The Dream Kept Getting Smaller

What did year-one me genuinely think SushiVid would become?

I thought we would be the JobStreet of influencer marketing. The Grab of influencer marketing.

I really believed it.

I had numbers, too. A 20 million ringgit exit in five years. At the very least, a US$1 million Series A within two. I thought I could game it.

The server room

We started out working from a server room.

I was fresh out of another startup in Singapore. The office was shabby. And it felt exactly like the Silicon Valley stories I’d grown up on. The garage. The humble beginning before something big.

I thought I was living the first chapter of that story.

And I thought all the influencers were like me.

When I was an actor, I was hungry. I would diligently send out my rate card. I would go out and meet people, give out my name cards, my call cards. I would create presentation slides on why I was the one suitable for the role.

I was eager. I was proactive. I pitched myself.

So I built a platform assuming everyone else would do the same.

They didn’t.

That was my first big lesson as a founder: I built a product for myself, and assumed the market thought like me. Most people don’t behave like that. It’s not that they were wrong. They just weren’t me.

Around that time, a company called FameBit got sold to YouTube, and I thought: that could be my benchmark. That’s what success would look like.

It didn’t happen. None of it happened the way I imagined.

A founder with a heart

Here’s the part that’s harder to talk about.

Before SushiVid, I worked at a startup where I felt the founders were overly aggressive. They didn’t care about the wellbeing of their employees. I was very sure I wasn’t going to be one of them.

Then I became a founder myself. And in hindsight, I understood: yes, that is what it took. Sometimes you have to be heartless.

But I was never heartless. So it was hard.

The hardest part, for me, was letting people go.

Every relationship matters to me. So it’s hard not to take it personally.

The person in front of me sees it from their side, and I understand why. I’d love to see it only from mine. But I can’t. I’m the CEO. I have to look at it from the company’s side, the shareholders’ side, and so many others. And sometimes, from those perspectives, letting someone go is the decision I have to make.

It doesn’t always go well. Eventually, it shows up on Glassdoor. I stopped reading Glassdoor. It was just too painful.

I’ve had to do it enough times now that it’s getting easier. The heartache doesn’t hit as hard, or stay as long, as it used to.

But it still hurts. And I think it should.

I really wanted to be a founder with a heart.

The dream, revised

Meanwhile, the dream kept shrinking. Every year I had to revise it. JobStreet for influencers became a marketplace. The marketplace became an agency-like business. The exit became survival.

The dream kept getting smaller and smaller. And every time it shrank, I felt like more of a failure.

For a long time, when I asked myself “what part of the dream actually came true?”, my answer was: none of it. Oh my God, none of it.

But I’ve been sitting with that answer, and I don’t think it’s true anymore.

Because one part did come true.

I wanted to be a founder with a heart. And that part I kept true to myself. Through every down round of the dream, through every revision, through every year the picture got smaller.

And I can see it now, in how my team works.

For a long time I was chasing growth. Work was hectic. Everybody had too much on their plate. Work was just work.

Today, every Friday, we stop. We paint. We make resin pieces. People don’t feel like work is just work anymore.

That means a lot to me.

And it shows. People stay in touch with me after they leave. They recommend their friends. Some come back for a second internship.

When I was a more growth-driven founder, people left and didn’t look back. Now they want to come back. That’s the part of SushiVid I’m most proud of.

I was wrong about the market. I was wrong about the influencers. I was wrong about the exit.

I wasn’t wrong about who I wanted to be.

Maybe the dream didn’t get smaller after all. Maybe it just got more honest.