TL;DR

As CTO, Meng is the lead systems architect, computer scientist, and resident good cop at Legalese. Twenty years ago, while working during the first wave of Internet startups, he created and led the anti-spam standard SPF to worldwide adoption. He's purportedly a lot wiser and more experienced now, so he wants to do the same and bring Legalese's L4 to worldwide adoption. This time, with a revenue model.

Long Version

Emails & first startup
In 1995, as a CS undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, Meng co-founded pobox.com, the first commercial email service (later acquired by Fastmail). A couple of years later, he created an anti-spam email standard (RFC4408 SPF) and led it to global adoption, by championing it to Microsoft, Google, Hotmail, and others. Today, SPF protects a majority of all email. The Washington Post did a piece on it.

2nd Startup
In 2005, Meng co-founded karmasphere.com, one of the first big data analytics solutions to deliver internet-scale “reputation data as a service”. This evolved to offer Big Data tools and was acquired by FICO.

Singapore & the 3rd Startup
In 2008, Meng returned home to Singapore (after 20 years away) for family reasons. He missed the Valley. So, first, he co-founded Hackerspace.SG, one of the first maker spaces in Singapore. Then, bonding over I'm OK, You're OK with his soon-to-be cofounder, Hugh Mason, they founded JFDI.Asia, Singapore's first startup accelerator. The amount of legal and quasi-legal documentation Meng had to deal with (not always successfully) at JFDI led Meng to put on his programmer hat for a couple of days and hack together what would later become v1 of Legalese.

Meng's background in innovation is informed by Everett Rogers, Geoffrey Moore, Clayton Christensen, William Janeway, Mariana Mazzucato, and Simon Wardley; by sitting on a variety of government panels in Singapore, most recently on the Committee for the Future Economy's subcommittee on Future Corporate Capabilities and Innovation (Startups); and by investing (direct and indirectly) in over 70 startups. He hopes that Legalese, as a deep-tech startup based in Singapore, will answer some of the questions he keeps getting ("what would it take for Singapore to grow the next unicorn?", "why is our R&D not yielding the results we expected?"). Other questions, like "are you Batman?", he'll never answer.

TL;DR

As cofounder and CEO of Legalese, Alexis's job description is very vague. Anything that's not done but ought to have been, is her job. As the recovering lawyer, Alexis also spends her day exorcising legal demons and unlearning her bad habits by sharing her understanding of the end-users, industry, and established conventions and practices (i.e. horror stories) with the engineering and product teams. She is known to sometimes style herself as Alexis N. Chun in the well-honed tradition of Iain M. Banks.

Long Version

Alexis spends her days exorcising legal demons and unlearning her bad habits. Mostly, she tries to get things off the research team's plates so they can focus on the hard stuff. That can be anything from writing about and for Legalese, pitching to anyone who will listen, convincing governments and companies to give us money, answer product / industry questions, managing the community, and putting her natural assets (RBF) to good use, by playing bad cop to Meng's good cop within the company. A little more self-interestedly, she does all this so she won't have to wait too long to become the first L4 legal programmer.

In her previous life, she first got lulled by the giant payout of being a corporate lawyer(she trained in corporate law at TSMP Law Corporation, a boutique Singaporean law firm that boasted the highest starting salary), before moving on to a 'Big 4' experience with Rajah & Tann where she continued her training and later practised as an IP, IT, and commercial litigator. (Customary thank yous are footnoted here)To TSMP, she is grateful for the character building and for having imbued her with a love of elegant drafting.

To Rajah & Tann, she is grateful for the wide scope of work, secondment opportunities (BNP Paribas;  JPMorgan), and for having always fed her like French royalty. Fortunately, none of the profession's razzle dazzle was enough to disabuse her of her mounting suspicions that the legal profession has neither the tools, math, nor systems needed to solve its problems. Her then-covert explorations in the tech industry led her to OKCupid, which eventually led her to Meng. Long story short:   They met, he proposed, and 1 month later she quit her job to become co-founder of Legalese. (Technically, he formally proposed only 3 months after, to which she might have reacted with a mild aneurysm and let a fumey fart escape whilst fully personifying the "???" thought bubble)

Alexis unschooled herself for secondary school in Singapore (preferring instead to hole up in her bedroom discovering music, films, and books), and is a proud alumna of Victoria Junior College. She's grateful that you read this far, but recommends that you read any other section of the website instead (she put a lot of work into that). Or even better, read Diamond Age. When she grows up, she'd rather like to be a monster mash of Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Lyra Silvertongue, Ursula K Le Guin, Nell, Karen Teoh, and Amanda Palmer.

Colin is an open-source and community building expert, software engineer, and business development consultant. He advises Legalese on building a venture-backed, commercial, open-source business.

Colin joined MySQL after Series B, and helped it grow from $34M in revenue in 2005 to $78M in 2008, and later to its $1B acquisition by Sun. Colin is also the founder of Grok Sdn Bhd, a technical architecture firm specialising in open-source software.

Currently, Colin is Chief Evangelist at MariaDB Corporation, where he is also a shareholder and part of the extended management team.

On top of being an active contributor and evangelist for the MySQL ecosystem and The Fedora Project, he was team lead (MS localisation), community marketing contact and trainer for OpenOffice.org, the leading open-source office software suite. Colin also co-wrote the End User Linux Desktop Manual for the United Nations Development Program’s International Open Source Network, and developed a Live CD for the UNDP, was voting committee member and conference chair for O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo for 3 years (where he also works on community-related web development), and is the project administrator for MySQL’s/MariaDB’s Google’s Summer of Code initiative.