My Story

I'm from Myanmar, I live in Vienna, and most of what I do now grew out of watching what happened to my country.

Shan State to Yangon

I grew up in Shan State, in the highlands in Myanmar's east , mountainous, mixed, and a long way from where decisions get made. My parents were government officers on modest salaries, and in our house the plan was to build a future slowly and not take risks with it.

I studied French at the University of Foreign Languages in Yangon. It was an unusual choice at the time and more useful later than I expected.

My first job was as a telephone operator at the Sedona Hotel in Yangon. Not glamorous, but a switchboard is a good place to learn how an organisation actually works and how people talk to each other when something is at stake. From there I moved into marketing at the Inya Lake Hotel, one of Yangon's grand old institutions, and started to understand how a place builds the way it's seen.

At twenty-one I left for Singapore on my own, looking for something bigger.

Singapore

I spent several years advising students on education pathways and helping international colleges build their presence across Southeast Asia. It taught me audience, messaging, and how to hold a relationship together over years rather than a campaign cycle, none of which I'd learned in a classroom.

Back to Yangon

In 2013, I came home in the middle of a transformation: a political opening, an economy waking up, and the transition to Democracy. Facebook and mobile internet arriving at the same time in the hands of a population that had been cut off from both until 2012. With that leap-frogging technology, I moved fast too.

Geek Girls Myanmar

I founded it in 2014. It started as fifteen women around a table and became a community of more than a thousand across fifteen regions of the country. We ran workshops, hackathons and mentorship programmes, with events funded by Oredoo Myanmar, Meta, Google and the U.S. Embassy. I hosted talk shows on hate speech and produced podcasts on digital citizenship, and I trained women in towns most people in Yangon had never been to.

The technology was the occasion. The point was access by telling women they belonged in rooms nobody had invited them into.

Digital Kaway

I co-founded one of Myanmar's first digital marketing agencies and spent six years building it into a practice with over a hundred clients ; multinationals, international NGOs, local businesses and more than 150 campaigns behind it. For a while I was one of the people the country asked what it meant to communicate in a digital era.

MyLann and the speaking circuit

As an another exciting venture, I served as Marketing Director for MyLann, Myanmar's first food directory app, and grew its community past 370,000 followers. I spoke at the Forbes Global Summit in Boston and the Misk Global Forum in Riyadh, and over a decade did more than thirty international engagements; panels, judging business competitions, and roundtables on everything from entrepreneurship to reproductive rights.

1 February 2021

The military took power, and most of what I had been part of came apart. Civil society organisations were targeted. The internet was throttled. People I had worked alongside for years became activists, and then targets. I ended Digital Kaway chapter due to all instablities and threats, I decided to leave.

Vienna

I moved here in 2023 for a Master of Arts in Public Policy at Central European University. My thesis examined how the Myanmar military used social media to silence online activists after the coup.

The CEU Budapest Foundation awarded me a research grant to keep going. I interviewed human rights defenders working under real risk and produced a study of the mechanisms of digital repression the military deployed against civil society. I interned with the Wikimedia Foundation's Human Rights Team, researching disinformation threats to freedom of expression in Myanmar, and published my findings with the Central European Institute of Asian Studies.

Now

I keep exploring and looking for adventures and opportunities in Europe. And yes, I am still a woman with ambitions and dreams to realize no matter where I happen to be.

Recognition

• Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia — Media, Marketing & Advertising
• The Holmes Report — Innovator 25, Southeast Asia
• Pioneer Women Who Smashed the Glass Ceiling in Asia