 My name is Yoshi. I'm an entrepreneur and as Andrew said, I actually raise my hand to give a speech here because I'm really, really fucked up. So before I start my speech, I just want to understand who are the audience. So please raise your hand if you are working for some corporations or companies now. All right, please raise your hand if you are running companies like SME or like startup companies. Good. And please raise your hand if you want to start some your own business or startup company or thinking something. All right, great. So in my presentation, I actually don't have any takeaway today. I'm actually showing my real fucked up, I mean live fucked up what is happening on myself. Good. Oops. Somebody can help me. Okay. Yeah, so fuck up and under my case. So just quick intro. I am a global business leader and a marketer. So I previously worked in kind of top Japanese corporation in Tokyo and I moved to Singapore in 2011 to join PNG and I was doing global marketing. So my basic strength is in the marketing and also internet businesses. And in 2013, when I was age 33, I wanted to start something new because I actually tried my startup in age of 25. It didn't work well. And I also did lots of business incubation in a couple of corporations. So at age 33, I learned like how to expand the business globally with multinational background teams. So in terms of ability or skill set, I had a confident that I could do something. And then I wanted to challenge it. But it's very, very scary because as you can see, I have some good job. I mean I earn certain money. And my social status was also very good. But I need to put everything, I need to bet everything on myself into something maybe resulting in nothing, right? So I was super, super scary. But I still remember the one day in November 2013, I was watching a video that I loved very much. Stephen Jobs, the Stanford commencement speech. So he said that if you believe in something, you should do. So I was super scary. But actually I was crying when I decided to start my startup. But I wanted to fight with the fairness and then decided to leave the company. Then my journey started. So in January 2014, I started a startup called Job Forward, which is an online based recruiting platform utilizing the social media to connect with the people. Because we know the best talent around us, right? So by using the power of social media, I thought we can create something more powerful, recruiting platform, probably the more powerful than like Monster or Job Street. And probably by utilizing multiple social media, it could be more powerful than LinkedIn. That was the initial concept. The journey was certainly going well. So in April 2014, we actually won the startup competition called Echelon in Singapore. And then we were selected top 62 startup company among 400 company from around Asia. So we had some recognition and the idea was certainly accepted by like audiences as well. And then in August 2014, we actually got the funding from a venture capital institute called Coined Venture Partners, a couple of hundred, a couple of hundred thousand bucks, which is good numbers to start the journey. So we expanded our teams and did lots of experiment to make the concept happen. And we realized that through the journey, we realized that probably the environment of the social network may not suit for the original idea. So we tested in eight markets with some prototype model. And then we found that Indonesia has the best fit for our idea. So we quickly shifted our market, core market from Singapore to Indonesia. I actually physically moved to Indonesia about eight months in 2015. And we hired the sales team, customer support team, and then we maximized all of the marketing activities. But it didn't work. So we tested a lot of methodologies, growth hacking techniques, and then utilizing lots of sales strategies. But the basic concept is basically the base business model didn't work. We struggled to acquire the talent through social traffic. That's why it's difficult to compete with competitors like Job Street, Job TV. They have strong pricing strategy and sales strategy, which I didn't recognize before I started. And by considering this situation, the capital strategy also very tough because to compete with the competitors, I need to convince the following investors to believe us and then put on us the million dollars. So through the experience, through the experiment in 2015, I realized that this model doesn't work. And I also didn't have the confidence to convince the coming investors to believe on us. Sorry, we're closed. So the end of November of last year, it was a very, very tough decision. But I decided to give up, we withdrew the old idea that I spent like two years receiving some money from external investors and then fucked up. So I tried to maintain my core teams because the idea didn't work. But I believe in probably our core team member has certain capability to make the next challenge. But it's also tough to maintain the basic members to continuously picking up some project or consulting jobs. So I also decided to release all team members by end of, I mean, actually yesterday. That's why it's very life. It was very pretty decision, very tough decision. But I decided to going back to nothing. So this is failure. I have lost a small saving of my money that I have earned in my corporate job. I have almost zero savings at this moment. I have no hours, no recognition, no success. Just a real entrepreneur who made some challenges but didn't success. This is my mind. It's very chaotic. I lost everything. I had a strong mission of myself, becoming a global business leader, to contribute eliminating the world problems. That's the vision that I have in the past 10 or 12 years. But actually I'm losing now. I don't understand why I was pursuing that vision. I have had the strong vision for 12 years but somehow it disappeared from my brain. I don't know, I don't feel anything from this world. It's very strange. So I'm losing my mission. I don't understand what the definition of success probably depends on you. I don't have my vision. I can't imagine my future. And yeah, what the greatness is. So it's, my brain is crushed, very chaotic and confused. This is my current brain. But imagine that if Elon Musk or Steve Jobs asked me or if I say I had to make some failure to Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, probably they may laugh. I usually think this is a failure. It isn't. If we ask Steve Jobs or Elon Musk because it's so tiny. So I even think that I might make some failure or mistake because my challenge was so small compared to these great guys. So I'm currently thinking about what I should do in my future or in my next couple of years. So I'm thinking about the universe. I'm thinking about the world. I'm thinking about my society, community, my family, and myself. What I can do? What I should do? I let the book, the secret for my first time. Probably I should apply the law of attraction, maybe. Or I started to do some small meditation. Yeah, I'm Japanese. I have some zen mentality. But I've never tried meditation seriously. But it may help. Of course, the money is important in certain amount. I mean, in certain extent. So I'm thinking about how much amount of money I want in my life. And also, I'm thinking about if I should commit into the startup or another small business or probably big cooperation because startup, like getting some big money, becoming like Mark Zuckerberg, is not a single success or happiness for you, right? So very chaotic. I'm starting from scratch. Or probably I may overwrite myself to version 2, 2.0 of Yoshi or something. But I don't have answer at this moment. That's why I said I don't have any takeaway from my speech. But I'm just showing how the chaotic or how the emotion of the fact-up entrepreneur is. But when I created this slide last night, I came up with one message for me. So I'm showing the world to the end of my speech. Stay hungry, stay foolish. Thank you. Questions for Yoshi. Hi. It's a two-part question. First is that could you share a bit of when did you realize that okay, it's time for me to close off to give up. And the second question is what, with the benefit of hindsight, do you think that you should have given up 30 years? The first question was coming from, I mean, it's coming from very reality. We're running out of cash. So we couldn't sustain the team like 10 months. So at the time, I realized that we have the money to sustain the team for four months. I decided to not shut down the company, but give up the idea and then shrink the team. So the coming from external pressure. Just for your information, I tried to raise the kind of bridge, it's sort of called the bridge funding to a couple of months. But I realized that our traction isn't strong enough. So I also gave up the idea, the direction to get additional funding. So the first question comes from the cash limitation. Second question, it's actually tough to say that because we conclude that the idea didn't work after we did, so we actually raised a couple of hypotheses. If they are true, the model works. So within the time, we tried a couple of approaches to validate the question is yes or no. So at the end of November, we found that most of the questions and hypotheses say no. So we decided to give up. So in this sense, if I stick with the first big point, if the social network benefit us to make a traffic, and then if I stick with the first, if the question was actually no, at the very beginning stage, and then if I could decide my decision, okay, I'll give you all idea at that moment, maybe the answer was true, but it's actually very tough to stick with a single question to bet on everything. And go back to 2004, we should embark on this project. And yes, what would you do different? If no, final. I'm a person who usually didn't look back myself because I believe that I made the best decision, I have made the best decision that I could do at that moment, but it doesn't answer your question. So let's say it's the condition that I know that everything's future, every future that happens in the time in 2014, then no, obviously no, because I know the project will fail, right? Probably I do Uber in Singapore, or Grab Taxi. I started from Singapore because I stayed here for like three years already, and I had network, and then starting companies in Singapore is much easier compared to Singapore. So I took Singapore as a bet market, like a test market. But from the beginning, I aim to expand to across the Southeast Asia regions. Because that's getting funding in the middle of that being an important part of your decision to move forward or not. So looking back, I guess, do you think it would have been possible to figure out if your model worked without that funding on a smaller scale trying to first build an audience? Or do you think that figuring out whether or not the model worked would not have been possible without some funding? Because I guess it's going to that question when you're in a new company, do you get funding to try to scale it or build it out to figure out if it works? Or are there so many ways to try to do it before you hire people and take investors' money and try to move forward, but then figure out if it works? To clarify, when we say we hire the teams, meaning it's a very minimal team, and the monthly burn rate was very reasonable to proceed with journey. And we have talked with the investment, like a spending plan, including investors. So the plan was all agreed with every stakeholder. And the question was if I have more money, I had a more chance to validate my ideas, right? Opposite. Your idea without the money. Or was money necessary for you to really get a bigger picture and a fuller answer? The money was necessary because our plan was on kind of typical start-up, start-up journey, which means that we pursue to continue the equity funding to increase the corporate values, which means that we give up all the short income, but seek the scalability without earning any money. So the truth is in the past two years, we didn't earn any single money, but we bet on the time and effort to seek out or mine the golden ideas. So, yeah, if we didn't have the money, the time to mine the idea will become like probably four times five times longer. Same question. I have a question. How was it for you to tell your investor that you had to go shop? The communication was very smooth because... On a free basis, I communicated all my business plan and the progress to the investors. And as I said, we all have the hypothesis, if this is true, it works. If this is untruth, it doesn't work. So we communicate those, the measurement and benchmark with numbers. So when I decided to shut down, the investor was, yeah, with this result, yeah, the decision was necessary. Thank you very much.