Volume IV begins.

Inspire Synergy was incorporated in Hong Kong in July 2008. For most of those eighteen years, it has been the legal entity behind whatever I happened to be building — a Google AdWords reseller and training shop in the early years, then an e-commerce platform called Cartforge, an analytics SaaS called Inspiroid, a Rails consulting practice called RailsAnt. Later, it became the vehicle through which we resold enterprise document management software — ABBYY, Hyland, OnBase — to a small handful of clients in Hong Kong.

Around 2020 the company went quiet. Not dormant — there were always contracts and counterparties — but quiet enough that no one outside a small circle would have known what it was working on. That suited me at the time. The work was institutional, the clients did not want a website, and I was content to let the company exist on paper.

This site is the start of Volume IV.

The premise is simple. Inspire Synergy is a holding company. Its job is to be the umbrella under which I build software ventures and run a long-term research practice for an institutional partner. Some of the ventures will live inside the company. Some will spin out into their own cap tables. Some will quietly be retired.

The site you are reading is deliberately small. It is a directory, not a marketing pitch. There is a /ventures page that catalogues what has been built. There is a /notes index — these — where I will occasionally write down what I am working on or thinking about. There is a contact page. That is the whole thing.

I have decided not to start a Twitter account or a LinkedIn newsletter or any of the usual builder-broadcasting tools. Volume IV is meant to be slower than that. If you are reading this, you probably found your way here through someone who knows me, or a venture I shipped, or a paper I will eventually publish. That is the right size of audience for the work I want to do.

Welcome.

— Benjamin Wong