Tell us your name and a little about yourself.
CEO of Exsulcoin, a startup delivering high-quality education to the world’s most disadvantaged people. As a company, we are the first to deliver English language training programs to the Rohingya, a stateless people living on the Burma-Bangladesh border. Also the first to deliver early-learning education in the country of Myanmar.
Underlying our education content we run predictive analytics, and we use that to identify high-potential engineering talent. We then invite those users to get training as software developers. Our current team of refugee developers are creating foundational blockchain technologies, with which we are building a bleeding-edge IP portfolio against.
Previously, I ran a private equity fund in Myanmar, and a hedge fund in New York. I’m trained as a psychologist and neuroscientist.
Why did you become an entrepreneur in the first place?
I don’t consider myself an entrepreneur in that I don’t seek out business opportunities. Instead, I solve problems. For instance, after college, I went to Africa on a Fulbright to do AIDS research. After the first year there, I noticed many of my patients dying, and they were getting progressively sicker because of Malaria.
In Uganda, where I was based, Malaria is spread by mosquitoes breeding in still pools of water, and these still pools were created by blocked sewers caused by plastic shopping bags being thrown away as litter. Hence, I built a plastic recycling plant, which then founded the plastic recycling infrastructure for all of East Africa.
While this is entrepreneurial, I don’t think of myself as an entrepreneur: I was just solving problems.
