Finally, we have completed the series A round fund-raising which was a long way to come, so now we are ready for the next stage, we gathered major shareholders and board members who are able to travel to Cambodia, our management team from India, all staff and BUDDY (AGRIBUDDY’s Rural Agents) members and selected farmers from Cambodia to conduct a team building conference.

AGRIBUDDY has shareholders not only in Japan, but in Cambodia, Singapore and Denmark. The board members are scattered throughout Japan, Cambodia, India and Vietnam. Because we are developing business in India and Cambodia, each of the senior management team has little opportunity to interact with each other. Furthermore, most Cambodian team members are not acquainted with our board members and do not understand the concept of shareholders in the first place. The main aim for this program was to provide opportunities for each of them to interact in real life and to provide a platform to understand what kind of people are involved in AGRIBUDDY’s business and their respective positions.

In my opening session, I spent about half of the time to explain how the shareholders support AGRIBUDDY, introducing shareholders who joined us and asked Mr. Okubo and Mr. Krishna for a short speech and helped the members grasp an image of the management team.

Of course, I cannot speak Khmer at a level that is understandable, so I asked Mr. Pak who is the managing director to Cambodia for an interpretation.

Unfortunately, two of the five board members were unable to participate but we were able to welcome two board members from Tokyo.

One was Mr. Okubo, who I mentioned in my last article.

It was the first visit to Cambodia for Mr. Krishna. He came directly to the venue from the airport.

Here is a speech by Mr. Boran, CEO of AMK which is a local financial institution and one of AGRIBUDDY’s strongest partners.

AMK originally started as a Christian NGO micro finance institution after the civil war in Cambodia, initially they employed only Christians, but they faced shortage of human resource, so they decided to employ people from other religions . Mr. Boran was the first “non-Christian employee” at AMK, his parents were poor and could not raise their children, so he was sent to a local temple. He studied English there, and was hired by AMK for his language skills. After joining the company, he studied accounting and after a lot of hard work he is now the CEO of a financial institution that has over 600,000 customers.

After the introduction, Mr. Pakk made a presentation about AGRIBUDDY’s progress, current situation and the future goals. He also made an introduction of our field staff, BUDDY and farmers who gathered from various provinces of Cambodia.

A short speech by the farmer’s representative and the local staff of AGRIBUDDY followed.

AGRIBUDDY ‘s field staff representative, Mr. Chan was a former section head of the Polpot army.

Polpot denied education, so it is obvious that he could only go to school for a few years, but despite his age (mid-fifties) and the fact that he is an average farmer living in a rural area, he is very eager to accept new opportunities. He is diligent and sincere and also a mood maker who is loved by everyone. Even though he didn’t know the alphabet when we first met, he now collects farmers’ data using his smartphone, he once sent me a message in Japanese using Google Translate and I was deeply touched by that. This is why I can’t stop working on this project, because I can see the moment when someone’s life changes, and this really motivates me.

Next, we had a Q&A session with AGRIBUDDY’s partners and farmers.

There isn’t much opportunity for farmers in remote areas to talk directly with the CEO of a microfinance institution, grain buyers, or agricultural material manufacturers because they live in a narrow world both physically and socially. Despite the fact that each business operator is related to agriculture, there is no way of contact with people other than in their own area or circle. So, this is the first time that they had the opportunity to connected with each other directly.

Actually, all the discussions were conducted in Khmer except for the speech made by myself and the board members, so I couldn’t understand what was going on 80% of the time. Despite that this company was founded by myself and I am currently managing the business as chief executive officer and this conference was my idea….

Well, I often go to rural areas and often do not know what the farmers are saying, so I am familiar with this situation, but as I was watching the conference progress objectively, I was wondering “How on earth did we get where we are today, how did the company grow like this?”. Because my (the founder) English is quite broken, probably only half of the attendants at the conference understands what I am saying, yet still everybody at the conference can communicate and discuss how AGRIBUDDY will improve farmers and the circumstances surrounding them.

The confidence in my skill set was my ability in communication in Japanese. I think that I am a person who likes to communicate, is also good at explaining and talking to people about things. I also like to read books and I think that my writing skills aren’t so bad wither. But that is all in Japanese. Certainly, I can communicate in English at a decent level but compared with a lot of other English natives, my ability is very limited, and my reading and writing skills are terrible. Of course, it gets worse in Khmer, my five-year-old son speaks much better Khmer than I do… Despite doing business here where I cannot use my skills, the business has done well so far. It makes me think that if I was able to communicate in Khmer in the same way as my Japanese, would the business have grown further?

The answer I am sure would be “No”.

That is because I can express only about the most important thing that I want to get the message through, and I guess I can do that without any bias because of my limited language skills. When there are more words, the most important thing you want to express can blur, the actions behind the words and expressions or feelings become invisible.

I was able to see through such facts through the conference and I was touched to see all these people believe in our business and future prospects and I was really happy to be able to connect people in various positions. From now on I would like to continue to hold such a conference at least once a year, so that I can provide a whole new encounter and experience for the farmers and BUDDY who are living a limited life with little change and don’t have much opportunity to leave their villages.

The beginning of the story was a message that Mr. Nagashima (who is in charge of AGRIBUDDY ‘s finance and management) sent me via Slack. By the way, for those who are interested in venture investment I encourage you to take a peek at his blog because he reveals so much detail of funding to the companies he works with.
https://note.mu/tsnagashima

“It seems like Keisuke Honda is in Cambodia, it might be interesting if he could invest in AGRIBUDDY considering his ideas and tweets we all see.”, he sent me this message, along with the URL of Keisuke Honda’s tweet.

I wondered where he was and googled, and I found the fresh announcement of him taking chair as GM of Cambodian national football team. I thought that’s big news but had no clue or means to connect with him, wondering if any of my friends on Facebook in Cambodia had connections with him, searching on Facebook I still had no connections what so ever. I thought to myself that Mr. Nagashima often gives me these unreasonable suggestions and left for my business trip to Japan. I had an appointment with Mr. Ieiri from Campfire right after I landed in Tokyo. Below is the story about how Mr. Ieiri ended up investing in AGRIBUDDY.

http://kengokitaura.com/2017/11/01/supporter/

Mr. Ieiri had set up a VC called NOW（https://now.vc/）, and I also met his business partner, Mr. Kajitani. We chatted about all sorts of things (mainly my stories of failure) and had a great time.

“Do you happen to know Keisuke Honda? He has taken office as GM of the Cambodian football team and what he talks about might be great emotional support for our clients (small-scale farmers), BUDDY (who are rural entrepreneurs and leaders of the group of farmers) and our employees. I really think it will be great if he can get involved.” I asked Mr. Ieiri, quite surprisingly he knew Keisuke Honda personally and told me that he would happily connect us with him. Few hours later, Keisuke Honda contacted us, and we scheduled a presentation via video call three days later.
He agreed to invest in AGRIBUDDY through this video call and this was another story of the series A fund raising rounds. I thought again that it is amazing that how quickly these people make decisions. After all it is fun to work with such amazing people and I also want to move forward without being left behind from them.

By the way, as I wrote in my blog yesterday, I am very much compatible with Ms. Shigeta, but I also have very good compatibility with Mr. Nagashima (and I assume this selfishly). He has given me a killer pass (or a super save) at least three times in the past few months since he joined our team in June 2018, Mr. Honda’s participation would not have happened without Mr. Nagashima’s suggestion. And the great support from Mr. Ieiri was also a key factor in this too. Looking back, I think that I always have people helping and supporting me, and I am always wondering how I can contribute back to them. Of course, I must bring success to our business, but I hope that I can give something in return to them in some other form.

As such thoughts pass my mind, I found out that Mr. Ieiri started another business. “escort” is a society that supports growth of business and provide mental support for the entrepreneur team. Generally speaking, when running a business, you will encounter quite a lot of hardships, especially during startup, rapid growth is expected and if you have investors you have to deliver results. For young people in their twenties or thirties with limited experience, sometimes they are forced into a corner and face mentally hard situations. And unfortunately, some may fail during their journey. If there was a system to support and provide care for such people, they may be able to challenge with confidence. I also registered to the service because I may be able to provide advice and support to someone from my experience as an entrepreneur.

https://es-cort.co/

I am quite impressed of all the services that he comes up with and then realizes them one by one.

AGRIBUDDY was founded by myself who although is a Japanese, our business has nothing to do with Japan, company is based in Hong Kong and our business model is not such a model that will be listed on a Japanese stock exchange. Under such circumstances, I figured it will be difficult to source the necessary funds from Japan, nor it will be an advantage to our business and its future plans by doing so, I always thought that it will be beneficial to work together with global investment funds out of Japan. But, since my ability of communicating in English is very limited comparing with my mother tongue, I thought that there was going to be “Giant Walls” that we had to get over at some point in our journey when I first started AGRIBUDDY, and back then I knew that I had no means or wits of getting over that wall.

Although I am a business man, I do not have a character of a serial entrepreneur, I have never experienced fund raising or third-party allocation of funds in my life of over forty years, and I had no idea of what people were talking about when I heard phrases such as series A fund raising or seed stage investment. For us, it was a bilingual (JP/ENG) venture capitalist who initially participated in the seed stage investment (ultra-risk funds) of AGRIBUDDY, Mr. Noriaki Okubo has a history of actively engaging in overseas M&A of trendy companies, and it was exciting to have him on the board member at the initial stage.

In addition, Mr. Yorihiko Kato who had participated in our business from the Cambodian agricultural plantation company before we spun off AGRIBUDDY as an independent project, he was also the one who made the suggestion of going independent and has always been the most supportive element of our team, we did have the vision of “Procuring funds from international investors out of Japan” back then but it wasn’t even at the seed stage of the business and we were a small agriculture startup in Cambodia which is a small country in SEA with not much positive images for conducting business. Having Mr. Kato on our team was positive for AGRIBUDDY because we could proudly introduce our project to investors with his backup. He was the reason why investors took the time to hear us out, and back then we had no other way, he has been supporting our activities side by side on procuring the funds and this is why we were able to complete the process. Here are some articles about this:

http://ken5.jp/kengo/archives/2500
http://katou.jp/?eid=575

The next round will no longer be an excuse. We must connect to international investment institutions and prove that we have a solid future. After the first procurement of funds in February 2017, we replaced the board member from Mr. Kato to Ms. Shigeta, who lives in India, and we also actively employed senior management personnel. Among them was Mr. Rajesh, an Indian who I highly appreciate. We sent him to the pitch event in April 2018 (NEST 2018) to test his abilities, I had been appearing in the pitch events in Japan (in Japanese) and one several events in a row, but in this occasion, I decided to send Mr. Rajesh and prepared the presentation in English. The result was he pushed the winners of every local pitch events in the country and won at a tie along with Pocket Marche, which brought great hope for us towards our future developments.

http://ken5.jp/kengo/archives/2515
http://katou.jp/?eid=585

In July, the MD of our Cambodian firm Mr. Pak joined us, it is no exaggeration to say that he is the second founder, and at this timing the business starts to form into shape, but I think I will write about that in a different occasion. As we had won several pitch events in Japan and receiving contacts from various investment institutions in Japan, sometimes we also hold presentations towards foreign investment institutions, so it is inevitable to prepare all presentation materials in both Japanese and English, it is complicated because the order we build the conversation and the composition of the story is totally different in the two languages.
Mr. Rajesh wasn’t confident in the creation of such presentation materials, so I had to do all the creation of the materials, then we brushed up the presentation in English, that is how we started anyway. Last November, Ms. Shigeta contacted us about an event “Farm to Fork” held in Bangalore, this was hosted by Mistletoe and asked if we wanted to join. Mr. Rajesh was already in Bangalore to attend the event, but Ms. Shigeta contacted me just before the event and told me that I had to be the one on stage, she said that there were several influential investors including Mr. Taizo Son, and it would be the perfect occasion to present AGRIBUDDY directly to them. So, that’s how I ended up talking amongst many Indian agricultural venture startups as a panelist, the change was finalized on the day of the event.

As a result, we were able to impress Mr. Taizo, he commented “you have a wonderful approach, please let us support you” and he decided to join the series A fund procurement, Ms. Shigeta’s precise judgement in all of this was proven in its best form. Actually, I was invited to the pitch events in Japan after appearing at NIKKEI Fintech, but this event was also a suggestion by Ms. Shigeta. I am always thinking that my compatibility with Ms. Shigeta is really good. (I don’t know how she feels about this but anyway…)

I could not thank her enough of the efforts she made physically and mentally till the end of the series A round, if I would say that Mr. Kato was the key person in the last rounds, then Ms. Shigeta is definitely the key person of this round. In that sense, I think the timing of changing the board member to her from Mr. Kato was impeccable.

Some may raise questions saying that since Mr. Taizo from Mistletoe made investment, we are not global at all. What is great about Mistletoe is that they have an international team based in Singapore, all staff of different nationalities communicate in English and is a “complete global investment institution”. Of course, Mr. Taizo and Mr. Taira, the managing director will be there to support, but basically all communication with the team committed with AGRIBUDDY is going to be conducted in English. And this is already showing positive impact, which is negotiations with other investment agencies. One of the members was proficient in both corporate finance and English and he played the role of a lead investor and took the opportunity to talk to other candidates for investment.

What I think is one of the big achievements of this round is that the local Cambodian VC and insurance company made a positive evaluation of AGRIBUDDY and made an investment. Receiving investment from companies who understands this country, actually doing business here and delivering results, gaining their trust and cooperation, this fact is very encouraging for AGRIBUDDY and the high expectation value is also encouraging for us too. Nonetheless, even though they had assessed AGRIBUDDY to some extent before the investment was finalized, and even with the support from Mistletoe’s team, I was totally helpless with the final negotiations and reading through all the final rules and fine print of the contract. Perhaps it does not matter whether it is written in Japanese, because the detailed rules are all based on corporate finance and I have no clue on the subject. Mr. Okubo was the one who supported me through this. Although AGRIBUDDY are already in a business partnership with Forte, it was Mr. Okubo who connected us to the top management of Forte for their strategic business alliance investment.

As a result, four global investment companies; Mistletoe of Singapore, Smart Axiata Digital Innovation Fund, a company run by one of the leading mobile phone companies in Cambodia, FORTE Investment Holdings which is the leading insurance company of Cambodia and INDEX: Design to Improve Life from Denmark, has agreed to invest in our company. I think I can say that we have climbed over one of the “Giant Walls” I visualized at the beginning. Although I knew that I had no ability to do so, with the support and cooperation of so many around us, we made it. And I am sure there will be many more obstacles we have to overcome during our long journey. But I believe with the team we have, and as long as we can all challenge this mission, we will be able to overcome anything.