A marketer, an architect and an AI fanatic share one table. What came out was Tandem, and a shared craving for freedom.
Doing what you like is freedom. Liking what you do is happiness.
A little bit of serendipity, a whole lot of luck, and a common belief system.
That belief system has a name now: Tandem. It’s the biggest upgrade we’ve ever made to Mavic, a new engine rebuilt from the ground up.
We called it Tandem because of what we believe about AI. It shouldn’t replace the human. It should ride with you, like a tandem bicycle: two riders, one direction, each doing the part they do best. The AI takes the heavy pedalling. Humans steer.
Actually, Tandem was built the same way. Three very different people, and the team behind us, tandem-ing every idea out. Or, as YC would put it, hantam-ing it out.
I wanted my Sunday nights back
For most of my career, I was the one in the room with the idea. I chased creative excellence across Asia at Johnson & Johnson, then globally. I led marketing for a restaurant group. I co-founded an agency where we filmed short stories about real people.
The idea was never the hard part. The hard part was everything after it. The endless versions. The resizing. The follow-ups. The Sunday nights spent formatting, and checking instead of thinking.
I don’t think marketers burn out from being creative. We burn out from everything standing between us and the creative part.
So when I started Mavic, I knew exactly what I wanted it to do. Take the heavy lifting. Take the mental load. Hand the human back the one thing a machine can’t use: the freedom to step outside, notice the world and break the mundane of everyday life. That’s where the good ideas come from anyway.
“Where am I this time next year?”
Then there’s Martijn.
Martijn spent a quarter of a century in aviation, where “we’ll fix it later” isn’t an option when the thing you built is flying at 35,000 feet. Martijn co-founded a company that put a shopping mall in the sky, streamed to passengers’ own phones mid-flight, and for years boarded a plane every three days.
When I walk in with a brilliant idea that has to ship by Friday, I already know the first question. Not “can we?” but “what does this break next year?”
It used to drive me mad. Now I’m grateful for it. Every shortcut Martijn and our engineering team didn’t take is a reason Tandem holds together today.
And Martijn’s freedom? Choosing where to work each morning. In Bangkok, that can mean a walk, a river ferry and another walk, just to arrive awake. And of course, a big sailboat to sail around the world.
The 侠客 who runs out of tokens
And then there’s YC, the most curious person I’ve met.
If a new AI model launches at breakfast, YC has tried it by lunch and found its limits by dinner. Of the three of us, YC is the one most likely to burn through a month of tokens in a week, and come back with something none of us thought was possible.
YC is a 侠客 (xiákè), the wandering hero of the martial arts novels YC loves: no fixed master, no fixed home, always moving on to wherever help is needed. Agency floors at DDB and Tribal. Lecture halls at NTU. More than 200 startups mentored via Start2 Group. And of course, Mavic. YC belongs to no one place, but collectively, brings a little of every place in every conversation he has.
Three beliefs, one table
Put a creative, an architect and an AI fanatic at the same table and you get arguments. Good ones.
I wanted it to feel effortless. Martijn wanted it built to last. YC wanted it on the newest model and capabilities. Every decision behind Tandem had to survive all three of us, and then the team who built it with us.
What came out is something none of us would have built alone. A team of AI agents that plan, write and design, carrying the load I always wished someone would carry. A foundation Martijn and the team wouldn’t let us rush: we replaced the old chat completely instead of patching it. And the best of AI working quietly underneath, the way YC designs experiences, so you never need to know which model is doing what.
You still approve before anything is published. Every image and video still comes back in editable layers. The point was never to take the creativity away from you. It was to give you more room for it. You steer; Tandem pedals.
Three perspectives. Three corners of the world. Three personal beliefs. One team. One engine.
Doing what you like.
We built Mavic with our team because we crave that freedom ourselves, and because we know so many creators, founders and builders who crave it too. If you’re one of them, come and see what Tandem can take off your plate.
Then close the laptop. Go somewhere. Find the thing that breaks the mundane.
That’s what the time is for.