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Perth · Singapore · Melbourne

About Preston Tan-Kang — the long way round to builder

The long way round to builder.

Perth coaching tables, an army detection unit, a commerce degree, club president, agency product manager, academy co-founder, AI builder. Each chapter taught something the next one needed.

what is underneath all of it

Underneath all of it is a kid who was always fascinated by robots and wanted to be a mechatronics engineer, merging AI, hardware and creativity. That pull towards how technology extends what people can do still drives every build. Software scratches the same itch with a faster feedback loop: AI to enhance the work, not replace the thinking, and automate the error-prone parts so attention lands where it matters.

my universe

Preston Tan-Kang

A Melbourne builder working across product, ventures and AI-made apps. Everything here is connected.

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My universe, connected

  1. Perth, the start

    Raised on table tennis

    Grew up in Perth and finished school there, spending 2015 to 2018 as an assistant coach at Table Tennis Western Australia, teaching the basics to beginners of every age. Teaching the sport started almost a decade before the academy did.

  2. Singapore, 2019 to 2021

    National Service, CBRE detection unit

    Two years with the Singapore Armed Forces. Three months of basic military training, then the chemical, biological, radiological and explosive unit at HQ: supply-chain logistics on SAP ERP, warehousing, audits and tracking, and custodian of very expensive detection equipment, testing every piece before it went to the field. The discipline habit started here.

  3. Singapore + Melbourne, 2020 to 2024

    Commerce degree, cross-border reps

    Bachelor of Commerce in Finance at the University of Melbourne, graduating with Second Class Honours Division A. Broad exposure by design, across both Singapore and Melbourne: internships at SABRE and then a product role at SQL View in Singapore, a product management internship at Telstra (Australia’s largest telecommunications company) in Melbourne, consulting with EY Supply Chain Consulting (top 3 finalist) and BusinessOne, peer mentoring, and a Product School PM certificate.

  4. 2022 to 2023

    Vice-President to President, six intervarsity events

    Ran the Melbourne University Table Tennis Club, moving from Vice-President to President. Organised six Victoria Intervarsity Games across Monash, RMIT, Deakin and more, peaking at 80+ players in a single event, run end to end with a marketing team, an operations team and a tournament director.

  5. 2022

    Double gold, Team Manager of the Year

    Team Manager of the Melbourne University table tennis program the year both the men’s and the women’s teams won gold, believed to be a first for the program. Named Team Manager of the Year.

  6. Nov 2024

    Peak Agility Table Tennis

    Co-founded a Melbourne table tennis academy with Alex. Rough early months, then break-even, then profit: contracts, venue partnerships, lead generation and a repeatable service learned by necessity. I run tech, finance and legal; my SEO work brings organic inquiries in weekly, and PATT became a known name in the community within its first year.

  7. Feb 2025 to Jun 2026

    Digital Product Manager at Techne HQ

    Product manager at an app development agency, client-facing across concurrent projects worth A$60k to A$200k+. Grew into an unofficial senior PM: mentoring two juniors and two interns, helping seal deals with value propositions and feature roadmaps, and bringing one product to public launch.

  8. Now

    PTK Digital Labs + eight shipped apps

    Running an SEO and automation agency with AI-search-first audits, shipping AI-powered apps at pace, and finishing a Master’s in Digital Marketing. The rule for this chapter: learn by doing, and let the shipped work speak.

The story so far
  • Logical with empathy: feel the problem from the user’s side, then design the system that solves it.
  • First-principles and systems thinking: map the moving parts and the workflow, design the UX around how people actually work, and catch the edge cases early.
  • AI to enhance, not replace: it clears the grunt work and sharpens judgement, but the thinking stays mine.
  • Automate to remove human error: the repetitive, mistake-prone steps become reliable systems, so attention goes where it counts.
  • Belief transfer: coached an international student to an 80% interview-to-offer rate.
  • At my best turning messy, ambiguous problems into clear systems a team can execute.
  • Under-promise, over-deliver.
How I think
  • Skiing
  • Table tennis
  • Co-op gaming
  • Board games
  • Cooking
  • Travelling
Off the clock
  • Englishnative
  • Mandarinintermediate
  • Cantonesenovice
  • Japanesebeginner
Languages