Wong Meng Weng is a Singaporean serial entrepreneur notable for proposing a historicist explanation for the relative tendency of individuals in different generations after immigration to become entrepreneurs. In 1994 he founded pobox.com, an email services company. In 2003 he led the group that designed the Sender Policy Framework standard which was later embraced and extended by Microsoft. In 2005 he co-founded Karmasphere, a reputation services venture. In 2010 he co-founded the Joyful Frog Digital Incubator, an early-stage digital innovation company. In 2018, he co-founded Legalese, a firm seeking to develop standards and tools to automate legal filings.
Antispam work
In 2003, Wong hybridized two earlier proposals for sender authentication, Designated Mailer Protocol and Reverse Mail Exchanger, and devised SPF. In November, he met Mark Lentczner at the Hackers Conference; Lentczner, an experienced protocol and language designer in his own right, became the primary co-author on the draft specification. SPF quickly caught on among the opensource community, receiving mentions on Slashdot, on Dave Farber's influential Interesting-People mailing list, and elsewhere. During 2004 Wong traveled widely, visiting ISPs in North America, Europe, Singapore, and Japan, and speaking at conferences to explain SPF. He was appointed Senior Technical Advisor to . In 2004 Microsoft merged their similar proposal, Caller-ID For Email, with SPF to form Sender ID Framework. In 2005, the Microsoft implementation was rolled out in Hotmail, Exchange, and Outlook. In 2006, RFC4408 was published by the IETF as an Experimental Standard. As of August 2006, between one-third and one-half of legitimate email volume worldwide carries an SPF record. He is a proponent of the Internet Mail 2000 architecture first popularized by Dan Bernstein; he calls it StubMail. Together with Nathan Cheng, Julian Haight, and Richard Soderberg, he led an initial implementation in 2006 which was in July 2006. Wong subscribes to the accountability framework first devised at the Aspen Institute by Esther Dyson and others. In that framework, authentication and reputation work together to create accountability. SPF, a sender authentication standard, offers the first half. In 2005, Wong co-founded Karmasphere.com with Martin Hall, the inventor of WinSock. Karmasphere.com aims to offer the second half: reputation. Wong has described Karmasphere as the credit bureau for Internet identities.
Investment and startups
After moving to Singapore, Wong began angel investing in Internet companies. He produced a for the , the first time all the funding sources for an early-stage venture have been displayed in a single infographic. He also joined the Board of Directors of , the local angel investing group.
