Launching and Scaling

Speaker 0: so you have been a serial entrepreneur. how has your approach to launching and scaling businesses evolve over time? well, i mean, it has evolved. i mean, i'm doing very much a rinse and repeat from my previous life. and i say rinse and repeat because in my previous life, i was in digital publishing, and i kind of entered that industry when people were still reading glossy print, okay, and newspapers. i think we've come a very long way. right? so this is the early two thousands. right? and i moved from sweden, which is my native country, to hong kong, and i i kinda built this brand which was called lifestyle hong kong at the time. but later on, as we expanded, to multiple other asian countries, it became lifestyle asia. and so it was the first of its kind luxury in lifestyle magazine. and, and and, you know, we were targeting yuppies or early adopters, which, of course, you you today would call millennials or more so gen c. and so i understand this target audience really well. you know, gen c and millennials today are the largest, group of pet owners globally, and a lot of them choose to have pets over human kids. and you know, they treat their fur baby as the nonhuman baby that they don't have, and, therefore, a lot of the disposable income kinda goes there. so so for me, it was kinda like, okay. i understand this audience. i'm a pet owner myself. i can relate to this. right? and, you know, i'm a loving and i wanna take care of my pet, but i'm also forgetful. right? and so and so i guess, you know, in many ways, i can kinda tap on my previous experience understanding the audience, but everything else is entirely different. right? there is no other similarities apart from its digital transformation, and it's the same type of audience that i'm kinda going after speaking to. i never built a hardware thing in my life before. i had, like, no idea. so it's kinda, like, that's what it looks like in a box quite appalesque, and then if you unbox it, that's that's the wearable, and you can kinda you know, comes with sensors on the back. i never spoken to a manufacturer in my life. that whole thing was extremely foreign to me. so so i guess, you know, before i could launch a new country with my previous business, and i would know within twelve months, i would sort of start to generate income from that market. i needed to go in, build the content, build the brand, throw a couple of dynamite events, you know, find the readers, be really good at seo, and then start to kinda sell advertisements, you know, around that content. it would take me twelve months. right? so i was in hong kong. i was in singapore. i was in in malaysia. i was in thailand, you know, india. we expanded to parts of europe. like, we did that really successfully. and so with this business, it's like, you know, after two years, i'm nowhere. right? i'm still kinda tinkering with blueprints and with algorithms, and there's just been, yeah, you know, completely different. right? so i think, know, launching it has been very different, and scaling a business that is hardware, software algorithms, ai, firmware is very different because the product cycle and the planning a a you know, takes really long time. like, i built my entire previous business on a million dollars, right, over a ten year period. that was all the cash we raised, a million bucks. and i think that the last five years, we raised no money. right? so it was really small money. and i think half of it came from, like, one vc, out of sweden, and and the rest was, like, you know, couple of strategic guys. here, i've raised many, many times more than that, and, you know, i've hardly launched. right? so so it is very, very different in that regard if i'm comparing it. but, you know, it's, it's nice to challenge oneself every now and then, and i think this has been the most challenging thing i've ever done in my life. i you know, once this is done and, you know, the i guess, down the road, an exit is inevitable. i'll i'll probably not be an operator anymore. i'll be helping out other younger entrepreneurs, and i'll invest, and i'll i'll, you know, i can share boards, and i can be probably a decent adviser, but i i'll probably not operate again? like, this is my last thing. and and i tell sort of my my friends that are entrepreneurs as well and that are much older than me, and they say, good luck. good luck, dude. you're you're gonna be like, you're gonna do this until you're eighty. okay? and i'm forty now. so forty two. so, you know, maybe not a forty years. who knows? but, yeah, very different.