Letters to my younger self
Inspired by Letters of The Law
November 2016
This is a letter to my 22-year-old self right after I came up with the
the initial idea for Good For Food.
Hey Rayner,
It’s me — well, you, I mean future you.
I see you’re getting really excited with that idea of yours. A mobile
platform where restaurants can sell their surplus food at a 50%
discount near closing hours? Why hasn’t anyone thought of this? It
looks so obvious!
Restaurants get to sell off their surplus food that would otherwise go
to waste, customers get a hearty meal at a highly discounted rate. It’s
a win-win situation!
You’re probably on top of the world right now and think you’re going to be
the next Mark Zuckerberg. Well sorry to burst your bubble bro but you’re
going to find out real soon that the idea is not as great as you think it is.
Don’t believe me? Well, you’ll see soon enough. I’m future you,
remember? I know all too well how all of this plays out.
Your future self,
Rayner
February 2017 — dealing with rejection
This is a letter written to my 22-year-old self after building the mobile
app and after spending a week making the rounds at restaurants in
the Jurong East area, chasing down restaurant managers and
eagerly sharing my idea with them.
Get used to this feeling, Rayner. Getting hit with rejection after
rejection sucks — I’m not going to lie.
From these rejections, you will learn one of the most valuable lessons
about building a startup.
Validate, validate, validate!
First step to building any solution and company is to first understand
whether the solution is even solving a problem. You may think it
does, but do your potential customers? Is the problem painful enough
that they will be willing to pay for it? Before investing time and
resources to build the solution, it’s worthwhile to first talk to your
potential customers and to validate your assumptions.
But more than that, you will learn a valuable lesson that no school, no
teacher and no class can teach you — how to deal with rejection. Get
used to it because you’re going to be feeling like this a lot as we
continue this journey. We’re innovators, disruptors, of course people
are going to think our ideas won’t work. I know it sounds daunting, but
I can tell you it only gets worse from here on out. You just need to
learn how to get better at dealing with it.
Now that you have greater clarity about what you need to do to tackle
the problem and an even greater hunger to get things right, let’s do
what we always do — pick ourselves up and come back stronger.
Don’t be too hard on yourself. It’s our first foray into starting a
company anyway. We’ll get there bro, we just need to be patient.
From your future self,
Rayner
June 2017 — define success for yourself
This is a letter written to my 23-year-old self when I was sitting in
finance classes and realising investment banking is no longer for me.
I’m currently toying with the idea of pausing my studies and going full
time into my company.
Hey Rayner,
You’re at a pivotal moment right now. In the course of your decision-
making, you will be faced with many naysayers:
“Why don’t you finish your degree first?”
“97% of all startups fail. Why don’t you work and gain some
experience first?”
“You think you Steve Jobs ah? Please la, how many Steve Jobs are
there in the world?”
In this period when you’re deciding whether to take the plunge, you’ll
care a lot about other people’s opinions of you. There will be days of
self-doubt that hang over you like a cloud.
Am I doing the right thing?
What will people say if I fail?
If I go back to school after this falls apart, I’ll be the guy who couldn’t
make it and ended up graduating 2 years after everyone else.
These thoughts that linger in your mind can be dangerous and
draining — but only if you let them be.
Rayner, of all the things you will learn in your entrepreneurial journey,
this is probably going to be the biggest. Don’t let other people’s opinion of you cripple you; you do you. Don’t let society or anyone
define what success looks like for you. You define what success
looks like for yourself!
You may not realise this now but you will realise that you don’t want
the same things your friends want so why let them judge you based
on their metrics of success?
They want a stable job and a five-figure monthly paycheck to be able
to take month-long holidays. While there is absolutely nothing wrong
with desiring these things, remember that you’re after something
completely different. You are after legacy and impact. You want to be
remembered as an entrepreneur who built solutions that better the
lives of people and Mother Nature.
This may not mean much or make much sense to you today but I
need you to trust me on this. It is not how much money you make that
will make you happy, it is how you make it. You will realise that even
though you will be drawing a really a low salary from the company,
the process of building Good For Food will make you so much
happier than you’ve ever been in your life.
Your future self,
Rayner
June 2019 — realising how blessed we are
This is a letter written to my 25-year-old self after closing our 2nd investment round, 2 years after I went full time on the business.
What a huge milestone Rayner!
In the frenzy to stay afloat and build the business, it’s easy to forget
how far you’ve come and, more importantly, the people who believe
in your dream and have come alongside you in the journey. It’s one
thing for people to offer to mentor you; it’s another thing for people to
put their money where their mouth is and support you — this 2nd
investment round is a further validation of the work you are doing.
Rayner, I hope you realise how blessed you are. In the startup world,
you’re constantly reminded of how hard it is for early-stage companies to raise even one round of investment and yet, you’ve
been blessed enough to raise two.
Now don’t get ahead of yourself, we still have so much work to do.
But I do hope that you’ll remember that we’ve been so fortunate and
blessed to be able to pursue our dreams.
Let’s be honest here, it is a huge privilege to even be able to dream.
Many others in the world don’t have this privilege because they have
to constantly worry about day to day needs such as food and water.
We not only have the privilege to dream because of the situation
we’re in but to also have the resources to actually pursue it, assured
in the knowledge that if we fail, we have a back-up plan to fall back
on.
What more can I say except that we must remember that in all we do,
because of how blessed and privileged we are, we need to always try
to bring society along with us. We owe it to them. We’re indebted to
them.
Your future self,
Rayner
