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Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?
We've almost certainly left someone out. If that's you and you'd like to be listed, don't just quietly resent us, have a good whinge about it
Wong Meng Weng
Cofounder / Computer Scientist
CTO
Alexis Natalie Chun
Cofounder / Recovering Lawyer
CEO
Job Chong
Developer / Ex-lawyer-to-be
Io
Emotional Support Creature
Colin
Opensource Strategy
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.
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.
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.
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.
The self-taught web developer at Legalese who is super relieved that he gets to deal with code and computers instead of having to actually become a lawyer (he'd met Alexis and her horror stories worked wonders on him). Law school was boring enough.
Yes, it's from that book and person in the bible. His
parents are religious; he no longer is.
The self-taught web
developerthough to be fair, he did attend a GA webdev course, but in his words, found it completely useless and preferred reading on his own insteadat Legalese deals with the practical side of
Legalese's product. This includes front-end work,
deployment, and all the other needs of a modern web
application. After studying four years of law, he
decided that the subject had turned his brain into mush,
and thus is now rehabilitating himself with the more
energetic environs of programming. But for Alexis's proclaimation that he is "too smart to be a real lawyer", he might have been peer and family pressured into Big Law. Boy, did he dodge one.
Job has one of the
most enviable memory capacities of the team, is
always first pick at trivia games, and a very avid reader. Somehow, he still manages to find time to
play and watch DOTA 2, enjoy movies, and develop an
opinion on music. He is occasionally (affectionately) teased
for being from the Gifted Education Programme (where
kids scoring amongst the top 1% of tested IQ are
recruited for special education) because he's often 3 steps ahead of everyone and doesn't like writing documentation. He comforts the rest of us by
pointing out that Meng was in it when it was designed for those in the top 0.25%, and if Meng can learn to write documentation and wait for the rest of us, so can he.
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.
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