Looking out the window as my plane lifts off from Christchurch to Auckland, I see a long, straight coastline below, drawn by the wind into a clean line. It looks exactly like the coast of Chumphon, where I watched the same horizon on my way home from speaking to the fourteen Southern Chambers of Commerce. For a moment the two countries fold into one image, and the 9,400 kilometers between them stop feeling like distance and start feeling like an old friendship we never quite finished building.

I work with founders and build companies for a living. As the Founder of SEA Bridge, a cross-border venture builder, I work toward one mission: to help educate and support one million entrepreneurial talents across ASEAN, solving local problems while creating global impact. I came to New Zealand as Thailand's delegate to the Asia New Zealand Foundation's Young Business Leaders Initiative (YBLI), five days hosted with extraordinary care. It was my first time in Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud. I arrived a stranger, and I am leaving in debt to the place and its people. This piece is how I begin to repay it.

Seventy years a friend

In 2026, Thailand and New Zealand marked seventy years of diplomatic relations, and both Prime Ministers have committed to a Strategic Partnership ^[1]. The friendship runs deep. King Bhumibol visited in 1962, five years before ASEAN even existed, and when he passed in 2016, New Zealand flew its flags at half-mast on the Auckland Harbour Bridge ^{[2] [3] [4]}

And yet, after seventy years, we still do not know each other the way old friends should. We trade a little, visit a little, and admire each other from a distance. The most generous thing two friends can do at a milestone like this is not to count what they have built, but to imagine what they could.

The shift worth making is simple: from two countries that are friendly, to two peoples who build together.

I believe entrepreneurship is the finest bridge between them, because building a company is hard for everyone, everywhere, in exactly the same way. A Thai founder and a Kiwi founder who have both lain awake at 3 a.m. over payroll understand each other faster than two diplomats ever will. The struggle is a shared language that needs no translation.

And our values already rhyme. At one Auckland breakfast I watched a founder describe bootstrapping a travel app to tens of thousands of users with no outside money, the room nodding like a congregation. At the University of Auckland's innovation center, the people who help students raise capital spoke about the students before they spoke about the returns. In Christchurch, a city that rebuilt itself after the 2011 earthquakes, I saw a place that knows how to begin again. Everywhere I went I found the quality I prize most in the best ASEAN founders: disciplined courage, the will to do hard, unglamorous work for a long time without applause.

Closer than the map shows

On my first day, the Foundation took us through the All Blacks Experience. I have never followed rugby, yet I felt the weight of that black jersey. For New Zealand, black is not the absence of color. It is seriousness, the quiet confidence of a small nation that decided to be the best in the world at something, and then was.

Thailand's recurring color is white: the white elephant once reserved for kings, the Buddhist robe, the band of purity on our flag. White, for us, is openness and welcome, a canvas of colors not yet painted.

Black and white do not compete. They complete each other, two halves of one circle, each carrying a seed of the other. New Zealand could borrow a little Thai warmth; Thailand could borrow a little Kiwi grit. We already share more than the map admits: a reverence for land, family, and faith; the hongi and the wai; and a Thai community in New Zealand that has grown from 41 people in 1961 to an estimated 50,000 of Thai descent today ^[5]. From Ayutthaya to Aotearoa, we are more woven together than the distance suggests.

We even share the same quiet problem. A record 72,700 New Zealanders left the country in the year to September 2025. Thailand's population is now shrinking, having become a "fully aged society" in 2024, and could halve within fifty years ^{[6] [7]}. Neither of us can grow our way out of this alone.

• New Zealand holds institutional trust, world-class universities, and a reputation for being principled and independent.
• Thailand holds youth, a place at the heart of the fastest-growing region on earth, and a doorway into 700 million ASEAN consumers and beyond.

Each of us has exactly what the other is short of.

Spicier Kiwis, cooler Thais

At the New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards, Marian Johnson, chair of the Hi-Tech Trust, said something that has not left me: New Zealand's founders are held back less by a shortage of ability than by an excess of humility, where their American peers are propelled by ambition. The same is true of Thai founders, and of most of ASEAN. We are raised not to stand out. Thais call it kreng jai, the reluctance to impose. New Zealanders call their version "tall poppy syndrome." We suffer from the same beautiful, limiting modesty, which is exactly why we understand each other instantly, and exactly why we are the right ones to push each other.

So here is a provocation, the kind only a cousin may make.

To my Kiwi friends: be a little spicier. The first time you eat real Thai food, the chili hurts. Your eyes water. By the third meal, you cannot live without it. Spice is discomfort that turns into appetite. Your own Southeast Asian neighbors recently called you a close, like-minded friend and asked you to be more present in the region, especially in education ^[8]. The appetite for you is already there. What is missing is the willingness to turn up the heat.

To my Thai compatriots: be a little cooler. New Zealand is cold in a way we are not built for, and the honest answer to cold is not to retreat indoors. It is to put on another layer, grow a thicker skin, and walk out into it anyway. We are wonderful hosts and timid guests. It is easy to get a Thai to vacation in New Zealand; it is hard to get one to live, work, and build something there. The next seventy years asks us to be as brave abroad as we are gracious at home.

The vision of the two lands: a path to 2046

If we are serious about building the next seventy years instead of commemorating the last, we should do what serious partners do, and write the plan down.

There is a working model next door. In 2023, Australia published Invested: Australia's Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040, a plan with a Special Envoy accountable for delivering it ^[9]. It proved a middle power can set a serious, long-horizon direction for itself in this region and then act on it. Thailand and New Zealand have nothing like it pointed at each other.

So here is the proposal: a bilateral roadmap, owned by both governments and aimed at 2046, when our friendship turns ninety. Not a fresh bureaucracy, but a plan that runs through the institutions we already have, New Zealand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, and Education New Zealand on one side; Thailand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Board of Investment, and the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation on the other.

The strategic logic makes it more than sentiment. Thailand and Indonesia are the only two ASEAN countries currently in OECD accession, the process of meeting the standards of the world's club of high-governance economies ^[10]. As Thailand adopts those standards, it becomes the most rules-aligned, predictable place to do business in the region, the natural anchor for a principled, independent New Zealand. And Thailand, at the center of mainland Southeast Asia, is the land bridge onward to the Bay of Bengal, China, and India.

Thailand is New Zealand's door to Asia. New Zealand is Thailand's door to the world.

I want to be honest about what this next part is. I am one founder, not a foreign ministry. Consider the four missions below an ignition, not a blueprint, the most useful version of an idea a guest can leave behind. The full roadmap, on trade, security, and climate, belongs to people who know those fields far better than I do. The chapter I can speak to is entrepreneurship and innovation, focused on five sectors where we are strongest together: food and agriculture, space and aerospace, the creative economy, education, and longevity.

One vision, four missions.

Mission One — OKOT! 🇳🇿🇹🇭

People flow: one hundred thousand Kiwis, one hundred thousand Thais

The deepest bonds between countries are not signed; they are lived. They form when someone spends real time on the other side, studies there, builds a company there, gets homesick there, and comes home changed. The program that brought me here, YBLI, has created exactly that kind of bond for about 270 people over fifteen years. The relationships are extraordinary. The scale is far too modest for what the friendship deserves.

• The goal: turn a proven trickle of deep experiences into a whole generation of them.
• The number: 200,000 by 2046, one hundred thousand Kiwis and one hundred thousand Thais who have studied, founded, researched, or worked in each other's countries. Not tourists. People who built something real and carry the other country with them for life.
• The flagship: Thailand once turned thousands of villages into exporters with OTOP, One Tambon, One Product, one sub-district, one product. Borrow that rhythm and you get OKOT: One (Hundred-Thousand) Kiwi, One (Hundred-Thousand) Thai. It is a name to remember, not a rule to obey. Some will come as pairs, most will come through universities, fellowships, residencies, and jobs. What matters is that the door is wide and the stay is long enough to change someone.
• Why it matters: people are the only foundation the other three missions can stand on. A generation from now, OKOT alumni should sit in the ministries, companies, and campuses of both countries the way Fulbright alumni quietly run pieces of the world.

Mission Two — Cracking Ten Billion 💸

Capital flow: triple the trade by backing the founders who can make it happen

Both governments have promised to triple two-way trade, from about NZ$4.5 billion toward NZ$13.5 billion by 2045 ^[11]. It is a fine headline and, on its own, a slightly hollow one. The tariffs are already gone, the trade is still thin and lopsided, mostly New Zealand dairy going one way and Thai vehicles coming the other, and as one trade expert traveling with us pointed out, inflation alone drifts the number most of the way there. The real barrier was never tariffs. It is that businesses on each side have no partner on the other.

That is a problem capital and people solve, not one more trade agreement. A tariff moves goods once; a joint venture moves goods, people, and ideas for a generation.

• The goal: make the trade target real by financing the companies that actually create the trade.
• The mechanism: a cross-border venture fund on a New Zealand–ASEAN thesis, anchored by both governments and matched by private money, Thai family offices and corporates on one side, New Zealand institutional and angel capital on the other. Thai public agencies like the TED Fund, NIA, and depa already exist to co-invest; New Zealand has shown how patient capital turns small startups into global champions, including an agritech company whose smart collars now manage livestock around the world.
• The example: fund a New Zealand food-tech company to scale through Thai manufacturing into ASEAN, and a Thai creative or wellness brand to reach the world through New Zealand. Each deal builds trade that compounds, instead of a shipment that clears once.
• Why it matters: capital is the spark that turns a friendship into a balance sheet, and the piece most within my own power to help build.

Mission Three — Double Down on Our Strengths, Share Our Secrets 🔁

Knowledge flow: solve hard problems side by side

Most "knowledge exchange" between countries is one-directional and quietly condescending. The truth between Thailand and New Zealand is a peer exchange, and the point is not to copy each other but to stand shoulder to shoulder on problems neither has fully cracked.

• The goal: support one another as equals, peer to peer, not patron to pupil.
• What Thailand can share: New Zealand's banking sector is dominated by a few large players and is only now debating "open banking." Thailand, with a banking landscape just as concentrated, simply built around it. PromptPay, our national instant-payment system, moved 2.16 billion transactions worth 4.2 trillion baht in a single month of 2025, reached near-universal adoption, and already crosses borders into Singapore, Vietnam, and Japan ^[12]. That is hospitality turned into infrastructure: our instinct for making life easy, built into a public system the world is now copying.
• What New Zealand can share: a nation of five million produced a cloud-accounting platform used worldwide and the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to reach space. As one of those founders put it, from a small market you have to export from day one. Thailand's home market is big enough to make founders comfortable; New Zealand's smallness made it hungry, and that hunger is the strength we should want most.
• The mechanism: stand up small joint task forces on shared problems, one per sector, each pairing a Thai and a New Zealand institution to commercialize research rather than just publish it. The five sectors where we are strongest together: food and agriculture; space and aerospace (two improbable space programs that belong in the same room); the creative economy; education; and longevity, where two aging societies share a problem worth solving.
• Why it matters: the measure of success is not memorandums signed, but patents commercialized and companies built.

Mission Four — Modernize the Work, Cherish the Soul 🪷

Culture flow: an annual exchange of people, not just protocols

Culture is not decoration around business; it is the operating system that decides whether a partnership survives. A Kiwi who knows how to wai at a Thai table, and a Thai who knows when to wait their turn in a Kiwi room making space for them, are worth more to a venture than another clause in a trade deal. And both countries are quietly asking the same question: New Zealand, what it means to be a Kiwi as the world tilts toward Asia; Thailand, what our place is in a world that no longer waits politely at our door.

• The goal: learn to live inside each other's world, as family in the kitchen, not guests at the door.
• The flagship: an annual Thailand–New Zealand creative residency, artists, designers, chefs, musicians, and founders spending a season living and making work in the other country, then bringing it home. Māori and Thai craft, food, and storytelling are among the most distinctive in the world and the least exchanged between us. Start there.
• The principle: modernize the work, cherish the soul. Bring New Zealand's discipline and Thailand's warmth, add the energy and ambition both our modest cultures hold back, and change fast without losing the temples, the marae, and the families that already span both lands.
• Why it matters: culture is the glue. It is what makes the other three missions stick, and what people remember long after the deals are done.

One vision. Four missions. One destination: 2046, the year our friendship turns ninety and, if we choose, the year it finally grows up.

Starting with me

New Zealand invested in me, so I will invest back, beginning on this flight home and waiting on no government strategy or closed fund.

• On people: I will bring Kiwi students into our programs and invite New Zealand universities, the University of Auckland and the University of Canterbury among the first, into the extended network of the SEA Bridge Institute of Entrepreneurship alongside our Thai and ASEAN members. And I will lecture, wherever it helps, on awareness of and doing business in ASEAN.
• On capital: I will build a cross-border venture studio around real joint New Zealand–ASEAN projects, and raise a fund to back them, turning the second mission from a proposal into a portfolio.
• On bringing the two together: I will host the first New Zealand delegation, universities, founders, and investors, at our Gen SEA Summit in Khon Kaen this July, and make it an annual fixture from there.

The invitation

The doors between our countries are already open, and closer than they look. At the Hi-Tech Awards, in a single evening, I had a brief word with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, Finance Minister Nicola Willis, and the Leader of the Opposition, Chris Hipkins. Ceremonial, not substantive, but a quiet sign that this relationship can reach the top table on both sides of politics.

The most valuable thing any of us can give one another is not capital or curriculum. It is an open door. Some doors you can see, and only need an introduction to walk through. Some are invisible until a friend points at the wall. And some do not exist at all until someone who believes in you decides to build one.

• To my New Zealand friends: Southeast Asia already trusts you and is asking you to lean in. So lean in.
• To my Thai compatriots: the friend who would walk us toward the world is one whose ambitions in our own region we should help carry in return.
• To my fellow Southeast Asians, from Brunei to Timor-Leste: this is yours too, because every door we build between Thailand and New Zealand is meant to open for all of you next.

I came to New Zealand to learn, and I am leaving in its debt. The next seventy years should be one of the best, not because we say so, but because we choose to build it.

For seventy years, we have been good friends, the next seventy, we should be a partner.

We are starting. Come build with us.

Kasper Tanakrit Sermsuksan is the Founder of SEA Bridge and Dean of the SEA Bridge Institute of Entrepreneurship. He represented Thailand in the Asia New Zealand Foundation's YBLI Tech 2026 cohort. Reach him on LinkedIn or at kasper@seabridge.space.

Build. Scale. Bridge on.

#SEABridge #ASEAN #NewZealand #TH70NZ #BuildAndScaleGlobalVentures

A note on YBLI: this piece reflects observations from the Asia New Zealand Foundation's ASEAN Young Business Leaders Initiative Tech 2026 cohort. The views and proposals are the author's own and do not represent the Asia New Zealand Foundation, the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or any other delegate or institution.

Sources

[1]: The Thailand–New Zealand Roadmap to Strategic Partnership 2024–2026. New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade. https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/media-and-resources/the-thailand-new-zealand-roadmap-to-strategic-partnership-2024-2026

[2]: List of state visits made by Bhumibol Adulyadej. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_state_visits_made_by_Bhumibol_Adulyadej

[3]: Association of Southeast Asian Nations, founded August 8, 1967. ASEAN. https://asean.org/about-asean/

[4]: Obituaries, His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej. New Zealand Parliament Hansard, October 19, 2016. https://www.parliament.nz/en/pb/hansard-debates/rhr/combined/HansDeb_20161019_20161019_04

[5]: Thai New Zealanders. 2018 New Zealand census and Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_New_Zealanders

[6]: National Population Estimates at 31 December 2025. Stats NZ. https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/national-population-estimates-at-31-december-2025/

[7]: Thailand population decline 2025, reporting on Thailand Ministry of Interior data; "fully aged society" 2024, Nation Thailand.

[8]: Southeast Asian Perceptions of New Zealand. Asia New Zealand Foundation, November 2025. https://www.asianz.org.nz/southeast-asian-perceptions-of-new-zealand

[9]: Invested: Australia's Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040. Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2023. https://www.dfat.gov.au/sites/default/files/invested-southeast-asia-economic-strategy-2040.pdf

[10]: Thailand reaches key milestones in OECD accession process. OECD, December 2025. https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2025/12/thailand-reaches-key-milestones-in-oecd-accession-process.html

[11]: NZ–Thailand Closer Economic Partnership; two-way trade NZ$4.52 billion in 2024, NZ MFAT; trade-tripling analysis, interest.co.nz, April 2024. https://www.mfat.govt.nz/en/trade/free-trade-agreements/free-trade-agreements-in-force/nz-thailand-closer-economic-partnership

[12]: PromptPay transaction data, Bank of Thailand; New Zealand Commerce Commission personal banking services market study, 2024. https://comcom.govt.nz/about-us/our-role/competition-studies/market-study-into-personal-banking-services