| Childhood Dream |
Riho Nagaoka
My dream was to be able to speak English fluently and work abroad. I've always loved foreign characters and anime, so my first goal was to be able to speak English. I remember dreaming of becoming a career woman who would be successful in America in the future.
Tsubasa Ishizuka
When I was a child, I wanted to work in the legal profession and become a lawyer. In Japan, which boasts a 99.9% conviction rate, I felt that lawyers were the last bastion of justice for defendants. As an adult, the situation has changed, but I am taking the patent attorney exam and striving to become a bastion for the company. |
| Motivation, Goals, and Ideal World |
Riho Nagaoka
My mother was the reason I wanted to start a business. "I wanted to do that" was a common phrase that my mother used to say while she was raising her child as a full-time housewife. My mother had many dreams since she was a student, but she married my father and gave birth soon after entering the workforce, so she was unable to achieve them, and I think she would often say this. Seeing my mother like that, when I was in junior high school, I strongly felt that "I don't want to have regrets like my mother" and "I want to decide my own life for myself." When I was about to enter high school, my father was transferred to Thailand, and I attended an international school. I was able to choose my own combination of classes each semester, and I learned the joy of making decisions with my own will and the importance of taking responsibility for myself. I became clearly conscious of starting a business when I was working for my second company after entering the workforce. I felt a strong sense of disparity with my experience in high school, and wanted to create my own life from now on, so I started my first company. My goal as an entrepreneur is to become a female entrepreneur who embodies the idea that women can be active in society regardless of their stage of life. I believe that there are still many women in today's Japanese society who are forced to stop their careers due to marriage, childbirth, etc. In such a society, I want to embody through my own growth as a female entrepreneur that starting a business is one of the options for career development. I also want to expand the community of female entrepreneurs and promote female entrepreneurship. Through my own experience of starting a business from scratch, I would like to create a world where there are fewer physical and psychological barriers to starting a business.
Tsubasa Ishizuka
My grandfather, who is the owner of the company, raised me as the breadwinner of the family, and I went to a private school until junior high school and grew up as a so-called rich girl, but my parents divorced when I was in high school and my life changed completely. With no food to eat tomorrow, we moved from house to house, and my mother, who had no skills or qualifications, chose to become a taxi driver, making use of the only driver's license she had. I went to a part-time high school. I managed to get into university, but then my mother became depressed and could not work, and I began a life of supporting my tuition and household finances alone. I worked hard for nearly 10 years from high school to graduating from university, gritting my teeth and completing graduate school. What I felt at the time was that a person's life can change greatly depending on their career and skills. Like my mother, I had a 15-year gap in my career and no qualifications or skills, so I had no choice but to become a female driver, which was rare at the time, and I also had no funds to study and struggled more than people from ordinary families to go to university. Looking back on my own experience, I wanted to create a society where opportunities are sure to come your way as long as you have the desire to learn, so I started my own company. The first company I started supports women's participation in the workforce by training female digital transformation talent and producing female entrepreneurs. At Favo Technologies, we launched a service that allows anyone, regardless of gender, to acquire English skills and work as an English talent if they have the desire to learn. All of my motivation comes from my experiences in my teens and twenties. I will use the hardships I experienced back then to ensure that Japan remains an equally-opportunistic country for young people in the future, and I will make sure to make the English conversation service "DAIAL" a success, become the youngest woman to be listed on the stock market, and become a role model that shows that you can rise up even from the bottom. |
Riho Nagaoka / Tsubasa Ishizuka