I dreamed of being an astronaut when I was a kid. They seemed so cool in movies. Plus seeing the world from the outside is really beautiful. You realize you’re tiny.

I taught myself about computers and wrote programs when I was in high school, but I decided to study industrial engineering at college. You should keep what you love as a hobby so you can enjoy it forever.

It took me seven and a half years to finish my degree, but I only spent a year and a half working in a company before I quit. I had graduated late and wanted to move fast. I wanted to take risks. So I knew I had to do something on my own.

I opened my own publishing company where I wrote and printed how-to computer books. It was going well until the economy crashed in 1997. Bookshops were giving me checks dated for two years in the future.

I started a Geocities page that collected different content. It became Sanook.com, which became the #1 Thai website. I sold it in 1999.

If you just do what you want to do, you won’t succeed. But if you figure out what people want, it will work. On Sanook.com, I had no direction. I just added the things people wanted.

My life felt like a failure when I sold Sanook. I had to stay on with the foreign owners for two years, draining my life in work and meetings.

I was not a good dad. I had no time to take care of my only son when he started developing Asperger Syndrome [a mild form of autism].

I quit Sanook to be with him and my wife for a year. But I had to do something else so I bought Kapook.com.

Everyone was saying the internet was a flop but my instinct told me otherwise.
I don’t see myself as successful. I’ve had good and bad times. My life is simple and I don’t collect anything because aquiring things is an endless pursuit.

I admired Steve Jobs long before he came back to Apple and released the iPhone. He started his own business in a garage and it beat giant companies.

Facebook can change the world more than anyone can imagine. Google and Microsoft should be afraid.

I am worried about cyber bullying. It can cause suicides among teens. We need to tell people that it’s serious.

I created Thaiflood.com right after I watched the floods in Nakhon Rachasima on Channel 3 in October last year. It was really violent.

I knew that flood wouldn’t be the last and there would be more severe ones, so I called my team at Kapook to create a website that night.

Thaiflood.com has 500,000 views each day. People are craving information, and there’s no centralized source of knowledge.

My life is so busy right now. I’ve had three meetings today and I’m really tired. I wouldn’t be this busy if government administrators did their jobs. I’ve spent nearly a million baht of my money running the site. I want to wake up and have nothing to do. It would also people are safe.

My Thaiflood team volunteered our services to the Flood Relief Operation Center (FROC) at Don Muang. We hoped FROC would agree regular citizens and representatives of the private sector could help, too.

I finally walked out of FROC after seeing that they were essentially ignoring us and that we’d just become their mouthpiece. It was better for us to leave and work in our own way.

People have given up on this government already. No one trusts them anymore.

Thailand doesn’t have a culture of accountability. When kapook.com was criticized for its content, even though it wasn’t showing anything illegal, I stepped down as head of the Thaiwebmaster’s association. But our leaders will never do that, even though so many people have died because of their mistakes.

My grasp on technology is deteriorating. New generations are smarter, but they don’t have experience. So we have to guide them in doing the right thing.

You can’t change the world on your own. I will continue doing what I believe in, but I hope others will join.