A little over a month ago the ProPika team (Angel Treat and myself) represented the University of Arkansas ­- Sam M. Walton College of Business in the Bangkok Business Challenge, Asia’s longest-running global student startup competition. The theme for this year’s competition was “Growing Impactful Ventures.” 20 semifinalists were invited to Bangkok selected from a pool of 276 applicants from 62 academic institutions across 19 countries. The 20 semifinalist teams came from diverse backgrounds with unique ideas. It was an honor to be included in this impressive group.

Getting to Bangkok was quite a journey for us. Total travel time was nearly 30 hours, including two layovers (Dallas and Doha). As we traveled, I was reminded how small the world truly is. We were boarding the plane in Doha, Qatar and I hear someone calling my name. It was an old friend from high school. I just thought, “What are the odds?”, which got me thinking about the significance of what we had accomplished. We were in the top 1% of all the teams that applied to the Bangkok Business Challenge, including teams from some of the most prestigious universities (Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management) in the world. Just making it to the semifinal round was a big achievement.

We landed in Bangkok on a Wednesday around 6am local time (we left Arkansas on Monday), jetlagged and tired. We went to get our bags from baggage claim and only 1 out of 4 bags arrived. We went to the service desk to track down our bags, and they said our bags would arrive later that evening or by the next morning at the latest. Nothing else we could do about that situation, so we went to find our ride to the hotel.

We shared the ride with one of our competitors, Ibukun Elebute from MetaCycler BioInnovations. It took about an hour to get to the hotel, so we had some time to get to know her. Her team is from the University of Waterloo out of Canada. They are making polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) from dairy waste. As we learned about her and her team, it started to sink in how tough this competition was going to be with 19 other great teams with great ideas.

We get to the hotel and our rooms weren’t quite ready yet, so we went ahead and met up with some friends from Thailand and explored a little bit of Bangkok. We weren’t really up for doing too much outside due to the heat and humidity. Our friends took us to Siam Paragon and Siam Icon to enjoy the air conditioning and try out some of the local foods at the food courts. The variety and freshness of the food really stood out. It was not what we expected from a mall food court. We tried to visit the Grand Palace and Wat Arun, but they were closed by the time we got there. We ended the night in Chinatown trying out some more of the local flavors. We even tried durian. We did not like it. By the end of the day, we were exhausted. In hindsight we probably should’ve just rested most of the day, but we wanted to make the most of our time in Bangkok.

The competition started on Thursday with the practice round and elevator pitch competition. We got to practice our pitch under the same conditions as the semifinal round. The judges were tough but friendly in this round. I think this probably gave us a false sense of security. We came out of the practice round feeling pretty good. We made some minor adjustments to our pitch that night, practiced, then got to bed early to get ready for the next day.

On Friday, we were the second team to pitch in our group. We arrived at Sasin School of Management early to get a little practice in before our official pitch. As we prepared to go into the room to pitch, we saw the first team, Xobify (Jirawan Apiraksakorn, Ph.D., Panuwat Kotsombat, Worawut Supanavong) from Khon Kaen University, Thailand, come out. Xobify produces sugars from cellulose using an enzymatic process. We asked them how it went, and they said it went well. They said the judges were really nice. We’re thinking this won’t be too bad, spoiler alert, it wasn’t quite as rosy as we expected. We go in and greet the judges. We go through our presentation, and it goes pretty smoothly until we get to the questions and answers portion. The whole panel of judges asked great, relevant questions. However, one judge, Dr. Andrew Stotz, seemed to have it out for us and he did not hold back. He fired away, one question after another. He followed up each question with blistering commentary. He accused us of greenwashing and told us how wrong we were about our margins. We walked out thinking there was no way we were going to advance to the finals.

We went off to lunch and talked to some of the other teams. They said they got the same hard-hitting questions and commentary. That made us feel a little better. After lunch we went and got our feedback. The judges tell us they really liked the presentation and gave us feedback on how we can improve if we advance. There are 5 teams in each of the 4 groups. The top team in each group automatically advances to the finals, the second and third place teams go to a playoff round for another chance to make the finals. One team from each group is also selected to present for a sustainability prize. They made the announcement of which teams got through and we won our group! We were also selected to present for the sustainability prize. The playoff and sustainability presentations started shortly after the announcement.

The sustainability round is set up as a 25-minute presentation where the judges can interrupt and ask questions anytime after the first 5 minutes. The finals were also set up this way, so this gave us an opportunity to practice under this format.

We presented well during the sustainability round and got most of the way through our presentation before any judges interrupted us. More importantly, we got a feel for what the finals would be like since we were presenting in the same format and in the same room as the finals.

Friday evening there was a dinner cruise with participants from other entrepreneurship events that coincide with the Bangkok Business Challenge. Finalists can skip this to use the time to refine their presentations, but we decided to go. Phil Shellhammer from the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation was there, and we wanted to meet up with him. We also ran into Brad Burke from the Rice Business Plan Competition. The global entrepreneurship community is like a fraternity, familiar faces at many of the business plan competitions and entrepreneurship conferences.

The finals took place the next day, Saturday. The order of presentation was decided by each finalist picking a ball with a number on it. We got the number 2 slot and were scheduled to present at 9:05am. Phil was able to step away from his conference for a bit and come support us. It was nice to see a familiar face in the audience.

As we go into the room to get ready to present, we see the judges and the judge right in the middle was none other than Dr. Andrew Stotz, the tough judge we had in the semifinal presentation. I thought to myself, this is not going to go well. We start our presentation and 5 minutes in we are interrupted. The judges start asking questions. I thought we were going to get hammered by Dr. Stotz, but he did not ask many questions. This time it was Robert Lomnitz who was bombarding us with questions and commentary. Angel and I carefully listened to each question and comment and responded accordingly. We were grilled on that stage for what seemed like several hours but after 25 minutes the MC, Mr. Kongpan Pramoj Na Ayudhaya, relieved us. Afterwards we go to see Phil and ask him what he thought of our performance. He responds, “that was different.” He thought we did well though.

We stayed and watched the rest of the finalist presentations. The judges treated us all equally. They were no less brutal to the others than they were to us. The teams finished up and we headed off to lunch while the judges deliberated.

After lunch we went to a rehearsal for the awards ceremony. A representative of the Royal Family presents the awards for the grand prize, His Majesty The King’s Award, and Her Royal Highness. Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn’s Sustainability Award.

The Royal Family representative arrives, and the ceremony begins. The H.R.H. Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn’s Sustainability Award winner is announced first, and the winner was MetaCycler (Eugenia Dadzie) from the University of Waterloo. The runner-up for the grand prize is announced and the runner-up team was Allegrow (Joon Nak Choi, Rong Liu, Chayanin Wong) from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology . Allegrow offers a platform for scalable, rapid and cost-efficient generation of cell therapies. After Allegrow was announced as the runner-up, John Tano, CPA from Oli tells me that we’ve won. Oli is a team from the Asian Institute of Management, Philippines. Their technology is cost-effective accounting software for all. The official announcement was made and ProPika won H.M. The King’s Award! We had to restrain our celebration until after the close of the Royal awards ceremony.  After all the announcements, the Royal Family representative came by all of our booths to greet us and discuss our ideas. The Bangkok Business Challenge closed out with a nice dinner at an Italian restaurant Saturday evening.

Sunday was an optional cultural day of touring and sightseeing. We started the day at Wat Arun and had lunch at Baiyoke Sky Tower. We ended the day at Siam Tea Room at Asiatique.

Overall, it was a great experience. The Bangkok Business Challenge team (Koichi Kanaboshi, Suphanat Woradit) at Sasin School of Management did a great job hosting us. We highly recommend everyone to apply for this competition.

Michael Burton, MBA and Clayton Woodruff, MBA represented the University of Arkansas Walton College of Business in Bangkok the prior year. They prepared us for what to expect and told us it was their favorite competition. While winning is great, the experience of the Bangkok Business Challenge alone was worth the trip. We met great teams from around the world and the judges were top notch. This event gave us the opportunity to expand our network well beyond North America. In addition to some of the teams mentioned earlier, we connected with kombucha producers from Vietnam, Mantra Kombucha (Hoang Tran, Tien Thai Thi Minh) representing Nông Lâm University . We also met programmers from Australia, Wicked XR (Graham Fellows, Salvatore Fazio) from QUT (Queensland University of Technology) .

It took a lot of hard work to get to where we are, but we didn’t get here on our own. It takes a village to start a company. We were fortunate to have an extremely supportive community in Northwest Arkansas. Our professors/coaches, Sarah Goforth and David Hinton, MBA, PhD . They spent many hours providing critical feedback and pushing us to be the best we could possibly be. Our classmates from our New Venture Development class were great sounding boards, especially the Hidalga Tech. and Animal Health Innovators teams. We struggled together and we learned together. Our professors from the inaugural Master of Science in Product Innovation cohort (Rodrigo Salas, Jessica Andrews, Meredith Lowry, ✨Stephen C. Kincaid✨, Sam Claassens, Kate McLean) were extremely understanding as we missed class while traveling to various competitions. We took what we learned from our classes and applied it to our business plan. All of that culminated in a clear, concise, and compelling business plan.

I’d like to extend an open invitation to everyone we met in Bangkok. We would love to host any of you for a visit to Northwest Arkansas. It’s an amazing region where you can feel the spirit of entrepreneurship all around you. Fair warning, you’re going to love it. The last international visitor (Permjot Valia ) that took me up on this offer continues to come back and has become an integral part of the Northwest Arkansas entrepreneurship community.

ProPika Update

ProPika is currently vetting the cellulose conversion the technology. We have confirmed that the solid acid-base catalyst works. We are making adjustments to the catalyst to make production of the catalyst scalable. Our competition winnings and other grants have provided us some non-dilutive runway to continue our journey towards a cleaner, greener, and greater future.

#entrepreneurship #sustainability #innovation #bangkokbizchallenge