019: HUBBA Co-Founder Amarit Charoenphan Shares the Story Behind Thailand’s First Co-Working Space and The Techsauce Global Summit

Amarit Charoenphan (Aim) is the Executive Chairman and Co-founder of HUBBA, Thailand’s first and largest co-working space and community. He started HUBBA with his brother 8 years ago, which was born as Thailand’s first co-working space, HUBBA grew to become an entrepreneur growth platform serving end to end from early stage startups to large conglomerates and MNCs like Coca Cola, Google and Tesco Lotus. 

Armed with HUBBA CONNECT and Techsauce, their business is run on a digital platform supported by media (4 million readers annually) and one of the biggest and top 3 best Tech conferences in Asia, Techsauce Global Summit. Today, Amarit is also the Chief Connection Officer and Co-founder of Techsauce, and their event attracted 12,000 conference goers, along with global speakers from former Chief Innovation Officer (CIO) of DBS, Principal of Sequoia Capital, Co-founder of Ethereum to the Former Prime Minister of Estonia. 

He has also been named as one of Forbes Asia 30 Under 30: Enterprise Technology, and Thailand Startup Enabler of The Year 2016. 

His passion for building the startup community over the past 8 years and to help entrepreneurs grow has led him to angel invest in many of the top startups and actively mentors and coaches over 100+ different startups founders annually. Aim has also coached and consulted ecosystem hubs and leaders in over 30 cities on how to build tech communities. 

He is also a Fellow of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship (EHF) in New Zealand, Obama Foundation Leaders: Asia Pacific inaugural cohort, and considers Singapore and New Zealand his second homes (his third home is the airport). 

Inspired by the book Big World, Small Planet: Abundance within Planetary Boundaries by Johan Rockström, Mattias Klum, and Peter Miller, Aim’s life's mission is to help entrepreneurial ecosystems flourish across Asia by combining capital, education and programs, talent and cutting-edge research and physical spaces to accelerate scalable solutions that will help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals before the world runs out of time. As a Youth Startup Support Consultant under the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), he helps to tackle extreme poverty and climate change through entrepreneurship. 

He also loves to travel, meet interesting people, attend conferences and visit communities, coworking spaces as if they were living museums. 

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Key takeaways: 

- How Aim started from scratch with no capital, network, or experience 

- What the 2008 Financial Crisis taught him 

- How he found himself in entrepreneurship and co-working spaces when there was no technology localized for Thai people 

- People’s relationship with each other 

- Biggest problem in the start-up ecosystem of going out of alignment 

- 3 Key Factors for Founders to stay together for the long-haul 

- What Ex-US President Barack Obama said to him about creating scale and impact successfully 

- Observations about SMEs and what’s holding them back from innovation, scale and speed 

- How SMEs can stay relevant & competitive - The #1 thing SMEs need to learn today 

- How to change & build Culture 

Contact Aim at: 

- Southeast Asia's leading technology media and events company (https://techsauce.co/en) 

- Techsauce Global Summit, one of the biggest and top 3 best Tech conferences in Asia (https://summit.techsauce.co/) 

- Aim’s Twitter (https://twitter.com/AimAmarit)