Investors Need To Say NO More Often
In all my years of doing business, I’ve met with a lot of investors locally and internationally. They are mostly uber rich, good-mannered, easy to talk guy and they love to share their knowledge (not their money). They look like an average guy, but usually with a fancier suit. They are NOT SCARY AT ALL. They’re nice people.
But being nice is a problem as well. When I pitch to them, I rarely hear they say things like: “No, we don’t like the idea”, or “No, That will never work”. What happens is usually they listen for a minute or two and then find an excuse to go and say: “Ok that’s nice. good luck!” or “Ok, we’ll contact you later” and smile. This is troublesome. Imagine a person with a sucky idea, try to pitch to investors and all they say is that it’s nice. That person will keep thinking that his idea is not sucky and therefore waste more time developing the sucky idea into something that’s usually sucky-er. All the while keep calling the investors to for confirmation whether they would actually invest in that person or not, which usually end in emails un-replied and phone calls unanswered.
Learning how to unlearn
Don’t let your education interferes with your learning.
Albert Einstein said that and I agree. Schools and colleges (especially college) put a lot of garbage in our head and it’s really hard to know what we really need and what we need to unlearn. So here’s 4 things that I unlearn from my education and life experience.
So I got chicken pox..
Yes, chicken pox. My immediate response is this 3: “Oh man I can’t be near Ashya for days”, and then goes to “Shit, 7 days of working time gone to waste”, but then my brain just popped this up “YAY! Free time! Finally I can finish all the games lying around”. Maybe it’s God’s way of saying “Slow down, enjoy life and get zits all over your body. Everything will be okay”.
The doctor told me to rest for about 3-5 days, I guess it’s good for some Me time (well I’m under quarantine anyway). So yeah, I guess I’ll do with plan C. Relaxing, play games and rethink about what I have done my whole life.
All is well :)
PS: got any Nintendo DS to recommend? Currently playing Ghost Trick
Work doesn’t happen at work
Jason Fried the writer of Rework share his controversial yet we all-know-it-inside knowledge on why work doesn’t happen at work. I personally love the book and believe reading Rework it is better than getting an MBA (yes, really!). But I disgres. In the video he elaborate what problems are happening in the office, how meetings and managers disrupt the workflow and why you never really work 8 hours a day. Totally worth the watch.
Originality is overrated
Originality is overrated, there I said it. Yesterday I wrote about the clone king coming to town, not so long ago Zynga the game company giant shamelessly rip-off Tiny Tower and also a desktop game Super Crate Box “heavily inspired” the iPhone game Muffin Knight. This 3 stories are just a small examples showing one simple fact: EVERYBODY COPIES!
The Clone King is Coming to Town
There’s been a lot of talk about shameless Samwer Brothers (Rocket Internet), their expansion to Singapore, Malaysia and our dearest Indonesia. Even their email brief to the Indonesia team is leaked out. For those of you not following the news, Rocket Internet is the clone king from Berlin, Germany. Here as quoted from sangatpedas:
These guys clone faster and sometimes better than the original. Rocket Internet is the Super KW AAA ++++ amongst the tech companies. While Pinterest is still in invitation mode (but getting unbelievable traction) the Rocket guys already have Pinspire up and running and surfing the wave of traction.
They have a very good track record so far (in terms of business deals), as quoted from SGEntrepreneurs:
Founded in 2007, Rocket Internet’s successful ventures include CityDeal, which was purchased by Groupon for US$126M; short terms rental site Wimdu, which has raised US$90M; Alando, an online auction house that was sold to eBay for US$50M, and more.
Asian startups doing mobile social apps for the global market will fail (Part 2)
As I’ve written before about Serkan Toto’s tweets, I invited you guys to discuss about the problem described in the title. But I guess commenting on blogs is considered “uncool” for today standard. Good thing I also made the discussion on startuplokal mailing list which got a couple of interesting replies.
Asian startups doing mobile social apps for the global market will fail (Part 1)
Stop Multitasking and Start Focusing
For us men, multitasking is a joke. It’s our way to assuring ourselves that we are doing a lot of things but we’re actually just wasting our time. I’m sure the idea of finishing that proposal while watching the last episode of Shameless sounds great, or returning emails while on a date with your Blackberry sounds efficient but it’s not. You’ll do a shitty job at it, and a slap in the face from your girlfriend.
