Team
The crew taking students to the future.
46 people, led by a science teacher, a climate modeller, and a game designer — and answerable to 9 students who can veto what we build.
Ho Chi Minh City, Cần Thơ, Hà Nội, and remote.
01Founders
Three founders. One flooded classroom.
WhereTheFuture started in Cần Thơ with a flood Portal written for one class. The founders still play every new world with real students before it ships.
Ho Chi Minh City
Lâm Khánh Linh
Co-founder & CEO
Lâm Khánh Linh taught science to lower-secondary students in Cần Thơ for seven years, until a flood closed the school in October 2022. The flood Portal that became WhereTheFuture was written on Linh’s kitchen table that weekend, for one grade-8 class that wanted to know whether their city had a future. As CEO, Linh still plays every new Portal with a real class before it ships, holds the company to its north star of shipped solutions over screen time, and teaches one day a month. Linh goes back to Cần Thơ whenever the rains come.
Ho Chi Minh City
Đặng Minh Khôi
Co-founder & CTO
Đặng Minh Khôi spent years in academic research building agent-based climate models: simulations in which thousands of households, farms, and pumps each make their own decisions as the water rises. Khôi saw the weekend flood prototype, rebuilt it from scratch in a month, and joined as co-founder and CTO when the company was incorporated. Khôi is the architect of Tide, the engine that plays out the consequences of every student decision across decades, and leads engineering, data, and AI infrastructure. The house rule: if a Portal’s science would not survive a hydrologist’s review, it does not ship.
Cần Thơ
Trần Mai Phương “Pip”
Co-founder & Chief World Builder
Trần Mai Phương — Pip to everyone, investors included — was the lead designer of a top-10 mobile game in Southeast Asia before trading leaderboards for flood maps. Pip co-built the first Cần Thơ 2045 simulation with Linh over a single weekend, drawing the city street by street. As co-founder and Chief World Builder, Pip leads Portal narrative and art: the writers, illustrators, and science reviewers who make each future feel like a place worth visiting. Every new world faces the same test from Pip: would a fourteen-year-old ask to stay after the bell?
02Leadership
The people who run the work.
Learning, partnerships, trust and safety, growth, and country operations — the teams that turn a Portal into a program.
Manila
Dr. Sofia Reyes
Chief Learning Officer
Dr. Sofia Reyes holds a PhD in learning sciences and spent more than a decade designing curriculum for public and private schools across the Philippines. Sofia’s research on futures literacy — how young people learn to reason about several possible futures instead of a single predicted one — became the backbone of how Portals are assessed. As Chief Learning Officer, Sofia maps every Portal to national curricula, designs the skills behind the Future Passport, and runs teacher training. From Manila, Sofia also leads the Philippines pilot with partner schools across the metro.
Hà Nội
Nguyễn Hoàng Nam
Head of Cities & Partnerships
Nguyễn Hoàng Nam spent ten years on the other side of the table, managing city-infrastructure projects and watching good ideas die in procurement. Now Nam runs the Problems Bank: sitting down with ward public-works teams, district hospitals, and NGOs, turning their unsolved problems into Portals, and fighting for the budget that takes the best student solution to a real pilot site. Nam negotiated the company’s first city partnerships and measures success in exactly one unit — things that actually got built, and are still working a year later.
Singapore
Amara Okafor
Head of Trust & Safety
Amara Okafor has spent a career on child-safety AI and data protection for consumer platforms used by millions of young people across Africa and Asia. As Head of Trust & Safety, Amara owns the guardrails around every AI citizen and every Future Self conversation, runs red-team reviews before each release, and leads data protection across Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Amara also staffs the Council of 2045: briefing its members on proposed features, explaining the risks plainly, and making sure their veto stays final.
Jakarta
Putri Wijaya
Country Lead, Indonesia
Putri Wijaya grew up in North Jakarta, where tidal flooding was part of the school calendar. Before WhereTheFuture, Putri spent eight years launching education programs in Indonesian schools, from teacher training to after-school science clubs. As Country Lead for Indonesia, Putri runs the Jakarta pilot: recruiting partner schools, adapting the Jakarta Floats Portal with local teachers, and bringing student ideas to the neighborhood teams that can test them. The goal is concrete — a Jakarta student’s solution running on a Jakarta street, with the class there to see it switched on.
Ho Chi Minh City
Lê Gia Bảo
Head of Growth & Schools
Lê Gia Bảo built school sales for a fast-growing learning app in Vietnam before joining WhereTheFuture as one of its first ten employees. As Head of Growth & Schools, Bảo leads the team that brings new schools on board, trains their teachers, and keeps them renewing year after year. The playbook is unglamorous on purpose: visit the school, play a Portal with the hardest class in the building, and only then talk about licenses. Bảo also runs the Explorer home plan for families who want the Portals at the kitchen table.
03Council of 2045
Our bosses are teenagers.
9 students aged 14 to 19 hold veto power over any feature that touches minors’ data, and one non-voting observer seat on our board. They have used the veto, and we are better for it.
Chair
Võ Ngọc Hân
- Age
- 17
- Country
- Vietnam
- Focus
- Chairs the Council; leads every review of features that touch minors’ data.
Seat 02
Minh Anh
- Age
- 16
- Country
- Vietnam
- Focus
- Privacy defaults and what parents can and cannot see.
Seat 03
Tuấn
- Age
- 15
- Country
- Vietnam
- Focus
- Accessibility for students with low bandwidth and older phones.
Seat 04
Thảo
- Age
- 19
- Country
- Vietnam
- Focus
- Future Passport consent rules and who may read a student’s record.
Seat 05
Dimas
- Age
- 18
- Country
- Indonesia
- Focus
- Fair selection of which student solutions get piloted.
Seat 06
Ayu
- Age
- 14
- Country
- Indonesia
- Focus
- Making hard Portal themes safe for the youngest players.
Seat 07
Rafi
- Age
- 16
- Country
- Indonesia
- Focus
- Language support in Bahasa Indonesia and regional languages.
Seat 08
Bea
- Age
- 17
- Country
- Philippines
- Focus
- Future Self guardrails and mental-health escalation.
Seat 09
Joaquin
- Age
- 15
- Country
- Philippines
- Focus
- Royalties and scholarships under the 1% Future Pledge.
Council members are listed by first name only, without photos. The chair is named in full.
04Advisors
People who tell us when we are wrong.
Advisors in public education, climate adaptation, and child psychology review our hardest calls.
Hà Nội
Trịnh Văn Đức
Advisor, public education
Trịnh Văn Đức is a former deputy education minister who spent three decades in public education, starting as a mathematics teacher in a rural district school. Đức advises WhereTheFuture on how Portals fit inside public-school curricula and how education departments evaluate and adopt new learning tools. The advice to the team never changes: earn teachers’ trust first, because no policy survives a classroom that does not believe in it. Đức also mentors the Council of 2045 on how to turn a strong opinion into a proposal that officials can say yes to.
Jakarta
Rizal Santoso
Advisor, climate adaptation
Rizal Santoso is a climate-adaptation urban planner who has spent two decades designing flood defenses, retention parks, and resettlement plans for coastal neighborhoods in Jakarta. Rizal reviews the science and planning logic behind the coastal Portals, including Jakarta Floats and Mekong Delta 2045, and helps match student solutions with neighborhood teams ready to pilot them. Rizal’s conviction shapes the Problems Bank: the best adaptation ideas come from the people who will live with the results, and the youngest residents will live with them longest.
Singapore
Prof. Nadia Rahman
Advisor, child psychology
Prof. Nadia Rahman is a child-psychology professor whose research focuses on adolescent identity, anxiety about the future, and how young people build a sense of agency. Nadia advises WhereTheFuture on Future Self and on every Portal that deals with hard themes such as disaster, illness, and loss, and helped design the age bands and distress-escalation rules the platform uses today. One question guides every review: does this experience leave a student feeling more capable, or more afraid? If the answer is unclear, the feature waits.
- SingaporeHeadquarters and Trust & Safety
- Ho Chi Minh CityOperations, engineering, and schools
- Cần ThơWorld-building studio, where the first Portal was built
- Hà NộiSchools and city partnerships, northern Vietnam
Careers
Come build the way there.
We are 46 people, with 8 open roles across 7 teams.