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