 Aloha and welcome to another edition of Business in Hawai'i. I'm Deila and Yanagita, and we are broadcasting live from the ThinkTech studios in downtown Honolulu. If you want to tune in live, we are at www.thinktechhawaii.com. You can sign up to get on our mailing list there as well. The theme of Business in Hawai'i is to bring you stories of local businesses by local people, and our guests share with us their journey to building successful businesses in what's known as a sometimes challenging environment. In the ThinkTech studios today are Shadler College of Business Executive MBA candidates Lee Wang, Tricia Yamato, and Kaylee Tangon. Welcome to the show, guys. Thanks for having us. Thank you. One of the things that we are so passionate about here is small business, entrepreneurship, and that's exactly where you guys are. And so I do know that as part of your executive MBA journey, it's supposed to result in some sort of large project, and we definitely want to talk about that today. But what we want to do to start is I want to hear about each one of you as individuals and how you got to the executive MBA program and why. So feel free to start. Okay. I'm Tricia Yamato, an executive MBA student, and I currently work at Bank of Hawai'i as a senior internal auditor. But my path to the executive MBA program was basically, as an undergraduate, I didn't get a very broad business experience or business background, and so I just decided to pursue the program just to get that more broader background. I'm Lee Wang. I'm the owner of a small business called Lucy's Lab Creamery, and I'm also a real estate broker at Locations and do project sales for Howard Hughes. I have my hand in a few different areas, and along the same lines as Tricia, I want to kind of round out my knowledge, getting the firsthand hands-on experience of running a small business definitely will teach you some things, but to get a more well-rounded business acumen, I want to formalize it with MBA, so that's kind of what got me into the Shidler. Nice. Okay. And pretty much the same story. I currently work for an environmental consulting agency in their program project controls. So I'm just kind of starting off my experience right now. So I thought that having an MBA would open more opportunities for me in the future and get to learn a lot from my classmates as well, so it's really great. So what I do understand is you're likely the youngest student of the executive MBA program, which is amazing, so there's certain criteria to get into the executive MBA program because Shidler also has a regular MBA program. Tell me about that. Tell me about the difference between the executive MBA program and your traditional. Oh, so for the executive program, it's more catered for full-time working professionals, and so the schedule, the class schedule kind of allows you to work full-time while still taking your classes, so we have night classes and classes on the weekend to accommodate everyone's working work schedule. And so it's helpful because you're able to, depending on your position, be able to apply what you're learning in the classroom directly into your professional life, so it's kind of a win-win situation in that sense. So do you find that you're able to apply the principles that you're learning in your program back to your full-time jobs? Definitely. I mean, every day, we're, I mean, we have a breadth of classwork that kind of puts us to the test, but I mean, it's different areas, leadership, one-on-one classes we're taking right now is real estate, and obviously that applies in my industry, but even outside of that strategy working with, you know, in your industry for HR, we're putting, I'm putting that to practice both in the real estate side as well as the lucy side, so yeah, every day we're applying it, a real life style. You said that you are working full-time in the environmental space. How are you able to apply some of the principles that you're learning in what you do? So for me, I work more in like the financial and project controls, so we do a lot of budgeting and finance, which has been really helpful, like since we've been learning a lot about that. It's just like, I think taking an introspective look at ourselves, too, is when our leadership class is what we've been learning about lately, and I think that's been like really helpful in my growth at work and learning how to work with people and more people or delegating. It's been really helpful, I think. Does it help to have the practical experience? I would say so. The experience is the key differentiator between the regular MBA program and the executive. I think there is a requirement of three to five years of work experience, so it's helpful, too, in the group dynamics because you're working with people that have a real life experience of both good and bad and how to improve, and those improvements are what is brought to group projects like ours, so it makes it fun, dynamic, and very, very rewarding. Very incubator. It is. Right? So because it's a requirement to have three to five years work experience, probably talking about the failures is probably more valuable than talking about all of the successes. Have you had classmates where you share those types of experiences? Definitely. We learn from each other, I think, a lot almost as much as the professors themselves because there's so many different backgrounds. We have CEOs, we have people in retail, hotel industry, medical, airlines, everything. So the diversity definitely helps to broaden our scope. Sounds like a great opportunity to ask some questions about different industries that you've always wanted to ask, just didn't have the resource, I want to know about the format of the program because I think you folks are on the tail end, is that correct? Okay, you're supposed to be smiling about that, so the culmination of your journey ends in a project. Is that correct? Mm-hmm. Tell me about the project. What's the assignment? So it's called the practicum and basically you can kind of tailor it to what you're interested in. And so I guess usually most people end up doing a consulting project for a local profit or non-profit organization, so depending on the needs of the organization, the professors want us to use our skills that we've acquired throughout the program to be able to fulfill the needs of the organization, whether it be like marketing research or perhaps like if they're going to launch a new product, will it like be successful in the local market? So just like you can do a wide variety of things, but for our group at least, we decided to go more the entrepreneurial route by I guess testing out a new business idea and seeing if it will be viable in the marketplace, I guess. Are there a lot of groups that are standing up businesses? I think we're the only one. We're the only one that's doing it. That's amazing. So it's not theoretical, right? You actually have to go out and start up this business. Yeah. Last semester we had an entrepreneurial class that basically taught all the theoretical and now a matter of execution and putting it into practice as well. Harder than they made it sound. So you folks decided to go the entrepreneurial route and to start up a business. How do you arrive at what kind of business you're going to start? Just throw some ideas and see what sticks to the wall. It obviously has to have a model that can financially pull itself up in the end. But it also has to have an element of application to our personal lives and a value that a consumer will find value in and put their dollar forth to. I think this is a concept that everybody can kind of relate to. You're just sitting around with your buddies and throwing around ideas. And it's no different than that. But it's just kind of running them through a process of how credible is the idea? What's the longevity of it? And what is it going to take to execute? So you throw a bunch of ideas to see what sticks to the wall. Well, what seems challenging to me about that is you don't have an infinite amount of time to start up this business, right? So is it you start up the business and you actually have to transact and report on? I guess for the purposes of our, I guess our scope that we presented to our professor was just basically run with the idea and then also just see if there's any traction. And just basically we used kind of the lean startup method. So we kind of developed a minimal viable product, very minimal. But just to put it out to potential consumers and see if they were actually interested just by getting their feedback. And so that's, we're not, I guess, transacting money per se, but we're just gauging their interest to see if we were to launch it further. Would people be willing to pay for that value that they see in the product? Has the journey been tough? It's been interesting. I'm trying to decode that. It's been tough, yeah. I think anything that's gonna be worth your time is gonna have to go through the mud. And we've been going through the mud, but I think at the very least, I want to get the experience for a group. Whether it was gonna be successful or be a failure, the whole going through the motions, going through the process is what was important. And the context of this being simply a class assignment, lends itself to the option of, it doesn't work out and that's okay. Well, the whole purpose is mainly to learn versus in the real world, if you do a startup, people have put some money in there and they're looking for results and the constraints are totally different. So this allows us to grow from it regardless of the end product. I think another thing too that would take away from this would be being like a vision come into fruition. It's like he had the idea to actually execute and to actually put something out there through different stories. And it takes a lot of hard work and just a lot of coordination to just get it started from a vision to making it something real. I think that we all want to hear about what you folks decided on in terms of what that venture was exactly. We're gonna go to a break and when we come back, let's talk about that startup because I'm really excited to hear about it and how it's going. We will see you back here shortly right after that break. This is Business in Hawaii. Aloha, this is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About where every other week, Mondays at three, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation and world. And events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're gonna learn a lot. You're gonna come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at three o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Lauren Pear. I'm a host here at Think Tech Hawaii. A digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to thinktechhawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Welcome back to Business in Hawaii. Joining us today are entrepreneurs and executive MBA candidates, Lee Wang, Trisha Yamato, and Kaylee Tengon. When we went to break, we were talking about the practicum project that you folks are going to end your executive MBA program with and that you actually decided to launch a business as part of an entrepreneur experience. So I'm dying to know what that business is. Please just tell us all about it and how it's been going. So our concept is called five friends dating. So it's basically a group dating concept where you have five guys and five girls just hanging out and get to know each other. To participate, each participant has to come with at least one person that they know, whether it's a friend, co-worker, classmate, and so on. They stay there for an hour, hang out. And the one rule to this group date is that there's no asking for contact information. So the whole awkwardness of, as a guy, do I ask? Do I not? How do I ask? How do I approach this? Is that the window? And the awkwardness for the girls, do I say yes? Do I not? Do I know this guy well enough? How do I turn him down? It's all, it takes a lot of, exactly. Yeah, so people can really just concentrate on just being there, getting to know the other person and being in the moment. And unlike group dating, unlike speed dating where you pair off one by one, this one you're encouraged to get to know everybody as a group. I don't like you at a house party. So as part of discovering what it is that you folks wanted to do, how did you wander upon, well, we're gonna do something in the dating space. Is that organic? What happens? How does that happen? So as part of last summer, we took part in the Asia Field Study Program, where we traveled to Japan, China, Vietnam to visit different businesses in the different countries. But one of the things we realized in Japan, they have a group dating concept, or they have the group dating concept, Gokwong, which is basically what we're trying to bring from Japan to the US. And I think it originated just because in Japanese culture, it's difficult to get to know, or people are very shy and reserved. And so by being together with people that you're familiar with, you can kind of open up and be on a different side of yourself that you may not be able to, if you're one-on-one with someone. So that's the kind of concept we wanted to bring back to Hawaii and see if people would be interested in trying out. Yeah. It kind of lends itself to some of the feedback we've been getting to, because one of the things we hear a lot is after you go to college and you graduate, it's really hard to get out there and meet people. 15, 20 years ago, you're at a bar and you go walk up to somebody and talk to a stranger, and nowadays it seems a little bit awkward to do that. And so having a format where it's totally OK to just talk to random strangers and it's a safe space for everyone, maybe in today's society, it's more of a necessity that we create that environment. So you discovered the need here for something like that. Yeah. You've all looked. I would say so. Well, of course, we've all been single, so we don't relate. I think because given I feel a lot of the current online dating apps and websites, a lot of it encourages communication via text or emails and online versus just meeting people offline and being able to see people face to face and getting to know their personality. Yeah, or in a group setting. Yeah, it kind of takes away that pressure. The one-on-one, so I mean, you could swipe left and right all you want. It's like really nice, I think, to just have that almost old school, like you're meeting somebody in a group of friends. I mean, my parents always used to say the best way to meet people is through your friends, probably, because they're kind of most likely like you. So you can bring out the best of each other when you're hanging out together. So I think that was basically the concept. So do you have any takers? Yeah, our first group date was actually last week. And it was very interesting. There were no connections made, but the feedback was that the format was really conducive to having fun. So our test daters last week, the date lasts an hour. They ended up, even though they didn't make no connection, they ended up just having fun and staying and hanging out for about three hours. So after the hour is up, you're free to leave or you're free to stay and hang out and do whatever you want. And they chose to hang out. And I think that kind of speaks to the format. Once you have to get to know a person face to face, you'll see that there's more to it than just their online profile and their pictures. So did you guys go along? I think for this first date, we observed from afar just to see how the interaction was going, just to see if we could read people's reactions and see how the flow of conversation was going. And just to make sure that it was going as smoothly as it could possibly go, I guess. So part of the minimum viable product or the lean startup model that Trish had mentioned to you before the break is that each time we're just trying to learn from what we did well, what we can improve on, and then the next week, give a better product to the consumer. And the more times we can do this, hopefully by the end, we have something that's just finished, ready to go, and people will enjoy to max. So is this the incubator phase of the project where you're gathering that data? I would say so right now. But I think we're going to do a couple more trials just to see how it runs. Because it depends on the different mix of the groups and how it flows. I think that'll play into effect, too. But so far, yeah, we're just collecting all the data and seeing how it's going to go from there. So how do you get the word out there about meeting such a surprise? That was the interesting part. So I think at first, we all tried to reach out to our friends, to our colleagues, basically our classmates, anyone that we knew that like, hey, you single, you have a single friend. Basically, we pitched them our idea and then had them tell their friends, too, if they had any. And then once we realized, you know, we got to grow our pool a little bit more. We actually went out to do market research, I guess you could say, to different bars. And I just went up to people and said, gave our pitch and see if they were interested. And majority of the time, they're pretty receptive. Or they'd be like, hey, I have friends that I'm going to start signing up. These are strangers at bars. Yeah, really. How much is someone willing to pay for questions? Trini, you did the surveys, so. I think for our preliminary date, it seemed like people are at least willing to pay like five to ten dollars to participate. So, yeah, I guess, yeah, a good starting point for now, at least. It's very, like, because a lot of the feedback we got was kind of limited because of our participant pool. And so they wanted a better refinement of the matching process. But because we're kind of constrained by who we have available at that, who's available for that day or date and time, it's kind of difficult. So we still need to work on expanding our user pool or user base, I guess. It kind of speaks to the five to ten dollars for a group of five people versus your alternatives are, if I take somebody out on a date, first 15, 30 minutes, I have a good sense of that person and whether I want to go on a second date. But I'm not going to pick up and get out of there after 15 minutes. So we stay, have a few drinks or dinner or whatever it may be. And I end up, you know, two hours have gone by, I've spent 40 or 50 dollars. And the commitment to that one person is fairly significant, right, as far as monetarily and time wise versus this alternative gives is a lot of options for very little commitment and just the possibility of having it go somewhere else, you know, I think that's kind of why we see that result of five to ten dollars. It's, it's a very good alternative to, to sitting on your phone and swiping left and right with no, a very little interaction, get to that point of real life based conversation. So it launches from a website? So eventually we'd like to see it launch from an actual app. But before we take the time and money to invest into programming and doing that, the part of the lean startup that Tricia mentioned is testing to see if people will, will give you, give you money if it wasn't an app. And so that's really what we're testing. We're doing everything by via text. So it's, it's very labor intensive right now on our part, but a lot cheaper than developing an app at this point. So if people that are willing to pay for it, then it makes sense to put the money. So is there an algorithm to matching people? Yeah, there is, but it's really constrained upon our, the user base, obviously, the less the smaller the user base, then it's harder to find that great plethora of participants that, you know, that one true love throughout that maze of participants. But our next step is to try and grow that database, have more choices for everyone. So I do know that you said that the project ends in four weeks. So where does it end? Or does it not end? Oh, I guess for now, I mean, for the project's purpose, based on our two dates that we have and the feedback that we receive, we'll kind of extrapolate to see like what works and what doesn't work. And then kind of come to overall conclusion as to whether it like it might be viable or not. But I think in the future, we, yeah, we do try, we would like to like continue our efforts to like make, I guess, try to see if we could grow the user base and then potentially try to see if we can make an app out of it and then go from there, I guess. Very exciting. We have about two minutes left. What do you want to say about five guys dating or five friends dating? Five friends dating. We might catch you. That's a pretty good one. Five guys dating. It's perfect. Murder's in dates. It's perfect. It's not going to, I don't think it's going to replace the current state of online dating. Dating is obviously different now than it was five, 10, 15, 20 years ago. And, you know, some of the research we've seen, people are getting married and getting in through long-term relationships later in life, and it has a double-edged effect. One is that when you do get to that point, you have a lot more compatibility and you have a better chance of deep, true happiness. And this is supposed to be kind of like an alternative to getting online dating offline and getting that in-person interaction sooner rather than later. Sometimes a lot of choices, you have information paralysis and just meeting people and getting the in-person connection helps to move you forward. Maybe just pushing outside of your comfort zone, I think, to, you know, most people will find that they had a great time to do it. Is there a way that folks can reach out to you if they're interested? Do you want to give them your phone number? Just kidding. It would be a different dating on a different level. Our website is 5FriendsDating.com. They have a contact form for inquiries or sign-ups. It's all up on there. Fantastic. I am so excited to continue following 5FriendsDating and to see how that does change the landscape of dating. But thank you so much for your time. Congratulations on heading into the home stretch of your programs and I'm sure that as entrepreneurs, you folks will do great things and maybe break into the whole dating-matching industry. Thanks for having us. Unfortunately, we are out of time. I want to thank Lee, Trisha, and Kaylee for joining us today. A very big thank you to our amazing production staff here in the ThinkTech studio. If you would like to be a guest on our show, please feel free to email your information to shows at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Business in Hawaii airs every Thursday at 2 p.m. And we are looking forward to seeing you back here next week.