The man who made ripples

Four years ago, Krittee Manoleehagul was being actively headhunted by two American giant firms. Trained in management with IT experience under his belt, he turned down the offers, choosing instead to return to Thailand, the country he left at the age of 13, to head up Sanook.com.

“I’d rather be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond,” says the chief executive of Thailand’s No 1 website infotainment portal with a grin.

Krittee is responsible for all of Sanook Online’s services including Sanook.com, mobile content on S! Mobile, gaming and Topspace, a premier digital advertising agency in Thailand.

He’s also confident about making a real impact with Sanook.

“If I had chosen to work at that foreign firm, I could have got lost [in the pond]. For me, Sanook is like an online megaphone. We can speak to Thai listeners on online,” he says.

Krittee was just 34 years old when he landed the chief executive job and at first the water in the big pond was far from clear, muddied by opposition to a Western style of management and the need to adapt to a different culture.

“There was certainly some culture shock, both for me and the staff. But I’m not the kind of person who worries too much about what others think,” says the young executive who worked abroad for 11 years.

Conscious that he might be misunderstood, he seeks to clarify his last statement. “I told the staff that if they didn’t change they would either die or be forced to leave. That shocked them,” he says.

“I personally felt I was in slow motion mode and I had to adjust to be in time with them. A former colleague in Hong Kong [his former working base] asked me why I was looking so slow these days,” he says jokingly.

In the months following the arrival of its new boss, Sanook saw a 30-40 per cent turnover rate in its staff, which seems high though Krittee says this is normal.

“I saw it as positive. I felt it would be better if we could recruit new staff who match our work and style,” the 38-year-old chief says.

Krittee holds an MBA in marketing, finance and strategy from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a Bachelor’s of Science degree in engineering from Brown University in the US.

His first job was as an IT consultant at CGI, a leading IT consulting firm in the US, where he stayed for five years.

He then joined Samsung’s Global Strategy Group in South Korea and worked with various Samsung businesses for two years. That was followed by a move to Hong Kong for Expedia Inc, a pioneer in online travel and hotel bookings, where he served as business development director, APAC, for the best part of four years.

Krittee admits that his working experiences overseas could not be applied to Sanook but insists that they have helped him to improvise, set up strategies, implement and deal with the changes.

Before his arrival, Sanook was just a web portal with an old-fashioned look. Krittee has taken it from portal to a “real” technology firm by using digital innovations to drive content and service and launched new products to meet users’ needs.

He’s also overhauled the working space, giving it a modern look inspired by Silicon Valley’s tech firms and devoting a lot of space to a recreation area.

Despite spending more than half of his life aboard and wanting a high performing company and team, Krittee says he’s not interested in bringing more foreign content to Sanook nor in employing foreign staff. 

“Our strength is local interest. It’s our DNA. We understand well what kind of content Thais want. So we stress local content and we need local staff,” he says. Although Krittee wanted to clean up what he calls “bad content” on the website, he is well aware that Sanook’s most popular topics are the horoscopes, entertainment news, and lottery results and thus these have remained untouched.

He is, however, determined to bring about change by creating new products that will attract users to stay with Sanook.

“Sanook has been able to exist as the most popular web portal for 18 years but if we stay as we are now, the chances are high that we will eventually vanish,” he says.

Sanook has traditionally been a community site. Over the past two years, it has evolved into an online destination with a 100-per-cent “mobile first” concept. And this year, it will focus on an application-first strategy by launching new apps.

With more strategy choices than ever before, the firm can create strategy in line with user behaviour on mobiles, he says.

The five most popular online behaviours are email, browsing, entertainment content (music and video), games, and e-commerce.  

“Our goal is to make Sanook’s apps the friendliest to users, to convince them download our apps and stay with us,” he says.

During his term as chief executive, Sanook has launched “JOOX”, a free music app, “WeChat”, a free messaging and calling app, and “iPick”, a dining social app under the “Eat-Share-Connect” concept.

He is particularly proud of JOOX, which has seen 1.4 billion songs streamed since its soft launch in mid November.  

Today, after four years in Sanook’s driving seat, Krittee estimates that he’s been able to achieve about 50 per cent of his teamwork objectives and has demolished the individual kingdoms. The next step, he says, is to empower the team to help him make decisions.

Sanook has radically changed since his recruitment. It has plenty of new blood and is more global while stressing local interest. The firm also has foreign staff in leadership roles and regularly exchanges knowledge with foreign firms.

“We create new ideas and concepts. It’s a good blend of different cultures but it takes time to push junior staff into being more engaged and participatory,” he says.

“No one can beat us when it comes to local interest or content. But we need to put more focus on technology and innovation development for new products,” he says.

He would also like to see Sanook have one or two apps that users will use every day.  

“This business changes all the time and we cannot predict or plan longer than six months ahead. But I like uncertainty and challenge. I hadn’t thought of working in Thailand or in the technology field but I think I made the right decision [to work at Sanook],” he says firmly.