It really starts with finding that confidence in yourself and being an entrepreneur is a lot of times very lonely. You spend all day by yourself. I spend like sometimes, especially with the pandemic, like weeks without seeing anybody working on weekends, because I don't know what my boundaries and limits are. And so being an entrepreneur can be lonely. And it's really important to find a community of people who understand what you're going through, knowing that each of you are working hard solo on your business but knowing that there's a community around you that are still going through similar steps as you of creating the mission statement, values, launching a product or whatever it is that you're doing.
So just being sure people know that they have others that they can lean on. And that through that finding that community, people can gain confidence in themselves and know that what they're doing is what they should be doing. That they're passionate about. My friend Christie Ishi moved back to the states during the pandemic, and that actually allowed us is start talking to each other more over Zoom. We're both entrepreneurs and didn't have 9-5 schedules or any support system around building our own businesses. So we started just having our own weekly Zoom calls to support each other wherever we needed in terms of building our businesses. And it just got us to a point where we thought this would be amazing to have this kind of community and support for other women who are going through what we were as well.
So that inspired us to start the Brave & Bold Mastermind program for Asian women entrepreneurs. And that led to us creating a 3 month container cohort with their first group being three entrepreneurs. Each of them coming to us with vague ideas or solid ideas about how they wanted to turn their passion projects into full-time gig and going forward with it. By the end of the three months, all three of them had launched their website or their product. And it was really exciting to see them and help them guide through understanding what their own values and passions were and how the business operation side of it goes as well. In Asia and specifically Japan, it's a really different market for women, especially with the gender gap index for Japan and Japanese women seeing career as a different kind of viewpoint than having this work life balance.
So we thought it was really important to support women through that journey and also to know that whether they're wanting to start a new career after a 10-20 year gap or thinking like this idea that they have can turn into a business I think there isn't a lot of support around that in Japan yet. So being able to encourage them and empower them through our own experiences of doing that over the last few years and giving them the tools and resources that we had and continue to have and to give them that support as well.
And it's not just the business side of it, but also helping them grow as individual people to gain more confidence in themselves and aligning their values with how they want to continue on with their careers going forward..