 Surprise, good evening ladies and ladies, I use that joke every time, still makes me smile. Welcome to She Says, we've got a few people just coming in the back door so I'm going to stall for about three minutes, this is when you wish that you had a good joke to tell, damn it. Okay just a quick raise of hands, who's been to She Says before? Awesome, we have some nice newbies as well which is always a positive. So She Says is a really fun thing that we do every month. One month it's a social session and the next month it's a panel session. Why do we do it? So we are the Singapore chapter of She Says which is a global network for women in the creative and marketing industries. We want to put more women at the top and so we have these sessions once a month to get to know more people, to learn more and to hopefully get to the top. Okay so tonight we've got an awesome expert panel but just as a reminder these are pretty casual easy-going sessions. We love your questions as much as anybody else's, we'll get the panel to fight amongst themselves hopefully but if you can think of all of those questions that you've ever wanted to ask these guys are absolutely awesome so you'll get some brilliant responses from them. These have literally been designed and run in a way where it's pretty casual so if I mess up don't worry about it you'll only have to laugh. We're quite keen on networking as well so every other month we head down to a bar and we get everybody to meet each other. We bring different HR groups with us but it's more of a kind of welcome to Singapore meet all the awesome people that are around you. After this we'll do the panel and then we'll have a little bit more networking because you are only as strong as the network you've got. So this is Lizzie and I'm Alicia. She brought, she says to Singapore three years ago I think and we've been running it almost every month since and she's a creative director and all-around awesome person. It does like a hundred things I don't know. I can't even list out how many things. Definitely not a hundred push-ups anymore. Alicia's an awesome chick. Come and chat to her afterwards and learn about all of her experience. There's actually a few people that help me run she says. All of these lovely people, the people that have checked you in, the people sitting in the front row with their pipes of beer and even the slightly preggers one. We couldn't do it without these guys. They are all quite fascinating individuals as well and they're really well connected so they know a lot of people in industry if you're willing or interested in meeting somebody or learning something please chat to these guys. One point I gave them more yellow lanyards so hopefully they've stopped wearing those now. But before we start, sorry Alicia, you should wear it. You should never wear it. It's working. Mine's orange not yellow. It's orange. It's a VIP one. However Farah is a massive part of she says she helps us organize everything and she also gives us this space. Can you come and explain who you are and what you do for five minutes? Well no 30 seconds. 30 seconds. Hi, welcome to Jessica. Jessica is Singapore's largest co-working space currently. As you can see, we have been working very closely with she says since last year. It's been almost a year and they have amazed me that I volunteer for it as well. So if you are you need a co-working space, if you need place to network please don't feel free to come to me. We'll be giving away also there's a table over there that we've got some notebooks from just go and if you're keen drop your name card and I will give you one free day pass to work out of here for free. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the evening. Amazing. Farah's very very cool chick. Fact. I hope you've all got a lovely glass of wine in your hands or a wheat beer as they told me. Bowls XO have been joining us every event for the last year or so. Download the app and get free glass. Plus you can get it wherever you are. Delicious food. Do you want to come say hi? Can everybody look at that guy making feel really welcome? Hi. And these guys have got amazing food. Cannot recommend it enough. Okay. And engineers SG. So we've got the guy filming tonight. It'll be cut down into a few different sections and thrown on our website. Thank you very much. But onto the topic. Okay. So my mum called me the other week and she went Elizabeth you've put the word online. I was like yes mum. It's it's okay. It's called triple F. It's fabulous female fuck ups. I don't say it out loud. Okay. Sorry. My traditional English mother is slightly in awe of this situation. There's an article that came out in the Guardian just this week where Dame Judy Dench was basically shown in a positive light because old women are starting to swear more and it's because they're taking back their power. I don't need don't know if we need to go that far. But there's actually something wonderful about people being able to speak in public about the things that have gone wrong. Now this is on a large scale whether it's entrepreneurs losing companies and thousands of dollars or if it's on a personal level of was I brave enough did I step up and do the thing I should have done. The funny one that happened this week is we popped Cindy Gallup in our in our mention and she actually shared our topic online our event online because she was so excited about the triple F. I'm going to try and avoid saying fuck up all night because my mum will be watching the video. It is a really fascinating one how that connotation has changed and how people are embracing it now. So without further ado we've got four awesome speakers tonight. We only publicly said that there was three but we've got an extra one. So without further ado can you please join me on stage. Come on Wendy. Come on Douglas. So we could be we could be funny and try and introduce them and say lots of funny stories about them because I know them all pretty well. However what we're going to do is we're going to see how good their pitch is. So they've they've literally got a minute to tell us all the amazing things about themselves because I hate it when people do speeches and they start this person passed the mic down. I'm going to start here and you can choose left or right. Left or right for what. Oh we always pass it. OK. Hi. Hi I'm Wendy. I work at Oracle. I also curate Lady Bad Assury in APAC. I'm the mother of two. I've lived in Singapore for seven years and I love Lizzie Dealy. I knew you'd go to me. Hi everyone. I'm Regan Bailey. My core role is MD for Zaxis in Singapore. I also do some other stuff. So I take on the talent strategy and diversity for APAC and I also I'm a member happy member of the IAB board. Yeah I knew I knew I had to say that. And I've been here for about four years. I came over with my husband and my five-year-old son. We can never go back because I love the weather so much and so that's me. Hi my name's B. Cylan. I manage the Singapore branch of JAWS Publications which is a corporate communications company. I've been in Singapore for seven years as well and they're very happy here. I've got a toddler and I'm going to have a baby soon to be newborn. And it's about it really. I'll pass it back. I have a Wikipedia page and I have a three-month-old baby girl but that's not what I want to talk about. Please download my app Vanity and find me for a $15 discount later. Okay thanks. Okay before I let you talk about social because Douglas did such a rubbish job at introducing himself. He has literally been named as one of the millionaires that created or lost it all and then got it back again. He's an incredible superstar and you'll learn lots more about him over the course of this panel. He taught me something tonight which was a lovely Chinese proverb that literally says somebody else's trumpet is louder than yours. About blowing your own trumpet. Exactly. Okay you tell them about social. Okay so we are on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter so you can find us Twitter at she says SG and on Instagram at she says dot Singapore. So tweet, share, tag your photos and let us know, show us what you learned today, ask us your questions and we may also take questions from the floor and from social media by the end of the event. Yes. So we shall kick off with our first question for today. So for our panel what is your biggest fuck up and how did it come about and what did you learn from it? I mean my first million when I was 23. I lost it about one and a half years after that. So I spent so at that time I've really sold like three companies. So at that time it was like 2005 each six. So I did nothing party all the time. Just had a lot of fun. Oh I sold three companies. Yeah my first one was a whole, I made 3. something million almost four plus million. So my first business was a hosting company and my second business was like an online forum and then my third one was like a website and design development hardware trading company and then yeah so I sold all three of that. So the biggest fuck up there was so when you party a lot right and you have no one else to party with right you end up partying with like brokers traders and basically people who party all the time right. So I got interested in this very interesting movement in buying stocks and shares called the big brother, the big boys. So those in the finance industry will understand. So basically you know you just follow the herd and then you park some money and then you earn some stuff. So I earn a million in nine months and I lost it in August 2007. So I lost everything. I have to sell my house. I was staying at the top floor of it's behind CK tank at Orchard Road. I have to sell my Porsche Boxster. I have to sell yeah pretty much everything. So I was penniless and I had a few job offers because they didn't know that I was penniless. So yeah because I mean you're just very free and you just sold three companies. So you kind of get a lease of offers right along the way. So I ended up borrowing seven thousand dollars from my mom and you can read the article online. So anyway I went to Indonesia and then I spent a whole year in a very shitty studio apartment that I saw I'll never ever be poor again. So in that in that studio apartment it was cold water. It's a very tiny apartment about maybe 100 each square feet. So it's literally just you go in is a toilet. It's very disgusting. It's about 25 year old never renovated since then. Tons of cockroaches insects and whatever. So I bathe in cold water every single day. And then after that I can only eat two food a day because I only got seven thousand dollars. So I can only eat like downstairs my house was the nasi goreng guy which is like fried rice and then the fried me noodle. And then yeah so there's only two food I can eat every day for a year. So then I managed to launch the website but that's not enough. So at the time I launched this website called show nearby to find the nearest thing nearby. And that didn't work. It wasn't eight lemon brothers closed down all the advertisers that I was talking to that wanted to advertise with us. The whole marketing team was gone. Right. So I don't know if any of you gone through that but basically every every company cut a corporate budget that's not advertising you know. So here I am with a website that has quite a decent number of traffic which means I have to pay a lot of server costs as well and no revenue. So then I went under again and I started fixing computers for people and then designing their websites for them go to retail stores. I mean of course I have a small team of three people doing that together with me. We're left with like a hundred K left in the bank because in between halfway we managed to get an angel investor who park about 250 K with us. And then after that since the website didn't work. Thankfully a lot of people want us to fix their computers for them and read the websites for them. So that kind of work. And by 2008 we were making about seven hundred over thousand dollars in net profit just by designing website and developing website for people. Thankfully because the Singapore government has this PIC SIP back then so they literally like pay you two thousand dollars to build your website. So that was a very good business for us. My sweatshop is in Indonesia. So back then the engineers were like hundred, two hundred a month. Of course now it's much much different. But back then it's hundred, two hundred a month. You know. So yeah so I did all of that to make sure that we can get by. And then I reinvested all the money again into building a show nearby mobile app. So in 2009 January when Android was really really new and it was the very first like I think it was what G1. It's the first Android phone in the world. So I say okay lah Google won't fail. iOS has so many competitors building something nearby, car park nearby, restaurant nearby, bus stop nearby. Okay I'll just do Android and Android only. So we launched the show nearby Android version in January. And then in less than three months we became number one because there's no other apps that's competing with us. And then suddenly every handset manufacturer, Sony, LG, Motorola, HTC, anyone can think of that was developing an Android handset basically found us and said hey I want to preload your application on our phone. So then it started with oh okay cool you're preloading me and advertising me for free. Then it went on to maybe you should pay me to load my app into your phone. You know so it went on like that and then in nine months Yellow Pages bought our company. So that's roughly the cost. I think you took a triple F to my brain. That was like a hell of a journey. So what we're going to do is we're going to get $2,000. Do you think we're using it? It's amazing. So hold on I'm just digesting. Just a small recap. There was like the time when you built these companies and then they all you're parting to us and that was one fuck up. And then you moved to Indonesia in four hours and they were ruined. And then from that you built a team of experts that created computers and fixed them. And then you got better because it went to Android. Okay, now I'm off today. Hurry up. That's all right. I will fast forward because you grew most of that information. So after I sold to nearby then I so the reason why I sold to nearby was because we couldn't make money. The application had a lot of users. We had a million over a million downloads. We have a hundred and ten thousand users using us every day, which is in today's standard still very big. And we have like 10 million dollars in India. We partnered with Met My India in India and but we couldn't make money. So it was very sad. So I sold to Yellow Pages and then after that when I finished the contract so I decided my next business must make money. So I built Vanity Trophy which is a beauty box business in Southeast Asia. So in 18 months we grew to seven countries and so we were very aggressive. I was only in Singapore maybe three to five days flying every other day. We grew to like 80 people and we have about six million dollars in revenue run rate. 22,000 subscribers across seven countries and we decided to pivot. So then I had a hard time telling my investors I'm going to kill the business and I'm going to change the business entirely to services. So because beauty product sales is very difficult. E-commerce sales for beauty products in your minds there's a certain fixed price and you expect a discount if it's online somehow. And then you expect free delivery plus we must market to you. So beauty products very hard to make money and the average spend of a beauty product is like 35 to 50 bucks per order so it's very difficult to make money. So then when during the whole process of trying to help the beauty industry I got attracted to how a lot of this beauty makeup artist, hairdressers, beauticians, they're really passionate in what they do. They really really love what they do and it's somewhat interesting that they don't have degree MBA, PhDs, they have none of that but they really love helping their customers look prettier. Whether is it solving the acne problem or whether is it like making them prettier with like maybe some contouring makeup or something you know. But basically in your respective job that's what you want to do. And because of that being artisans right so what does it mean? It means that they don't really know how to charge. So they usually they usually go very low on prices. So then you have the bigger brands, the bigger salons, the bigger chains that will come in and say oh you know this is the price. So then all the staff will be like you know just trying to do their best and then the boss say if you want a commission you got to sell this you know. Then she's pressured right. So then we thought okay we're gonna start vanity, we're gonna help this women who are currently providing these services so passionately to their customers making them happy, a platform so that they can charge fairly and consumers don't have to find it so hard to find them because when you're getting married the first question you have is like who's gonna be your makeup artist? So you're gonna ask all your friends who are gonna be your makeup artist and all your friends are gonna recommend you a thousand and one makeup artist and you're still wondering who's the best one for you. So on vanity we have all of that you can see their portfolio, you can chat with them, you can do all those stuff just to assure you and be confident in your booking. So we started off doing like all the home based artists, so home base and freelancers in the beginning. Then of course two years later, okay so my seat round was five million. Okay, no startups here? Anyway, so my seat round is five million and then so we focus a lot on the beauty professionals, the beauty freelancers but unfortunately they don't make much money because they don't charge so much either. But thankfully some of them started to open up shops so that gave me a very good transition to say okay now we also support salons and shops who don't mind having transparent reviews, genuine feedback from consumers. So a review can only be made on vanity if you have made a real purchase, a real booking. So we now have like thousands of reviews and ninety-eight percent of all our bookings have ratings above four star and our reviews, 66 percent of our reviews have pictures and a lot of text. It's not your normal good, I'm satisfied. It's really chunks of text from fellow women in the community who really love the service and they share it. So that's... Okay, I'm going to come back and ask you more about the fuck-ups you've done. However, I think a range of these things can happen. So incredibly successful has gone from the highs and the lows. What are all those little things in between? Where are the points that you kind of have been at the fuck-up on a smaller scale I would say? Regan, you work at an incredibly successful place now. Have you had any kind of places where you've gone around before? Yeah, have I got to follow that? I can't follow that. Yeah, thank you. Well actually, it kind of... I've actually had a failed business myself, so it kind of reminds me about that, but very very different and mine will be a very different story and there was certainly not that kind of money floating around. But when I was 22 I actually left a very well-paid job with Equity because I thought that I could run my own business. I don't know what that was based on, but I started my own agency with two partners and it was kind of like a reverse MBA, like everything... if that teaches you how to run a business, we did everything wrong, like how not to run a business. I should write a book about that. So everything that could go wrong went wrong, starting with, you know, my partners who were 10 years old and they had MBAs, I thought they'd know how to run a business, they didn't know how to run a P&L, we didn't really understand how cash flow works, we didn't understand that accountants pay for themselves when we were getting massively fined because we were trying to do our own books. It was just one thing after another and it was absolutely amazing experience, but the same thing, I actually sort of culminated in a huge spectacular fail at the end where it went into liquidation after two and a half years and I was kind of left broke you know, homeless because I couldn't afford my flat anymore I also lived in a really shitty studio flat for quite a while I had to sleep with a knife under my pillow because it was so bad and, yeah, yeah, exactly you don't have them in Singapore and, you know, it was just it was just a very, very hard time the car had to go back and all of that kind of stuff so I didn't have transport and I kind of had to pick myself up off the floor and start again and say what now, how do I do this? But when I was thinking back, and this is quite a long time ago that wasn't the fuck up the fuck up was actually the fact that I didn't tell anyone I didn't confide in my friends I didn't talk to my parents I just, I was kind of ashamed and I kind of took it all on myself to try and get back and get back on my feet and, you know, on paper, what a great story, yeah, I got back I got a job and, you know, blah, blah but it probably stayed with me for quite a few years and actually kind of affected my confidence for quite a few years and it was just something I carried with me and now I look back and think why didn't I go out and have martinis with my friends and, you know, laugh till I cry or cry till I laugh or whatever and also because I didn't process what had happened I actually made a few of those mistakes again because I didn't kind of work through what had gone wrong so, you know, we all kind of mess up from time to time but that's just life and I probably wouldn't change it because I learned so much from it but, you know, I would definitely, and I've got some of my best friends here, you know, when I they know when I do fuck up we go out and we get drunk and we have a laugh about it and, you know, they help me get through it and I think you really, you really, really need to do that. Did that answer the question? Yeah, very good but can you follow down with something that you've done that's fucked up when you cried about it or when you've got martinis? Oh, I've probably done a bit of both. I think, you know, there's definitely a lot of professional, you know, launching websites or products and things that failed and investing in things and thinking that people know how to run a business just because of their job title and realizing actually a lot of people don't know how to run a business but I think for me in a more personal level I was put into a management role before I was 30 and it took me a long time to grow into what I was actually supposed to be doing and I think I did a lot of fucking up along the way and, you know, this was the early internet years so that was around 2001 that I was put into a management role and I had a team of about 100 and something people at one stage and I wasn't much older than anyone else and learning how to manage as well as run a business and understand P&Ls and why you actually need a HR manager and all that process shit and learning how to fire people how to hire great people and how to fire people and fire people fast because how much of an impact toxic people have on your culture how much of an impact not hiring the right people has on your ability to deliver a great business and a great outcome for the business all of those things you learn as you become a manager and trying to help grow the business and grow the people that work for you and I think my biggest mistake or fuck up was really that I had imposter syndrome you know, being promoted so young and never really having had management experience you know, all up as we went along so I never thought big enough and that meant that I didn't take my team with me as far as we probably could have gone you know, like if you're not really promoting yourself and driving and celebrating your own success then you're not celebrating the success of your team as well and you're creating a fake ceiling for everyone that works for you and so I kind of regret that in some ways and I learnt a lot from that in terms of my own confidence and my own ability and also as a manager your responsibility is you know, your team is what makes you successful and making your team successful and celebrating your team means celebrating yourself as well What, what, I have a question how did you talk yourself out of the imposter syndrome and what advice would you give to girls, young girls or young ladies who have that now because it's really common and you don't really talk about it that much Great question I actually formed a network of a lot of ladies in this room actually and a lot of other ladies so every couple of months we have dinner and I have someone speak at that dinner and usually on a topic that I want to learn about I'm pretty selfish about it I curate who I want to have there I curate the content and the attendees and the venue and hope that everyone else wants to learn what I want to learn and through doing that I've really been able to understand that everyone's you know, we're all going through the same shit we all have the same fears and insecurities we all don't think we're as good as other people think we are all that kind of stuff so I really have been conscious about creating interactions with people and also through actually like when I was on the IAB board and a couple of other boards where I was the only woman I started to get to know people that I thought externally I always thought of them as some kind of gods or whatever and the more time I spent with them in this third party environment the more I realized that they didn't really know any more than I did and in fact a lot of them knew a lot less than I did and so getting involved in third party things like being on the IAB or being involved in running an event like this you really get to interact with a lot of cross section of the industry and that was another thing I fucked up like I spent 14 years with the same company and for 13 of them I never interviewed anywhere else I never ever like I was so absorbed in what I was doing and building my team and building the business that I just you've got to be external as much as internal you've got to cultivate networks across way beyond your own industry as well so I found that really empowering is you know building a professional learning environment with people that I trust and people I can learn from amazing thank you I think on that same note I think there's a lot to be said for mentorship programs and I don't know if you guys have ever sort of done that or looked into it both from the mentor perspective and the mentee's perspective and just it's a great way I think to avoid this especially for younger people who you know you might see that they're going through the similar stuff that you went through maybe 10 years ago and you can probably save somewhat a lot of that sort of a lot of fuck ups along the way so I think yeah I'm going to start looking for one after my mat leave but yeah I think it's something that I think we need to push a lot more within our networks and I also agree that there's a lot to be said for having a network outside your company outside your business outside your industry so much we can learn from each other even if it's not even related and especially in terms of running a business and stuff like that and yeah that not everyone knows actually what they're doing and a lot of people are faking it till they make it and some of them just fake it better than others until you start talking to and you realize oh my god yeah I think it's I think it's a really important one so she says globally have something called who's your mama and it is a mentoring piece where you get paired up with different people now we haven't started that in Singapore we weren't sure how to do it and we wanted to make sure we did it in the right way it can be a really challenging one to try and find a mentor I find it's very personal and it's a real connection you need to make with that person so we don't actually provide that service but I do tell everybody that comes and she says go and be your mentor you can find your own mentor as well but go and mentor somebody else you need it because actually everybody in this room has something to offer something to teach somebody else so actually the best way that we can start mentoring system is by making you all mentors because then at least the younger generation have got that I'm going to quickly throw it back to the because she's not spoken enough about herself I actually can't wait for her to come on to this panel tonight I technically fucked up by inviting everybody that had a very late only a couple of days or weeks before it happened we're normally a lot more kind of courteous than that so Bea had a really big thing that she wanted to talk to about tonight she actually felt the driving test three times I'm not going to point a finger at that though it was more about as an editor I'm intrigued by the voice that people give to you and how do you edit around that so if somebody comes to you with a piece that has got a lot of mistakes in or a way that they're trying to express something have you correct somebody by kind of taking out the fuckups or do you kind of mix them in or do you dex around I think there's a lot of aspects to that so one of the services we provide is proofreading so in terms of the clients I would say you definitely have to be very tactful because people get very attached to their writing even as a copywriter you get very attached to the stuff that you've created it's very personal and as an editor or a proofreader you can push back to a certain degree and you can definitely correct the grammar, correct the typo stuff that you can really prove it's definitely wrong but stylistically or speaking about tone and stuff there is a lot of stuff that is personal and in terms of clients at the end of the day the client is always right and quite often you just have to bite your tongue and say you take it from here there's only so far you can go you don't want to push someone too far in terms of internally proofreading a colleague stuff I think it's very important to be self-aware and yes of course you want to correct the grammar again in the typos but it's very important to be aware that your style might not necessarily be their style in my previous company in my previous role one of my colleagues would always proofread my stuff and she would change it to how she would say it which there were definitely typos and stuff in there as well but a lot of it was just changing it to her tone her style which wasn't necessarily my tone and my style and it wasn't incorrect or correct it was just different and so I definitely learned a lot from that experience and it was very hard not to do that with other people's work if it's a colleague's work to just try and respect that person's personal style and that's the reason why they're a copywriter because we believe in what they do and if you just try and turn everyone into the same voice you lose a lot of the company's personality especially given that as a corporate comms company we have different voices so to make every company in Singapore sound like me would just be it would be my dream but it would be really weird so what I'm going to interpret from that is like only fuck up just say it how it is be your own voice you can correct me on that later Elyse do you want to ask the next question where are you going to jump from here so we're going to talk about damage control once you've had a fuck up how do you damage control how do you do you have any strategies do you have like too late well as I say I don't think I think I did the damage control pretty well it was kind of I just didn't yeah I just spent the next three years driving myself into the ground with regrets but in terms of damage control that's mine actually done okay we'll have it after thank you and yeah so basically but I ended up writing a list of what I could control and what I couldn't and there wasn't much on what I couldn't control and so I just kind of started to break it all down and say what do I need first and this was absolutely years ago so you actually had to have an address first because we weren't emailing so much it was like I need to have an address so I kind of scraped together some money I think in the UK they would just lend you anything at the time to manage to get some money and got this studio flat and then I kind of thought I need money straight away so what do I do how do I get it quickly again it was really time consuming to find a job then so I phoned up an old boss and said look you know I'm available can I come and do some consultancy and that actually turned into my first job in platforms which kind of turned into what my career is now so it kind of it worked out but it was a proper well thought out strategy of how the hell do I get out of this and it was really driven by self preservation and still that horrible ego pride thing of I mustn't lose face here and you know I don't think that's necessarily a good thing and as I say looking back on paper I did the right things but I challenged the right did now and I should have just gone off and spent a year in Bali I didn't answer that question so if only $7,000 you can't do anything much in Singapore even in 2007 yeah so going to Indonesia I kind of figured that the engineer would cost about 100 to 100 a month so and since I rented the apartment so that's my office as well I come to work there it's about 2 hours away from Jakarta so that's my first damage control second damage control was I go through all? PR kind of perspective did you sort of tell everybody in the world that the company had gone under and that you'd partied the life away oh yeah yeah I was very honest actually so I was so honest that my initial investors didn't want to invest in us because I was like oh I'm not going to invest in you then I got $7,000 for my mom in Indonesia and I tried to find the next investor and then this time I was thinking should I tell her should I not tell her okay I thought I'll just be honest and tell her anyway and then she was in construction and then she ended up investing and PR yeah so there was this like news article and there was an NUSK study on like the guy who built from nearby spectacularly failed and then now fixing computers for people so there was you can google that online yeah so there was an article on that where the headline was something like um what ah tech companies it was that period where a lot of tech companies couldn't raise money and then it was like you know tech companies couldn't raise money or something and then it was like put it put in bow in a big statement now that says I'm gonna fix computer even if I have to or something yeah oh but um um no I mean it's true so then a week later after that microsoft contacted us and they said they want to help us so we're like okay give me free office free everything anything you can give me for free just give it to me yeah so so during during that phase I think Schoenberg was quite lucky we got a lot a lot of press coverages during that period because I was just being very honest to the to the media and I think the journalists kind of like that um yeah but sometimes they get cheeky with the way they draft the sentences she just kept moving forward to make it exaggerated don't you think don't you think the narrative has moved on now and you know that whole idea around failing and learning well off learn as someone coined it some years ago um and and you know all the tech entrepreneurs now have at least one failure behind them so it's more acceptable to fail and pick up and start again so you're like the poster child for it yeah it's a badge of honor right and you're the poster child for the Singaporean version um and so yeah you can say I've done it and I did it again luckily you've got the good outcome that you actually ended up making money so just on that note if it is a badge of honor so I've had three failure startups is it different in the industry pretty good three job startups is it different in big corporate so would oracle hire me have they known that I got fired from my previous job if we're on video I'd rather not would a corporation hire you um that's a tough question yeah um big industry I think different enterprises look at it differently and I think more modern digitally native enterprises are much more likely to hire you based on the variety of your experience and how you've adapted because we live in a very rapidly changing world and being adaptable and being able to pivot and do things differently as a result of learning about things that aren't working is a very valuable skill and something that everyone should celebrate but there's a few legacy companies that are still getting their head around how to integrate that into their business and how to celebrate that and adapt their business model to champion the ability for people to do that internally so their HR functions may not yet appreciate how to celebrate someone that may have that kind of experience generally speaking in my observation just kind of looking at that kind of that larger world in industry and I'm kind of pointing at the two of you because you've seen sort of bigger corporations how we've seen a lot of press around CEOs kind of getting it wrong and either apologizing it or really not United Airlines there's a few people that will apologize publicly and there's a few that won't where do we stand in that world of soft skills for CEOs by the way I only gave three questions which were I'm really passionate about the role of the CEO particularly in legacy businesses and working in transformation and thinking about how businesses need to change their models it all starts with the CEO and if the CEO doesn't get it then the business isn't going to change and do I see CEOs taking responsibility and ownership of what they need to do differently no so I think there's a lot of people with their heads buried in the sand hoping and the law will just go away and I think those type of people again are less likely to be publicly taking ownership of mistakes and I think in a customer driven world that empathy that you get from someone admitting that they've done something wrong and trying to fix it and address it in a really fast and effective way you earn more brownie points and you earn more loyalty than you do from just pretending it didn't happen or writing it off to that's not the way we do things in this corporation you can actually turn an event like that into your advantage there's so many great examples especially in the UK of companies that have had massive problems but they've actually turned it around because they've been able to react and if appropriate humorous manner a lot of times bringing humor into it or just showing a bit of personality can go such a long way to repairing the damage and it can even go further it can take your brand a lot further than it was before in a positive way I would say I was just going to say I think it's sort of a good thing to do one as well I think sometimes if we make mistakes just a genuine heartfelt apology actually taking responsibility for what you've done can be can go a long way and also can be very disarming and also having worked in corporate comms as well I know that CEOs even when they're told what to say don't listen and do the other thing so just on that note I had an overseas day and in a forum like this obviously it's closed door and I can't repeat anything that was said but it was a hilarious moment where I kind of asked about the gender diversity that should be in creative teams and sometimes if you don't have a succinct answer it's better to go hey let me get back to you because after three well no I'd go 15 minutes of going around in circles and sinking himself into a small hole we kind of said it's alright you can leave the question so these guys have actually done an incredible job of answering the questions quite succinctly and making sure that we're kind of all aware of the point they're getting to we've got a couple more questions but then the emphasis is on you guys so have you guys got some questions that you'd like to ask these awesome people it can be anything to do with effing up or it could just be something that you've read about them in my bit of research I did notice that Regan put a little video together on YouTube about Christmas wishes so I'll get I'll get round to that one Alicia have you got another question for the panel so when do you decide it's time to throw in the towel when you're working on a project or you're working on your startup or your business and you realise that you're effing up when do you throw in the towel I'd like to say it's when you're unhappy and not enjoying something but I actually think that's often the worst time to leave something because I think you can make really bad choices for me and when it's happened in the past was a situation where I was unhappy but it got to the stage where I was losing my confidence because I think if you're and I kind of talked to this I've got some of my team here I talk to people about this all the time and protecting your confidence because nothing's worth losing your confidence over and you can lose it in a second so for me it got to the stage with this particular job and you're your own worst enemy sometimes trying to make something work when it's clearly not right and it wasn't working for me and finally after far too long this time I did confide in somebody and she actually sorted me out with this amazing coach and who was a award-winning actress in the UK and she was absolutely phenomenal she talked to me and she took one look at me and said oh dear we've got some work to do because I was like introverted and she really made me realise what the hell was I doing I needed to kind of get out of there and find my voice again so for me it was like that was the towel drop I think from a business perspective it's a commercial decision if you can clearly make a call in the next 12 months and if it's costing more than it's making then you need to make the call and you either need to reduce the expenses or change the model for the revenue model or if neither of those are going to work then you just got to make a call and move on so it's pretty easy when the numbers speak for themselves would you agree? yeah so for Vanity Trove when we had that 6 million it was it was very difficult to convince your investor that you're not going to sell the company and you're just going to bring it down to zero and pivot so most investors would be like why don't we try and sell it to someone else but then the investor is not thinking for me I'll have to work for someone for at least the next 1-2 years to 3 years depending on who's the buyer and how much they're paying for so I guess at that point the first deciding whether or not to pivot should I continue selling beauty products online or should I pivot to beauty services so that was the first the numbers just didn't make sense as I described to you guys earlier for beauty we will just end up burning a lot of money but believe me even after you show to the investors that you'll just burn a lot of money they will still be like but we have 6 million in revenues maybe we can consider selling it to someone else so that was the first time then the second time was like as I shared earlier when we were trying to cater to the salons because a lot of the home base and freelance beauticians and artists that we were partnering with we don't want them to feel betrayed we don't want them to feel like hey you know we started this platform for you guys we're trying to help you to reach out to consumers and then now we are helping a salon that can have walk-in crowd so we were very very careful in that transition phase and we were really trying to address as much of their concerns as honestly as we can as transparently as we can so we told them the truth that we won't be able to make money and we won't be able to survive nor will we be able to sustain if we continue this path so we have to cater for salons and you so what we did was we created a ranking system for them so then they started to be happier and then the salons weren't that happy then we started to like say okay now we split okay so there's shops there's artists so two different segments and so on it's also a separate random way when did you lose your confidence on any of that journey so coaching is quite interesting so last year I went and found this coaching pause where a group of like startups that have raised at least a few million will gather together so there was like this three, one VC two coaches and one VC so the whole session was about three days and at that moment was when it was like so what do you want to do in life so I didn't think of that because straight after you know I social invited to yellow pages I was thinking okay maybe I'll just you know just really jump to something that I can make money from so I did vanity trove and the initial intent was actually just to build it in 18 months seven countries like Groupon sell it off quickly that was the initial intent but as we built that we just fell in love with the business and we realised that there's just so much gap in the beauty industry and interestingly most engineers are men right so they are unlikely to build beauty solutions and most women don't want to be engineers so not now more but you know two, three years ago less so most women don't want to be engineers so there's not much engineers so then there's not much solutions for beauty companies anyway so that's why we think that it's a big opportunity and we when I went to the Bali trip yeah yeah yeah that period yeah three days intense workshop 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. every night every day yeah so that point was like you know am I running the company correctly because we were like 80 people in seven countries then we went all the way down to four right and then after that when we did vanity we also had this very nice hockey stick growth where we went all the way up to 35 people revenues were crazy numbers were crazy bookings were crazy and so on then last year was winter for investments so if you're familiar in the startup world last year it was very difficult to raise money so I had to do what normal guys would do normal CEOs would do and I cut the team down to I think about 10 people yeah from 35 to 10 we shifted from a bigger office to a much smaller one and so on and so forth so then that period was also the same time where I went for the Bali coaching thingy and then it was like wow and I just got married in 2015 December went for my honeymoon in May and then I was like you know in between thoughts of like am I doing the right thing should I have just sold vanity trophy so it takes a lot of bravery for these guys to stand up here and talk about failure pieces like that so obviously we're pushing them to do it now it's your turn to push them because then if you've got a question that you'd like to answer by the panel wonderful Doug Gabby will throw a microphone at you if you're softly spoken ways just a question for Douglas so how big is the team now now we have chow full time but at any one time we have about 8 to 10 interns how many of them are women chow full time in Singapore then I got 3 in Malaysia and 2 in Korea how many of them are women so all the interns are women definitely there's no male interns but half the company are women except the engineers so chow people 8 are engineers so in the engineering team getting the engineering so this one's for everybody across the panel what would you say is the best or most sort of memorable piece of constructive feedback that you have received either professionally or personally so this was advice I got from my previous boss and and I don't think she meant it politely but it's still very good advice which was basically just own it you know I was in my previous job I hadn't been in the work in a normal job for very long I was a journalist in the UK I did life subtitling neither of which are sort of corporate 9 to 5 jobs and when I moved to Singapore I had my first sort of proper day job and I didn't even know how I didn't really know anything apart from I used to use it in my old job for arranging parties that was about it so I had a lot to learn and my confidence was very low in that new sort of corporate environment and one of the things I did was I didn't have enough confidence in the work that I was doing and she would always say you need to own it you need to own the project you need to own the work and you need to own what you're doing and again I don't think she meant it in a polite way but it's very useful advice and it comes back to what I was saying earlier which is really fake it till you make it because eventually you will make it and then you can own it with confidence and hopefully then you're correct I think the fake it till you make it is a really good one I've heard it in different guises really dressing up everybody being a complete nightmare I heard as well which was charisma works both ways someone with charisma can lift a room in an office they can also cause everybody to feel the mood that they're feeling so I always thought that was a really good way to say just calm down you know but fake it till you make it is a really good one okay so I'm going to combine those two and really throw everybody off slightly because I've had both of those pieces of feedback own it and don't take the room with you because I'm literally the person that walks in and if I'm sad everybody knows that I'm sad and if I'm happy everybody gets a bit of it 90% of the time I'm happy it's great but that 10% of the time oh you're in so much trouble I wasn't going to call myself charismatic but there's something interesting it was never given as positive feedback of you're so outgoing that people know and feel it you can change a room to happy to sad just because you're sad you can't take everybody with you and the interesting bit is own it right so yes that's who I am I'm not going to run a company from a CEO position so I'm not going to take a company down with me I'm creative I'm flamboyant I'm wearing matchsticks to set the world on fire like nobody's going to give me millions of dollars sorry because I'll spend it but there's something really lovely about owning it like understand where your boundaries are and then just go okay cool I got this bit of it and there's something quite charming about that I knew you would why wouldn't you run a company that's bullshit you run about 50 different things why wouldn't you run a company that's absolute bullshit and you're not like really realising your own potential you don't agree with me I just don't think you're owning your boundaries at all right you're limiting yourself deliberately and that's bullshit there's no way you're not going to run your own business and be a CEO there's just no way and you're already doing it you're already on your way there so you know can you tell us the best bit of constructive feedback that you've had have anybody given you feedback from the same perspective the trainees in Bali was like the most useful help me to see a lot of things because I've never worked for anyone in my life so all the companies that I've worked in are all the companies that I sold to so other than when I was 14 and you work at some part-time jobs and I find those really stupid I've never worked for anyone in my life so constructive feedback those 3 days in Bali it lent a different perspective because there were different people from different backgrounds so some of them were entrepreneurs before this some of them were like corporate jobs some of them gave up their corporate jobs with huge equity tens of millions of equity before this so everyone lent a different perspective and because we spent 3 intense days it gave me a very different perspective I'm like oh so I've done a lot of not so good stuff in a HR perspective so my mum said this is the coolest part my mum said that whether I choose a job or my own, she'll fully support me so when I asked her for 7000 she was like is this enough and I was like well I don't know how much you have how much can you give me and then she was like yeah I only have about 7000 but later on she told me if you tell me she got more then I'll probably want more but she needed to pay for my bills and everything else that is needed to sustain the living so she said she'd better to have some savings so she always does that so she said that if anything happens please just call my mum is Indonesian so I have an Indonesian family they are very well to do so she asked me to just call them if anything happens this is addressed to the panel so do any of you have any of you had any experience or any moments or fuck ups that was a moment when you should have quit but you didn't and why didn't you so before you answer that who are you and what do you do what do I do tell us all I'm Stephanie I'm a clinical psychologist awesome yeah I'll take that one I did a contract role not that long ago for a founder who was really passionate about his product and really really believed in his ability to build his business and I thought that I could help him and actually I realised pretty early on that he was going to be a very difficult person to help and I should have walked much earlier than I did in my typical female I can make a difference here and I want to protect this team from this craziness and I want to give this a shot and I should have walked much earlier than I did in hindsight I learnt a lot I wouldn't take back what I learnt and made some great connections but from a principal's perspective I should have walked away from the business much earlier Hi I'm Vicky I work with Regan so Regan you mentioned about how when you were when you were experiencing like in our private sessions but you mentioned about how when looking back in your past you wished that you could have talked to someone and stuff how would you have done it differently because I know a couple of people in my life who are going through a really difficult time who have been very successful and are now experiencing failures kind of admitting failure and seeking out help be it in the industry or in their own industry is a very difficult thing not just in the fact that people don't want to be associated with you but also admitting it to yourself so how would you handle what happened to the rest of the panel too sure I think that so now it's a lot different because I I think just over time I mean I talked before about ego and pride and they're they're not necessarily things that I want to have in my life at this point and it was really cathartic actually looking back on all the things that I've done wrong and I didn't care it was kind of funny and I was thinking oh my god I've done so many funny ridiculous things so I think now it wouldn't affect me and I would just deal with it in the way that I would it wouldn't affect me in the same way that it had and I think that's something that you get with just experience and over time and all of those kind of things getting old all of that kind of stuff and then looking back if that's the question what I could have done differently is it would have been to lose the pride and the ego and saving face and all that crap and who cares really and I could have confided I could have asked for help I could have just spoken to people about it that would have been happy to listen and give me great advice but also I was so young because I started work very young it ties in with building your network building the people that you can trust and I think you get that over time so if that answers your question I think maybe that's what I definitely would have asked for help and advice then and I would have tapped into my network whereas actually what I did was I pushed them away because I didn't want to I didn't want to deal with it but now whatever happy, fine exactly on that note we're all sitting in a country that's actually really good opening doors for each other having lived in the UK and Australia and a couple of other places you can't always get access to the top people or to people above your level Singapore is very different about that there's a really wonderful culture here that has been created of now whether that's from a transient point of view or because we're all in it together I would say root chat to people that you've got contact with but even strangers that explain what's going on and how you'd like to learn from them it's one of the things that I love about Singapore is that I can knock on the door of NMD pretty much and say have you got half an hour for coffee I'd love to talk to you about this couple of hours of coffee and the majority of people come back to and say yes of course I think it's a brilliant way for you to understand your skills, their skills and how you can either work together or get better at what you do so honestly reach out to people I know a few people here have reached out to not just the she says girls that run this stuff but also those that have been in the community so please try that I'm actually going to wrap up tonight it's been a really wonderful hearing stories we're going to put on some loud music so you can all carry on your conversations and not everybody can ever hear them so you'll probably get even better conversations from these guys as it's been said tonight network is kind of the strongest thing that you'll have you'll want to lean on it a few times whether in the bad times such as I'm fucked up I don't have a job I did something wrong at work but also in the good times make sure that you giving back to those people that have either reached out to you or make sure you're I think one of the brilliant conversations was make sure you're looking after your team and your team isn't just at work make sure they get the praise they need but your team is also the guys that she says so on that note I'm going to quickly jump back to all the people that have gone tonight they're all in this room tonight and I could not do any of this without them so can I have a round of applause for them I could have more than awesome and finally can have a round of applause for the guys that have come the special event will be in June come and get drunk with us I mean come and talk to us if you have any of your lovely pictures otherwise I'm going to put some music on carry on, thank you and good night