About · Tom Thaung Su Nyein

I'm Tom, full name Thaung Su Nyein. I live in Zürich and spend my time building products and helping other people build theirs.

I've founded three startups so far. StoryHero is a storytelling app for families, where children become the heroes of their own illustrated and narrated adventures. Griva is a personal memory and execution layer that captures everything you mean to act on and follows through on it. Roundly is a live audio room for books and fandoms, where readers step into real-time conversations about the stories they love. Each one taught me a different version of the same lesson: that AI changes the shape of a product team in places you don't expect, and leaves other places untouched. The interesting work is figuring out which is which before you've spent six months on the wrong thing.

When I'm not running my own products I work as an AI consultant. Most engagements are short and concrete. A few weeks of strategy, or a couple of months building the first working version of something. Occasionally I embed with a team for a quarter or two as a fractional product lead. I take on a small number of these a year, mostly with founders and product teams in DACH.

I grew up in Myanmar and studied computer science in New York in the late nineties, though I spent the two decades that followed as a founder and publisher rather than an engineer, back in Myanmar. I built a 300-person group spanning media, software, and e-government, and became one of Myanmar's leading digital media platforms. In 2021 our family moved to Switzerland, and I joined one of the largest Swiss media, marketplaces, tech companies as a Senior Innovation Lead, coaching product teams through their internal accelerator and watching at close range how large organisations absorb new technology. When LLMs arrived and made it genuinely possible to build and ship at a pace I recognised from the early internet years, I started founding again.

I write at the notebook here when I have something worth saying. Usually it's about the practical side of building with AI: the mechanics of going from prototype to production, the parts of product work that change when a model is in the loop, and what running my own startups in parallel keeps teaching me.

If you're working on something AI-shaped and want to think out loud about it, the contact page is the fastest way in.

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