A Founder’s Journey
Why rooted leaders, grounded culture and sustained impact matter to me.
I didn't set out to fix organisations. I set out to change education and create social impact.
What I didn't see then was that both problems were the same problem.
Many Organisations Begin With Good Intentions
In 2002, at 25, I co-founded School of Thought in Singapore — an experimental learning centre using after-school tuition to help young people become more self-aware and engaged beyond their exams.
Our first class of 20 grew to 100 within a year by word of mouth. That success grew into The Thought Collective, a cluster of well-known social enterprises spanning publishing, cafes, and learning journeys. By the ten-year mark, we had over 100 employees and a reputation for building a sustainable, seven-figure impact business.
We loved what we built. But we didn't see what was coming.
But Good Intentions & Fast Growth Hide Gaps
The next decade was both the best and worst of times.
There was much good. The young people we taught entered the workforce, and their managers noticed how differently they thought and communicated. 'Can you teach our adults what you taught them?' opened doors to organisational consulting work.
But internally, gaps grew between our stated ambitions and actual actions. Complex co-founder dynamics. People problems we didn't have the models or maturity to navigate yet. The speed of growth outpaced my leadership capability.
I hit my ceiling in 2012. I found perspective through Praxis, an ecosystem for founders building redemptive ventures. Being selected as a Praxis Fellow in 2014 gave me language I'd been fumbling toward: integrity in all things is fundamental for long-term impact.
From 2015–2018, I served as a Nominated Member of Parliament representing youth perspectives. In 2017, The Thought Collective began what would become my most significant long-term project: an experimental civic centre in partnership with the government.
The civic centre was meant to open in 2020. The pandemic delayed it.
But it was our own internal crisis that nearly killed it.
Crisis Exposes What Must Change
In early 2021, I discovered gross professional misconduct by one of my co-founders —multiple violations of professional boundaries and abuse of positional power that contradicted everything we claimed to stand for.
The breach of trust was too huge for there to be a future forward. By mid-2021, my other co-founder and I chose to dissolve our business partnership as The Thought Collective entirely.
That was how I took on solo leadership of Common Ground.
That organisational trauma was devastating. It cost relationships, resources, and a decade of shared history.
It provoked foundational questions that now inform my work:
How can we ensure skilled and powerful leaders uphold rather than violate the principles they espouse? How can we help communities recognise rather than normalise harm?
Through the crisis, I was deeply struck by Dallas Willard's definition of the soul as the integrator of all aspects of a person (thoughts, feelings, will, actions) into a single cohesive life. It told me why we must attend seriously to any growing gaps between what we say and what we do.
People and organisations don't fall apart overnight. They disintegrate through daily choices that slowly misalign us inside out.
The gap between stated values and actual practice doesn't begin as an organisational problem. It starts as a human one.
Where the Work Is Now
Common Ground today is built on two decades of impact work and every lesson the post-crisis years taught me.
I am in Year 7 of 9 for the Common Ground Civic Centre, the project that outlasted a pandemic and organisational crisis. I am a Venture Coach for Praxis' 2026 Asia-Pacific Accelerator — a full circle from the Fellowship that first gave me words for this work.
My conviction:
Sustainable change cannot be built on exploitation, exhaustion, or extraction.
Such practices — however well-intentioned — produce fragmentation.
They fracture the integration of will, mind, feelings, and action in everyone involved.
Common Ground exists to help leaders close the gap between their deeper values and their daily actions at work. Not because alignment is a nice aspiration, but because fragmentation is structurally unsustainable.
This work is hard to do alone. It's more honest, and more enlivening, done in community with others who refuse to settle for the gap.
