 Good starring, tailing, makes me feel like I'm a kid. Just be careful, don't press one. Okay. Yeah. So I'm calling my, my name is Darryl, I'm the founder of Neo Deck. Maybe you just press the button. Yeah, I'll just press the button. This is a bit funky. Yeah. So I'm calling my presentation a life of colour. It's a pun because I sell colour cosmetics. But I'll explain a bit more later as well why I'm calling it that. So my background is a little bit, I stumbled into entrepreneurship. So I was an accidental entrepreneur. My last year of university in 2011 was kind of just looking for an extra way to make extra cash. My girlfriend at that point of time, who is now my wife, she had been buying a lot of nail polish and I was like, what, what, I should start selling nail polish. It's an easy product to make money from. So, so that's what I did. I was lucky. I brought in a brand from the US. So, and it was called Blaze and I was very lucky to supply it to Zalora in 2011. And that gave me the confidence to do the business full time after I graduated. I expanded quite quickly, opening push cuts. In fact, one of my customers, very first few customers is here today. And so I think this is kind of the overview. Like I just wanted to showcase like Neodeck through the years, how it started from a very traditional business, B2B distribution, opening up a push cut, three push cuts and how it evolved to what it is today. So I guess I just wanted to share what happened and what went wrong for the business. I was young, you know, at the start I was really young and impatient for results, you know. I expanded very quickly and hired too many people, spent all my cash on bringing in new brands when I didn't know if they would sell. So in the end, I ended up with a few thousand bottles in my bedroom, couldn't sell, ran out of cash and had to think of something else to do. So I decided to put a business at home and then I went to work for a local VC, Cartwright.Ventures. And back then, one of the investments that my company, the company I worked for, did was in this very successful hardware 3D printer company. It did very well on Kickstarter. So I was just like, okay, I'm going to do that too. I'm going to do a hardware startup. We called it an espresso for nails. It was going to dispense custom nail polish. And I brought in a co-founder. He was a chemical engineer with a master's. And, you know, I literally went around pitching to investors with just this 3D rendering. It's actually an espresso machine. We just kind of tweaked it and like went around pitching and sort of going to events and talking about it. Like, I'm going to build this. I'm going to build this. And I guess it's quite embarrassing to talk about that now. But back then, you know, I guess I was kind of full of myself. I was like, yeah, I'm going to do it. I'm going to raise half a million dollars and get somebody to build it for me. And I guess at that age, yeah, it seemed like a reality, but on hindsight it's not. So we were just selling hot air. None of us had any experience running this hardware startup. Fortunately for us, for me, my partner who I brought in, he's actually really a very smart guy. So we had this color matching algorithm at the back. And we managed to get a small grant from the government, $50,000. And we managed to pivot a little bit to come out with this e-commerce app, which is still on the App Store, I think. It is still on the App Store, but it's a little bit different now. So it was an e-commerce shopping app, M-commerce shopping app, you know, allowed you to take pictures of items and color match it to the nail polish. So it was actually not bad. But again, yeah, on hindsight, a lot of stupid mistakes, right? Being the CEO of the company, I kind of thought that I should be focusing on raising funds. That seems like the only logical job for a startup CEO to do at that point of time. And I spent like 80% of my time just talking to investors and leaving all the more important things. Like actually talking to customers and trying to get users on board. I left that all. My interns could do that. So it was kind of like, I was leaving the most important thing to the interns. Nothing against interns, which is I should be doing it as well. And I didn't. So we were focusing on everything. I was talking to the media. I was trying to get Tag in Asia to cover us, trying to get A27 to cover us, you know, and talking to 20 over investors, just trying to get them in. And a lot of the future was hinged on closing that round of investments. So obviously in the end, it didn't happen. I ran out of cash. Again, Michael found the other guy that had to leave for family reasons. You know, his family was just like, this Joker friend of yours trying to like trick you into selling your life away. So he had to leave and I had to let the team go. So not as dramatic as an ending as Stalings. I was a little bit depressed, but probably not as bad. I was kind of like, just for me, it was kind of like, it's five years since I brought in my first brand of nail polish that since I sold my first model. And I was kind of, I felt like I was kind of back to square one again as well. And I, yeah, I wanted to stop. I wanted to quit. I just wanted to go and get a job just to share a bit at that point of time. All this happened at the same time when my co-founder left. I got the keys to my HTTP flat. So not a small sum. And I actually delayed the key collection so that I don't have to start paying the mortgage, the bank loan, right? So delayed it by six months. Actually, I just moved in two weeks ago. So left it empty for six months. I had a kid six months old at that point of time. Cute little bugger, but they're not cheap. They cost, and they just get older and older. So, you know, you start thinking about that, like, oh my God, all these fees, you know. And so, yeah, I really, really wanted to just get a job first. You know, I love what I did. It just didn't seem like I was a very good entrepreneur at that point of time. Yeah, so this was sort of like the struggle I was facing. Eventually, I did continue. And I had three main reasons for that and the takeaway I have. So for me, I was very, very lucky to have a very supportive wife. And I write hope for the right people in your life, because I think it's quite hard to intentionally find a wife that would support you. So, I mean, we've been together for a long time, and she was there when I first started. So, you know, she was like, if you quit now, all those weekends we could have gone to watch movies together, all those nights that we could have helped hug out when you were working would all have been wasted, right? And, you know, so she actually told me to continue. And she encouraged me to continue. And I did. I mean, if she didn't, I wouldn't have stopped. I wouldn't be here. So yeah, hope for the right people in your life. Hope they support you. This was the other thing. I felt that I was not completely honest about myself and the business that I wanted to run. I just kept reading things in tech in Asia in E27 and thinking that's how everything should be done. You know, raising a large amount of money from brand name VCs. And then because I came from the VC world, because I worked for VC for two years, I did have a lot of connections to a lot of VCs. So I kept pulling on all those connections and I kept calling them up and I kept pitching to them because I just felt, I just thought that was the only way to go. Raise the money, hire the people, get into the job and then sit back and let the company run. So the truth of the matter is, I mentioned earlier, I spent 80% of my time engaging investors. I actually hated it, I dreaded going for all these meetings. I dreaded asking them for money, I dreaded negotiating valuations. I just, yeah, I didn't enjoy it. And so I thought back to how I first started NIODA in 2011. I started with $6,000. And I was like, yeah, I don't need VC money. I don't really enjoy investing for that. I just plug into my savings, delay my home loan. And that's what I did. I just sort of like, I just didn't feel that, sorry, how do I say it? I think previously I felt that that not being able to raise money from a VC was a shameful thing for an entrepreneur. And I think there's no shame in running a business that's not VC funded personally. So this leads me to my last point, which is to really sort of understand what entrepreneurship means for you. At least for myself, I didn't understand what it meant for me the first six years. I just started it as a way to just make extra money, extra pocket money. So for me, it was always an alternative career path. It was always this other thing that I can do as opposed to, say, going to work for another company. And I think when I hit rock bottom, instead of what I was really faced with, the decision of whether I should continue or not, I realized how much entrepreneurship meant to me on a personal level. And I see it as this... I see NEODAG as this tool. Sorry, I'm trying to articulate it properly. So what entrepreneurship means for me is really this tool that can help me hack the world, the lives that I want to create. I want to have the best of both of us. I want to have a colorful life, something that's more than just about my work. Not that I don't enjoy it, but maybe I'm greedy. I want to have a good fulfilling work life. And I want to spend good time with my family, building relationships. I want to explore the richness and vastness of the world. Traveling, I want to do... I do triathlon. I want to one day be able to compete in the IMN triathlon in Hawaii. There's a lot of things that I want to do. I want to learn how to cook, I want to learn how to do deep-sea diving. And I want to have a fulfilling career as well. And I'm not saying you can't do that by working for others. It's just that I personally feel that there's less factors involved if I'm doing it myself, if I'm running the show myself. So that's really what it means to me. And when I think of it from that perspective, and I don't know how many of you would agree or disagree with me, when I think of it from that perspective, that entrepreneurship is a tool to help me achieve the lifestyle I want to create, then giving up is not an option anymore. Continuing on is not an option. It's become a necessity because I want to create this life. So for all of you who are thinking of quitting or stopping or pivoting or doing something else, I guess if you can really truly understand what your startup means to you, and is it for myself, it was previously just a thing to make money. But now it comes from a deeper place. It comes from a point where I want to be able to come home to spend time with my family. It's not that I work less. It's just I have more flexibility in time. I can choose to come home earlier on a Thursday afternoon but work later on a Saturday night or something like that. That's how I view it. So continuing on is not an option. It's a necessity. I have a code to end it as well. It's one of the codes that I think about a lot. In a more crude way, a very wise man once told me you chose shit on the wall enough times one day it would stick. And that's kind of stuck in my head. So yeah, this is Nail Deck today. Hopefully it's going to be the final version of it. We are brand of its own. Starting to sell a couple of retailers looking at overseas markets and hoping to build up the business to a point where it's growing and bigger. Yeah, that's about it. Thank you very much. So the thing about Nail Deck is that I've known him for about a few years now and I've seen you on the surface right. Seeing from Facebook posts and everything. I actually didn't know that this was the struggles that he's been going through the past few years. So I think it's something that we constantly want to share right now which is on the surface everything can seem great but even to your friends who see you passing it every few weeks we might not know this. So now I'd like to open the floor for any questions that we have for Daryl based on what you just heard. Is there anything that you'd like to ask him right now? Oh wait, that's one question. Awesome. Oh yeah, you like it? She was just asking what colour was Daryl having on his fingers? So Nail Deck is a... We produce our own colours. We are a custom cosmetics company. So we produce four clients. One of our key clients is Singapore Airlines and Silver. And we have an app that you can take a picture of anything. Take a picture of this and send it to me and I'll make the photo of your polish in that colour for you. So we produce everything ourselves. We have our own proprietary way of making our nail polish. And yeah, also 9-3, if you guys know what that means means it's free of the 9 main harmful chemicals. Vegan cruelty free as well. So I test out my own products. It's kind of like a sales thing that I do. So it's easier to convince my customers if I'm using it myself. And I'm a guy, so they're like, oh okay, this guy really believes in his product. And I do. I do. I actually really like it. And yeah, there's no name for it. It's kind of a colour I was experimenting with. Thank you Daryl. So we want to applause to Daryl.