Mentoring is the most practical kind of optimism
When founders asked me where to begin, I rarely started with the business model. I started with the person. Most first-time founders in Cambodia are not short on ideas; they are short on someone who has walked the road and will tell them which parts are real.
That was the work I came back to, cohort after cohort, at the National Incubation Center of Cambodia between 2021 and 2023. I sat with new founders on pitch refinement, market entry, and business planning, the unglamorous arithmetic that decides whether an idea survives its first year. I supported the Bandos Digital Startup Competition, which drew more than 250 applicants a year, and hosted Startup Talk panels that put founders in the same room as the people already running companies.
The work spilled out of the incubator quickly. I ran seminars at universities across Phnom Penh, ten campuses and more than six hundred students in all, through sessions like "A Day as an Entrepreneur" that tried to make the founder's life concrete rather than mythical. I taught the data tools a founder reaches for, Python, Power BI, and SQL, so decisions could rest on evidence instead of instinct. And I ran training built for women, on leadership, marketing, and the confidence to manage rather than assist.
None of it was abstract. Supporting a local business is more than a transaction; it is an investment in the future, in the jobs that founder will create and the people who will learn from her in turn.
I know what it is to be underestimated, and what a single act of belief can change. Those years were how I passed that on.
Mentoring and training portfolio Open