Domo! Alvin Lai desu!

I can’t believe I’ve had the chance to step afoot in to my favourite web based IM company Meebo in Castro, Mountain View!

Imagine! Having AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber all in one instant messenger program! How convenient is that!?

And we’ve got to chat with the Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg! Woo!

And here’s what I gathered:

Meet get to know people who have complementary skills to yours! In school, we tended mix around with peers who are very much like us, and as we think the similar thoughts, I reckon there probably was little out of the box thinking.. Get to know people who have skills that complement yours and that can probably improve on your weakness!

Seth isn’t really a techie person, but he got to know his techie friends’ friends and together he started a company with them! Awesome isn’t it?

Autonomy from Venture Capitalist is great to have, imagine the flexibility to make strategic decisions that could make or break the business!

Launch first, do what you yourself want first, without thinking what others say, get some traffic then get advice and comments! Otherwise you might just never get started!

Be clear of what you want and be prepared before opportunities come your way!

You NEED VCs because you need them to hire people!

Revenge is the wrong answer. STOP. Cut losses early. Ask! Why do you feel that way?

Respect people and have intellectual conversations.

Approach job interviews like a conversation, it’s just conversation about business!

He joined IBM and learnt a whole lot about business – his advice to us is to join a startup or a business before starting our own, because there are so many aspects of a business to learn about, a little contrary to what Farzad saying that the best way to learn is to do your own startup. As they say, there are many ways to get to the final destination!

Startups!

• Be really flexible, let chaos and ambiguity be the norm!
• Be a self starter, just do stuff that helps!
• The less time you need to be managed, the more you’re actually helping and doing things!

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook is smart and he surrounds himself with smart people.

Got more to add? Fire away with comments!

Thanks to Esther and Wee Li, a few of us will have the opportunity to have a lunch session with “Deep” Nishar - The Director of Product Management at Google. It will be interesting to see what we can learn from him! More on Nishar’s Profile can be found at the Silicon Valley Webguild site.

Wee Li’s in the process of fixing an appointment with Vipul Gupta, a Distinguished Engineer in Sun Microsystem. It’s another chance for NUSEA members to go over to Sun after our last visit. Looking forward to meeting Vipul soon!

It was my second day in Silicon Valley and off I went to visit Logitech, one of the premier companies in personal peripherals for computers. Guerrino De Luca, CEO of Logitech shared with us the company’s business and personal experiences as a CEO.

He told us about some of the key factors a company should keep in mind before venturing into a new business were firstly, to understand customers’ needs and secondly, to have one’s own cost-saving model to face competition. He illustrated it with one of the key challenges Logitech faced in 1998-2000 in the scanner market with the launch of hand scanners. The popularity of standard printer-like scanners which were cheaper than Logitech’s hand scanners increased tremendously. And henceforth, Logitech felt that they should have known the market well and been ready to face competition at that time. He even shared with us the new fields Logitech is exploring into which are mainly digital music and home. He said that the success of the company depends on having right people at the right places and all of them from engineers to marketers should participate in the innovation of the product.

Being an Italian himself, upon being asked he told us that being Singaporeans, we all have a high success rate in setting up companies or finding a job in global environment of Silicon Valley because of our ability to speak two languages. This skill enables us to think deeply in various matters and gives us an edge over Americans who know just one language.

With insightful questions and answers the visit ended with a group photo with the CEO. There was a lot more to the trip and those who missed can actually see a broadcast which would be posted on NUSEA’s site soon. That’s all from my side. This is Gundeep saying Chao!!