Thoughts of a newcomer to the Valley.

One of the best things of being in the Valley is the rare opportunity to interact with people, entrepreneurs who have been there/done that, on a personal level and to learn from their experiences. And in a quaint coffee shop in downtown Mountain View on a wintery March afternoon, we did just that.

Role of a Product Manager
The topic of discussion for the day was Making a Career out of Product Management: Opportunities and Best Practices. So what exactly does it mean to manage a product? Product managers are a special breed of people. Essentially, they are charged with bringing the product to life: from concept to reality. The Product Manager is intricately and intimately involved in every single detail and with that, brings with it different challenges and required skills.

Outward Looking vs Inward Looking
As product managers, one of the key challenges faced is finding a balance between the issues of dealing with external business and marketing needs and handling the engineering and creative teams. Are you a more outward looking manager that focuses heavily on the business development aspect of your product or one that builds strong relationships with the engineering team? As with many things in life, there is no best way. Product managers with different styles have succeeded in creating great products. The best product managers understand this need and embrace it completely

There’s no I in T E A M
This extremely over-used cliché rings true, especially in product management. As a product manager, you are a team leader, a consensus builder. Between the inevitable complaints from the engineers that what you want done is impossible and the requests from the marketing department for a flashier product, you need to find a middle ground. At the same time, you want to make the impossible happen: to create a product that will change the world. How exactly do you do that? Communicate, communicate, communicate. Managing your team and their expectations and most importantly, bring out the best in them. Succeeding as a team only makes success all so much sweeter.

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!

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!