Lessons I’ve learnt in the last 377 days

Jun 2018 — M17 roadshow team en route to NYC. (L to R): Jessie, Hiro, Agatha, Shang, myself, Jeff, Gina, Andrew

A few weeks ago, I did an interview with Techinasia (TIA), right before the 1 year anniversary of M17’s 2018 IPO attempt.

The last 377 days have been a rollercoaster ride. Ringing the bell, listing, not trading, scramble to resolve the problems, postponing the listing, coming back to Asia to rebuild, turning profitable, becoming #1 in all markets we’re in, expanding business into new business segments — The list goes on.

Some of the lessons I’ve learnt:

• You fall down. You get up. The earth spins. You move on.
• Make a decision. Move on and iterate. Stop questioning yourself.
• It’s all about the people. Spend more time investing in your team.

I will dedicate more time in my next few posts regarding the lessons above. For some insights to what’s happened in the last 377 days, check out the TIA article, link below. A quick summary for those who don’t have time to finish the whole article:

M17 has over 20,000 global live talents who stream exclusively on 17.live, and is Japan’s #1 live stream platform

• The IPO attempt wasn’t successful for a myriad of reasons, imho not one party could have foreseen the outcome. One thing led to another led to another led to…
• On hindsight, perhaps not the best thing to not respond to media enquiries as you let the narrative run away from you, which more often than not makes things sound worse than they are. One of the reasons why I hope to set the story straight one year on, better late than never
• The last 377 days have been hard, but not any harder than the last 6 years since I started Paktor in 2013. Some difficult and unpopular decisions were made. I don’t regret any of them except perhaps the point above. If you want to make everyone happy, go sell ice cream
• M17 has grown 70% YoY, and is on track to ~USD 300m in revenues this year, and we’ve been profitable the whole year, 9 months ahead of schedule
• We have achieved dominant market share of over 50% in key markets like Japan and Taiwan, and are growing rapidly in others
• M17 is expanding into new markets (USA, Middle East etc.) and new business segments (e.g. live commerce, via acquisition and organic growth)
• My key focus in the last 6 months has been focused on investing in our M17 team, and it is easier to focus on that now given I have one less worry to deal with (since we are profitable and growing steadily)

For full interview, check out Techinasia article here