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! 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

The Singapore American Business Association (SABA)
brings us this very interesting seminar about.. ok the blog post title is pretty self explanatory..

At the center of the limelight would be  Patrick Yam, who’s the CEO of Sensei Partners LL, a Menlo Park, CA venture capital firm, who has a pretty good history in the finance realm, check him out!

In short, this seminar would touch on:

• Validity of historical investment myths
• Return on Location (ROL) – which refutes the popular contention of the “on-hour” rule of venture capital investing

Patrick would proceed to elaborate why ROL is “an answer to better venture capital investing today and beyond”.

Check it out from SABA’s website!

Wow! I just gottasaythatagain. WOW!

After blogging about Farzad’s session in a whole new style, I’ve received tonnes of feedback – mostly great and encouraging ones:

Great! Fresh outlook! Cute! (for the Domo-kun banner, woo!) Well done! Looking good! Direct to the point! Great style! Good humor!

Even from friends who are not from the NUSEA/NOC network! Thanks Alastair and Ah Buang!

And of course from our most lovely dear program manager Jupe!

THANKS!

It feels AWESOME to receive fan-mail! I can attest to the ego trip!

But of course there were a few thoughtful people who gave useful and interesting pointers to improve upon:

Too much self advertisement

Several links to alvinlai.com – my personal blog. An introductory post for readers to check me out, a couple of posts to illustrate my writing styles. Too much? You tell me

I think this blog is an excellent avenue for NUSEA members to be heard, why not let our readers get a good glimpse (or ogle) at who we really are, how much fun we are having while reaping a full, wholesome, and rich experience in leapfrogging hurdles and relishing the Silicon Valley entrepreneurship process?

Really? Why not?

That is why I encourage the concept of guest blogging! Everyone should take this opportunity to let our readers know you better! Where better place can you portray yourself personally along with a YOUNG VIBRANT PROFESSIONAL STUDENT ENTREPRENEURIAL organization in the world’s most renowned tech hub of innovate SILICON VALLEY CALIFORNIA!? I’m so psyched up as I’m typing this! XD

So what are you waiting for! Guest blog!

My dear friend Derek Du Wenyu has made a great headstart over everybody by submitting his thoughts on Farzad’s mentorship session! I’ve updated the post! Check it out on Mentorship Session with Farzad Naimi!

Come on guys! Don’t lose out!

An informal blogging style

An informal blogging style might not represent NUSEA in a manner that everybody would like – some prefer a more professional corporate style.

After someone told me that it would look weird to have Domo-kun splashing across the front page on the NUSEA blog, I chickened out and removed the banner. But after some good consideration, I got it back up.

WHY?

Because I believe that it doesn’t do harm. I feel that a blog is supposed to be personal, fun and interesting to read. Pictures that catches your eye definitely do well to attract readers.

What’s more the Domo-kun image serves as a striking bold introduction to a new start and a new blogger contributer – me!

That is exactly what guest blogging is about!

Who’s our target audience?

Fellow bloggers? Professionals? Entrepreneurs? NOC alumni? NUS? Singapore? California? So many! As we fondly recall our favorite person saying we are AMBASSADORS! You must always bear some AIR (Attitude Integrity Responsibility) in your head! We will never never forget that!

Is the blog nicely geared toward our target audiences? Remember that means YOU TOO!

Thoughts to keep in mind

There were also some good pointers that were floating around too, I might as well just post them here as a good reference point to fall back on should we return to them in the future:

Great motivations for blogging (I didn’t edit to preserve the full meaning the author/commenter had intended):
1. archive of lessons learnt in each session
2. new mentees will not feel unprepared when joining
3. avoid asking the same questions each time over and over again (it should be continous and progressive. not walking on the same spot each time)
4. act as resources (sounds like a rails plugin!) that we can always have a common place to share our lessons learnt.
5. this is community driven. it is collaborative efforts and we could see different perspective on that.

Interesting, personal guest blogging style or formal corporate risking readership?

Monitored content – permission from mentors to avoid potential liability issues.

Recommendations

There were a couple of recommendations on how to move this forward too:

Podcasts

So that peeps who missed the mentorship sessions don’t miss out when they read the exciting notes!

Link Exchange!

Like link up with local NOC bloggers (e27, TheDigitalMovement), of course! Always welcome!

Separate/another blog for mentorship

Someone suggested having a separate blog for mentorship, apart from the main NUSEA blog bringing total to 2 NUSEA blogs. (I’m not so sure about this, tell me!)

Did I miss out on anymore points?

Tell the world who you are and what say you!

For obvious reasons I have not identified who commented on what, but if you’d like, I think it would be excellent if you can let others know what you think for more vibrant discussions! Those with great positive constructive feedback need not shy away, in fact you should let the world know how awesome of a person you are! I can edit this post to identify you if you wish!

REMEMBER! It’s all about you!
This blog is for you! YOU YOU and only YOU! This is an excellent avenue to share your thoughts, your passions, your dreams (SO cliche, but I like XD).

The world’s your oyster.

Fire away comments!

PS: You might wonder why I chose that bowl of something for a blog post image and what’s that. Easy. I love nice food, and images of nice food attraction attract (thanks Vincent for point pointing (walao double smack in the forehead – can u guess how psyched up I was typing that?) that out!) attention and curiosity. Now can you guess what’s that?

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.

We recently concluded our recent RainMakers Live event, NUSEA’s biannual mixer. However, with so many mixers and panel discussions in the valley, it’s difficult for our event to stand out. We wanted to do something more than organizing an event and getting speakers. Already, NUSEA had our fair share of learning from experience of others - What we really need to do is not to just engage in passive learning - But to be involved in active learning and creativity. (Check out Mohan’s interview with Folksonomy) Therefore the main considerations we had when organizing this year’s event is:

“How can we come up with an event where participants themselves were an integral part of the show? How can we encourage active learning, rather that simply sitting down and listening to people who have “been there and done that?”

NUSEA members put their thinking caps on and came up with the idea of having an entrepreneurial game. Participants got a chance to be part of the event by actively getting involved in forming teams, brainstorming ideas and pitching ideas to other teams at the event. We further refined it by inviting a cool new startup, MINT to deliver a challenge to the participants at the event. We deliberately did not inform the participants about the challenge before the event and we wanted them to think on the spot. Participants had just over half an hour to come up with a plan for MINT. The top 3 teams will then pitch their ideas to the judges from MINT. The winning team will walk away with a $500 cash prize sponsored by MINT.

It was interesting seeing the different mixes of the teams and their dynamics. Most teams came up with elaborate sketches of their ideas, along with funky team names. The best part was that participants were actively engaged to think on the spot and interact with people they met at the event itself. We were really privileged to have Justin Ricaurte who flew down all the way from Seattle to join us!

The event was not big scale. No famous panelists. Nothing ordinary. Nothing fantastic. However, all of us had a great time at the event and we achieved what we set out to do, or more likely what we set out not to do and that is to not do “yet another panel discussion”.

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

The 10th committee has been sourcing for a way to manage the people we know in NUSEA. Apparently, handing over spreadsheets of contacts from one batch to the other is not very effective in building up our network. What we wanted was a solution that enables us to share our NUSEA network.

And as a result of all this, we’ve created a NUSEA LinkedIn Group for our networks! You can join in our group over here:

NUSEA LinkedIn Group

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!