---
title: Tabrez Syed
description: Technology entrepreneur on my fifth startup, now in AI. I write weekly about AI through lenses borrowed from history.
canonical: https://www.mandalivia.com/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](/writing) — essays, letters, and the digital gardens
- [Atelier](/atelier) — software, extensions, and tools
- [Talks](/talks) — presentations and workshops on AI

<div class="dark:hidden">
  <p>Some of that writing has appeared in Towards AI, The AI Journal, Design Bootcamp, Artificial Intelligence in Plain English, and Open Data Science:</p>
  <img src="/images/featured-in-strip.png" alt="Featured in: Towards AI, The AI Journal, ODSC, AI in Plain English, Design Bootcamp" />
</div>

## Elsewhere

- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tabrez/)
- [X](https://x.com/tabrezsyed)
- [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mandalivia.com)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/tabrez-syed)
- [Medium](https://medium.com/@tabrezsyed)
- [BoxCars](https://blog.boxcars.ai/) — weekly writing on AI
- [Zenist](https://www.zenist.org/) — attention and non-duality
- [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/@tabrez_syed) — 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.