The Art of the Strategic Pivot: Linda Lim’s journey from disruption to AI-hybrid filmmaking
In this Founder Series interview m25’s Chris Thorp sits down with Linda Lim, founder of Bangkok based MOONJI, an AI-hybrid filmmaking company built around the intersection of traditional production and emerging technology. Thorp and Lim discuss career reinvention, surviving business shocks, hiring for curiosity rather than credentials, the reality behind AI-hybrid production, and why adaptability, rather than technology itself, may be the most valuable skill for production businesses facing an uncertain future.
In 2026, it feels like the production landscape hasn’t just evolved, it’s being rewired. We are moving past the initial wave of machine-automation panic and the flood of superficial “AI” rebrands that followed. What remains is the operational reality of day-to-day business management: software pipelines update almost weekly, and client budgets are tighter than ever, unlike expectations.
Having built and run studios myself, I know that surviving this environment isn’t just about chasing the latest tech. It always comes down to the unglamorous daily work of managing cash flow, hardware depreciation, company discipline and team morale under real commercial pressure. I wanted to look past the industry press releases and talk to the people who are actually getting on with the businesses here in Asia, founders who are evolving and positioning their teams to thrive for the long haul.
That brought me into a conversation with Linda Lim, founder of MOONJI, which specialises in AI-hybrid filmmaking in Bangkok. A Korean-American creative entrepreneur who traded corporate San Francisco for Southeast Asia in 2014, Lim has repeatedly rewritten her business from the ground up from earning 12 patents for an eco-design brand distributed in Target and SFMOMA, to losing her Myanmar agency overnight during the 2021 military coup. Lim has repeatedly rewritten her business from the ground up.
1. The Zig-Zag Career & Overcoming FOBO
Thorp: In your newsletter you write candidly about FOBO the fear of becoming obsolete and how easy it is to look at younger founders on social media and feel deflated. Your own path spans an abandoned Ph.D. in Chicago, corporate fashion, product design, and running agencies in frontier markets. Looking back, how did you stop viewing those shifts as hurdles and start seeing them as your greatest operational asset?
Lim: For most of my life, I thought I was lost. Everyone else seemed to have a clear calling while I kept starting over, which made me feel like I was always behind. But I’ve completely stopped believing that.
Author David Epstein calls quitting a bad fit early a “match quality correction.” Leaving academia or stepping out of corporate when I had night terrors wasn’t failure, it was finding my real fit. Every single chapter left me with a skill I use right now. Corporate taught me P&L and client management. Designing physical products taught me production logistics. Muay Thai taught me what business school never could: what it feels like to get hit hard and keep going anyway.
Arthur Brooks writes about fluid intelligence, raw speed and processing power which peaks in your thirties. But crystallized intelligence the accumulated stock of knowledge, context, and judgment keeps growing through your fifties and sixties. Technology commoditises speed and volume. It cannot replicate context or taste. If you’ve spent your life starting over, disruption isn’t fatal. You already know you can survive it.
2. Survival as a Catalyst: The Myanmar Reset
Thorp: Pivoting business is generally essential over its life, but done under a managed timeline. For you, moving to Thailand wasn’t, it was forced on you overnight when the 2021 Myanmar coup hit. What goes through your mind when everything you’ve built vanishes in twenty-four hours?
Lim: The defining moment was pure survival. The day before the coup, I had signed the largest contract in our company’s history without a pitch. We’d spent years building the largest independent agency in Myanmar, Multiverse Advertising. Twenty-four hours later, both our agency and production company were gone due to forces completely beyond our control.
When we relocated to Bangkok, we had no network, no referrals, and no clients. We spent months chasing buzzwords such as VR, AR, XR and in the end just confused everyone, including ourselves. Things only clicked when we decided to invite the market in and hosted our first virtual production open house. I remember that day it was pouring with rain, but 350 people still showed up. With disruptive tech you need that personal edge and experience.. You can’t just pitch people a slide deck. You have to put them in the room and show them how it really works and why it will help them.
3. The Unconventional Leader
Thorp: That renegade and highly agile approach seems to form the backbone of how you’ve built the business and hired for it, you told me that you ignore CVs entirely. What do you look for?
Lim: When I hire, formal education is the last thing I look at. I skip the CV entirely. For example, the woman cleaning our building became our office manager, running a team across multiple offices, having never touched a computer in her life. Our studio manager spent twenty years in a local print shop. One of our lead producers joined us at 17, no English and no degree then went on to become an entrepreneur himself.
Growing up in emerging markets our team are mostly self taught, their own curiosity driving them to learn software off tutorial DVDs, build their own computers. That drive to learn becomes ingrained. When a client brings us a brief that traditional houses turn down as “unproducible,” nobody on my team sits around explaining why it can’t be done, they have become natural problem solvers. I believe you can be a demanding leader while staying compassionate through continued reinvestment in the team with ongoing training. That might be English lessons, presentation skills or AI pipelines.
4. Dethroning the Tech: Workflow Over Hype
Thorp: In an industry tussling with automation, speed and daily tool updates. Which all glossily displayed across media, influencing client expectations. How do you stop your company from building on sand or getting seduced by the latest tools?
Lim: Building a company around a specific piece of software is building on sand. The tool everyone is obsessing over on social media today may be obsolete next week.
Every studio has access to the same tools now. They get cheaper and faster every week, so the playing field at that level is fairly even. What we provide is taste and a consistent process, the thing that gets us from a brief to something that’s actually good, plus the judgment about when the solution is a real camera on a physical set, when it’s generated rather than filmed, and when it’s a combination nobody has tried yet. That last one is what we mean by AI hybrid. That’s all from our experience, wins and losses over the years
New tools we break in-house first. We run weekly sessions where the team shows what they’ve been playing with or breaking on their own. We fail in our lab, never on a live client commercial. Software tools get swapped constantly, but visual literacy, storytelling, and set discipline remain fixed.
5. Longevity & Lived Experience
Thorp: “Looking at your path to where you are now and where you want to go, learning business mechanics on the go, to now building a hybrid production company in Bangkok, isn’t your real edge constant adaptability? While the industry struggles with the constant barrage of AI tools, how do you train your team to deal with this? There is nothing permanent except change!
Lim: None of us learned adaptability from a corporate mission statement. My team and I built our creative careers across frontier and emerging markets dealing with daily power outages, blackouts and a military coup that wiped out our business overnight. When that is your baseline, a new AI tool dropping on a Tuesday isn’t a crisis; it’s just another day.
Tech keeps moving, you have to accept that forces beyond your control are the default condition. Once you have lived through real disruption multiple times, change simply becomes the norm. We anchor ourselves in our workflow rather than the tech stack. I’m always honest with the team that I have no idea what the industry will look like next year or even next month. What I trust completely is our process, our filmmaking standards, and how we solve problems together.
Thorp: Day to day with all the challenges that come with running a production business in 2026 how do things play out for you when an agency drops a very creaky timeline on your desk, like rebuilding Manhattan in a Bangkok studio in eleven days? As a production business owner, I always had this sense that what appears impossible can be broken down and tackled with a shift in mindset and process. Do you agree?
Lim: Absolutely. Our secret is that we front-load all the technical lifting before we ever step foot on set.
Taking on an eleven-day build isn’t a gamble. It’s instinct built on decades of hands-on set experience by the time we say yes, we’ve already mapped out how those days break down including post. In Muay Thai, the moment you panic, you get knocked out. Training teaches your body one simple rule: breathe, don’t freeze.
Thorp: For younger creatives and studio heads entering an industry shaped by automation from day one, what is your core advice for building a career that actually lasts?
Lim: One of our recent interns nailed it recently: too many of his peers use automation as the hand that writes for them, rather than a helping hand. The moment you use a tool to skip the struggle of learning core craft, you render yourself completely replaceable.
A beautiful frame is cheap now. What is rare is making a frame that actually says something. Most of what floods feeds today is technically polished, but emotionally dead inside.
Knowing why a shot works, why a scene lands, or why a performance feels wrong is only down to experience. Software can give you a hundred variations in ten seconds, but it won’t tell you which one has heart and which one is actually right. Anything genuinely original has to come from a life actually lived by your scars, your references, your taste, and your personal perspective. Whatever chapter you’re in right now, it isn’t your last one either.
You can check out Lim’s newsletter and MOONJI here.