Inquiries from High School Students

Recently, our company's contact form received several messages from high school students in a short span — an unusual occurrence.

Day-to-day, a startup like ours gets a steady stream of inquiries. Honestly, we can't give thoughtful responses to all of them, and some are just noise — unsolicited sales pitches.

But high school students taking the initiative to reach out to a niche startup like ours, and to someone with my background — that struck me as genuinely rare, and I'll admit it made me happy.

Looking back at my own high school years, I was consumed by rugby every day and never thought about engaging with the broader world.

That contrast made me curious: why did they reach out? What were they hoping to talk about? I was genuinely interested, so I agreed to speak with them.

"I Want to Become Someone"

When we actually talked, I was struck by how seriously they were thinking.

One student had already started their own business and asked specifically about how to scale into retail at the speed 10X had managed. Another said they'd discovered 10X through a NewsPicks video and reached out because they were feeling uncertain about what they wanted to do with their life.

Both of them — honestly, impressive.

What stayed with me most was the conversation with the second student, who was searching for what to aim for.

He'd been watching peers his age build companies on social media — startups in their teens are apparently not unusual anymore — and told me he felt a strong sense of inadequacy when comparing himself to them.

I told him: "That anxious feeling is entirely valid for where you are, and it matters."

At the same time, I said the important thing is not to discharge that anxiety too quickly — to keep it somewhere inside you.

Comparing yourself to someone else at a single point in time, and feeling elation or defeat based on that — that's just looking at a single dot. It doesn't tell you anything useful.

Everyone has their own unevenness. What I'm bad at, someone else is good at, and vice versa.

When you're young, it's okay to feel a lot of anxiety. That anxiety is exactly what becomes the engine that pushes you to try things, take one more step.

What matters most in that process, I think, is genuinely going all-in each time you try.

Only when you've truly given everything can you see the result clearly enough to know whether that thing is a strength or a weakness, something you love or something you don't. Half-hearted trial and error won't show you the contours of who you are.

Pulling Opportunities Toward You

When you keep repeating that cycle — giving your all to each experiment — somewhere along the way, there might come a moment when "what you love" and "what you're good at" overlap, and that combination happens to meet an opportunity the world is asking for.

Looking around at people my age, the ones who've found that kind of happy alignment are not the majority. Luck plays a big role.

There is only one way to improve your odds: take more first steps, and go all-in each time.

Try a lot of things. Fall down. Get hurt. When you've moved yourself to a different position, the scenery you see and feel from where you stand will definitely change.

The people around you change, and the ways they influence you change too. Your environment changes.

And as the environment changes, the next opportunity that comes your way changes.

Repeat this stubbornly, and maybe — just maybe — you'll encounter the place, the opportunity, the business that fits you perfectly. That's what I shared with them.

Finding the Path

Looking back, the moment I could honestly say "this is the path I'm going down" didn't come early for me. I think I was in my late twenties.

I started my career at a trading company, then moved to an NPO focused on disaster recovery. Through a project with Google, I viscerally felt that "software products have the power to change the world in a real way" — and that became a major turning point. A few more years passed before I founded 10X with my own risk on the line.

Even after founding, it took a while before I felt like I'd truly found "my business." The Stailer business — the one I feel that way about — was sparked by a chance encounter with a particular customer, a deal that could only have come together at exactly that moment.

There was no way to plan for it. It has zero reproducibility.

I had done some preparation, but essentially: a window opened suddenly, I jumped through it, and what was on the other side happened to feel like my path — a lucky punch.

As a Father

There's a strong paternal side to me. More than anything, I hope my own children will find a path that fits them — however narrow it might be.

But I also know well that it's heavily shaped by luck, and that the search itself is hard.

As a parent, I can't guide them to it. All I can do is hope they find it through their own efforts.

With the high school students who reached out, I spoke to them in the same spirit as I would my own children.

Hold onto that anxiety and that uncertainty. For now, just take one full step toward what's right in front of you.

That willingness, that energy — it's a precious resource that gradually diminishes as you get older.

Being confused, just trying things anyway — all of it is a privilege unique to this stage of life. Use it to the fullest.

That's what I think.