Nearly thirty years ago, I was a software engineering student in Singapore.
Pascal. C. C++. Java. HTML. SQL. .NET. I learned to code the old school way — rote, structured, disciplined. We lived inside the SDLC. Frameworks weren't suggestions, they were doctrine. It was rigorous in a way that felt almost military at times.
And honestly? I wasn't very good at it. I was really bad at it.
I struggled. I pushed through. And eventually I walked away from a career in software engineering, convinced it wasn't for me.
But something stayed.
Not the syntax — that fades. What stayed was the thinking underneath it. The ability to read code without being intimidated by it. To understand how logic flows, how systems connect, how a user's intent maps to a function, a workflow, an outcome. That kind of structural thinking doesn't leave you. It kinda just stayed dormant, latent. Waiting (I think).
For the next two decades I built a career on the other side of the tec equation. Working closely with engineers, product managers, product marketers. Translating between the people who build things and the people who need them. And somewhere along the way I realised something — the foundation I thought I'd abandoned was actually one of the most valuable things I had.
Knowing what it takes to build software changes how you see problems. You stop being intimidated by complexity. You stop waiting for someone else to build the thing. You start seeing the gap between what exists and what should exist — and you know just enough to do something about it.
That's what brought me back to building.
AI-assisted development changed the equation for people like me. Product thinkers with a deep coding foundation can now move faster than ever — meeting the market, shipping product, iterating in real time, solving real problems without a team of ten engineers and eighteen months of runway.
But the reason I came back wasn't just because I could. It was because I saw something worth building.
The advertising industry had automated everything except the decisions that actually mattered. Upstream decisioning — who to reach, where to run, what inventory is worth buying — was still manual, fragmented, and impossible to scale. The gap was real, the problem was structural, and nobody had built the right layer to fix it.
That's why I built Syntria.
Not because it was technically interesting — though it is. Because it sits at the intersection of everything I know: product thinking, user experience, advertising technology, and a genuine belief that the industry deserves better tools than it has.
I care deeply about UI and UX. About workflows that feel effortless. About the moment a user interacts with something and it just works — where the complexity underneath stays invisible and the outcome is exactly what they needed. That's not a feature consideration. It's a founding principle.
Syntria is built from that principle. And from a mission that hasn't changed since day one — to make advertising intelligent, innovative, and performant.
Thirty years ago I walked away from code thinking it wasn't for me.
Turns out, it was just waiting.