My $50,000 mistake.

I’ve never told this story to ANYONE. NOBODY.. I mean NOBODY knows about this, I’ve never told a single SOUL NOR SHOULD anyone even know about it… well besides my closest friends.. and now today I’m going to share my deepest SECRET with  you very special people.

I’m going to share HOW I fucked-up my first company in Spain ??.

Gulp.

For those of you who know me, you know my reputation. I never fuck up. I’ve made mistakes here and there but I’ve managed in my 32 years not to fuck up big time and disgrace my immigrant Taiwanese family.

I’m very passionate about social media, there’s no one crazier about social media than me in Barcelona. And if there is, please introduce me to them.

So in November 2015 when Mark Zuckerberg (My God, my lord, my savior… ) posted the first ever 360° video on his FB status update, I F. flipped!

It was a 360° immersive surfing video filmed in Tahiti. I felt like I was surfing and moving with the waves right on Facebook Newsfeed. This was it for me. This was the NEXT BIG thing.

I turned to by THEN boyfriend (now EX), “WE HAVE to do this! How do we do this? How do we make 360° videos and create virtual reality?”

This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

It was my first experience with VR right from my iPhone and I was hooked.

Facebook made experiencing VR and 360 video possible – THIS is the evolution of social – By making social media more interactive and immersive, we were going to be the FIRST production company to do it and make a millions of dollars.

So with all our enthusiasm we got started and formalized a Spanish production company in March 2016, obviously we starting without any clients nor any idea of who we were going to work with or even sell to…

Actually, in 2016 marketing directors and the majority of the Universe didn’t even know what 360° video was. But we knew we were ahead of the learning curve.

However, neither of us knew how to make a business plan, I mean. Plan? Who cares let’s just go buy all the newest equipment and start creating!!!

I was building my dream business… the one where I could wake up and work in my underwear all day. No shirt, no shoes… just manage everything from my bed!

So thanks to our first angel investor, American Express —

We invested in: the newest biggest and baddest MacbookPro direct from
Mountain View. We needed all the best software to stitch the videos and the hottest accessories and the biggest hard drive we could find. Since you know 100 seconds of 360 video is like more than 10 gigabytes, so we didn’t even know what our plan was to back any of the content up..

But we went ALLLLLLL in baby !! All or nothing! I spent all the money I had and borrowed everything I could from good old American Express. It was a lot of money for me, I’m not a crazy rich asian, in fact I was pretty broke at the time when we made the investment.

Of course, we didn’t get any insurance on our cutting edge equipment or technology. because by the time we thought of it we were already broke before we even started.

Amazing fucking news is…

We magically landed our first client to shoot an international 360° comercial for Facebook distribution. I was really fucking happy. My dreams were coming true and I was in Lalaland thinking this was way too easy! “I’m a fucking genius. We’re gonna be millionaires!”

Long story short, we shot an amazing 360° commercial for our awesome client making back half our initial investment so I was a very happy and proud Boss Lady.

During our travels back, we had all our equipment in my Sonar backpack ?

Everything was stolen.

Including all the video we shot.

Our data was not backed up, it was probably terabytes of content so it wasn’t even possible to back up in a timely manner. But yes, all our equipment in one backpack. stolen. The whole company was gone.

I was destroyed, one minute I was so high and the next, my life was falling apart. Worst part is… How do I explain this to the client? Even if they did believe me, I’d never working again. My reputation was ruined, I felt doomed.

How could I have fucked up so bad that I didn’t get insurance? Stupidest stupid thing I’ve ever done.

Lessoned learned was — make a freaking business plan before you go
on a shopping spree and get insurance on your assets!

#LearnWithDot

Thank you.