'They know I don't bullshit. If I have it, I have it; If I don't, I say it," says Chanond Ruangkritya, rocking on his chair's two hind legs.
The executive, dressed in a tight company polo shirt and matching chinos, is known for his cutting humour and propensity to push the envelope. Authenticity, a mixture of grand intellectual musings and provocative statements, has allowed him to win the trust of investors, propelling him to the top of Bangkok's property game.
Ananda Development's head office is itself a shrine to Mr Chanond's testy spirit: a Silicon Valley outpost overlooking the bustle of Klong Toey market. The lobby is a multi-level, dark-grey room outfitted with dinosaur statues in all shapes and sizes. The main stairs are covered with large wooden boxes, reminiscent of Nintendo's arcade classic Donkey Kong.
Up on the second floor, in truly Google-esque fashion, employees move from station to station to receive their free daily meals -- a perk that costs the company about 50 million baht a year. Free BTS and MRT transport is included in most pay packages, a local adaptation of bike-laden Palo Alto campuses.
In a slightly more staid section of the second floor sits Mr Chanond looking wistfully at a pile of greens and avocado, also included in the employees' free menu. ("Take a picture before I have green all stuck in my teeth.") The chair he rocks in looks remarkably similar to those used in many of the company's developments. In fact, everything in the room, from the lighting to the thickness and curvature of the table, embodies the same design language of the company's nearly 50 properties.
Product design is an obsession for Mr Chanond, who does not shy away from comparisons to design-minded entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. In common with them, Mr Chanond makes bold predictions about the development of his company, already the largest condo developer in Bangkok by new units.
"In the future, we will move to a subscription model by selling you an Ananda lifestyle," he says. "We will let you stay at any BTS station, get you two vacations per year, insurance and everything else to keep you happy for a single fee."
Weaponised money
Mr Chanond's dream of revolutionising real estate began when he was a rather awkward and precocious kid. "Look, my parents were business people back in the seventies, when it was the wild, wild East in Thailand, and people were trying to keep up with economic growth," he says. "At six or seven I spent a lot of time with my own thinking. Thinking about the nature of existence, about religion, about inequality. I've always wanted to understand how the world works."
Mr Chanond spent most of his childhood in Florida, where he was sent to live with relatives against his wishes. Protests notwithstanding, he eventually ended up at the University of California at Berkeley, a bastion of liberalism that shaped how he thinks about gender and ethnic equality today.
"We have a gay executive, and a lesbian executive. When I wanted to shoot a commercial with gays and lesbians and everything else, they thought I was crazy, but I wanted to exemplify how liberal we are. My wife asks me why there are so many women on the board. I tell her I don't see them as women, just as people. I never label anyone, who cares!"
While Mr Chanond sprinkled the interview with anecdotes from his early years, plus some asides about the birth of Ananda, the bulk of the conversation was focused on the problem of inequality, something that has haunted him since he travelled Thailand's countryside as a kid.
"When we took trips to the North, I used to always ask my mom why we had to drive in a Mercedes while the people around us were walking barefooted," he recalls. "Was it just dumb luck of birth?" The puzzle became more pressing when Mr Chanond moved to America, which contrasted strongly with 1970s Thailand.
The puzzle remains unsolved, and it will become more pressing, he says: "If you think about it from a real estate perspective, the price of land is increasing, while 75% of Thai workers will eventually be replaced by automation and robotics. We will see extreme wealth in the coming years, but also extreme poverty."
Inequality is wrong, Mr Chanond says, but he is resolute that giving away his wealth is not the answer. "No one accounts for productivity at most philanthropies. You have to direct the system to something that is sustainable."
At Berkeley, "I realised that money is the most powerful weapon in the human arsenal. In the past, two countries at war with each other would send in armies and bombs. Today, they can just set a tariff". This perspective led him to a search for what he terms the "raw physics of money". "I am not a finance wizard," he says, "but when I look at an issue like the 1997 financial crisis, I understand it like an equation to be solved."
Mr Chanond caps all lengthy discussions with "equation statements". Once you understand the equation of capital, you are much likelier to attract that capital and deploy it to its best use, says the 45-year-old, who speaks of a three-part equation for the real estate business -- the most important variable being availability of land.
After working in investment banking for a few years in Thailand, Mr Chanond shipped off to the London School of Economics, where he focused on accounting. This training, he says, allowed him to understand companies fully by looking at their balance sheets. "When I look at businesses, it's like Neo in The Matrix. I see business as just numbers running down my face, and I can sense a company's weaknesses and competitive advantages just by looking at its numbers."
Mr Chanond founded Ananda shortly after graduating from LSE, when memories of the 1997 crisis were fresh. "I sold my car and borrowed from everyone I could to start our first project," he says. "The idea to found this company did not come out of any revelation, but rather was a way to help the family get up after the financial crisis."
He got his start by recruiting "a few people no one wanted" from Windmill Group, a developer founded by his dad. "Don't get me wrong, most of the work from marketing to cash flow management was done by me. You have to have a sense of startup. We had to run with precision, otherwise we would run out of money. There was no Plan B."
While the company in many senses still feels like a startup, capital is no longer a problem; the problem is finding enough projects and locations to allocate the capital to.
"Money was not a problem once we attained a certain size, because we have so many sources," Mr Chanond says. "I can pick up the phone and pitch my project to Japanese investors."
At 30 billion baht plus in assets, the company no longer shies away from Plan B. Speaking about the embattled Ashton Asoke project, which the government has threatened to tear down if the property does not include an exit to Asok Montri Road, Mr Chanond says the company will be in good standing regardless of the dispute. "However, in terms of financial prudence, we do have a Plan B, of course we do."
Close to 17 years after founding Ananda, retirement is on the cards for Mr Chanond ... sort of. "I wish I could leave tomorrow," he sighs. "Find me a better person and give me a call. So I can just hang out with my kids."
Will the company be as successful without him? It depends, Mr Chanond says after an extended attempt at circumlocuting the question. "Look, Tesla would not be Tesla without Musk. I think the individual values of a leader change the company as well. I hope that certain values will go on without me, but it depends on the new CEO."
By retirement, Mr Chanond says he's most likely referring to leaving Ananda's core business to develop another of the company's big projects. "You have to understand how other founders spent their time. Towards the end of his time at Apple, Jobs was mostly focused on product design and marketing. Musk now devotes a lot of time to SpaceX.
"Companies are like organisms, they grow and develop. We are good at the property game, but there are many other technologies we would like to explore."
While Mr Chanond's Silicon Valley musings may command a good part of his attention, for now, his three kids (ages one, three and six) take up the bulk of his time.
In a sense, he approached child rearing in the same way he tackles other problems: philosophically.
"I discuss this with my wife all the time," he says. "I myself like to read boring business books, but I won't force my kids into that. Man, if they want to be rock stars, nerds, video gamers, potheads, I would be fine with that."
