Paul Lam

I tend to go outside tech to find problems to work on. Once I get interested, I dig, sometimes for too long. Some of my best ideas come while I’m soaking in a hot bath or playing with my kids.

I spent seven years leading engineering at Motiva, building machine learning for enterprise marketing. Surface the problem, find a lazy solution. I like doing just enough to get the job done. At Motiva, I spent four years building increasingly complicated infrastructure before realising, oh, this is workflow orchestration. There are tools for this already. So much for lazy.

I want the things I build to support the people involved and our families. Motiva gave me a steady paycheck and room to start a family halfway around the world. I like building businesses that earn enough to keep doing useful work and support the people doing it.

I’ve been living in Japan since 2018. I bake sourdough without keeping a starter and travel with my family to old country inns—ryokan 旅館.