Founder and CEO of OWN Academy Ms. Natalie Chan @ Fireside

采訪者：蔣沛芸，吳業澧

Interviewer: Wendy Chong, Lawrence Ng

So we know that you are the CEO of OWN Academy which is a growing non-profit. You founded OWN Academy in 2016 and it’s already been 5 years. During this journey, are there any difficulties to success that help shape you into a better person?

To clarify, OWN Academy is not a non-profit, we’re a social enterprise. We’re an enterprise with a very strong social mission, helping students find purpose in their careers as well as helping companies find the most talented and purpose-driven students. So we, I mean, I think with any type of organizations, when you start it’s super challenging; when it comes to having a concept and you need to turn it into reality… so yeah, OWN Academy is a platform that we want to connect students who are looking for purpose in their career, as well as for companies looking for the purpose-driven and committed young talents. And there are always going to be challenges when it comes to, you know, starting a company from a concept, turning into reality, and honestly challenges also come in different stages of a business. And in the beginning of course, having something just as a concept, the first challenge is to convince people why OWN Academy is important and why OWN Academy is needed. And then when it comes to people understanding and believing it, then it comes down to how you grow your business from just being a one-person because I am the sole founder – like, I founded this by myself – how you then convince other people to join your team to grow your vision. And then from there you begin to worry about how you sustain a company, especially when we are a company that is not funded – we don’t have like a sponsor – so how you make the money in order to support that. So right now, we actually just celebrated our 5-year anniversary, and the challenge we have now is how we then take what we’ve learnt in the past 5 years and scale it across Asia-Pacific, because our goal is to be the education innovation company that works with all the different schools and universities in helping their students find their purpose and achieve their highest potential. So right now. our challenge is how we expand the business and actually impact more people. Our goal is to reach 1 million students, so how we do that, is going to be our next big challenge.

Wow I see! That’s really inspiring because it’s very difficult to put ideas into action. But I can see that you are very positive and optimistic. Congratulations on the anniversary! And I really wish that OWN Academy can be more and more successful in the future. So going back to our conversation. Because I know that you have attended the World Economic Forum earlier, would you mind sharing some of your experiences and thoughts after meeting such a diverse community of industry leaders and business professionals?

Yes, so I was invited to the World Economic Forum in 2019 because I am part of the community called the Global Shapers. Global Shapers is a young changemaker community under the World Economic Forum, and there are about 10 thousand members of us around the world in different cities. Every year, they choose 50 young leaders around the world to attend the World Economic Forum. And as we know the World Economic Forum happens once a year in Dublin, Switzerland and the objective of it is to bring all the business leaders and political leaders to talk about how we shape the world for the better...

Please kindly refer to https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t3V_O2zpzDyb6tffYzZ8TqrK2PnTcH-N/view?usp=sharing for the full transcript.

Editor: Calix Deng

編輯：鄧嘉熙