Wilfried Buiron is the Founder & CEO of Zaapi, the software toolkit for Southeast Asian e-commerce entrepreneurs today focused on the Thai market. Wilfried is also a passionate watch enthusiast, Mandarin speaker and the founder of luxury independent Chinese watch brand, Atelier Wen.

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👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

I do everything that needs to be done for the business to succeed. At this stage, it mostly means setting strategy, monitoring progress and troubleshooting, hiring and fundraising.

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🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

I'm the CEO of Zaapi, but am also the founder of an independent Chinese luxury watch brand, Atelier Wen. This is the first company I ever started and has risen to increasing prominence in the luxury independents circle in the past few years.

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🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

I learned a tremendous amount about hiring and forming a top team at Zaapi and am extremely proud about the team we have today at the company.

While we never made significant missteps hiring for aptitude, we struggled to bring in the right individuals for the culture we wanted to build in the first 1-2 years and no matter how much we pushed and pulled to try to force the culture to be a certain way, I eventually realized that building culture is much more about bringing the right people together than about putting together a culture deck or slapping core values on the wall.

By contrast, in the past 18 months, we have really zeroed in on how to hire exceptional people and have seen a tremendous impact from that in terms of productivity, creativity and everyone's workplace satisfaction.

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🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?‍

GenAI—what else?

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💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry?

Advice to prospective founders:

- Take your time to figure out what it is you want to build - don't just "launch whatever and pivot". Can pivots can usually only happen within a narrow range and your starting point will determine your business outcomes and lifestyle for many years to come so you want to make the right decision

- Once you've decided, commit, show up to work every day and be patient - building great things takes many years and you need to be perseverant to see it through

- It's rarely "too early" to be a founder, but can often be "too late". The younger you are, the less you have to lose and the lighter your responsibilities. By contrast, the older you get, the more that pay cut from X to 0 is going to hurt and the less you'll be able to afford it as people tend to scale lifestyle along with income and then have a hard time retrenching. So if you really want to be a founder, don't tell delude yourself by thinking that another 3-5 years in your job will make you ready—it won't. Being a founder will be new to you no matter what you used to do and like all things you're just starting out at, you won't be great at it. So know that there will likely never be a better time to get started than now and if you decide it's right for you, just take the plunge.

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‍🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours?

Geopolitics, China-West relations

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🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show?

Friends

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🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?‍

Matcha