Blog / Editorial 

Lately, I’ve been feeling like a player in a new league. The pitch looks familiar—the drive to build, the passion for a vision—but the tactics and the language are entirely new.

You see, I’ve recently started a new chapter. I’m now at a new role at EDB New Ventures, where I work directly with ambitious AI founders from around the world through the Global Founder Programme. My job is to help these really cool and smart founders land and expand in Singapore, to be their strategic partner on the ground.

Every day, I’m immersed in conversations about transformer architectures, inference costs, and multimodal models (and I'm still lost 90% of the time! Eeeks!). These founders are brilliant. They are building the future. And I want to do more than just facilitate; I want to contribute meaningfully. To do that, I need to understand their world not just procedurally, but intuitively.

This professional shift has made a personal question even more urgent: How do I connect this new, fast-moving tech frontier with the world I’ve always known and loved? Could it work?

Well, I'm giving it a try, starting with a small project I call Goals.AI.

Goals.AI: Building My Personal Playbook

Right now, Goals.AI is my personal learning notebook. It’s how I’m tackling (pun intended) this new language by translating it into my first language: football.

When I listen to these founders, I don't want to hear code and cost structures. I want to intuitively hear patterns, strategy, and specialisation—concepts that are second nature on the pitch. So, I've started drafting "player profiles" to connect the dots in my own mind. The point isn't about dumbing down tech; it's about finding a shared point of reference to build my mindmap.

Here’s a peek at my current starting lineup:

The Visionary Playmaker // Large Language Models

• Player: Marta. Her genius isn't a single pass; it's her ability to see the entire developing play, assessing every option in a split second to execute the perfect through-ball.

• AI Concept: This is the core of models like ChatGPT. It uses an attention mechanism to read a whole prompt, understand how every word relates, and decide which connections matter most to generate a coherent response. It’s about contextual awareness at scale.

The Engine Room Midfielder // Neural Networks

• Player:Yui Hasegawa. She is the ultimate connector, constantly receiving, processing, and redirecting play. Her game is built on creating reliable networks and learning the rhythms of her teammates.

• AI Concept: This mirrors a neural network. Data passes through layers of interconnected nodes. The strength of these connections—the "passing preference"—is adjusted through training. Like Hasegawa learning which pass leads to a scoring chance, the network learns patterns from data to make accurate decisions.

The Clinical Striker // Generative AI

• Player: Sam Kerr. Give her the slightest hint of space in the box, and she creates a moment of pure, novel brilliance. She generates spectacular outcomes from tightly constrained opportunities.

• AI Concept:This is Generative AI (like ChatGPT, Sora, DALL-E). You give it a text prompt—the "constraint"—and it creates an entirely new image, story, or solution. It’s not recalling memory; it’s synthesising something new from a deep, learned understanding of the world.

The plan is for this framework to help in two ways. First, to help me learn, by anchoring abstract concepts to tangible sporting intelligence. Second, to help me listen better, where I can ask smarter questions and engage with the founders I support on a level that goes beyond the basics and spreadsheets (yeah, I'm accounting trained), fostering a more valuable partnership. Or at least, I try to (haha!), because while my brain loves football, it sometimes needs a translator for pure math+code.

Re-Mapping My Ikigai: Where I'm placing the ball with this pass

This journey from the grassroots football pitch to the global venture ecosystem has me redrawing my own map. That search for ikigai (i.e. where what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can build all meet) feels more active than ever.

• What I Love:The teamwork, the stories, and the sheer potential of women’s football.

• What I’m Good At (I hope...): Being a bridge. Connecting people, ideas, and opportunities across different worlds.

• What the World Needs: For transformative technology to be understood and shaped by diverse perspectives, and used for good. For more people to feel they have a gateway into the future being built.

• What I Can Offer: Possibly, a unique perspective. The ability to help translate complexity into relatable insight, fostering deeper understanding and collaboration.

The intersection feels like it’s here: Using the universal language of football to open doors, demystify complexity, and help more people engage with the ideas shaping our next chapter.

An Invitation to Join the Starting 11

I’m sharing this not as an expert, but as a fellow learner figuring it out in real time. This idea is admittedly in its earliest days, and far from a v1.0. 

It won't be a solo journey. The first supporters, the early thinkers, the curious minds who believe that the best way to understand something new is to connect it to something you already love. I’m not looking for benchwarmers; I’m recruiting my starting team. 

If you’re intrigued by the crossover of sports and tech, if you believe in making the future more accessible, or if you just want to follow along as this idea grows, I’d be honoured to have you on the squad.

Join the Goals.AI Starting Team here: wosogoals@gmail.com

Let’s explore this new pitch together.

With humility and excitement for the first whistle,

PJW

P.S. I’d love to hear from you. What’s a concept in your world that you’ve struggled to explain? Maybe we can brainstorm a football analogy for it together.

#GoalsAI #WomensFootball #ArtificialIntelligence #TechStartups #Innovation #SportsTech #DeepLearning