Winson Wong is the co-founder and CEO of Afterlife Ag, a sustainable foodtech startup he launched in 2021 that upcycles food waste from restaurants to cultivate mushrooms for sale back to the restaurant. His decades of expertise as a founder and operator spans product innovation, strategy development, user acquisition and international growth with extensive work in more than a dozen countries. Wong has mentored founders as a UB entrepreneur-in-residence since early 2025, sharing an approach that combines no nonsense and all heart.

"I’ve been on all sides of the startup world over the last 10 years, as an investor and having started my own venture-backed company. Over time, I realized I had accumulated a lot of knowledge. I’ve spent so much time working with myself, my idea and my company that it made sense to give back because it’s not easy starting a company. There are a lot of small things like administrative stuff, legal stuff, how the startup ecosystem works. Those are things that I was taught by other people, and I thought it would just save a lot of time, effort and mistakes if I could share that back to other people."

"I come from a family of entrepreneurs. My parents always had restaurants and ran an import/export business. I feel like I was influenced by them in terms of just how much effort, hard work and vision it takes. I saw what they put into it, and the life they were able to provide for my brother and me when we were growing up. That had a huge influence on how I think about my career."

"I’m the accountability guy. I like to keep people on track and moving and actually getting stuff done. Entrepreneurship is driven by how self-motivated you are. Doing everything by yourself means motivation can come and go. We also talk about understanding yourself, understanding who you are and understanding whether or not this life is for you, honestly."

"We keep track of what we’re targeting, making sure we have a clear vision of what we want to achieve for the next milestones. We set clear weekly goals, then have a plan to move forward. We create a series of pipeline documents that detail who we’re going to reach out to this week, which investors, what customers.

We take a step back as well and spend time talking about what the founders really care about, what they’re looking to achieve. Driving self-awareness is really important, and so is an open forum to ask questions. I want to make sure that founders feel comfortable coming to me on anything and everything because I want to be a helpful, honest, transparent resource for them. It’s a relationship that has to be built through trust, and that’s the only way that I see it successful."

"The program gives founders access to different people with different expertise. UB’s Cultivator is unique in providing these kinds of relationships in the region. It offers a lot of resources that founders may not know how to take advantage of. My advice to founders is to be proactive, find the right programs and resources for the stage they’re in, and really take advantage of it."