Told by a Teen / Female Founder Stories
Little Moons – From her parents’ bakery to worldwide mochi sensation
The conversation
Vivien Wong grew up in her parents’ bakery and turned mochi ice cream into something you can buy in every supermarket in the country.
The year it went everywhere
There was a stretch where demand went vertical and the manufacturing could not keep up. Vivien talked about that honestly, which is rarer than it should be. The version you normally hear stops at the point where it went viral and skips the chaos immediately afterwards.
Lonely at the top, and saying so
She said being an entrepreneur is quite lonely when you’re at the top. Then she said something I did not expect at all: sometimes it’s all right to show vulnerability and say to the team, I have no idea.
I had assumed the job was to always look like you knew.
No one judges you for your grades
I am in the middle of exams that feel like they decide everything, so this one landed hard. Vivien’s point is that the beauty of being an entrepreneur is that nobody asks. What they ask is whether you can actually do the thing. It’s all about execution, she said. You can have great ideas, but if you can’t bring them to life it is’nt going to happen.
Her answer on success was the luxury of having control of her own time. Not the size of the business.
What I took from it
Time is the one thing that as a young person I have more of.
Vivien said no one judges you for your grades once you’re building something, and I’ve been turning that over.
I’m in the middle of exams that feel like they decide everything. They do decide some things. They don’t decide as much as the room I’m sitting in seems to think.
She didn’t get straight As either.
