Domo! Alvin Lai desu!

With just 3 months left in the Valley, it’s a good time to look back.

Very different from a regular student exchange program, groups of NUS Overseas Colleges participants in Silicon Valley actually get a job working full time for a salary, get together to form households, rent full sized houses, buy their own cars, pay their own bills, you get the idea, it’s very much like settling down in America, for real.

The NUS Overseas Colleges program is quoted from its website to “infuse a spirit of enterprise into NUS education, providing NUS students with a globally-oriented educational experience.”

Indeed, that is true, with so many valuable components painstakingly pieced together over the years and only made possible with the work done by the people before us, with staff like Jupe forming strategic alliances with high technology startup companies for internships and previous batches of NOC students handing down contacts and relationships of worthy organizations and individuals.

Because of this we are very privileged to be able to have very awe-inspiring mentors like CEOs from Digg, Meebo, Google and so on.

The buddy system where the incumbent batch would be assigned to help the incoming junior batch to ease in and settle down is especially heartwarming, as it encourages the spirit of paying it forward, forming close friendships the process.

All these would never be easy for a single person starting up here alone (actually I know of just one, the CEO of Red Pod). We are so lucky to be able to benefit from the time accumulated fruits of labour!

But of course that’s pretty much what everybody enjoys in the process, are there other intangible and subtle stuff that is not immediately obvious to the onlookers?

Plenty!

Just being here with a couple of friends in this big wonderland called America with plenty things to do, I’ve become a more independent and resourceful person, constantly finding out the hows and the wheres to do new crazy exciting stuff.

I’ve done crazy hikes and scaled half dome in Yosemite National Park, planned and executed a successful and enjoyable outdoor camp trip where we slept under the stars, met up with a stranger who works in Intel to go para-gliding and many more!

Moving out of my comfort zone, charting out and venturing into previously unexplored places. Getting lost and finding your way around, being ever ready to take on challenges and conquer the unexpected.

I will return to Singapore stronger, better and ever ready to take on new challenges that come by my way.

Just a mere 3 months, and I’ll be back. Life will never be the same again

Hello everyone! I am Gundeep!

Last Friday, I along with Yujun and NUS Entrepreneur Association organized garageTalk – an event meant to connect global leaders, altruists, students and entrepreneurs.

The event kicked off at 6:30pm with light dinner. The food area was filled with 80 people from different backgrounds and different parts of the world. Standing at the corner of the room, I felt satisfied to see old classmates meeting each other, entrepreneurs sharing ideas with budding entrepreneurs, employers meeting potential employees and like-minded people sharing ideas and inspiring each other.

Then at 7:30pm, Tom Kosnik, one of our Stanford professors for Global Entrepreneurial Marketing shared his vision of GLEAN (Global Leaders Entrepreneurs and Altruists Network) with everyone. During his talk, I realized the diversity of the in garageTalk and how each one of us could contribute to other people’s life to make world a better place. Following Tom Kosnik’s talk, we had 3 entrepreneurs, Julian, Dev Ramnane and Michael Pierantozzi talking to us about their entrepreneurial lives. They ended their talks with different challenges each one of them was facing in their respective companies. The thing that inspired me was Michael Pierantozzi’s quote, “Leaving a big company and starting your venture is like jumping out of an aeroplane and building a new one on your way down.” Indeed, starting a company is a challenge but one needs to take risks in life to be able to start next Google or Microsoft.

The event ended but the 3 challenges posed by the entrepreneurs were still roaming in my mind. I also met other like-minded people who were willing to help me for the next garageTalk.

Indeed, the event was PRICELESS for people who had come with an open mind. I could see new friendships forming and partnerships nurturing. It was great organizing such an event and meeting people of different genres.

Domo! Alvin Lai desu!
Look! Our dear Shao Shao having a wild time in the Vasquez household! Smile until sooo happi!

Here in Silicon Valley, National University of Singapore (NUS) students on the NUS Overseas Colleges program work full time at high technology startups and take courses at Stanford University in a bid to experience and do entrepreneurial things like start startups, organize events and pursue their passions (ok that was a mouthful :D).

6 of us rent a nice place called Vasquez Court and we soon became the Vasquez household. Our dear happy friend Shao Shao (Shaorong)’s a guest today and from the looks he’s so happy to be here!

Okay enough messing around, here’s what really happened.

What started out as a simple invitation for a group of GEM students became a big gathering where people invited more people and their GEM classmates, to the point it became like a big meetup. We had nice Singaporean dishes and we got to meet and make new friends!

I personally met GEM classmates who work in Google and Microsoft and even people who are really excited to pick up Ruby on Rails! How cool is that!

We should do this often man! Ok, nuff said! Pictures!

See everyone so on pose and pose! Especially Bernard damn gek seh Eugene’s like tickling Weichong’s tongue, Shao Shao posing like Farmer brand peanuts and Gavin’s forking his nose and both Zai Zhuang and our teh ping hui looking pretty.. Hmm..

Our nice Chinese friends, huan yin guang lin!

Cool dudes!

I can’t wait for the next gathering!!! :D

Domo! This is Alvin Lai, your new host for the NUSEA blog. I just took over as VP of Media and publications of NUSEA barely a week ago and this is my first blog post! I hope to learn from all you dear readers, please feel free to provide feedback and comments!

You might notice a slight change in writing style here, as I believe in writing in a very personal and candid manner, which makes for interesting reading (I hope :D). You can find out more about me, and how I view blogging and the what’s in it for both of us (dear readers and yours truly) at my blog, Alvin Lai, An Introduction.

Back to the main topic!

Today, we are very very fortunate to have Farzad Naimi, the very charismatic CEO of LiteScape for a sharing session with us. Check him out from the Litescape Executive profiles page.

Personally, I like to take down concise salient points, like after I read a very insightful Paul Graham essay or the famous Steve Jobs Stanford commencement ceremony speech. In doing so, they serve as good reminders and triggers for future reference and reflection.

The only drawback would be that it might be difficult for readers to understand the context, well don’t worry, just ask! Comment! We can make this better as we go along.

Here goes!

Leverage existing affiliations – working for VISA.

How you find the japanese call center? An existing pain point for VISA – most if not all ideas come from pain points!

Are you a tech person? How you balance tech and business?

Passion not really with engineering.

Bootstrap, slowly 20%, 30% open up to investors. want flexibility!

Success == feel good about yourself.

Finding/building right team – takes time

Expose yourself to business models, see the full chain
Had basics MBA, finance, economics - very useful.
Opportunity work with others CFO CEO

Entrepreneurship is an attitude. Failure not in vocabulary!

All humans are open, just approach them from the right angle, especially if it matters for you

Treasure people around you - They might be your lifetime mentor, take them seriously!

Pay attention to details, single flower example – employee saw pretty flower, he gave him flower, brighten up their whole day, deadline seem like nothing.

Singapore government – very rare positive approach attitude towards entrepreneurship.

View people as a resource, need examples to push forward change in Singapore.

Starting startup, plan a deadline, give yourself 2 years, see what happens then.

Starting startup – best to do it yourself, you learn best. The wave experience, go up and down, startup experience a prerequisite for joining other startups.

Bad blood relations – admit need courage, learn from it and emerge stronger, good character building, with sincerity.

Exit at pre IPO – else golden handcuff, wanna remain liquid.

Team Leadership
Loyalty, experience, they know u can do it, trust and feel good about you.

NO mediocre team, might as well not start – Farzad meant that given a choice of starting a team with lousy people, he’d rather not start at all. Thanks Alastair for pointing this out!

Tom Kosnik as advisor, 5 min coffee also good.

Crossroads, bleeding, just abandon the idea.

Some startups are chaotic in nature. Agile!

Write things down! They force you to think! Sounds familiar huh!.

This is an experimental blog post in terms of content and presentation style, tell me what you think!

*Update*

Thanks to dear Ryan for suggestions for improving the blog post:

• adding an intersting banner image to catch attention
• embolden key points for easy reading
• search engine optimizing tips

Thank you Ryan!

*Update 2*

Here’s our dear friend Derrick Du Wen Yu’s contribution and reflection of the mentorship session. Apparently he has taken away quite a bit here!

3 Shining Characteristics of Farzad that Helped Him Become a Successful Entrepreneur

Humor

Many people ignore the contribution of humor when talking about an entrepreneurs’ success. Humor can help diminish team’s stress; Humor can help glue the team members together; Humor can help build up nice relationship with contacts. And humor can help you to become a good sales person —-as an entrepreneur, you are selling every day. Analytical skills and technical skills are important for entrepreneurs, and humor can make those skills more powerful.

Pursuit for happiness

“Happiness exists in the process of pursing it” For every start up, Farzad exits at the pre-IPO stage; for him, the process of building up a new thing is more fun than getting the great finance return from the 18 month handcuff IPO.

Trust

Farad trusts his team, his friend and his partners. “I don’t believe you will do it, I don’t think you will do it; I just know you will do it; this is my language of success” quoted from Farzad. Because of the trust, his
subordinates follow him, investors bet on him and customers buy from him.

But do not trust people too easily, Farzad also has the experience of being cheated, when he bought a Ferrari from an acquaintance. However, if that happens, take it as an individual case only, not making the statement like “I will never trust Chinese/Japanese/Korean… people any more”

Awesome Derrick!

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.

NUSEA recently went to the Womens 2.0 napkin challenge, an innovative event where participants had to mail their business idea on a napkin. =)

The top 5 teams would pitch their ideas (this time with presentation slides) to a panel of VCs and industry experts, as well as a packed audience of eager entrepreneurs, excited to see the ideas.

The 5 companies that presented were:
• FindYourScene: A community website where people can find “their crowd” and post, discover, and rate social events.
• Laser-Seal: Exploits ground-breaking interaction between light physics and cell molecular biology to reduce cost and improve quality of surgical wound closure.
• QTstar: Video monetization and intermediary ad service company in China and the United States.
• O’Light: Cutting-edge OLED technology to lighting designs.
• (YOU)STYLEME: Online fashion community where men and women who have particular style needs can connect with other consumers who are style-savvy in a fun and engaging way.
All of them had solid presentations with well thought out plans. In the end, the 2 winning teams were O’Light and Laser-Seal. The audience choice award went to O’Light as well. More details on the event can be found here.

Winning Team: Laser-Seal

Winner and Audience Choice - O’Light

(Pictures courtesy of Women 2.0)

The takeaway I got from this was not so much on the ideas and how people were pitching it. I learnt that there were so many people out there who were passionate about their own ideas and willing to share it publicly to get feedback. Trust me - Coming up with an idea and making the effort to come up with plans is hard. But to pitch the idea in front of a large crowd and pitching it to a panel of critical and experienced entrepreneurs and VCs was no mean feat. That was something I believed NUSEA members and Singaporeans alike could greatly learn from. What we really need are people who are passionate about what they do and not be afraid of risking everything to go pursue it. Having an idea that is perceived as bad or “just won’t work” is fine. It’s the effort and the process of going through it that really counts. A true failure is one who never tried in the first place. In my eyes, everyone who took the effort to draw out their ideas on that little napkin and send it to the Women 2.0 team deserved a big pat on the back for making the effort and trying.

-Mohan Belani

Evan Huang, CTO of XMLCities was kind enough to grace us with a visit this evening. Despite his status and achievements, he was humble and eager to share his experience with us. His focus tonight was on market segmentation and product positioning.

As we huddled around a table in the middle of the NOC office to enjoy a good spread of Vietnamese sandwiches, Evan began his story of his time back in Adobe where he and a couple of folks worked on several projects ranging from the very exciting array signal processing to plain telephony. It soon became evident to him that the telephony project, simplest amongst the plethora of cool projects his team was working on, turned out to be the most profitable project simply because there was a market for it.

Read: Technology is not the end all - there must be a market for it

Stories came one after another ranging from his unsuccessful venture in color OCR, which served its intended function well - perhaps too well as it soon caught the attention of software pirates who eventually destroyed his business model.

He also touched upon his version of a secret sauce for a web startup - collecting user information.
The key insight is that if one can somehow harvest information from customer visits, that information can be very valuable and not easily copied. An example of this is showing a user what multitudes of users before him/her think about a product.  This is only valuable once there is enough traffic and another me-too site will find it hard to duplicate such information.
He wrapped up the sharing session by demoing/pitching his thumbdrive solution that will allow any computer to boot an operating system (Mac OSX, Windows or Linux) of your preference from the thumbdrive.

Users of this technology will not have to worry about key logging and viruses as the operating system booted from this device is encapsulated in a Linux Operating system, which are additional compelling reasons apart from the obvious portability and archival purposes.

All in all, it was a most interesting and enlightening evening.

Silicon Valley is home to numerous high-tech ventures. Walking along the streets of Mountain View and Palo Alto, the person you brush shoulders with could be the founder of the next big thing. It could be the next Youtube, the next Google, or the next Hyflux. Here technology is king. The ventures that get the most coverage are high-tech startups, purveyors of new technology or cool online concepts.

Yet today we managed to arrange for a meeting with a successful entrepreneur in an industry totally unrelated to bits and bytes, networks and chipsets. An entrepreneur involved in an industry close to the hearts (and stomachs) of a selected few – the food and beverage industry. This deviation was probably what led me to sign up for this dinner meeting. He was someone who had found success down a different lane. What I wanted to know was if the walk was the same.

The venue for the meeting was a place totally related to the roots of his fortune. Waiting for us in a brewpub off Castro Street, Mountain View was Mr. Pete Slosberg, the founder of Pete’s Brewing Co. and inventor of Pete’s Wicked Ale. Ah… Beer! Definitely one of our favourite topics.

Pete was kind enough to sit down over a chilled glass of brown ale (an absolutely splendid quaff we would like to add) and tell us about how it all started for him. His story is unique for one founded in the Valley in that it has nothing to do with engineering and technology.

He won an award for one of the homebrews he had made and decided to market his product. He attributes his success to luck - luck that he had won the award that planted the seed of an idea in his mind.

Pete covered a lot of ground during our session but what stuck in my head was his style. He had minimized cost (took some risk in the process) to prove his concept and roll out his product. Since his venture had nothing in relation to his job at the time, he could start work while still being employed. Pete and his partner had laid the ground rules to their company even before they had a product. There were only three if I recall correctly but the last one characterizes many of the startup cultures here in the Valley — nothing is to be taken seriously except the product.

Then from successful entrepreneur, Pete turned teacher-cum-evangelist for beer and started our education on the finer points of beer. Let me be honest, this was what I was looking forward to. He taught us differentiation of the brews by their colour and their content and at the end of it all, we put our lesson to practice, tasting an ale, a lager and a stout. Lip-smacking good, I tell you. What’s more, the lesson took only ten minutes. He had devised it as a way to extend the knowledge of servers in restaurants, with the intention of furthering the penetration of Pete’s Wicked Ale as an alternative to the mainstream brews.

I left the brew pub suitably woozy not just because of the alcohol but with the knowledge gained. Pete had given us an alternate perspective to approaching a startup and shared some really great experiences with us. As Singaporeans in the Valley, I appreciate the opportunities and privileges that would otherwise have been lost to me had I not made my journey here. And often it’s people like Pete who really make the trip worthwhile.

A new year has begun and what better way to celebrate it than the usual traditional Chinese 8 course dinner feast. The Lunar New Year Celebration dinner this year was co-organized by NUSEA, SABA and SGConnect at the Dynasty Restaurant in Cupertino. Held at a classy Chinese restaurant, the night was set for good food, great company, and an excellent line-up of entertainment.

NUSEA’s role was to encourage and rally Singaporean student bodies from colleges around the bay area, to join in this celebration and participate in the programs for the evening. We coordinated the programs for the evening and hosted the entire show. The night began with a well choreographed Fashion Show which featured clothes of oriental design, by Lan Vie, and shoes from our very own Singaporean Designer Nora Haron. Modeling and also a guest for the evening was Miss Asian American Queen, Jennifer Fields. Throughout the evening we had performances from the Stanford, Berkeley and NUSEA students in a mini Talent Competition. From NUSEA, Bernard and Sophia played and sang 关怀方式 <Guan Huai Fang Shi>, to the 450 strong turn-out.

The dinner not only allowed us to see the greater Singaporean community at large, but also allowed us to savor traditional Chinese dishes only served during the Chinese New Year. We even had Yu Sheng! It all ended well with an enthusiastic lion dance, much to the amusement of the many kids present. It was indeed an evening to remember.

-Harville Tan

Weijin just introduced me to the AIESEC community in San Jose State University - How exciting! After some email correspondence, they’ve invited me to join in their gathering tonight (after the 9th farewell dinner) at Christmas in the Park (over at San Jose).

Apparently only Sharan was interested in meeting them, and the 2 of us set off while the rest of the NUSEA members were busy taking pictures. We had some difficulty finding our way there, but when we did - The journey was well worth it!

One common trait among AIESECers worldwide is that they are really a bunch of crazy, friendly people at heart. And this group of AIESECers were also pretty friendly. Their examinations end next week, and this is really the crunch time period where everybody should be mugging. Despite that, a group of them still continued to meet the San Jose High School students for mentorship sessions - which was really admirable.

I’ve learnt of a new sport from Cody (one of the AIESEC members) - It’s called Fris-Golf. Basically it is like a game of golf and played on a golf course - Just that instead of using a golf club/balls - you use a frisbee instead. Pretty cool~~

There are lots of cops at downtown San Jose though - Pretty scary when you are in a car cos you don’t know for what reason they can pull you over even though you are minding your own business. But San Jose is a beautiful place, and so was Christmas in the Park.

Looking forward to having more meetups with the AIESECers around here! I heard there’s still AIESEC at Berkeley, and AIESEC at San Francisco State University - Can’t wait to see them!!