to go and build in the areas I'd been championing: sustainability, then the wave of generative and agentic AI that was just beginning to break. But I carry those years with me. The habit of starting from the business problem, not the technology. The belief that you unlock the best in people by making them the heroes. And the simple conviction that the most interesting things happen when you back the builders.