Tabrez Syed
Once upon a time, in 1988, an eight-year-old boy dreamed of an island.
It emerged, quite unexpectedly, from the depths of the Indian Ocean - a pristine territory unclaimed by any nation, untouched by any map. He named it Mandalivia.
In his childhood imagination, this island became a playground of possibilities. Its economy flourished with chocolate coins, its parliament debated the merits of longer recess hours, and its chief export was perhaps dreams themselves.
Years later, when the digital seas of the internet opened new frontiers, Mandalivia found its new shore here, at mandalivia.com. The boy, now grown but still dreaming, established this virtual embassy of imagination.
That boy was me. I’m Tabrez Syed.
I’m a technology entrepreneur on my fifth startup, working in AI. I’ve had the luck of watching several waves arrive: distributed computing at Tivoli, when CORBA was going to connect everything, then Java, then the web, then mobile. I spent eleven years at Spiceworks building a community of six million IT professionals, and after that came companies of my own in real estate, personal finance, and data.
I write weekly about AI, mostly by holding it against the waves I’ve already watched arrive. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.
I’ve also been meditating for twenty-five years. The two subjects turn out to be less separate than they look.
Mandalivia is where the work lands: essays, a digital garden, and the things I build in order to think. I write about AI at BoxCars, and about attention and non-duality at Zenist.
Where the work lives
- Writing — essays, letters, and the digital gardens
- Atelier — software, extensions, and tools
- Talks — presentations and workshops on AI
Some of that writing has appeared in Towards AI, The AI Journal, Design Bootcamp, Artificial Intelligence in Plain English, and Open Data Science:
Elsewhere
- X
- Bluesky
- GitHub
- Medium
- BoxCars — weekly writing on AI
- Zenist — attention and non-duality
- Unsplash — photos, free to use
This website, like the imaginary island that inspired it, remains in a perpetual state of discovery. New territories may be added, old paths might be redrawn, but the spirit of that eight-year-old’s dream lives on in every pixel.