NZ visit highlights potential for deeper business ties — Thai entrepreneur
In May, nine emerging tech entrepreneurs from Southeast Asia visited New Zealand to gain insights into the country’s innovation ecosystem, connect with local founders and industry leaders, and explore opportunities for future collaboration. During the programme, participants took part in workshops, site visits and meetings with investors, startups and business communities in Auckland and Christchurch. In this article, Thai entrepreneur Kasper Tanakrit Sermsuksan reflects on his key takeaways from the visit and shares the entrepreneurial lessons that New Zealand and Thailand can learn from one another. The visit was part of the ASEAN Young Business Leaders Initiative (YBLI), delivered by the Asia New Zealand Foundation on behalf on New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Kasper: "The deepest bonds between countries are lived, not signed."
Looking out the window as my plane lifts off from Christchurch to Auckland, I see a long, straight coastline below, drawn by the wind into a clean line. It looks exactly like the coast of Chumphon back home. For a moment the two countries Thailand and New Zealand, fold into one image, and the 9,400 kilometers between them stop feeling like distance and start feeling like an old friendship we never quite finished building.
I came to New Zealand as Thailand's delegate to the Asia New Zealand Foundation's Young Business Leaders Initiative, hosted with extraordinary care over a week in Auckland and Christchurch. I build ventures for a living — as Founder of SEA Bridge, a cross-border venture builder helping to educate and support one million entrepreneurial talents across ASEAN. I arrived a stranger and left in debt to the place and its people.
Seventy years a friend
In 2026, Thailand and New Zealand mark seventy years of diplomatic relations, and both Prime Ministers have committed to a Strategic Partnership. The friendship runs deep. King Bhumibol visited in 1962, five years before ASEAN even existed, and yet, after seventy years, we still do not know each other the way old friends should. We trade a little, visit a little, and admire each other from a distance.
The shift worth making is simple: from two countries that are friendly to two peoples who build together. Entrepreneurship is the finest bridge between them, because building a company is hard for everyone, everywhere, in exactly the same way. A Thai founder and a Kiwi founder who have both lain awake at 3 a.m. over payroll understand each other faster than two diplomats ever will.
And we are closer than the map shows. A Thai community in New Zealand has grown from 41 people in 1961 to roughly 50,000 today. We share a reverence for land, family, and faith. Our greeting is anything but casual, the hongi and the wai. From Ayutthaya to Aotearoa, we are more woven together than the distance suggests. We even share the same quiet problem: a record 72,700 New Zealanders left in the year to September 2025, and Thailand's population is shrinking and could halve within fifty years. Neither of us can grow our way out alone.
Spicier Kiwis, cooler Thais
Jason Wang of venture capital firm IceHouse Ventures discusses New Zealand's investment sector with the visiting group
At the New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards, Marian Johnson, chair of the Hi-Tech Trust, said something that has not left me: New Zealand's founders are held back less by a shortage of ability than by an excess of humility. The same is true of Thai founders, and of most of ASEAN. Thais call it kreng jai, the reluctance to impose; New Zealanders call their version "tall poppy syndrome." We suffer from the same beautiful, limiting modesty, which is exactly why we are the right ones to push each other.
To my Kiwi friends: be a little spicier. The first time you eat real Thai food the chili hurts. By the third meal, you cannot live without it. Spice is discomfort that turns into appetite. Your own Southeast Asian neighbours recently called you a close, like-minded friend and asked you to be more present in the region, especially in education. The appetite for you is already there. What is missing is the willingness to turn up the heat.
To my Thai compatriots: be a little cooler. New Zealand is cold in a way we are not built for. And, the honest answer to cold is not to retreat indoors, it is to put on another layer, grow a thicker skin, and walk out into it anyway. We are wonderful hosts and timid guests. The next seventy years asks us to be as brave abroad as we are gracious at home.
A path to 2046
The entrepreneurs hear from Ben Erskine, the chief marketing officer of Christchurch start-up incubator Ministry of Awesome
If we are serious about building the next seventy years instead of commemorating the last, we should do what serious partners do and write the plan down. In 2023, Australia published Invested: Australia's Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040, with a special envoy accountable for delivering it. Thailand and New Zealand have nothing like it pointed at each other.
So here is a proposal: a bilateral roadmap, owned by both governments and aimed at 2046, when our friendship turns ninety. And the strategic logic makes it more than sentiment. Thailand and Indonesia are the only two ASEAN countries currently in OECD accession; as Thailand adopts those standards, it becomes the natural anchor for a principled, independent New Zealand in the region — and the land bridge onward to the Bay of Bengal, China, and India.
Thailand is New Zealand's door to Asia. New Zealand is Thailand's door to the world.
I am one founder, not a foreign ministry. Consider what follows an ignition, not a blueprint. One vision, four missions.
Mission One — OKOT! 🇳🇿🇹🇭 People
The deepest bonds between countries are lived, not signed. They form when someone spends real time on the other side, gets homesick there, and comes home changed. YBLI has created exactly that kind of bond for about 270 people in fifteen years. The relationships are extraordinary; the scale is too modest for what the friendship deserves.
The number: 200,000 by 2046 — one hundred thousand Kiwis and one hundred thousand Thais who have studied, founded, researched, or worked in each other's countries. Not tourists. People who built something real.
The flagship: Thailand once turned thousands of villages into exporters with OTOP (One Tambon One Product). Borrow that rhythm and you get OKOT: One Kiwi, One Thai — alumni who, a generation from now, sit in the ministries, companies, and campuses of both countries.
Mission Two — Cracking ten billion capital
Both governments have promised to triple two-way trade, from about NZ$4.5 billion toward NZ$13.5 billion by 2045. The tariffs are already gone, the trade is still thin and lopsided — mostly New Zealand dairy one way, Thai vehicles the other — and the real barrier was never tariffs. It is that businesses on each side have no partner on the other.
That is a problem capital and people solve, not one more trade agreement. A tariff moves goods once; a joint venture moves goods, people, and ideas for a generation.
The mechanism: a cross-border venture fund on a New Zealand–ASEAN thesis, anchored by both governments and matched by private money — Thai family offices and corporates on one side, New Zealand institutional and angel capital on the other. Thai public agencies like the TED Fund, NIA, and depa already exist to co-invest; New Zealand has shown how patient capital turns small startups into global champions.
Why it matters: capital is the spark that turns a friendship into a balance sheet — and the piece most within my own power to help build.
Mission Three — Double down on our strengths, share our secrets knowledge
The week concluded in Auckland where the group got to reflect and share insights about their time in New Zealand
Most "knowledge exchange" between countries is one-directional and quietly condescending. The truth between Thailand and New Zealand is a peer exchange.
What Thailand can share: New Zealand's banking sector is dominated by a few players and is only now debating "open banking." Thailand, with a banking landscape just as concentrated, simply built around it — PromptPay, our national instant-payment system, moved 2.16 billion transactions in a single month of 2025 and already crosses borders into Singapore, Vietnam, and Japan. Hospitality turned into infrastructure.
What New Zealand can share: a nation of five million produced a cloud-accounting platform used worldwide and the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to reach space. From a small market, you must export from day one. Thailand's home market is big enough to make founders comfortable; New Zealand's smallness made it hungry, and that hunger is the strength we should want most.
The mechanism: small joint task forces on shared problems — food and agriculture, space, the creative economy, education, and longevity.
Mission Four — Modernize the work, cherish the soul culture
The group visiting the newly opened One NZ Stadium in Christchurch where they learnt about the city and New Zealand culture
Culture is not decoration around business; it is the operating system that decides whether a partnership survives. A Kiwi who knows how to wai [slight bow] at a Thai table, and a Thai who knows how to wait their turn in a Kiwi conversation, are worth more to a venture than another clause in a trade deal.
The flagship: an annual Thailand–New Zealand creative residency — artists, designers, chefs, musicians, and founders spending a season living and making work in the other country. Māori and Thai craft, food, and storytelling are among the most distinctive in the world and the least exchanged between us. Start there.
The principle: modernize the work, cherish the soul — change fast without losing the temples, the marae, and the families that already span both lands.
One vision. Four missions. One destination: 2046, the year our friendship turns ninety and, if we choose, the year it finally grows up.
The invitation
The week included an Asia After Five event in Auckland where the entrepreneurs shared stories of starting tech companies in their respective countries
The doors between our countries are already open, and closer than they look. At the Hi-Tech Awards I had a brief word with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Finance Minister Nicola Willis, and the Leader of the Opposition, Chris Hipkins — ceremonial, not substantive, but a quiet sign that this relationship can reach the top table on both sides of politics.
The most valuable thing any of us can give one another is not capital or curriculum. It is an open door. Some you can see, and only need an introduction to walk through. Some are invisible until a friend points at the wall. And some do not exist at all until someone who believes in you decides to build one.
To my New Zealand friends: Southeast Asia already trusts you and is asking you to lean in. To my Thai compatriots: the friend who would walk us toward the world is one whose ambitions in our region we should help carry in return. And to my fellow Southeast Asians, from Brunei to Timor-Leste: this is yours too. Every door we build between Thailand and New Zealand is meant to open for all of you next.
I came to New Zealand to learn, and I am leaving in its debt. For seventy years we have been good friends; the next seventy, we should be partners — not because we say so, but because we choose to build it.
Kasper Tanakrit Sermsuksan is the Founder of SEA Bridge and Founding Dean of the SEA Bridge Institute of Entrepreneurship. He represented Thailand in the Asia New Zealand Foundation's YBLI Tech 2026 cohort. The full version of this article, with sources and further detail, is at seabridge.space/post/the-long-white-cloud-and-the-war-elephant.
