Blazing the trail for a nation of startups
The TTSA president and founder of digital accounting service AccRevo wants to lead by example, and his first piece of advice to Thai entrepreneurs is that they can’t be afraid of failure.
The quick and easy-going Panachit Kittipanya-ngam shows up in a bright orange T-shirt to match the logo of AccRevo, the startup he founded and leads.
It’s just two months since he quit his post as director of the Innovation Department at the Electronic Government Agency. In the meantime, he has launched his digital accounting startup and was voted president of the Thailand Tech Startup Association (TTSA).
The man behind many startups in Thailand rose to the top spot at a turning point for the TTSA. The co-founders and committed members were asking themselves, after four years and with many emerging startup associations in Thailand, whether the TTSA was still necessary and, if so, what its role in the country should be.
“We agreed that the TTSA is still necessary and a lot needs to be done,” says Mr Panachit. “First, we must reorganise our association.”
The few hundred companies with membership in the TTSA were recently told to show their commitment to remain as members. Those who wanted to continue would have to pay a 3,000-baht annual fee to have access to seminars, training sessions and talks. About 60 companies have paid the fee.
“The association could grow bigger until one day some members might not know the other members,” Mr Panachit says. “There can be issues of transparency. So we need to verify and make it right.”
DIGITISING THAILAND
The 40-year-old Mr Panachit is stepping up the agency’s missions: strengthening the tech startup community, building a suitable ecosystem for tech startups in Thailand and digitising the nation so it becomes a friendly market for tech startups.
“The government may be used to having land animals, but the world has changed and there are also aquatic animals and birds,” Mr Panachit says. “How can the government help create an ecosystem of diversity in which all the animals can survive and live together?”
Meanwhile, promoting the use of technology will not only make people’s daily lives easier, but it will also enlarge the user base and generate more profit for producers.
“It’s clear that digital is coming,” Mr Panachit says. “If we don’t change Thai SMEs to digital, foreign startups will bring the change as they come to make their profits here.”
The TTSA was set up by the first wave of Thai tech startups, including Wongnai, Ookbee, Claim Di and Builk. The aim was to inform the public that tech startups differ in nature from others and cannot survive in Thailand’s traditionally low-risk environment.
“To be an innovative society, Thai people need to allow more failure,” Mr Panachit says.
Tech startups need a long time to develop and prove themselves. But when they succeed, they can amplify quickly and the economic impact is huge. Once strong revenue streams are in place, a startup can carry on growing by itself or be bought by a big company.
“The thinking framework for tech startups is no longer finding a form or product as with other SMEs, but finding value or the solution to a problem,” Mr Panachit says. “And the process is trial and error that can change swiftly when we see that what we are doing does not work.
“Our association tries to help each other by sharing knowledge to make sure that the Valley of Death, the period before a business reaches the break-even point, is as shallow and short as possible for each startup.”
Mr Panachit notes that more than 90% of startups fail.
“Even if the startup fails, Thai society must give the entrepreneurs a chance, as those people who already experienced failure at a startup will be valuable employees who have learned the entrepreneurial thinking process and had more experience in doing businesses compared with those who were always salarymen. Their failure in startups must not be interpreted as they were incapable.
“We can see that startups help develop human resources for a new era that is not based on sweat and labour. But are we judging the warriors by the scars that they have or how smooth their skin is. We want to say that failure is okay, let’s fail and learn from it.”
The important and urgent mission for the TTSA under Mr Panachit is to make the government and the public understand why they need to support tech startups.
Nowadays the government is putting a great deal of effort into startup promotion. There are awareness-building and match-making events. However, since the government’s money “cannot be risked”, it’s difficult for startups to get capital or loans from the government.
MAKE IT MARKETABLE
An important foundation for Mr Panachit was the five years he spent as a research fellow on healthcare technology at the A*Star institute in Singapore. The experience taught Mr Panachit the importance of “making tech research marketable”.
He made sure that the innovations originating in labs became useful and were applied by people in real life, a phenomenon that differed from the typical custom in Thailand, where research was kept within institutions or held for academic purposes.
Mr Panachit studied electrical engineering in Britain, received a doctorate and lived abroad for more than a decade. But he always planned to come back and contribute to his home country. He began with the post of assistant director of the Innovation Center at True Corporation, where he came to one of the big crossroads of his life.
NEW PERSPECTIVE
“I had culture shock,” he says. “For example, there were too many steps to do, lots of memos. Many colleagues only enjoyed their comfort zone and did not want to try new things, so they kept idle. I put in 100% effort and got only 10% output. I felt ill mentally and consequently physically and thought of going back to Singapore. I almost gave up.”
Mr Panachit went to the the Buddhadasa Indapanno Archives, meditated and realised that he could have seen and made use of the good in the bad just as the fertilisers that make trees grow.
He also changed his way of thinking. “I realised I was only thinking from my own perspective,” he says. “I was like Calvin Klein, all minimalism. When I saw lai kanok (elaborate traditional Thai pattern), I said it was not beautiful. Actually, lai kanok is beautiful in a different way,”
The thought became the philosophy for his life. He changed the way he treated his colleagues.
“When I work with other people, I will always say to them, here, I’m not gonna do this for myself. Now we are here together and we have our goal. What is it? What and who are we doing this for?”
Afterwards, he had chances to collaborate with many institutions and students. He enjoyed helping the younger generation of innovators develop their projects. He became an adviser and an investor, putting money in startups such as the dormitory and apartment management system Horganice and the elderly-friendly food caterer Me Fun Meal.
Along the way, Mr Panachit had a glimpse of how the Thai laws and bureaucracy threw up hurdles to the development of innovative businesses.
With the other members of the TTSA, he spearheaded a white paper giving suggestions for the development of Thai laws to keep pace with changing technology and global trends.
“We suggested changes in six sections of the civil laws that do not accommodate high-risk management,” he says. “The laws on convertible debt and bankruptcy are among the proposed changes. They [entrepreneurs who went bankrupt] failed to pay the debt not because they wanted to cheat but because their businesses failed, and they deserve the chance to stay or even start over in this society.”
The amendments are now under deliberation by the Council of State.
Mr Panachit later applied for and won the post of director of the Innovation Department, with the aim of learning how government really works.
At the same time, he incubated his own startup, AccRevo, a digital accounting service provider, which he believes will enhance the capacity of accountants and optimise accounting for clients, especially SMEs, in an era when AI can do many things in place of a human.
When the startup was ready to be launched, Mr Panachit quit the Innovation Department.
BALANCED LIFE
Despite his advocacy for a digitised Thailand, Mr Panachit says his ultimate goal is different.
“I want the scientific thinking framework and technology to be just part of my legacy, as they are only for survival,” he says. “But I would love to pass on good human qualities and practical principles such as compassion, empathy, contemplating the root causes of problems, kindness and sharing, aiming for win-win situations or looking at value-chain association.”
The name and nickname of his son also reflect these ideas. The boy is named Palamokkh, which means the power for liberation, because Mr Panachit hopes that he can be part of a freedom-loving next generation.
“My son’s nickname, Gon, means ‘operation’ or doing,” he says. “I want him to be a hands-on person and get his hands dirty to learn.”
During office hours, the 85-square-metre AccRevo office is packed with busy young developers and accountants who sit together at three large tables without any fixed seating.
Everybody, including the chief executive, Mr Panachit himself, has an equal private space at the office, the same-sized personal locker.
There is space for musical instruments, however, including Mr Panachit’s saxophone, which he likes to play at night time.
And over a cabinet is a painting of the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej, an inspiration to Mr Panachit and his colleagues.
We are judging the warriors by the scars that they have or how smooth their skin is. We want to say that failure is okay, let’s fail and learn from it.
PANACHIT KITTIPANYA-NGAM
PRESIDENT, THAILAND TECH STARTUP ASSOCIATION