Building the tech future of Cambodia in a national park — Kirirom

One of the things I love most about working in marketing is the opportunity to work with many different types of projects and industries. I’ve lived in Cambodia for one year now working in marketing, and while I’m no expert, I’ve had an opportunity to see many different businesses here. A former CTO at an ad agency, I now consult nonprofits and businesses around Cambodia transition into the digital age.

One of my clients, Kirirom University, is a technology institute located in a Kirirom National Park Cambodia. Their President and CEO, Izuka Takeshi a successful Japanese entrepreneur, is trying to solve a fairly complex problem. Japan’s median age is 47 years old and projected to trend upward.¹ I’ll spare you the economics, but basically they need more younger people entering the work force to support the older retiring generation.

Cambodia’s median age is 25.² His solution: start a technology institute in Cambodia, training software engineers, digital entrepreneurs, and programmers, and get them jobs in Japan after graduation. The students are given a free scholarship, housing, food, etc. and are supported by the revenue generated by a sister business, Kirirom Resort.

The students also work on practical real world projects, with any revenue generated by those efforts supporting the school.

After working here for three months, I think I’ve given it a fair assessment. One of the things I love most about this company is their flexibility to change and adapt to a vision. If I were to outline my personal vision for Kirirom, it would be this:

Step 1: Revenue Generation

The first step in most businesses should be revenue generation. As a marketer, that is held in a single question: “How can we get more people to visit the resort?” Kirirom is 3 hours west of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. It’s location makes it difficult to get tourists to dedicate a whole day to visit what is relatively unknown in the “tourist circuit.” While you could hammer adwords/facebook ads hard and brute force your exposure, I think its important to remember what this place is.

Curating your audience

One of my favorite documentaries is “Valley Uprising”, a beautifully shot story about climbing, and the history of Yellowstone National Park. Its dope, you should watch it:

These scraggly climbers, who lived on cans of beans, whisky, and pure adrenaline found their mecca in a relatively unknown pocket of the world. Gathering there, they formed small communities and simply did what they loved. The food wasn’t always great, it poured rain drenching their tents, they got arrested a couple of times… it didn’t matter, they were doing what they loved. More importantly, they respected the park they played in, almost taking a philosophical respect for the nature they climbed on. In a lot of ways, that is how I see Kirirom.

I think it’s important to not only get more people here, but get the right people here. People who will preserve and respect Kirirom.

I would attack this effort in many different ways.

Photography tourism is great tourism

Photography seems like the natural³ choice of a target audience. Many people visit national parks all around the world on photography expeditions. They don’t mind traveling 3 hours for the perfect shot. In this way, we can position the park as the attraction, our accommodations are just the natural byproduct.

Because Kirirom is relatively unknown, we can also offer a unique opportunity for photographer tourists to get a picture of a truly unique area of Cambodia. Did you know the pine trees that cover our mountain were actually brought here by a French General? The kings old summer home is a also here, but has since been abandoned… Sometimes, when I walk around this place, I feel like I’m walking places most people will never see.

We can offer tour guides, and all that other jazz… But we would offer to wave that fee if you come back from your tour with 2 bags of trash that you cleaned up as you went about your journey. We want to curate an attitude of environmental consciousness as well as natural wonder.

Recycling platic is the shit yo

In that same vein, I’m a big fan of the open source project Precious Plastic:

Basically, you can build your own plastic recycling factory, and make products like this:

I would start the students on creating that machine, and work on creating real world products that we could sell at our gift shop/online/locally.

One of the things I love most about Cambodia is the “copy-cat” nature of business trends here. If you show something works, most other businesses rapidly follow suit. The trick, is just to show that green efforts “work” and that you can generate as much (if not more) revenue supporting those efforts… and I think we could do it.

I reckon that if these efforts go right, we should be able to start naturally attracting an environmentally conscious tourist stream, giving us the revenue we need while protecting the mountain I’ve come to love.

Educating the future of Cambodia

As we scale up revenue generation, we are revamping the technology institute side as well. One of the interesting things I’ve come to learn in my career, is that while many people understand the importance of “digital” “data” “ai”, most people don’t know what to build. I guess that’s where I shine. I believe great products come at the intersection of technology, art, and nature. I’ve always enjoyed finding ways to create products that users love… and Kirirom University offers the flexibility to pursue building those products.

The students are great… young and passionate, they want to build the technological future of Cambodia, and work way harder than I ever did at their age.

One of the most critical problems I assessed upon getting here though, was that we did not have any actual software engineers on staff teaching these students, doing code reviews, etc. While I am a big believer in self teaching, without having someone to explain best practice, why that error is occurring not just how to fix it, it is very hard to make products that will be revenue generating in the real world. While it is possible (holla holla Zucc!), it is very difficult.

The school knew this was a problem as well, but finding the right person to do this is extremely difficult. This person would ideally live here in Cambodia, on a mountain, with one restaurant and about 300 people. Instead of making $300/day as a software engineer in Europe, they would need to work for Cambodia pay. They’d need to be ok the sun, the dust, the random wildfire’s that you end up having to beat back with a branch… its a hard sell. Lucky for us, I have a bit of social media reach, and we have found two software developers who are joining us April 1, 2019.

This is the part where you tap that clap button to the left there a ton, like/share, etc… those actions have a direct impact on my ability to find people to help make this crazy thing happen. While you may not be a software developer, or an artist who can drop everything and move to Cambodia, someone in your network may be able to. Your share makes a difference. instagram too, love you!

What makes a “smart city” smart?

In the end, my job is to take ambiguous, vague, and terribly ambitious ideas and turn them into a reality. “Build a smart city in Cambodia” certainly falls into that category… but what makes a smart city smart? Is it the drone delivered packages? The ai driven life-guard by the pool? The advanced laundry system with corresponding app? I would argue that it is the people inside the city which makes it smart, not the projects or place itself.

To truly make a smart city, you must first attract the right type of people. Much the same as the tourists above… people who are smart, driven, altruistic, innovative… interested in making this world a better place and not droning on in a 9–5. If you throw those people in the middle of a situation and say “solve this problem” they will. They naturally do that everywhere they go. They will create the solar powered scooters and plastic recycling plants here, simply because that is what they want, and those type of people make change.

Hard, but not impossible.

Making Kirirom into what I hope it can be is certainly a heavy task. Understaffed, lower funding, isolated, and hot, its no joy ride. But. If you’re like me… someone who doesn’t mind getting in the dirt and working hard for the sake of working hard then this place is as good as any to be. Every organization across the world has the struggles in some form, and that pain is solved by people… join me in Cambodia, could be fun :)

Hey. I’m Chris, I build best in class marketing software in Cambodia to support nonprofits and NGO’s around the world, for free. I sustain myself with consulting work, if you have big data problems, or want to be prepared for the ai revolution, I’m your guy.

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¹ https://www.statista.com/statistics/604424/median-age-of-the-population-in-japan/

² https://www.statista.com/statistics/438648/average-age-of-the-population-in-cambodia/

³ please clap for my pun