In the Mongolia I grew up in, almost every family I knew was trying, in some form, to build a small business — to live, and to give themselves and their children a better chance than the one they had been handed. An auntie selling sweaters on Narantuul. A neighbour selling meat out of a small shop off the courtyard. An uncle importing car parts. A family down the hall cooking and selling food from a kitchen the same size as ours. It was the grammar of the nineties and the two-thousands — the post-transition country teaching itself capitalism by doing it, every family improvising its own version.
My family was one of them. My mother, alone, ran a small Korean-language centre out of our apartment in Ulaanbaatar — a language she had taught herself, then taught to the neighbourhood's children. The apartment was not only the classroom: it was also where the whole family lived. My mother, my grandparents, six aunts, one uncle, and me. Two bedrooms. Eleven people. I did my homework on the floor because the kitchen table was where she taught. She was her own accountant, her own marketing department, her own curriculum designer. She was also the person who swept the classroom at the end of the night. I watched her succeed, I watched her struggle, and I watched her close things that did not work.
I did not yet have a word for what I was watching. I have one now. It is the word infrastructure — the quiet scaffolding that lets a small business exist, and the absence of which makes every small business in a country like mine a kind of private improvisation.
The first place I escaped that kitchen table was the volleyball court. From fourteen to eighteen I trained toward the national team, six days a week, through Ulaanbaatar winters. It was the first thing in my life that was entirely mine — unrelated to the family business, unrelated to the math that did or did not work. A car accident at eighteen ended that path. I remember the silence of that first week. Not the pain, the silence. The strange flat hours of losing something you had organised your life around.
The thing that arrives after a door closes is rarely the one you had rehearsed for.
The year after the accident I flew to Roxbury, Vermont, as an Electives Counsellor at Windridge Tennis & Sports Camp — the first Mongolian the programme had ever taken. I ran the mountain-biking track. I taught volleyball and archery to American kids who had never heard of my country. I flew alone, for the first time in my life, and discovered that the world is much larger than anyone in my family had ever seen.
I came back from Vermont on a plane with a notebook full of bad ideas and one good one. The good one was that if a month in an American summer camp had cracked my world open — and it had; I was nineteen, I had been on a plane for the first time, I had taught volleyball to children whose countries I could not find on my own map — then there was no reason a Mongolian kid from an apartment like mine should not have the same chance.
So I started a company to open that door. I pitched the idea to every sponsor who would take a meeting, and eventually one said yes. A signed contract. A designated partner on the US side. A pilot agreed at ten students for the first summer. I drew the flyer, I ran the interviews, I sat with the parents. Families enrolled. Paperwork moved. For the first time in my life the math was mine to carry and, somehow, it was working.
Then the world closed. You remember how quickly it happened. Borders shut on a Tuesday. Flights vanished on a Wednesday. By the weekend I was the one on the phone with the first mother, explaining that there would be no flight in June, and there would likely be no flight at all. The polite calls lasted about a week. After that came the calls that start with your first name and end with a word I will not put on this page. Parents who were frightened, and out of money, and who had trusted a nineteen-year-old with both. I absorbed the costs I could absorb. I returned the rest. I closed the company.
For a long time I thought of that year as my first failure. I don't any more. The decision to close something is not the opposite of building it. My mother had been making that decision, quietly, every few months for most of my life. I was only now learning the weight of it.
After the closure I went back to the kind of work that has other people's systems behind it. I was a server on weekends. I took photographs at weddings. I picked up shifts at the front desk of a hotel. I took a marketing internship at Tavan Bogd — my first real corporate job, where I learned what it looks like when a company actually has a plan for a bad month. And in the months that followed, that internship became a lead, which became an interview, which became the full marketing desk at a subsidiary of the Mongolian Fintech Group. That subsidiary is the next chapter. It is called Sendly.
My honours thesis was called Start-Up project for developing student's soft skill evaluation platform. A dry title for what I actually wanted: a piece of civic infrastructure — a way for Mongolian students to evaluate one another on the skills a volleyball coach and a single mother running a business had taught me mattered most. A startup studio liked it enough to offer a grant. I read the contract, then read it again, and I was not okay with the terms. They wanted the upside, they wanted the decision rights, and they wanted me on salary. I walked. They pushed me out of the pipeline. It was the second company I had closed in two years, and it was the first time I understood that a contract is a kind of translation too — the place where someone else's idea of your work becomes the only version of it that is legally true.
The thesis still mattered. At the defence, the faculty started — unprompted — discussing whether to adopt the framework university-wide. I graduated with Top Honours and the Dean's Scholarship.
The rest of university happened alongside the work, not in spite of it. I was waiting tables on weekends, taking photographs at weddings, picking up shifts at the front desk of a hotel, and running marketing at Tavan Bogd — and in the same years I founded the UFE Red Cross Club with sixty members and ran blood drives and disaster relief; I led a team at AIESEC placing foreign interns into Mongolian NGOs; I helped coordinate a UFE Christmas Market that brought in five million tögrögs in sponsorships. The years were loud and full and I was rarely in one room long enough to finish the thought I had started in the last one.
Systems that do not account for the bad month are not systems. They are weather.
The business education my mother needed, in the apartment in which she raised me, simply did not exist. I began to suspect it would have to be built.
Sendly was a mobile money app. The parent company, Mongolian Fintech Group, hired me in 2021 as a marketer on one of its quieter subsidiaries. The chairman watched me grow that subsidiary from nothing for five months and, without much warning, handed me the whole thing. I was twenty-one. I had ten marketers reporting to me.
Then the company decided to go public. Suddenly our marketing team was also an investor-relations team. We had weeks, not months, to explain a financial instrument to an audience that, for the most part, had never bought a share of anything. We raised $300,000 in seven days on a twenty-five-thousand-dollar marketing budget. The full public offering raised ₮10.5 billion — roughly $3.7 million at the time, and a meaningful number in a country the size of mine.
After the IPO I wrote two award submissions on my own initiative — I had never written one before — and sent them to the Global Banking & Finance Review. Both won. Best Digital Wallet, Central Asia. Best Payment Solution Provider, Mongolia.
Running a ten-person team at twenty-one teaches you what a chairman will not say aloud — that the room is watching to see whether you hold.
Rio Tinto hired me into its ePMO in late 2022 as an Analyst on Project Enablement. I did not know what Project Enablement was. I learned. By the middle of 2024 I was Training Lead & Senior Analyst, Integrated Planning, Systems & Reporting — the sole training resource for a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Project Operations rollout spanning three hubs across three continents: Ulaanbaatar, Brisbane, Montreal.
What I built in that time was, in essence, the onboarding layer of an enterprise programme. A bilingual training curriculum in English and French-Canadian. A SharePoint site that users actually returned to. A handful of PowerApps — a benefits tracker, a work-request flow — that turned informal habits into quiet governance. None of it is glamorous. All of it is the difference between a rollout that sticks and one that does not.
The piece I am proudest of is quieter still. I built a small library of AI prompts — nothing fancy, a working scaffold — that catches translation errors, reduces rework, and speeds module production. It saves the programme a meaningful share of its production time. What it actually did, for me, was teach me that the difference between an enterprise system that works and one that does not is almost never the software. It is how precisely someone has translated the work.
The longer I worked on enterprise systems, the more clearly I saw what small entrepreneurs in Mongolia do not lack. They do not lack technology. They lack translation. Nobody had taken the governance discipline of a nine-hundred-million-dollar programme and rendered it small enough to fit a dairy producer in Khovd, or my mother at her kitchen table.
So I started returning. Through Grow with Google Mongolia I trained a hundred and sixty young entrepreneurs in digital marketing and e-commerce. Through the EBRD's Youth in Business programme, another three hundred-plus. Over four hundred and sixty young people, over two years, learning to make their small businesses visible.
One of them was Tungaa, a dairy entrepreneur in Khovd — a province the better part of fifteen hundred kilometres from the capital. She finished a module I had built on three-channel digital positioning and, in two months, her sales rose sixty per cent. She called to thank me. I thought about my mother for a long time after that call.
Alongside the training work, I serve as Program Director of the Young Professionals' Group Mongolia Chapter — a hundred and fifty members, around seventy mentors, fifteen active mentees per cycle, a hundred and thirty cumulative since 2022. YPG is Mongolia's longest-running structured mentorship programme and I have had the privilege of co-leading it through ten consecutive cohorts. In 2026 we take it, for the first time, beyond the capital.
A dairy entrepreneur fifteen hundred kilometres from the capital finishes a module on three-channel digital positioning. Two months later, her sales have risen by sixty per cent. She calls to thank me. I think about my mother.
Delivered Google's Digital Marketing & E-Commerce curriculum to one hundred and sixty young entrepreneurs aged 18–35, in partnership with the Ministries of Culture and Digital Development.
Consultant and trainer on the EBRD's Youth in Business programme — digital marketing, e-commerce, AI tooling, Mongolian-language case studies — reaching three hundred-plus young entrepreneurs.
Joined as the youngest member in the hub's history. Rose to Communications & Impact Officer, then Vice Curator. Led fundraising that brought in $48,700 (~169M ₮) across sixteen partnerships for road safety, mental health, and mentorship.
The bridge between what enterprise systems can do and what small entrepreneurs actually need is the only work I want to be doing. It is also the work I have been preparing for since I was eight years old, at a kitchen table in Ulaanbaatar.
He combines analytical rigour with an entrepreneurial instinct and a collaborative way of leading. He is one of the students I have been glad to teach.A ProfessorUniversity of Finance and Economics
Under our joint leadership, the Hub raised 169 million MNT in a single year — from the World Economic Forum, the Embassy of Canada, and the Asian Development Bank. Anar played a key role in this record-breaking year.Batchimeg BatboldFormer Curator, Global Shapers UB Hub · CEO, YPG Mongolia
The apartment I grew up in taught me what was missing. The apartment I live in now is the one I have built — warm, deliberate, and shared with a cat who found me before I found her.
Here, near the end, is the sentence I could not have written at twenty. My life has been spent, so far, between two systems.
The first is the one I grew up inside — the improvised Mongolian small-business system. My mother's Korean-language centre. Tungaa's dairy in Khovd. The woman at Narantuul, the food shop off the courtyard. Resourceful. Unprotected. Full of talent and short of infrastructure. A system where every entrepreneur is expected to invent from scratch what, in another country, would simply be a form on a government website.
The second is the one I walked into at Windridge in 2019, and deeper still at Rio Tinto, Global Shapers, the EBRD, and Google. The enterprise system. Governance. Training curricula. SLAs. Three hubs across three continents. Lavish in infrastructure and sometimes, in return, starved of the human detail that makes an intervention actually land.
Neither system has ever been enough on its own. The work I am most proud of — the IPO that explained shares to a country that had not bought any, the training layer that let a hundred and sixty-eight users across three continents use the same system, the module that lifted Tungaa's sales by sixty per cent in two months — all of it is the same shape. A piece of system two translated, with care, into a form system one can use.
That is the work I am here to keep doing. Translation, in both directions. Bringing the discipline of the large system to the small entrepreneur who has always had to improvise it. Bringing the honesty of the small entrepreneur to the large system that has forgotten what it is for.
If you are a team building that bridge — in development finance, in enterprise training, in civic infrastructure, in any of the places where the two systems meet — I want to hear from you. The boy at the kitchen table has been studying for this role since he was eight years old.
Bring the discipline of the large system to the entrepreneur who has always improvised it.
Bring the honesty of the entrepreneur to the system that has forgotten what it is for.
I am looking for the work that builds the bridge. If you are doing that work, or looking for someone who will, my inbox is open.