Enterprise Speaker Series: “Entrepreneurship: A Journey of Risk, Reward and a Whole Lot of Luck”

On the 14th of January 2025, Enterprise@APU hosted the Enterprise Speaker Series: “Entrepreneurship: A Journey of Risk, Reward and a Whole Lot of Luck”. The event featured Mr. Hajime Hirose from Alphaus Inc., a global tech startup founder with 30+ years of experience. His talk aimed at sparking interests in startups among the participants through sharing of journey, insights, and lessons from his startup ventures.

The session was highly interactive, as participants were engaged in fun activities and Q&A with the use of Mentimeter. They were introduced to the ins and outs of startup funding processes and stages of startup development. Mr. Hirose shared an interesting tip on creative marketing tactics known as “ice cream campaign” that successfully attracted users to sign up for app usage.

Mr. Hirose also shared about his background and success stories, about his 4 startups with one failure but 3 successes. He touched on issues he encountered such as competitors copying ideas and insufficient fundings. He also highlighted some key fundamentals of entrepreneurs’ success factors such as vision, execution, adaptability, and resilience. He advised the students to start small and scale up and with consistency to achieve results. Mr. Hirose further iterated that X-factor (luck) to succeed is a result of preparation meeting with opportunity. Prof Vinesh, Chief Innovation & Enterprise Officer of APU applauded the energy he sees within the participants and encourages them to leverage and participate in the entrepreneurship initiatives in APU. A token of appreciation was presented to Mr Hirose by Prof Vinesh.