Episode #73: How to Stop an Innovative Start-Up
Hla Hla Win had never really been scared of the police before the coup. There was no real reason to be. She had lived abroad for many years, and once back in Myanmar, had served as a trainer at ASEAN-related conferences on police reform. So she was in many ways their senior. “I was not afraid of them. They were my students,” she says.
But this dynamic was flipped on its head by the military take-over. She and her husband had joined a community watch group, where ordinary citizens banded together to protect themselves, not from common criminals, but from those supposedly charged with protecting the citizenry. At 11 pm one evening in March, they were on the rooftop of their condo when the police rolled up to dismantle the barricades the people had erected around their neighborhood. Hla Hla took out her cell phone to film them, but could barely do so with her hands shaking so much. And because her camera lit up when she was filming, the police spotted her and started shooting.
Luckily, she wasn’t hurt, but that experience and others caused Hla Hla to believe that it might be time to flee the country. It also brought back painful childhood memories of 1988, when she was the age her daughter is now, and her grandmother covered her eyes to shield her from the severed heads hanging on spikes around Yangon. So along with her husband, Yan Min Aung, who also joins the interview, they made the painful decision to escape from the country where they had built a life. They initially went to a monastery which, like many Buddhist centers, was known for hosting meditation retreats, and huddled with other refugees while trying to calm themselves with the practice advised by the head monk, while at the same time, a bomb shelter was being constructed on the grounds.
Eventually they made it out of the country, but the trauma didn’t just end even though they were no longer in physical danger. She says, “There were police in the airport just walking around and making sure people were okay. [But] seeing them, my heart jumped, and I held my daughter's hand tightly. She was so scared. These police, we knew that they were not from Myanmar, and they were not there to threaten us or put us in danger. But that was our first encounter in the transit point… I had nothing in my belongings to be scared of, I had nothing illegal or anything, but they're the people in uniforms, and that trauma we had experienced played back.”
Choosing to leave Myanmar represented not only the end of a life and community in their home country, but also the realization that the innovative company they had founded there, an augmented reality learning app known as 360ED, would be severely impacted as well. Hla Hla had combined her professional backgrounds in tech and education to create a service that could bring learning opportunities to those marginalized groups often left on the sidelines. To her, this was deeply personal as well. She says, “I was born into a low-income family and access to quality education was a luxury that my parents could not afford. And I also struggled in school as a dyslexic student.” So when she saw how the new developments in augmented learning could make “abstract things become visible,” she dedicated herself to finding a way this service could become real for so many students around the world. Moreover, they knew that many of those who would need the service most wouldn’t necessarily have reliable or inexpensive internet, much of the app can function even when offline. Plus, they made sure the apps were fun, as they knew that few children would want to use it otherwise.
After many years of product development combining solid learning methodology with the newest tech innovations, they were ready to launch, which they did in Silicon Valley in 2016.
Then as part of the “re-pat” movement, in which exiled Burmese settled back in the country during the stable and optimistic 2010s transition period, they moved their operations to Myanmar. By the time of the coup, 360ED had grown to 70 employees working on 1 5 apps, with over 400,000 downloads of their products! And it was remarkable that they chose to establish their company in Myanmar, essentially bringing one of the world’s most innovative and cutting-edge technological learning tools to a country that had only recently gotten on-line at all. In other words, when the coup broke, 360ED was well on its way to becoming Myanmar’s first true tech start-up success story! This was not just subjective, but also objective, as they were named:
“Top ten digital innovations award” from Net-explore/ UNESCO, 2018
“Social entrepreneur of the year” from World Economic Forum, 2019
“ Product Excellence Award” from Nikkei Asia, 2019-20
Of course, all this came to a crashing halt in February. At first, like many businesses, they paused their operations and evaluated how to proceed. But when their team members began dispersing across the country to go into hiding, they came to the sad realization that their business was not sustainable under the circumstances. Plus, with the educational system in complete disarray like so much else in the country, and with many schools actually having been repurposed as military bases by soldiers, it became apparent that collaborating with school administrators would not be possible.
So while many outside observers have been following the daily terror and pervasive human rights violations that are now sadly commonplace in Myanmar, stories like these often slip through the cracks, and thus, the extent of the damage and disruption being unleashed by the Tatmadaw is not fully known. In the case of Hla Hla and Yan Min, this meant not only trauma in their personal life, but at least the temporary end of their technological and educational dream in Myanmar as well.
Today, 360ed is now re-emerging as a start-up in another country. Although not developing new apps, it maintains and support current apps and their users. They are in the process of launching their commercial apps in more developed market albeit much later than their previous planning. To support their work, consider donating here.