HIKARI YOKOYAMA

TELL US ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND

Well, I grew up in a fairly normal way for the 1980s – in a split level house in the economically optimistic suburbs of Chicago. Only I was born in Japan and my dad was Japanese. And my mom was (and is) a devout Baha’i. I had that classic bicultural, biracial feeling of feeling like I never fit in and I was desperate to fit in. That took a lot of energy and lead to a lot of false starts. It was only when I finally made it to the city, to university that I felt like I could start exploring who I was without working so hard to camouflage.

TALK US THROUGH YOUR CAREER JOURNEY SO FAR…

For years I have wished I was one of those people who knew exactly what they wanted to do, and did it. When I read the Steve Jobs bio, I was heartened by the story that he took a calligraphy class in university not knowing what it would be applied to, but then it helped him to create Apple and gave him an edge over the other less aesthetically inclined computer companies of the day. Sometimes, I feel like my whole career has been a series of calligraphy classes. It’s often that I am not totally sure where each step will take me but I now see all of my various experiences and skills that I have learned dovetailing into a brilliant company.

WHAT ADVICE DO YOU HAVE FOR FELLOW FEMALE ENTREPRENEURS?

I don’t know if I am in a position to give advice to female entrepreneurs, but I would say that I’m aware now that I spent a lot of time looking for extrinsic validation in my career. Like many girls, I was brought up as a girl to be pleasing, to be polite, tidy in my appearance and look for praise to know I was doing the right thing. When I got older, I wanted to be pretty, stylish, popular and get good grades. It’s something we are all encouraged to do – we spend hours of time on apps designed to hook us into looking at the world through the quantification of extrinsic validation.

It’s hard to describe in a glib way, but making time and space to sit with yourself, to really look into the mirror, to make decisions in a non-reactive way, to prioritise your time and resource to what has meaning for you and the world at large are all things that I think entrepreneurs should do. A lot of entrepreneurs make decisions based on what will give them the most money or the most extrinsic validation. Both are factors appealing to investors, press and consumers, but if you build your business with real integrity, you have a solid rudder guide you through deep waters.

DO YOU HAVE ANY RECOMMENDATIONS THIS YEAR FOR FRIEZE?

Micheal Armitage at White Cube, Magdalena Abakanowicz at Tate Modern, ten dedicated presentations at the main fair curated by Sandhini Poddar called Indra’s Net– a term derived from Buddhist and Hindu thought and refers to an ethics of being in which an individual atom holds within it the structure of reality. The curator refers to the idea as akin to a ‘vast bejeweled net: at every nexus there is a reflective orb that mirrors and refracts every other orb in its entirety. Every part is held within the whole in a system of dependent origination. All sentient life is interconnected and interdependent; shifts to one atom subtly alter the rest.’