It’s been just a week since I reactivated my company DreamVision Inc. I did not even anticipate, but I received lots of replies to my resignation email of SunBridge Global Ventures. And being asked to have lunch or dinner. Much appreciated, even though I’m little exhausted by lunches and dinners 😉
Next Monday July 10th in Tokyo, I’ll be speaking at one of the largest conference related to “Innovation” and “Connect startups to large corporations” in Japan. It’s called “Innovation Leaders Summit“.
The talk session I’m going to host is with my friends, Ron Drabkin and Jen O’Neal from Silicon Valley. And the theme I’ve been ordered is “How to get in the Inner Circle of Silicon Valley? Challenges & Opportunities for the Japanese companies.” Obviously there are lots of challenges and issues… also opportunities.
Ron is a serial entrepreneur who made “3 exits” who grew up in Los Angeles. His grand father and father had been running a vegetable farm and drug stores in LA and there were lots of “Japanese immigrants” there also running vegetable farms who were very diligent and successful.
However, all the sudden when World War II happened they got arrested and taken to the “Jail” for the Japanese immigrants. His grand farther and farther helped their Japanese friends to sell their properties for good price before they got arrested to make them enable to revitalize their lives when the war finish.And they had kept telling Ron that “Japanese people are so diligent. So you should come visit Japan in your future…”.
This story motivated me to visit LA to meet his father and I did in April this year. His father is a very nice person as I anticipated.
Jen is the founder and CEO of Tripping.com based in San Francisco which has kept rapid growth as a “Meta Search” of the vacation rental sector. When I met her for the first time was the time I hosted a work shop “Innovation Weekend Silicon Valley”with TechCrunch co-founder Keith Teare who had run an incubator “Archimedes Labs” to exchange pitches of the Silicon Valley startups and the Japanese startups.
And when Ron met Jen for the first time was when Jen came to the interview of Just Answer which Ron was working at. He really wanted to welcome her as a his team member, but she founded her own startup.
Jen started Tripping.com back in 2009 and launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010. She made a big “pivot” before she reached “Product-Market-Fit” and they were having very hard times as “The Hard thing about the hard things”.
When I joined SunBridge and started seed-early stage investment and Innovation Weekend back in March 2011, I did not even think this kind of things would happen to my life.
As Steve Jobs said, “Connecting the dots.” and “Future is the result of today.”
Bless one’s luck.