Forbes: A Girl From A Groundbreaking School In Cambodia Visited Google HQ - This Is The Question She Asked

[Tharum Bun]

Elizabeth MacBride, Contributor
https://www.forbes.com/sites/elizabethmacbride/2018/09/12/whats-still-most-important-about-silicon-valley-its-soft-power/

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Socheata grew up in a bright yellow house on Koh Sdach, an island with
a population of 700 that sits in the sea between Thailand and
Cambodia.

There were bridges to the world: She played a game on her father’s
phone, in which the words “San Francisco” popped up next a photograph
of the city. But she thought San Francisco was an English vocabulary
word for a certain kind of city, a fancy one.

When she was 10, she was lucky enough to be one of 110 students chosen
from among thousands countrywide to attend the Liger Leadership
Academy. Liger was founded in 2012 by an American financier who fell
in love with Cambodia and saw it as a good place to start a
ground-breaking school.

“The Victorian model of education needs NOT to be reformed, it needs
to be replaced and no matter who it is driving that revolution, I’m
growing more convinced with each passing day that it’s critical,” said
Trevor Gile, who with his wife, Agnieszka Tynkiewicz-Gile, has spent
about $14 million over a decade to bring Liger to life.

Liger is loosely part of the global entrepreneurship movement, which
is an idea, driven mostly by Western investors but rapidly adopted in
emerging markets, that Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurship can
create jobs, help build investment infrastructure to funnel money to
emerging markets, and spark innovation (and eventually returns). Part
and parcel of the movement are a certain set of values: that change is
rapid and we need to keep up, that acknowledgement of failure is key,
and that innovation, especially in technology, can make people's lives
better.

Global entrepreneurship has reached the Holy Grail of movements : It’s
inspirational and transforms individual lives, for very little money,
in ways that scale. It started among young people in their 20s, but
it’s beginning to cross-pollinate education reform, too, which is what
I was interested in at Liger.

There are obvious dangers to exporting Silicon Valley’s mindset,
especially to very young people. In the United States, Silicon
Valley’s business models rewarded a few people too much on the backs
of people who deserved much better. Whether emerging entrepreneurs and
leaders will be wise enough to take a different path in developing
countries remains to be seen, though it seems inevitable that the
mindset will be adapted in new places.

Gile, who founded Liger, made a fortune in futures trading – his
company is Liger Investments Ltd. -- aims to produce community-minded
leaders. Socheata was chosen from her island in part because at the
age of 10, she was working on the question of how to shield the island
from lightning strikes. “I had a plan for planting trees,” which she
shared with the admission test administrators.

With a long interest in education, one shared by many entrepreneurs,
Gile decided to try to build a model in Cambodia for students ages 10
– 18 that could be replicated elsewhere. Cambodia is obviously a
convenient place to try an educational experiment, because it doesn’t
have the regulations that hamper innovation in the United States.
There’s also a great need: The educated class was targeted in the
genocide.

“From the very beginning I’ve put a huge emphasis on having a culture
where there is no stigma for being wrong and no stigma for failure and
a sense of pride for admitting to it quickly,” Gile said.

Last October, Socheata and I were sitting outside her dorm, in the
Phnom Penh suburbs. The two-story modern building lay under a dense
canopy of green; the air was warm but not oppressive. There were
probably some snakes (cobras!) around, but I was pretending not to
think about them. Knowing I was a Western journalist and write about
technology sometimes, Socheata asked me a perceptive question: “How
does Google make money?”

Back on the island, Socheata’s father worked for the local government,
and she attended the state school, where curriculum is based on
memorization. At Liger, she’s encouraged to ask questions, especially
the tough and critical ones.

At Liger, Socheata had gotten involved in a program called
Technovation. She won a prize for budding entrepreneurs for a project
selling Cambodian handicrafts online, and was invited to San
Francisco and the Google headquarters, which is where she realized how
much money Google makes, which in turn caused her to wonder about its
business model.

“If you can’t tell what product a company has,” I told her, giving her
the old saw: “the product is probably you.”

At Liger, where every student attends on a full scholarship, the
curriculum is based on projects in addition to some traditional
coursework, so that students are assigned projects of varying length
to work on in teams. The projects could be anything from creating a
tourism operation – we traveled on bikes with student guides on a city
tour of Phnom Penh – to scuba diving as part of a research operation
on the coast, to publishing a book about the economy of Cambodia
(Liger students created one so good that it was adopted to use in the
state school system). The older students cook their own meals and
manage their own dorms and when we visited were developing a virtual
currency to use among the students.

Despite the size and breadth of the global entrepreneurship movement,
it draws relatively little mainstream attention. Government funders
and development experts rarely mention it and when they do, tend to
see it as merely glamorous and don’t understand its soft power. It
gets confused with traditional forms of entrepreneurship support, like
micro-finance programs that help women set up market business, and
there is some crossover. But the infusion of outside capital and the
sense of being part of a large community are key to the tech-driven
driven movement.

I’ve been in crowds of 25,000 in Cairo, listening rapt to lessons
about seed funding and A-rounds; one organization, Endeavor, reports
that 1.2 million jobs have been created by the high-growth
entrepreneurs it works with worldwide. Worldwide, $140 billion was
invested in startups in 2017, and the value of the startup economy
reached $2.3 trillion—a 25.6% increase from the 2014 to 2016 period,
according to the Startup Genome report.

I don’t know if Socheata will grow up to start a company, but that her
profession or business will be tech-enabled is a given; and that it
will be informed by the ideas of the tech world, speed, innovation,
iteration, is at this point a near-certainty, too. When I visited with
other journalists, including Ron Claiborne of Good Morning America and
Amanda Sperber, who freelances from Kenya, to give panels on our
profession to Liger students, they asked us questions that probed our
ethics.

“What do you do when your boss at work tells you to write a story you
don’t think is right?” one student asked – a shockingly adult question
with even more meaning in a country that experienced genocide in
living memory. That kind of critical thinking, especially directed
toward questions of right and wrong, can be part of entrepreneurial
culture at its best – and I have seen many more examples of it in
emerging markets, versus Silicon Valley.

“If you build a reputation for being the first to admit when you’ve
made a mistake, you have vastly more credibility when you believe
you’re right and choose to stick to your guns,” Gile said by email.

Teaching young people to think critically and act quickly may spur
economic growth. That’s one of the reasons that Saudi Arabia is
investing in entrepreneurship, planning a $500B tech city, that Brazil
has a thriving entrepreneurship scene, that entrepreneurs in China and
Israel are forming alliances to help boost communities in both
countries, and that Liger is thriving in Cambodia, with support from
the education ministry. The difference between 3% and 7% growth in an
emerging market is the difference between a good life and hell. I’ve
come across other education programs and schools, like Dent Education
in Baltimore, that are adopting entrepreneurial concepts like design
thinking to the education sector, and with more attention in general
being paid to education reform in general by the likes of the Gates
Foundation and the Dubai-based Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation for
Education, more links between entrepreneurship and education seem
likely.

One of the secrets to the success of the global entrepreneurship
movement is that it is private-sector driven. The World Bank’s IFC
invests in venture capital funds and has begun investing in
accelerators, but huge government pots of cash for entrepreneurship
are rare; rather, the funding is mostly coming from investors. Some
are looking for the new innovations and a chance to shape a more equal
world.

“Especially in rising markets, the nature of the challenges — lack of
infrastructure, regulatory challenges, last mile logistic, less access
to banking — are very similar,” said Christopher Schroeder, co-founder
of a new global venture capital fund, Next Billion Ventures.

“Hence solutions are more similar, say, among Brazil, Indonesia, Egypt
than with Silicon Valley. The need and reliance upon traditional
“western” tech solutions is much less, as the world innovates on its
own terms.”

He says that many in the West are missing the ramifications of the
inter-related combination of rising middle classes and near universal
access to technology around the globe.

Others see the power of entrepreneurship to reshape societies as the
movement reshapes lives. I met Seth Levine, one of the partners of
Boulder-based Foundry Group, when I was working in Israel/Palestine.
He was serving as a mentor for a Ramallah-based company that he’d
invested in, Mashvisor.

“Part of my motivation to help entrepreneurs working in
non-traditional markets is because I believe that by doing so I'm
helping people positively impact their communities, cities, towns,
countries and regions,” he said. “Done thoughtfully … entrepreneurship
can bring jobs, investment, currency and purpose to communities around
the world. This isn't wishful thinking - we're already seeing this in
places like Palestine where several companies have launched, been
funded and are growing nicely.”

He's also invested in several companies in Ethiopia.

A few miles from where Socheata and I were sitting that day, Chinese
investors’ money was raising buildings in Phnom Penh. The Cambodian
government had just closed down a newspaper and was moving toward
authoritarianism. One the ride over, I’d asked a school administrator
why they sought most of their donations from Americans: “Americans are
donors,” he said. “Chinese are investors.”

Nearly a year later, American power has faded in Cambodia; Chinese
power has risen. But the real power lies with the school and the
movement: Socheata will grow up knowing it is possible to change, that
an idea can turn into something real, and that San Francisco, well,
exists. She thought the food there was overpriced and the highways
were huge.

“I thought Americans must get lost a lot,” she said.

That, I told her, is fundamentally true.

We talked about advertising in the 21st century then. I don’t know
what she’ll grow up to be, but I’d guess it will be something pretty
amazing.

A business journalist for 20 years and a freelancer for more than 10
of that, I’ve written about tobacco farmers in Amish Country,
immigrants in New York City and financiers all over the world. Right
now, I'm writing about the business of guns.
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Best,
musings from the murky mekong
https://tharum.com/blog/