Founder’s Impact Stories
On Thursday, November 17th, 2022, the long-awaited in-person event “Founders’ Impact Stories” was finally held. Facilitated by Social Impact Lab Japan, the event welcomed Ms. Yan Fan, the co-founder and COO of Code Chrysalis, and Mr. Philippe Khin, the CEO of SewaYou to join in and share their personal journey running two of the most recent and innovative startups in Japan. Our goal was to show real-life examples of how business leaders established their enterprises and grow their social impacts in their communities. Under the roles of company leaders, Yan Fan and Philippe Khin delivered speeches describing their own inspirations and how they get to where they are today. This encompasses commitment, determination, and accountability. Our founders come from different backgrounds, however, they shared the same dream - working for something that they share a passion about.
For Yan, our inspiring woman leader, starting her career in finance was a good start after graduating from Dartmouth College, but that was not enough. She always felt that something was missing from her life and she was dissatisfied with her job. After deciding to walk away from her company, during her transitioning period, she took the chance to enhance her coding skill which then helped her to land a new job as a software engineer at Ayasdi, a leading Silicon Valley machine learning startup. With the political and social turmoil that happened due to the 2016 Syrian civil war, she found herself training and co-founding a coding boot camp to help refugees ensure their livelihood. Later on, she met Kani Munidasa, her now business partner, to start a boot camp of their own. This became the well-established Code Chrysalis we know today. Code Chrysalis has helped thousands of people, including many women, to start their careers in coding, and gain access to technical skill training programs across Japan.
After graduating from college, Philippe started building SewaYou as a language exchange app to teach himself how to create different features from scratch. Before the time that SewaYou became his full-time commitment, he worked as a Software Development Engineer for Mitsubishi Electric Power Products, Inc., and then as a Full Stack Engineer for AXA, a multinational insurance company. His quest was to learn things by building, and be familiar with new technologies through app development, user requests handling, email marketing, etc. Like Yan, Philippe embraced his entrepreneurial urge, went on to quit his job, and started working as the CEO of the company. With his motto of “Customer is always right”, SewaYou was developed to fit the market that it was serving, and it has received several positive feedback from users across the platform. In 2022, after 4 years of non-stop side hustling and developing, he successfully secured the VC funding needed for SewaYou to take off to a new level.
Our panelists provided different approaches to starting their own businesses. For Yan, finding the right co-founder, and the right partner was crucial. “It’s kinda like dating to get married, you need to find the right partner”, she added. During the early days of Code Chrysalis, she spent a lot of time talking about vision, hypothetical situations, and scenarios of the business with her co-founder. Rocket Fuel - The One Essential Combination That Will Get You More of What You Want from Your Business by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters, was the book that Yan recommended the audience to read. On the other hand, Philippe shared with us the joy of being a solo founder with different hats, assigning and being responsible for different roles in the company while learning all the necessary skills to develop the products. “You can still get help while going solo”, would be the best takeaway that we have from Philippe’s advice. We learned that regardless of having a team or not, the biggest strength founders would have is their proactiveness and determination to get through obstacles and make things happen. Most importantly, as Yan Fan said at the end of the event, "No matter how many books you read and how many preparations you made, you will always make mistakes and you don't learn until you make those mistakes." Our founders agreed on one famous quote: “Don't be afraid to dream big. Shoot for the moon and even if you miss, you'll still land on a star”.
For Code Chrysalis, the biggest social impact that the company generated was giving access to professional training through boot camps, hence promoting a new generation of tech-savvy programmers that are capable of working with codes. For SewaYou, the eradication of language barriers and fostering community building is the clearest measurement, helping more than 4000 people to connect and build meaningful relationships. Throughout the conversation, we were able to not only understand more about our guest speakers’ motivation, but also their strength, resilience, and their strategic decision-making process that brought them the success that they have today. We are incredibly grateful for the opportunities to learn more about the challenges that they faced during their time building the company, and we truly hope that the companies would continue to thrive and provide a much greater social impact to the community at large. Furthermore, we hope this event would inspire the next wave of leaders who will take the action to work on something that they love while making a positive change in other people’s lives the way they want to.
Once again, we would like to send our biggest appreciation to Yan Fan, and Philippe Khin for taking the time to share with us their valuable experiences. We would like to thank our audiences for their attentive participation and their thoughtful questions to our panelists. Additionally, we would like to thank the team and the volunteers of Social Impact Lab Japan to make this event happen. We look forward to seeing everyone soon!
