In 2012 I graduated from law school at Thammasat and went to work in a law firm. In those years I kept noticing how many things in the work could be automated and done far more effectively. That is where my dream came from. I wanted to build a legal tech company. Thailand had nothing like that back then. The only solid model I could point to was LegalZoom, all the way in the US. That was the dream, and that was the original plan.

My former partner wanted a consulting company, which is what Senna Labs is, and I wanted my legal tech company. That is how the partnership started, as an exchange.

In 2017, Senna Labs was born, named after my daughter. The deal behind it was simple. I would handle everything except the technology and the sales. Company setup, hiring, BOI, tax, every piece of paperwork that exists, all mine. In exchange, the platform for my legal tech dream would get built.

The platform never got built.

A young company eats whoever is standing closest. When we had no project manager, I became the project manager. When we had no QA, I became QA. When we had no sales, I did sales. My dream sat in a drawer while I kept everyone else's projects alive.

Here is the honest part. By then I was a mom. Senna arrived in 2014, and Tiger was born the same year the company was. I wanted something solid, a foundation for my children. That was my choice and I own it, it is nothing I put on them. But underneath that choice was something I think many women will recognize.

I did not shelve my dream because of my kids, and I did not shelve it because I was too busy. I shelved it because I did not love myself enough to trust myself to go all in on it alone. Putting my energy into Senna Labs, into a partnership, felt safer. I believed it would turn out better than me pursuing my dream by myself.

Then, in late 2020, my partner left the company anyway.

I can laugh about it now. The safe option and the brave option carried the exact same risk the whole time. Nobody tells you that.

So there I was, CEO of a software company in the middle of a pandemic, and I will be honest with you, because this whole website is me being honest with you: the company was a mess. I was not sure what I was doing either. I kept asking myself whether this is really what I want to do with my life, and then whether doing what I want even matters at all. And all of that was happening while I was learning an enormous amount, the tech, the sales, how to actually run a business.

Then I made two decisions. I shut down the legal tech company completely, not paused, closed, because holding two drowning things means losing both. And I stopped treating Senna Labs as a stepping stone. For years it had been the company I ran so that my legal tech dream could get built one day. From that point it slowly became my company, my thing. It became clearer every day, without me even realising it.

Today Senna Labs is almost ten years old, with enterprise clients in Thailand and around the world, from the UK and Australia to Canada and Singapore. Senna, the girl the company is named after, is twelve now. And I still call myself forever a recovering lawyer, and now you know the second meaning. I never completely left law either. I still go back and teach at the same faculty I graduated from. This whole journey consumed me in a way that I became someone I can trust and am proud of, and I think this is all that matters, not my title or even the knowledge I have or the success. I can trust and be proud of myself because of how I went through all those years. I never gave up, I barely complained about how hard it was, I faced my problems and did my best, and every time I got down I got myself back up.