Last year, Rungsimanond started his third venture with an old friend, whom he met while working as an investment associate at the San Francisco branch of GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. Looloo Technology offers AI, data science consulting and data security services, and has worked with large organisations and corporations in sectors such as healthcare, finance and transportation. It’s also working on creating its own products, such as a software similar to Apple’s Siri to enable people living in rural areas to use and learn English. 

Running three companies at the same time has sometimes allowed Rungsimanond to cross-promote his businesses across different platforms and to different audiences. “As a serial entrepreneur, it’s important to find synergies between your companies. How can they support each other?” he says. 

Besides being hired to develop Carenation’s website and creating an AI-driven measuring system for Parich Fertilizers, Looloo is also helping to revamp the online donations platform of a large public hospital, which happens to be one of Carenation’s partners. “In this specific case, Looloo is building the technology and Carenation is providing the funds, which is from the donations it received for the hospital,” he explains.

Rungsimanond has carved a niche for each of his businesses, something he says entrepreneurs often overlook. “If we want to offer a product or service, we need to identify what our niche is and build a competitive advantage,” he says. “The question is, how can we prevent others from copying our product and entering the same space as us?”

In addition to building a competitive product that people want, research also tells us that not having the right team in place is one of the most common reasons why startups fail. 

For Carenation and Looloo, Rungsimanond says finding the right co-founders has been key to the stability of both businesses. “They are people who aren’t too much like me,” he says. “When you look for a co-founder, the person should be strong in areas that you’re not, but be able to see and believe in the same vision as you.”

Rungsimanond speaks from experience, having gone through a few failed business ventures. Once, he invested in a friend’s property management company, which later shut down due to “market reasons” that he didn’t want to elaborate.

Another example was a restaurant he set up with other friends that closed down after two years. “We were young and as friends, we just wanted to work together,” he says. “But we didn’t know anything about running a restaurant. We also had such similar mindsets and skills that we weren’t able to think of different ways to tackle our problems.” 

Rather than shy away from discussing his past failures, Rungsimanond thinks entrepreneurs should talk more about their own too. “People tend to overlook the lessons that can be gained from those times of failure,” he says. “In my case, people mostly know me for the businesses that I’m still running today, but they don’t know what I had to go through to get here.”

“It was through my failures that I realised many things about myself and about running businesses. All this has contributed to helping me create better businesses and make better decisions today.”

See more honourees from the Social Entrepreneurship category of the Gen.T List 2020.