Year: 2022 | Role: Venture Incubation Program Coordinator
Climate & Sustainability · Venture Building · Program Design
The Challenge
Single-use plastics in Southeast Asia are not a simple problem. Waste infrastructure is uneven, supply chains are entrenched, and behavioral change moves slowly even when the will is there. RISE IMPACT‘s SUP Challenge was an acceleration program for early-stage ventures working on plastic reduction in Thailand’s food and beverage industry, funded by the PREVENT Waste Alliance and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The challenge was building a program rigorous enough to actually move these ventures forward, not just put them in a room together for six months.
What I Did
I joined as Venture Incubation Program Coordinator alongside Chayanat Supasongklod, and the two of us were a strong team. My focus was on the program design side: structuring the curriculum, coordinating the schedule, managing relationships with external stakeholders, and making sure the support we offered matched what the ventures actually needed at their stage. We were working with founders at the point where clarity of problem definition matters more than product maturity, so the program had to create conditions for honest, rigorous thinking rather than just polished pitching.
The SNOWBALL x SUP cohort brought together ventures working across different angles of the same problem: Good Food Loop was rerouting restaurant orders into reusable stainless tiffins, DropRefill was making cleaning products dissolvable in reusable containers, and Delifill was running a refill delivery service by electric scooter. Each of them was trying to solve something real, and the program’s job was to help them find out how.
Outcomes
By the end of the six-month program, all three pilots had been successfully tested. The ventures showed measurable growth, received strong feedback, and built lasting relationships with the food and beverage partners they met through the program. More than the metrics, what the program produced was a clearer sense for each founder of what they were actually building and why. That clarity is what follows ventures past the program’s end date.