How fifteen years of running restaurants led to Symbious. Each step arrived the same way — not as a plan, but as something the operation revealed once I was standing inside it.
It began as a bachelor's apartment on the fifteenth floor, with a view of the river. It was never meant to be a restaurant.
Friends came for parties, and then they came for dinner. Then they brought friends, and those friends brought friends, until people I had never met were asking to sit at the table. At the end of 2011, in the space of about ten days, we turned the apartment into a private dinner — a guerrilla thing, cooking and pouring wine for strangers above the water. We called ourselves the accidental restaurateurs, because that is exactly what we were. Nobody advertised. The demand simply arrived, and kept arriving, and we followed it.
The menu grew. Wine, cocktails, beer. And one night some guests — well-travelled, generous, the kind who had eaten everywhere — wanted to pay by card. That was Square. I hadn't gone looking for it; the table had outgrown cash, and the guests handed me the reason. It was the first time the operation became a number instead of a feeling. The transaction became legible. But that was all it ever saw — money changing hands, the narrowest sliver of a whole evening.
In 2018 the work moved to a proper riverside room in the old town at Talad Noi — and almost at once, the pandemic. I spent those months reading everything I could find about how the virus moved through a restaurant, how gastronomy might survive it at all. I braced for the worst.
What I understood in the end was simple and stark: no touch, no cash, no talk. So I found a small software company and commissioned a QR ordering and payment process built entirely around those three constraints. The effect was not survival. It was revelation. From the very first day, the restaurant ran as if it were on rails. Staff moved differently. Guests moved differently. Partners saw it. The friction every operator lives with — the misheard order, the disputed bill, the training that never quite holds — thinned away. A second venue opened, then a third, and each time the setup and the staff training were almost effortless, because the system now carried what used to live only in our heads.
By then the system had carried tens of thousands of orders across three venues, each opening smoother than the last, and one of the rooms had spent a long stretch at the top of the city's listings. I believed, honestly, that the operation had reached the top of what was possible — that there was nothing meaningful left to improve.
And then the operation left the building.
The same guests who had pulled us into cooking in the first place began flying the whole thing to their own cities. Twelve times, around the world, we ran Nang Gin Kui as a pop-up for people who had never set foot in the original room. We did it from purchase lists, to-do lists, checklists, and a short training for staff on the ground who had never met us. And it worked — every time. I didn't think much of it then. I thought I was simply being organised.
What I had actually done, though I could not have said it this way, was write our operational memory down by hand and carry it across the world. The knowledge of how the place ran, made explicit enough that strangers could execute it faithfully. I had reached what looked like a peak. I was standing on a plateau.
Then I came across NFC — the small, passive chip that costs almost nothing, holds no battery, and can sit invisibly in any surface, waking only for the instant a phone touches it. And I saw the door I hadn't known was there.
The card reader had captured the transaction. The QR had captured the front-of-house and put us on solid ground. But even on rails, a restaurant runs on a thousand human judgments that no transaction ever touches. This one is clean. This is ready. This goes back. The fish is good today. These live for twenty seconds — in a cook's head, in a server's glance, in a manager's walk through the room — and then they are gone. No system I had ever bought could hold them, because no system was ever there, at the threshold, in the moment they were made.
NFC could be. Not to record the sale — to witness the operation itself, at the point, in the instant, by the person who made the call. The lists I had written by hand for twelve cities could become something a building writes for itself, every day, without me.
That is Symbious.
The realisation carried an obligation with it. A building that can remember itself is one small decision away from a building that watches the people inside it — and those are opposite things. Witnessing is a person confirming a condition they chose to attest. Surveillance is a record built about someone, without their act. Everything I am building rests on that line. So the first thing I wrote was not code but a constitution — the Concordat, published to the public domain, with prohibitions no future owner, board or acquirer can ever revoke. Events, not people. The record belongs to the place and to whoever keeps it — never to anyone who might want leverage over them.
I don't ask anyone to take the idea on faith. The argument is published where anyone can read and dispute it, and the first instrument is running: a handful of nodes on a street in Bangkok, each record sealed to the one before it, in a database that refuses to alter its own history — including when I ask it to. Whether a street will actually use such a thing is the question the next ninety days are for. That is the honest state of it.
For fifteen years, the table taught me one step at a time: into cooking, into the first card reader, onto the rails of QR, and finally around the world. Each step arrived the same way — not as a plan, but as something the operation revealed once I was standing inside it. Symbious is the next step, and it began exactly like the others.
I wrote our memory down by hand for a long time. Now I would like to give buildings the ability to remember themselves.