About BTFL
Why we built this.
Best Time For Life began as a personal project before it was a company — the kind of structured developmental experience our founders wanted to exist for their own children, and could not find.
About BTFL
Best Time For Life began as a personal project before it was a company — the kind of structured developmental experience our founders wanted to exist for their own children, and could not find.
Origin
Erika and Jochen, both raising their own children in Singapore, kept noticing the same pattern. Football on Saturday, coding on Tuesday, music on Thursday. Every individual activity was good. The through-line was missing. Their children were collecting experiences, not building capabilities.
What began as a private list of principles became a curriculum framework, then a working Adventure format, and finally the modular Experience-to-Capability system that now sits behind every BTFL program. Best Time For Life is the version they would have signed their own children up for.
BTFL is designed around real children in real settings, not more screen-based content.
Founding team
Built by people who live Connect, Create, Contribute themselves.
Co-founder, lead educator — Connect to World, Create, Contribute through Stewardship.
“I wanted my own daughter to learn the way nature, classrooms, and laboratories taught me — by stepping into something real and being trusted to figure it out.”
Erika holds a PhD in environmental electrochemistry from EPF Lausanne, with postdoctoral research at the University of Stuttgart, the Fraunhofer Institute, and the University of Milan Bicocca on wastewater treatment and solar energy. She has contributed to the University of Cambridge’s Business Sustainability Management course and to Singapore’s decarbonisation research at Cambridge CARES / NTU.
She complemented her scientific career with a PGCEi from the University of Nottingham and teaching experience at Tanglin Trust School in Singapore. She has facilitated workshops and mentored students through schools, NGOs, and educational consultancies on sustainability, design thinking, entrepreneurship, and climate change.
Co-founder, lead coach — Connect to Self, Connect to Others, Create, Contribute through Enterprise.
“Most of the adults I coach are practising at forty what they should have practised at twelve — taking initiative, recovering from setbacks, leading a room. I would rather give children that head-start.”
Jochen is a leadership coach and culture architect whose work centres on psychological safety, team performance, and the human conditions under which people grow. He brings fifteen years of corporate leadership across engineering, manufacturing, strategy, and innovation, including a decade in Singapore leading the ASEAN Innovation Hub at Bosch and heading Team and Culture Development for Bosch Business Innovations globally.
He is an ICF Level 2 certified coach with over 1,000 coaching hours, certified in Psychological Safety and Team Design, trained in Improv, and currently completing the Master Certificate in Executive Coaching with Robbins & Madanes. His clients have included Google, Bosch, Siemens, ING, and startups across Singapore and New York.
Erika brings the scientific mind, the educator’s craft, and the planetary lens. Jochen brings the leadership coach’s understanding of how humans develop under pressure, the entrepreneur’s grasp of building from nothing, and the team-culture expertise that makes psychological safety a design principle rather than a slogan.
Between them, they have lived and worked across more than a dozen countries, trained at leading institutions, run companies, taught children, coached executives, and contributed to causes from sustainability to startup ecosystems.
How we behave
Our framework describes how programs are designed. These describe how the company behaves — toward families, children, and providers.
Safety & safeguarding
Before any program is designed, any badge is awarded, any framework is taught — these four commitments are in place.
No coach or facilitator meets a BTFL child before passing a documented background check. The check is repeated on a published cycle.
Every Adventure format has a stated minimum ratio. We do not run Adventures that fall below it, even at the cost of cancellation.
Every BTFL coach is trained to start with connection before content. Children are never publicly shamed, ranked against one another, or forced to perform.
A direct, confidential channel for any family to raise a concern at any time — answered by a named person, not a form.
Detailed policies are shared with every pilot family before Basecamp.
The road
Right now
Singapore. The BTFL Pilot — twelve children in two batches of six, chosen by application. Basecamp opens the journey at the end of July (Batch 1) and the September school break (Batch 2). The goal of these months is not scale — it is to learn what works, with our first twelve children, in our city.
Where this is going
As each child completes more Adventures, Stamps accumulate in the Passport, the Route is refreshed at each Waypoint, and the founders' Field Notes build into a long-form view of who a child is becoming. The framework is built to extend across cities and age groups, but only once the Pilot tells us it works. See the framework for how the progression layer is designed.
Ready to start?
BTFL opens to its first twelve children — by application — at a founding rate. Read the full Pilot page to learn what we're building, then apply if it's a fit.