 Thank you, Angela. You can use the microphone. I can click for you. Just a quick show of hands. Who's working in corporates more than five years? Corporates. Okay, great. So like many of you, I've been in corporate for eight years. And I used to come to work every day. And instead of working, I used to daydream, right? So what did I daydream about? I daydream about... Oh yeah, sorry about that. I used to daydream about creating a very big company and becoming very successful. And just like Mr. Dicaprio over here, I thought my life was going to be like this. All the way up. Between working and daydreaming, I actually worked on a lot of ideas, and new ideas, start-up ideas. Sorry, for the last three years. Especially on weekends and after work, I used to meet my partners and create the start-up ideas that I wanted to make. And in March 2013, I created Veneerific. By chance, six months later, my boss at the time, he actually announced that the team was going to be made redundant. So I was like, wow, the first thing I thought about was Leonardo, right? It's like, you know, I want to resign. Give me the money. So I resigned. So in this slide... Sorry. This slide, you can see different stages, from what I think is different stages of entrepreneurship, starting from the monkey becoming a soldier, becoming a Jedi. Obviously, I was still in this stage, and if I show you the next slide, you can see why. That's right. After receiving the money, the first day, I went to party. And I did it for three months straight. Three to four days a week, right? You can imagine the amount of hangovers that I got during the three months. So when I did my job, I did calculation. I can actually survive one year with this payout, doing my business, but I spent it in three months. Sorry, I still have three months left. So I spent nine months' worth of cash in three months. Can you guys imagine spending nine months' worth of cash in three months? It's pretty comfortable. It's a lot of drinks. So it comes to the next slide, where it's a battlefield. Why did I choose this slide, right? So you can see there's Prince Lyla. There is an alien Jedi over here. And next to the alien Jedi, there's that guy on the floor. Basically, in business, if you have no experience and no knowledge on how to do business, you can die. It's quite cruel out there, you know? You don't want to be that guy. So get a mentor, get someone that can protect you instead of jumping straight into business. But unfortunately, that's not what I did. I jumped straight into business, and I did a Han Solo. So I want to talk about some of the experiences that I had during the journey of the three years doing VanuRific. After three months, you know, I sobered up finally. I realized like, hey, I only have three months' worth of cash. What do I do? No attraction. There was only a little bit of attraction. The product is there. So I decided, okay, I'm going to look for partners that knows how to do events, and I'm going to invite event organizers who plan events to attend this event. I'm going to make money from it. Great idea, right? So finally, I found this guy, and he looks quite, you know, sleek, wearing his suit all the time. He said, oh, I've been organizing events for four years. Very big events, and I can help you. So we went on. We did the events. The first event was successful. Second, third, and then fourth. But there was a problem. He started giving me all the work. So by the end of the fifth event, I was doing 90% of the work. So we ended the partnership, right? So we shook hands and we became buddies. And then one fine day, he came to my office and he said, hey, how you doing? Good, good. Ricardo, you know what? I have a brilliant idea for you. I've been working in a business world for four years, database of 10,000. I can pass this to you. Wow, this guy is super nice. He must be feeling really sorry because of the partnership. So I was like, okay, what do you want to return? He's like, oh, just, we can swap database, right? So that's exactly what I did, right? The following weekend, I was browsing through Facebook. And I saw a post from this guy. If you're looking for the best event space in Asia, check out this link. And he wasn't my website. He basically passed the database to a new competitor that created the same thing as us. And he's basically doing consulting for them for a lot of money. So this is what I said to him. You were my brother. How can you do this to me? When you're doing business, you're bound to come across a lot of opportunities, right? Some of the opportunity can be really attractive and you probably make a lot more money than what you're currently doing, right? So this is around nine months into the business. We're getting some traffic, but revenue was okay. And this intelligent guy, I met this intelligent guy at the bar. So when you meet someone at the bar, don't do business with them. He kept pitching his idea. He bought all my friend's drinks. Very intelligent, very smart. Right? He was like, you know, Ricardo, I need you in this team. I'm making a superstar team and you need to be in this. All you need to do is put in a little bit of money and commit some time. I was like, I'll think about it. To be honest, I didn't believe him. I smelled his BS and I didn't put in the money. But some months later, I did. I decided to put in the money. I decided to go dark. Right? So why did I do it? Well, he managed to get a VC to come in. And then he got a very famous radio presenter to become the face of the company. And then he got a banker to invest as well. So for me, I was thinking, wow, small amount of money makes sense. I can make returns within a few months. So I did it. Anyways, it didn't go well. Once we sent all the money in, he disappeared. He was using fake name, everything. So the lesson here, always eat cookie from the light side. So after working hard forgetting about the incident and feeling really bad about putting the money in, I got approached by another friend after one and a half years. He's like, hey, I met these two really talented people from Malaysia. You can expand. You should expand. You shouldn't wait. Wow. One and a half years. Yes, let's do it. So we met the guy. We interviewed them. We did all the background checks. They were superb, perfect, talented, but we couldn't afford them at the time. So we offered them equity for Malaysia business. So we went ahead. We trained them for six months. We gave them all our trade secrets, all our functions. We're going to build exactly in details. And unfortunately, they were building the same side as ours. And they created a similar site. So we wasted a lot of time and money. This is the last problem that I'm going to mention to you. As your company grows, you're going to face different kind of problems. You will learn from all your mistakes. And this time around, it's going to be a text from inside the company. So it's stuffing. I'm going to give a good example of this particular case of my head of sales. Basically, he was doing one in the beginning and then suddenly the sales started dropping. He started slacking off. I can see it as well. And then one day I confronted him. It's like, hey, what's going on? How come we're not making any sales? So it's like, okay, okay, I'll work harder. I'll make sure I'll get the sales in. We're coming to work the next day. Everyone's typing away, doing work. And this guy is doing this. The whole day, looking at the screen. So I was thinking, wow, he must be thinking of a strategy for us. So I'll come back to work again tomorrow. Still zero calls, zero emails, just doing this. It's like, oh, I'm watching something. I can learn something from this. Right? Sales didn't come in again, second month and then third month. By the end of third month, we cut him off. But to be honest, three months waiting with no sales can cost you the business. So sometimes you have to make that non-emotional decision to cut someone before you make, before it costs you the business. So that brings me to the end of my presentation. Sorry I was a bit nervous in the beginning. So in summary, if you want to be ready to be critical, stay focused, expand at your own pace and cut when necessary. You don't have to be a Jedi to win wars or build successful businesses. Han Solo didn't believe in the force. He still did his fucking job. Right? Thank you for your time. Okay. So some really hard lessons learned along the way. But I'm glad that you're not in how many cities now? Four cities now. So that's quite something. So we want to do a bit of Q&A if anybody has any questions. Yes. What you learned about reading people, having met all the interesting people that you have met through your stories. So now when you meet somebody and someone offers you new opportunity codes, how do you, what kind of questions do you ask to make sure that they are... Number three, stay focused. Don't stray. Be loyal to what you're building. So whatever the opportunity is, I think if your baby is now running by itself, you shouldn't be doing other stuff. I have a question. You have stress issues now. Definitely. I was a very nice guy when I came out from corporate. So now I'm a bit careful. But in the interview process with new employees, do you have anything to look out for which is, yeah, proposals or advice? We get testimonials from friends of friends and then we check out what school they go to and how they perform. And other than that, past portfolios, past work that they did, as well. And so you will cut someone off. That's fine. This one, because I got quite close to him so I felt emotionally attached. I didn't want him to be disappointed. Did you understand what idea this is or not? I did, but it's quite personal reason so I don't want to mention it. If you had to do this all over again, what would you do differently? I would try to find a mentor to avoid all the costly mistakes and the slowness in growth. I could have grown the business a lot faster. So I wasted the first year basically just drinking. Sorry, three months. What's your favorite bar? I used to go to Penn Pacific a lot. Now I don't drink anymore. When I was working in corporate, I was thinking I just want to make a lot of money but actually after you start building your own business, you start to have different beliefs. I felt that being successful, being rich is not important anymore. I just want to contribute to the world and make a change. So I meet a lot of business owners and my passion is to really help them get the events so that they can make revenue and survive and grow. We can all grow together. That's what I want. Thank you so much. Awesome. Everyone, come on. Congratulations Ricardo again.