1. Could you tell us about yourself?
My name is Sethisak San, a Software Development student at AUPP on a full scholarship. At my core, I am someone who loves to learn – particularly about machine learning and how mathematics and statistics can reveal patterns in the world that are otherwise invisible to the human eye. What drew me to machine learning was not a single moment but a gradual realization during my study of statistics: that functions and mathematical models can describe reality in ways that feel almost like uncovering hidden truths. From that point on, I became obsessed with not just understanding these models but building with them.
Alongside my technical work, I have always had a deep interest in philosophy – something I discovered before university and have carried with me ever since. I see philosophy less as an academic subject and more as a meta-skill: it shapes how I learn, how I process information, and how I approach problems from first principles. The two worlds – machine learning and philosophy – may seem separate, but they feed each other in ways I find difficult to fully articulate.
What gives my work its deepest meaning is knowing that I can apply what I love to a society that is genuinely underserved. Cambodia has immense potential, and technology – particularly AI – is still very new here. The idea that I can contribute to changing that, even in a small way, gives me immense joy. Not because I set out to be impactful, but because impact turned out to be the natural result of building things I genuinely care about.
2. Could you tell us about the achievement you are most proud of?
If I am honest, the achievement I am most proud of is not a trophy or a ranking – it is the moment a customer reached out to thank us for building SMEAN.
SMEAN is a Khmer-language speech-to-text and transcription platform I founded in early 2025. After nearly a year of building, iterating, and pushing through uncertainty, we began gaining real traction. And then something unexpected happened: our users – doctors, government officials, researchers – started reaching out not to report bugs, but to tell us that the product had fundamentally changed how they work. That it had saved them hours. That they could not imagine going back.
That moment felt more powerful than any competition win because it was proof that the thing I had labored through for so long had genuinely entered people’s lives and made them better. Building AI SaaS for a Cambodian audience is especially challenging – this kind of technology is entirely new to the market – so knowing that we were not just building a product but contributing to AI adoption in Cambodia made it feel deeply meaningful.
The second achievement I hold close is publishing three research papers in international conferences. As a student, research is typically seen as the domain of graduate academics. Breaking that assumption – contributing findings on Khmer sentiment analysis, historical sculpture classification, and speech recognition – reminded me that the walls we perceive around what we are allowed to do are often self-imposed.
Winning the Huawei ICT national competition across two different tracks in consecutive years and representing Cambodia at the Asia Pacific Regional Round rounds out my proudest chapter. It gave me the opportunity to explore cloud computing and artificial intelligence – two fields I believe define the future of digital technology.
3. Could you tell us about one thing or experience you encountered that changed your life?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself drawn to reading – philosophy, classics, anything that could help me make sense of a world that had stopped making sense. It was then that I encountered Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and it changed everything.
Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, observed that the people most likely to endure were not the strongest – they were the ones who found meaning in their suffering. Drawing on Nietzsche’s idea that those with a strong enough why can bear almost any how, he built a philosophy around the idea that meaning is not found despite suffering, but within it.
Before this book, I lived going with the flow. I believed I had potential, but that potential never materialized because I never found a reason to push through discomfort. Frankl gave me that reason.
The first test came when I received a full scholarship to study Software Development at AUPP – a field I had not chosen. I had wanted engineering. But I made a deliberate decision: find meaning in this path and trust that the journey would reveal something worthwhile. It did, beyond what I could have imagined.
The second test came through competition. I lost five consecutive times before winning anything. After the third loss, I fell into a genuine period of depression. But I kept returning, because each loss was sharpening my mind, building my resilience, deepening my knowledge. I had learned to find value in the difficulty itself.
Hercules was not made great by his strength alone – he was made great by the weight of what he had to bear and overcome.
4. Who is the person you look up to the most?
Viktor Frankl.
Not simply because of his ideas, but because of the integrity between his philosophy and his life. Many thinkers arrive at great ideas through academic reflection. Frankl arrived at his through the Holocaust. He did not theorize about finding meaning in suffering from the comfort of a study – he lived it under the most extreme conditions a human being can face, and then built an entire school of thought, logotherapy, from what he observed and endured.
What moves me most is something he wrote about the difference between those who survived the camps and those who did not, even when circumstances were the same. The differentiating factor was whether a person could find meaning in their suffering – whether they believed that what they were enduring held some future value.
I am not comparing my struggles to anything Frankl faced. But the mechanism is identical; only the scale differs. Without my willingness to find meaning in repeated failure, in choosing a field I did not initially want, in building a startup for months with no revenue while managing my coursework – I cannot imagine how many times I would have given up.
Frankl showed me that the capacity to endure is not a fixed trait. It is something you build, deliberately, by choosing to find meaning in whatever you are given. He also led me to Nietzsche, whose concept of amor fati -loving one’s fate – deepened that understanding further. Together, they gave me a framework I apply every day: not just in moments of crisis, but in how I approach learning, building, and growing.
For that, he remains the person I return to most.
5. What are the steps you took that led you to where you are right now?
My path has been less a straight line and more a series of deliberate bets that took years to pay off.
In my first year at AUPP, I made two commitments: to educate myself in machine learning deeply enough to solve real problems, and to start entering startup competitions. I lost every single one I entered that year. But I kept going, because I was learning more from each loss than I ever could from a win.
In my second year, I began taking research seriously. I published my first paper at an international conference on Khmer sentiment analysis, while continuing to enter and lose competitions. The research gave me something competitions could not: a sense that I was contributing knowledge, not just competing for recognition.
My third year was when everything converged. I was selected as one of 30 participants from over 500 applicants for the DICHI Techpreneur Bootcamp. I won the Huawei ICT national cloud track and represented Cambodia at the Asia Pacific Regional Round. I published two more research papers. And I founded SMEAN, finally putting years of machine learning study into a real product. After five consecutive losses, I also began winning competitions.
Now in my fourth year, SMEAN has over 10,000 users and paying customers whose workflows have genuinely changed. I won the Huawei national AI track, took first place at the Turing Hackathon among 127 teams, and have seen the startup begin to make a meaningful mark.
The honest summary: I spent years failing quietly, building skills nobody could see yet, trusting that the compound interest of effort and resilience would eventually show up. It did.
6. What are the happiest moments of your life?
The happiest moment of my life, without hesitation, was when our SMEAN customers reached out to thank us.
Not to request features, not to report issues – but simply to say that what we had built had changed how they work. Doctors, government officials, researchers telling us they could not imagine their workflow without it. For a product built for a market that had never encountered AI SaaS before, that felt extraordinary. It was the moment a year of labor, uncertainty, and sacrifice became real in the most human way possible – through gratitude.
The moments surrounding my research papers come close. Each paper carried three distinct peaks of happiness: the acceptance, which told me my work was worth sharing; the presentation, which placed me in a room with real researchers and made me feel I belonged there; and the publication, which meant the work would live beyond the conference and contribute to something larger than myself.
These moments share something in common: none of them were about me. The customer’s gratitude was about impact. The research was about contribution. The happiness I felt in both cases came not from personal gain but from knowing that something I had worked hard on had genuinely mattered to someone else.
If I could leave one thought for anyone reading this who is struggling and doubting themselves: do not measure your worth by where you stand today. If you keep moving forward – not because the path is easy, but because you see meaning in the act of moving forward itself – that perseverance is already a form of strength. The strength of courage.
7. Is there any advice for the people that look up to you?
I want to be honest: I do not think I am particularly worthy of being looked up to. If you could see the full picture – the five competitions I lost consecutively, the depression that followed, the months of building SMEAN with no revenue, the countless moments of doubt – you would see someone who is very much still figuring things out.
But perhaps that is exactly the point.
What I can offer is not a formula for success but a philosophy for endurance. Set a standard for yourself – not one defined by what others have achieved, but by what you believe your potential, fully realized, looks like. Hold that standard with an almost unreasonable level of commitment. And then accept, genuinely accept, that every failure and setback on the way to that standard is not a detour. It is the path itself.
I still have not reached my own standard. I am not sure I ever fully will. But that does not discourage me – it gives me a reason to keep going. There is a peace of mind that comes from knowing that as long as you keep walking, no matter what stands in your way, you will eventually get there.
Use your failures as fuel. Find meaning in the struggle. And never confuse the absence of results today for the absence of progress.
The wins will come. But the person you become in the waiting – that is what will make them worth having.