Hello, and welcome to the Art of Thinking Smart.
This is a program that was originally developed by David Chang at Wealth Bridge, and I've
been hosting it for some time.
I'm Michael North, and in this program we try to interview some of the leaders of Honolulu's
business and social and cultural and political communities to discover what are their secrets
of success.
What makes it possible for them to do the work that they do, both from a personal and
a professional standpoint.
So we're interested in their story and what they're doing, but we're actually trying
to get behind the scenes to understand who they are and why they're doing it.
And that's the Art of Thinking Smart.
So today our guest is Antonio Trincal, who is originally from Portugal, but he's living
now in Honolulu and running an exciting young company called You Can Event.
Now I want you to think about You Can Event for a moment and think, what could that possibly
be?
And now we're going to ask Antonio, what is that You Can Event?
Hello, Michael.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here on your show.
So basically You Can Event is an online community where brands can easily identify vendors when
organizing an event.
So for example, if you want to do an event for Think Tech Hawaii, you can find entertainers
catering venues and easily you can do your event.
So why wouldn't I go to an event organizer, an event management company that bundles all
of that together?
Yeah, because basically most of the times those event agencies are just working with
a few number of vendors.
And with us, you can find all the vendors available in Honolulu.
Okay, and you put together your own virtual team based on the recommendations that come
from your system.
Exactly.
So our customer, in a comfortable way, he just typed, I want to do an event in Honolulu
for 200 people and I might need catering venue and entertainer and our wide network of vendors,
they get back with a lot of proposals and we have a local event planner to help you
in operations, management and advertising for your event.
So do you have a kind of an eBay auction kind of thing where you hear from several different
vendors?
Yeah, I like to say like we are kind of like Uber, so the customer just send the request
and then the vendors get back with proposals, with bids.
Okay, so Uber for parties, Uber for conventions, Uber for business meetings, Uber for weddings.
Right now we are not focusing on that market, but soon we will be.
I think that will be called like you can marry.
So you can, all of that.
You can, exactly.
Okay, that's your brand.
So how did you get into this?
You just like to party and you want to help your friends to party better?
So as you said, I'm originally from Portugal and on the Latin European culture, we have
a lot of, we are like we have a lot of pleasure on the art of restoration and tourism and
events and Cece was a young boy around my 15 years old.
I work on the bartending industry, nightlife industry and then I belong to a non-profit
organization called Azituna and I did a lot of, say that word again?
Yeah, Azituna.
Azituna.
Yeah, it's similar than tuna, the fish, but it's called Azituna and basically we did
a lot of international tours, we played all over the theaters in Europe.
And so every time that we was playing on those theaters or organizing international tours
or doing events on the nightlife industry, we had this question, how should we do an
event?
Where should we find the vendors?
How can we negotiate with vendors easily to do an event?
So that's how it came, already.
Yeah, especially in a big city like Lisbon, for example, there's so many options and
unless you produced an event successfully before you really don't know where to start.
Exactly.
And you could end up spending a lot of money for somebody else to advise you on how to
do it.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Okay, so this is outsourcing and pushing the expertise out to the edges so that people
can access the knowledge and contacts that they want as opposed to getting it from single
sources.
So you said you were a bartender, you were like a Tom Cruise in cocktail?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I want to see a trick or two.
Yeah, if I have a shaker here, I would like to do it.
I could do it with a piece of paper.
We do this again.
Yeah.
You have to bring some shakers.
Yeah, yeah.
So basically, I love the cocktail culture.
I have a friend that we worked together, called Antonio as well, and we worked together
for a lot of years and we had a great pleasure on the art of the cocktail production.
So what was it that turned the crank in you to, oh, about being a bartender?
Yeah, exactly.
There must have been something, is it to help you to get girls?
So yeah.
I'm sure that didn't hurt.
Yeah, it's perfect.
We can give a lot of different pleasures to women.
There must be something deeper to sustain the interest.
Yeah.
The thing is that I always had a real passion about the entertainment industry.
So since I was a young boy, I was the guy that was the actor on the school, was singing
a lot of songs with my colleagues, so I always had a passion for entertainment industry.
So when I got into the nightlife industry, I saw that I had a good way to build relationships
with people, because when you are serving on a bar, you tie strong relationships with
your customers, with the people that surrounds you, and at the same point, creating a personal
experience for the people that you are talking to, the way that you talk, the way that you
do your cocktail, the way that you create your own show, is perfect to bring you soft
skills in terms of entertainment and selling as well.
So it'd be safe to say that you have the soul and the heart of a networker, of a relationship
builder, and it really turns you on to see people come together and form.
And my real pleasure, I love to gather people, that's why we are doing You Can Event.
I worry a lot about people.
I'm the guy that, if I'm going to a restaurant, the person that I really care about is the
guy that is serving the food.
A lot of times, and like a lot of people that know me, know that, that I'm going to the
restaurant and I steal the bartender or the employees and I bring them to our party saying,
oh, no, now we have to join the party with us.
Now we have to drink with us.
So you must be a good tipper.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm always...
Somewhere in there, there's a feeling like people are not connected enough.
People are missing opportunities.
There's energy that is left unmatched, and you feel like you can be the spark plug that
brings people together, is that it?
I have a nice vision about that.
I always say to my team members and co-founder that I came from the future.
And in the future, I'm known as the god of celebration, so I gather a lot of people.
So a person that gathers the entire world with celebration and events.
So I always use this metaphor about what we want to achieve, and so we want to really
connect people and we believe that in a world full of technology, having like personal relationships
and connections with real people physically on site, it's the future, you know, to ensure
the humankind.
So we're not going to go completely virtual and just live as a simulation in a...
No, I don't believe because we human beings, we have like...
We have two sides on our brain, like the side that is disruptive and wants to create massive
evolution, but on the same point, we care about keeping the nature as we know, right?
For example, you can see that now we are caring a lot about the environment and the foods
and the organic foods, you go to the supermarket and you see a lot of those things.
And I believe that the people that are doing that is because we know that we have to stop
in some way the massive growth that the earth is facing.
So in a sense, you're using the tools of cyberspace to bring people together better in human
space.
Exactly.
So the easiness of technology can empower the real connection, the physical connection.
Okay, so there's this young bartender who's just mixing drinks and smiling and having
your time with people and introducing and it's somewhere there must have been a seed,
like when you were 18 when you were doing that, 20 years old.
Exactly.
So somewhere the seed got planted in young Antonio Trincal.
Maybe from your father, your mother, a mentor, a teacher.
What's your earliest recollection of the energy that became Yucan event?
Yes, so I have like one important moment on my life that was created by my father that
basically he offered me like a trip on my 18 years of birthday and I traveled to New
York City with him.
And when I arrived in the United States, the feeling that I had was, okay, everything
that I see in the movies, it's real.
So that whole Tom Cruise thing was actually real.
And when I felt that the movie thing, what happened on the movies is real in the United
States, I felt that I can be the actor of the movie.
So when I felt that, I decided that I will have to do something really big to the world.
So you followed a very interesting path from your beginnings in Lisbon.
I think a few years ago you started working with an incubator type company that made some
investments.
You went to one of these entrepreneurial kind of gatherings where you get to pitch and you
won that or you got some recognition from that and then you bounced through to an event
in New York and you got more visibility from that.
Can you describe the progression that you made?
Okay, so before I answer that question, our objective since the beginning is to be a quarter
in the United States because we have the biggest event cities in the world.
Honolulu, Los Angeles, New York City are the main hubs of events and entertainment in the
world.
And so on the beginning of our journey in Lisbon, our startup was incubated on Startup
Lisboa that is a really famous incubator in Europe, one of the best and we had a lot
of events on the week and I had to do a lot of networking, a lot of pitch sessions and
that allowed me to connect with companies, with customers like Microsoft, Primark, Merike
and many more.
Interesting.
So what was your experience with Microsoft for example?
Yeah, so Microsoft, we just partnered with them to do a big event on their headquarters
and we have done like, it's called a tech meetup where we gather a lot of companies
from Portugal to meet disruptive ideas that are being done by the startups in Portugal.
Okay, so Microsoft headquarters, they have everything for us.
Microsoft has a headquarters in Lisbon.
Or just Iberia or for all of Europe?
No, it's for the Iberia, yeah.
Okay.
So Portugal and Spain.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Oh, that must have been fantastic.
Exactly, perfect.
Wow.
So then you got spotted by Blue Startups, which is one of the elite incubators I think
in America, if not in the world.
Top 20.
Yeah, really.
It's amazing for such a small city and out in the middle of the Pacific where nobody
notices us on a global picture.
It's amazing that there's such talent and they spotted you and we're going to go into
a little bit of the details of that on the other side of this break with Antonio Trincal.
Thank you.
And we're back with Antonio Trincal and we're talking a little bit more about Blue Startups
and Honolulu.
Yeah, Antonio, you're a long way from Lisbon.
I'm sure you heard about Hawaii and Honolulu and you thought about Mai Thais and grass
skirts and sand and sun and so on.
Did you ever think that you were going to come here and organize a company?
That is a curious question.
So first, Hawaii was a dream for me, since I was a young boy, being here, it's a dream.
And second, I believe that Hawaii Texan and Hawaii as a hub for entrepreneurs is perfect
to build your culture.
So the first reason that we decided to come to Honolulu was because I wanted to build
a culture on our team, the values, the mission, the higher purpose.
And Hawaii, it's the best place for that because of the Aloha spirit.
So I believe that in the future, a lot of good companies will come to Hawaii to build
a culture to define the values because this is really important on your team.
And after that, of course, they will move to San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City
because of the market industry.
But on the first stage, building the culture, developing your product, build an MVP, Honolulu
is one of the best places.
And it's a gateway to Asia, too.
Exactly.
The biggest markets.
Exactly.
So I want to break from this subject completely and look at a piece of video that came from
about five years ago in an earlier stage of the company.
Can we bring up that video?
It's an event video from Lisbon.
So talk us through.
What are we looking at here?
So that's our non-profit organization where I met my co-founder.
Azaituna.
Azaituna.
Yeah.
And we organize a lot of events.
This event is called SELTA, is one of the biggest events in Europe.
It brings more than 10,000 people on the weekend and involves all the Portuguese scene and
student community.
So it's really big.
We bring a lot of famous artists.
You will see further on the video, the theater, the music, the lighting, the audio visuals.
It's really, really, really engaging.
So did you organize all aspects of this, the tickets, the program?
Precisely this festival, I organized with my co-founder, João.
Here you can see the theater.
I organized with my co-founder, João, and like I said, it's a huge event.
It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
It's a big event.
You will see the theater further.
Yeah.
I'm familiar with the management and I know what it takes to make something like this happen.
Yeah.
Exactly.
You see the theater?
What theater is this?
It's called Teatro Circo.
It's in Braga.
It's really, really big.
I think that won a reward for being one of the best theaters in the world.
It's similar to one theater in Paris, really, really.
So that kind of represents the apex of what you guys want to help people to coordinate.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Pretty much everything that people do is going to be smaller than that.
Yeah, exactly.
It could be a really small event, but even a small one needs a bunch of different aspects
all of course.
So let's go back a little bit further.
We were talking about what it takes for Antonio to be Antonio and I expected that somebody
who started out as a bartender and has kind of freelanced his way through incubators and
so on would be kind of a non-linear thinker, but you're not, right?
Can you tell us about your day and how it begins and how it ends and how you manage
it?
So my daily basis is built on this sentence, I want to be the best.
So I have strong methods during my day to keep my fresh mind and my body healthy.
So every day in the morning I wake up at 6.30, I drink a glass of water with apple cider
vinegar and a little bit of pink Himalayan salt to keep the body detoxified.
And then I go further and I drink right now here in Anululu, a cup of Hawaiian spirulina.
It's algae, it's really, really cool.
And then I have my breakfast.
Usually I eat things without gluten because gluten hurts a lot.
I eat things like coconut and a lot of healthy things.
And then I move forward with my daily meeting with my team.
I speak with my team, I share like the objectives for the team.
And then on my lunch I try always to heal as healthy as much as I can.
And then on the end of the day I do sports.
So between 6 to 8 p.m. I try to do my daily sports.
We have lots of options here because it's always summertime here.
It's perfect.
So do you keep track of things on a piece of paper or on an app?
So I'm developing like a method that basically I do these three things.
So every Sunday I grab a piece of paper, white paper, and I write down a cross, okay?
And I write like three themes of my life.
You can event my professional area, yeah, so exactly.
So you can event, then my personal life, personal, and then sports, okay?
And then I do the weekly preparation of everything.
So I just define like, okay, for you can event, I will do this, this, this, the follow-up
for this customer, the meeting with that customer, whatever.
And then for personal, I have to talk with my father, with my mother, with my friends.
I have to-
With your six girlfriends.
Yeah.
Try to keep track of them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have a Portugal in the United States.
Yeah.
So and then the sports.
So I want to practice everyday sports and I want to do that.
After doing that preparation, I put everything on my calendar because we are not productive
with to-do lists.
We are productive with everything scheduled.
And the final piece of this puzzle is that every day, I have like on my laptop sticky
notes, okay?
And every day, I do the history of my day.
So I talk with that customer and he said that he's not able right now to meet with
me or I close the deal or I will have an interview and all of those records, I type on the sticky
notes.
Okay.
So after the meeting, I can compare my brainstorming, my scheduled tasks, and then the follow-up
of those tasks.
So that leads into the next day.
I don't miss anything.
It's perfect.
So this is-
I don't know if we can catch this on the monitor here.
This is Antonio's technique.
You see, there's the event, there's the personal, there's the sports, and there's a calendar
that ties them all together.
That's it.
When do you do the wrap-up of how it all worked out relative to how you planned?
This technique I learned from Darren Hardy.
He's a big international mentor and I just learned from him, he thought to us, and it's
perfect.
Okay.
That's very useful.
I'm sure everybody will have their own variation on that.
And I'm able to speak with anyone in the show if they want to ask me, how do I manage that?
Right.
So, talk a little bit about Blue Startups and what the experience has been like.
I spoke with Chanoa yesterday.
I asked her to refer to us, one of their best young companies who like to be on the art
of thinking smart, and she came back in half an hour and said, Antonio is ready.
So what has been your experience just across the street here?
So it's been amazing, you know, like all the workshops, all the mentors, like you sharing
every day, you're practicing every day like your company, getting your pitch more accurate,
going to customers, managing your team is so intense, but at the same point so valuable
that this was our best decision.
So you're part of what they call the ninth cohort, which means there's a group of companies,
a variable number, six, eight, or companies or so, and this is the ninth wave of those
companies over the past few years.
And I think we have here a slide that tells us about an upcoming event on July the 7th,
where you can come and meet Antonio Trincal and his brothers and sisters in the ninth
cohort.
And out of that, well, Guy Kawasaki, who is one of the gods of the Apple universe, will
be there as a speaker, very excited to see him again, and he's an amazing, an amazing
person who has such a global vision.
So I want to encourage everybody to come if you can and see that event with Antonio and
Guy Kawasaki, and just understand a little bit more about blue startups, because they're
always bringing in new people, right?
They're always like six months or less away from bringing, starting a new cohort, and
they're always looking for great new ideas.
So let's say we're 10 years in the future, and UCANN event has accomplished everything
that you want to accomplish.
What will that final vision look like for you?
Doing an event on Mars.
We will be the first brand of doing an event.
That's too bad David Bowie is gone, if we could take him.
But basically, we have to win all the industry sectors of our industry.
So sporting entertainment events, corporate events, webbing, bartending, nightlife industry,
everything.
So are you going to do an Olympics or something like that?
All the Oscars, Victory Secrets show, Super Bowl, that's our vision.
We will be the platform for doing all the events in the world, but in terms of branding
and awareness and creating beautiful experiences, we want to do those events.
I'm looking forward to seeing and I'm looking forward to going.
We have Antonio's name and contact email here, if you're interested in being in touch
with him more, and go to ucanevent.com to see the whole program in action.
So I want to thank everyone very much for tuning into this Art of Thinking Smart, and
until next time, from Think Tech Hawaii in Honolulu, Aloha.
