Bangkok
Ten days of entrepreneurship teaching in Bangkok, December 14–23, 2026, for high school and college students from underprivileged backgrounds. Lijie and Chuck are both teaching. The trip is coordinated by Pear Chotbunwong, who grew up in Bangkok and took Chuck's MS&E 272 Entrepreneurship Without Borders at Stanford, which is the pattern behind most of the Foundation's durable partnerships.
The Foundation’s first Thailand programming runs December 14–23, 2026 in Bangkok: ten days of entrepreneurship teaching for high school and college students from underprivileged backgrounds. Both co-founders are teaching. The Board approved the program at the 2026 annual meeting.
How it came about
The trip is coordinated by Pear (Manyasiri) Chotbunwong, who grew up in Bangkok and took Chuck’s MS&E 272, Entrepreneurship Without Borders, at Stanford, where she is now in her final year. She is president of Foundess, a community for early-stage women founders that she co-founded, so the entrepreneurship material is not foreign to her. She knows both the Bangkok context and what the teaching is meant to do, which is the combination that makes these programs work.
That origin is not incidental. Vietnam came through a former student. So did the groundwork in the Philippines. The Foundation’s most durable partnerships have consistently started with someone who sat in one of Chuck’s classes and then went home. It is a slower way to build a program than picking a country and cold-calling schools, and it produces relationships that survive the first difficult year.
Bangkok replaced a planned December trip to Metro Manila. The Philippines partner conversations remain live and may still produce a program; the December slot went to Thailand because the local coordination came together first.
What we know so far
Two partner schools are confirmed and more are expected.
The teaching will follow the pattern the Foundation has settled into across Molokai, Penang, Vietnam, and Tanzania: short hands-on sessions rather than lectures, built around students making something and presenting it the same day. What that looks like in Bangkok depends on the partner schools and the age mix, which is still being worked out.
Why Bangkok
Thailand is not a country where entrepreneurship education is absent. It is a country where it is unevenly distributed, concentrated in well-resourced Bangkok institutions and in English-language international schools, and largely missing for students from low-income families a few kilometers away. That is the same gap the Foundation works on in Penang and Ho Chi Minh City: not a country-level absence, but a within-country distribution problem.
Teaching high school and college students in the same trip also lets us test something we keep running into. The career-planning and entrepreneurship material lands differently depending on how close a student is to an actual decision about what to do next, and we have never run both cohorts back to back in the same city with the same instructors. Bangkok is a chance to see the difference clearly.
Foundation support, in summary
- Ten days of direct entrepreneurship teaching in Bangkok, December 14–23, 2026.
- Both co-founders instructing.
- Beneficiaries: high school and college students from underprivileged backgrounds.
- Coordinated locally by Pear Chotbunwong.
- Two partner schools confirmed, additional expected.
- Approved by the Board at the 2026 annual meeting.
This page will be updated with partner schools, the session plan, and reach figures as the program firms up, and rewritten after the trip to report what actually happened.