as his mentor for making UTokyo AIS happen, I am highly familiar with Fumi's turnaround competence. very excited to endorse his project. i have spent 20+ hours to date handholding Fumi over regular meetings Discord exchanges.

we first met since February 2026 during EAG Bay Area SF, it was his first EAG, and during our 1-1, he was compelled by my pitch to seed an AIS university group in Tokyo, and he followed up with "so what next steps need to happen to make the AIS group?" despite only having EA contexts -- that action-bias disposition persisted with our biweekly meetings since then, and fairly consistently came into the meetings with "so i already did this this past week" without being prompted.

- where he dragged his EA-cofounder friend Makoto (also a UChicago transfer student from UTokyo) to make the UTokyo AIS group happen + followed up with every who's-who in Japan AIS (he coffee-chatted everyone, got and even got @bioshock on the organizing team!! https://x.com/bioshok3
- they did BlueDot course over this past summer to rapidly gain context on AIS
- we then met at MWEA 2026, Midwestern EA retreat in April 2026.
- they (finally) got into Pathfinder August 2026.

[betting on the founder] the EA / AIS community is lucky to have someone like Constance to begin with; I've seen her various works in public and trust whatever she has to output.

met James during the Create for Good event, learned that he’s a video consultant for From Fauna (not to be confused with his “Fauna Films”)

my apologies netizens, i meant https://compassfellowship.app/ NOT ASPR (couldn’t edit original comment) @tzukitchan

tldr they are so so deserving of stipends to run the group / take it to the next level.

1) similar to AIS HK, I spent 20hours+ total handholding this bunch at the very initial stages (which is a lot of my time through December and January -- yes during what's suppose to be my holiday weeks) till they have a reliable weekly-meeting cadence + budget fundraising + structure + tacit knowledge on handling various unfamiliar decision-making situations (including if they should take money from an external source) that arise in running a group.

2) worth highlighting that most of the core team members also went to Asia's SPARC camp organized by David Yu: https://www.aspr.camp/

3) i was frankly so sad that they were initially rejected from Pathfinder in January 2026, I still think it was a mistake back then and I have personally voiced so to Kairos (to be clear I'm still a Pathfinder mentor / fan, but I think rejecting TWAIS was a regretable mistake); and I want the world to know that then getting into Pathfinder on their own after I went hands-off in August 2026 (after 8 months of track record) is a testament of their competence in making things happen!

4) they have a good thing going, and they are easily one of the strongest groups in Asia (alongside Singapore's, Hong Kong's, maybe Vietnam's), and I would be hard-pressed to see another group from the region as dedicated / on-the-ball as them. let's not fail this dedicated bunch!

@tzukitchan *SPARC's supplementary summer chapter.

[betting on the founder] im familiar with David's work, highly competent executor and very thoughtful+articulate+intentional on vibes-curation conducive with the theory of change for any given camp; really excited for SPARC's next chapter.

[betting on the founder] i'm familiar with Cecil's work and I trust that whatever project he outputs is more often than not going to be net-good.

[betting on the founder] the EA / AIS community is lucky to have someone like Constance to begin with; I've seen her various works in public and trust whatever she has to output.

SAIGE continues to perform / output at a high-quality level and Jessica continues to consistently execute competently.

I spent 20hours+ handholding this bunch at the very initial stages till they have a reliable weekly-meeting cadence + structure + tacit knowledge on handling various unfamiliar decision-making situations that arise in running a group;

they are a team i literally woke up at 6am PT for to coach in the very initial stages (not an exaggeration).

i'm strongly rooting for this core team; namely under Kenneth Chan's and Abeer's leadership.

As a BASE advisor, I'm also a big fan of what Lawrence is building here. We need more black folks in the community; otherwise, we're missing out on some talented people who could otherwise be part of the most important conversation of the century.

Rooting for yall.

I spent 6hours mentoring Yunika thus far and can attest to her competence in organizing.

i chose to mentor Jessica’s group to make AIS germany happen and i am in-the-trenches informing with battle-tested experiences / make tricky judgement calls.

• i think the team and theory of change is sound (experimentation required to know what uniquely works in germany, what works in other geographies might not apply there, the team’s operating on best guesses right now).

• there’s the hunch that Germany has many untapped engineering talents, and i liken this initiative’s value-add to be similar to AIS Australia and New Zealand, where cities / unis are physically spread-out, and there are promising mid-senior career professionals who want to engage but the nearest town is 20miles away. very-online good.

• another quick: Jessica is *very highly conscientious, ran Epoch AI Tier4 FrontierMath symposium with her; this is the second time we’re working together professionally.

i endorse and can vouch for Gergo’s track record, might donate later just as a signal of support

I applaud you and the team for trying to make this happen in Singapore! And to the other comments by Chris and Ryan, glad to see you're implementing the fixes upon the earliest sign of feedback! That's always commendable.