Written by Devin Yoshimoto

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Maxims for Revolutionists

I was nervous.

I had never conducted an interview before. I was not exactly sure which questions I was going to ask, and in which order I was going to ask them. All I knew was that I was graduating soon and, in the future, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to have the opportunity to meet and learn from as many entrepreneurs as I could.

The first person I was going to interview was Jeannette Hereniko, the founding director of the Hawaii International Film Festival and creator of the website asiapacificfilms.com. I could not have been more excited.

Knowing that I wanted to make a good impression, I had to be prepared. I had done all the research a couple days before, prepared my list of questions and wrote a rough outline of how I wanted the interview to go. I even prepared my camera phone to record the audio so I would not miss a single word. I expected everything to go as I had planned.

About half way through the hour, thoroughly engaged in the conversation, I realized that I was not following my outline at all. On top of that, my phone’s auto-sleep function went off and stopped recording after only ten minutes. Not wanting to break the flow of conversation, I abandoned all my attempts to follow my outline, and did not bother with resetting my camera phone. I improvised the rest of the interview and adapted the questions to what I was most interested in asking at that moment. By the end of the hour, all I had were my hand-written notes and the satisfaction of meeting a distinguished local entrepreneur.

Almost nothing went the way I had planned yet I felt I gained much more value improvising than what I might have received had I tried to desperately stick to my prepared outline. When things went wrong, I chose to be flexible and adapted, while always keeping in mind why I was there – and that was to learn. Coincidentally, those were the same guiding principles Jeannette told me she had learned to follow throughout her own experience as an entrepreneur.

Jeannette Hereniko seems to embody the entrepreneurial spirit. She is a visionary who dreams big but also has the ability to take action and execute. When I asked her for the most important character traits that helped her get to where she is, she told me that you have to have passion, tenacity, perseverance and focus … but you must also be flexible and willing to adapt to change, while still staying true to your larger goals. In fact, her new venture, asiapacificfilms.com grew out of forward thinking and Jeannette’s ability to see the direction of the industry and her ability to adapt.

Jeannette served as the director of the Hawaii International Film Festival for 16 years with the vision of connecting film makers from around Asia and the Pacific to viewers in the West through hosting an annual film festival in Hawaii. Following the huge success and growth of HIFF, she chose to expand her original vision from just an Asia-Pacific focus to providing an outlet for under represented film makers from cultures around the world through the internet.

However, during this time, the internet had not developed the infrastructure needed to share such a high volume of video with such a large number of people in an efficient way. So, Jeannette invested much of her own capital into building an online database of films that would later become the basis for asiapacificfilms.com. Over the next couple years, with the development of the internet as a cheaper, further reaching distribution channel, she was able to adapt to the new market circumstances and share her database with subscribers worldwide.

Throughout the website’s initial stages of development, she received a lot of funding from governmental and non-governmental organizations. However, she soon realized she would need to start seeking outside funding in order to grow.

She started writing the business plan in 2007 and started pitching her ideas to local investors. She contacted the Hawaii Angels and was invited by them to make a 20 minute presentation. She had been writing and revising her business plan for 6-8 months previously multiple times. However, she was rejected by the angels on her first try. The angels offered to work with her for another 6 months to improve her planning and presentations. She presented a second time, and managed to secure a total of $300,000 of funding from angel investors on Oahu and Maui.

Today, Jeannette is in the process of finishing up presentations for a second round of funding from new venture capital firms.

The ability to envision new market trends and to adapt to new circumstances has been the key factor in allowing Jeannette to move forward into the new era of online media — with her dream of sharing stories with the world. Her journey as an entrepreneur was inspiring for me to hear in person.

At the end of the interview, all I walked away with were two-pages of barely coherent notes. The interview had gone off track, my camera phone did not get any usable audio and I was not sure whether or not I would be able to translate that experience into a single coherent message.

But sometimes – most of the time – things do not go according to plan. I realized that I had to work with what I had, and maybe, walk away with a valuable lesson in adaptation.

Jeannette Hereniko was awarded the Entrepreneur of the Year award in digital media for 2009 by the Hawaii Venture Capital Association.

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