Amigo Khadka: LSE Changed the Way He Understood Startups

An on-demand last-mile logistics platform in Kathmandu, connecting individuals and businesses with pickup carriers, using technology to solve the particular chaos of moving things around a city like Kathmandu. He had co-founded it, built it, run it. He knew the market, knew the problem, knew what he was doing and why.

He had also worked at JPMorgan Chase in New York before returning to Nepal, so he understood what scale looked like. Or so he thought.

Then he arrived at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Met his classmates. Met Chevening scholars from across the world. And something that had felt obvious started to look different.

"I realized I was thinking of startups, my aspirations, in a very narrowed Nepali perspective only."

The realisation wasn't that he had been thinking too small. It was more specific than that. He had been building for Nepal, solving Nepali problems, for a Nepali market, within a Nepali frame. What LSE showed him was a different possibility: building from Nepal. Using what Nepal has, its distinctiveness, its produce, its story, as a competitive advantage that could reach the world, not a local constraint to work within.

That single shift, from building for Nepal to building from Nepal, changed everything that came after.

———

Amigo chose Chevening deliberately, for reasons most applicants don't lead with.

He was clear from the start that he was coming back to Nepal. The mandatory return clause, which requires scholars to return to their home country after the scholarship, wasn't a constraint for him. It was a filter. It meant Chevening was designed for people like him: people who were going to the UK to get something and bring it back, not to stay.

He wanted a one-year programme. The full funding, tuition, flights, visa, stipend, meant he could focus entirely on the work rather than the cost of being there. And the network: a global community of leaders who were all, by design, going back to make things happen in their own countries.

He was awarded both Chevening and the Mansion House Scholarship in the same year, two of the UK's most competitive leadership scholarships simultaneously. He chose LSE and studied Masters in Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a programme that sat precisely at the intersection of everything he had been working on: how organisations create change, how social enterprises are financed, how innovation scales beyond the community it starts in.

Amigo's analysis of what makes a Chevening application competitive is the most precise in this series, and worth reading slowly.

"We generally highlight what we did and focus on our journey. But competitive applications speak of four things: my journey versus my goals, versus why this master's and Chevening will help bridge that, versus how my goal adds to the broader cause and development of my community."

Four elements. Not one, not two. All four in conversation with each other.

Most applicants write about what they have done. Strong applicants write about what they have done, where they are going, why this specific scholarship and programme bridges the gap, and what it means for the people beyond themselves. The committee is not selecting a biography. It is selecting a trajectory.

The Chevening interview, he says, is very short. It goes fast. There is barely time to put on a show.

Which, he argues, is exactly the point.

"It is not about what you prepared. It is an assessment of what is your default reaction."

This is a different understanding of interview preparation than anything else in this series. Most advice focuses on what to study, what to rehearse, what questions to anticipate. Amigo's point is that the interview is short enough to bypass all of that — and what it reveals is not your prepared answers but your instinctive ones. The person you are when you don't have time to think.

Preparation matters, but the goal of preparation is to make your authentic self instinctive, not to overlay it with performance.

Amigo had lived in New York for three years working at JPMorgan on Wall Street. New York taught him what fast looks like. The pace of capital, the urgency of markets, the culture of building quickly and moving on.

London taught him something different.

What struck him about the city was the way it held its history — the preservation of culture and tradition while modernising, the celebration of heritage while embracing new ways of doing things. The sense that what you build can outlast you. That institutions have a life beyond their founders. That legacy is not a vanity project but a design challenge.

"The importance of building lasting institutions, culture, legacy, that was something that stayed with me."

For someone who had spent years in finance and then in startups — two cultures that celebrate velocity above almost everything else — this was a quietly radical reorientation. You can build fast and build well and still build something that disappears. The question London put to him was: what are you building for?

The answer he came home with was different from the one he had arrived with.

The business he chose when he came back made the shift concrete.

Nepal Tea Collective is not a Nepali business serving the Nepali market only. It is a Nepali business built for the world, giving Nepali farmers and producers direct access to international buyers, making Nepali tea a global household name by starting from what Nepal has rather than accommodating what Nepal lacks.

Nepal grows exceptional tea. High altitude, distinctive terroir, flavour profiles that compete with the world's most celebrated producing regions like Darjeeling, Yunnan, but that remain almost entirely invisible to the international market. The quality has always been there. The raw material has always been there. What has been missing is the positioning, the access, and someone willing to build the bridge rather than wait for it.

That is the from-Nepal model in its clearest form, and Amigo is now using his LSE and Chevening alumni network to open early doors in the UK market, bringing Nepali tea to the country that gave him the lens to see it as a global product.

Communiversity was not something Amigo discovered at LSE. He had been a founding member since 2018, three years before his Chevening year, working with educator friends on an idea about redesigning how Nepal learns.

What LSE gave him was the frameworks to make it rigorous. His master's dissertation focused on finding innovative ways to revamp Nepal's higher education — using the tools his Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship course gave him: business models, financing structures for social enterprises, how innovation can be designed to scale.

He used all of that in his thesis. And then he used his thesis in the world.

Today, Communiversity is a registered non-profit. Most of the learnings from the dissertation have materialised into its structure and design. It is now preparing to launch a master's programme in partnership with Kathmandu University, a programme heavily influenced by his LSE degree and Chevening year.

He had been planting the seed for years. Chevening gave him the knowledge to design what it could grow into.

A founding idea became a dissertation. A dissertation built an institution. An institution is now becoming a university programme.

That is what building for legacy looks like.

———

There is a difference between building for Nepal and building from Nepal.

Building for Nepal means solving local problems for a local market, valuable, necessary, and limited by definition. Building from Nepal means using what Nepal has, its people, its produce, its knowledge, its story, as the foundation for something the world can access.

Amigo came back from LSE and chose the second path. A tea company that takes Nepal's finest product to shelves around the world. A university programme, built on an LSE dissertation, that redesigns how Nepal learns. Both rooted in Nepal, both reaching far beyond it.

He didn't learn the difference by reading about it. He learned it by standing in London with people from every part of the world, looking back at Nepal from the outside, and seeing what was already there.

and you feel stuck, or like the ceiling is lower than your ambition, maybe the problem is not what you are building. Maybe it is the frame you are building inside. A year in the UK will not give you a new idea. But it will give you new eyes. It will show you what your work looks like from the outside. It will put you in a room with people solving similar problems from entirely different coordinates. And sometimes that distance, from your market, your assumptions, your daily context, is exactly what unlocks the next version of what you are trying to do.

If you are already building something in Nepal, Chevening might be exactly what takes it from local to global.

Applications for the 2026–27 Chevening Scholarship open in August 2026.

Applications for the 2026–27 Chevening Scholarship open in August 2026.

Every story on ScholarsNext began with one honest answer to one honest question. We are not looking for polished narratives or highlight reels, we are looking for the real journey. The doubt before the application. The moment the email arrived. What the year actually did to you. What you came home to build.

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Amigo Khadka is a Chevening Scholar (2021–22), Co-founder and Managing Director of Nepal Tea Collective, and Director of Strategy & Growth at Nepal Communiversity. He studied Masters in Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the London School of Economics & Political Science.

Story #008 — ScholarsNext | Chevening Nepal Series

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