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.

I know it’s rude to blatantly say “Dude hell no, your idea suck” but really if you do that, you’re actually being nice to the guy. If that person knew the idea suck, he/she will ask what’s wrong with it and you as an investor with your knowledge can tell him how to fix it, or tell him to just dump the idea. That would save a lot of that person’s time and your time as well.

From all of my pitching experiences, there’s only 2 Investors out of a dozen that actually said NO explicitly and in person. Here’s their exact words: “No, The deal is off”, and “No, I don’t believe this will work”. Those are harsh words but I accept it with open arms, they’ve found holes in my idea and thought that it won’t work with the current condition.Yes rejection hurts, but I learned my mistakes and move on to another pitching session after fixing all the holes they mentioned. 

It’s hard to say no, I know. It might offend the person or worst, that person can get angry at you (yeah I’ve heard some news of that). But in the end the choice is clear: Do you want to be a nice guy at first and a jerk later on for wasting their time? Or do you want to offend that person now and let the person renew the idea. Who knows, maybe that new idea is exactly the one you’re looking for.

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.

1. College degree determine your success and status

A degree is only good to impress your mother-in-law, it does not determine your success. It may be easier to get a job with a degree but then again even the highly educated find it hard as well. Need an example of successful people without a degree? Here’s a list of 100 of them. How about a local example in Indonesia: this and that.

I’m not saying you should drop out right away, but reading news that a 17 years old Daniel Gross gets $4 Million funding is.. well you get the point. I myself have a degree and start a company while still in college to speed things up. A degree enables me to change jobs 4 times a year, but it does not enable me to live out my passion.

2. Life is a race   

Life is a rat race and the path of everybody is the same, defined by the society. You go to school to get smart, get a degree, work in an established or international company to get a decent living, get married, have kids, and die. The faster you accomplished those goals, the better you are in society.

Why is it have to be that way? Being the first does not make you better. Why is it a problem that your friend is getting married and you’re not. Wil Chamberlain never got married, but claimed to have sex with 20,000 women! Ok maybe that’s a bad example. Why do you envy your friend working in Oil Companies when you’re building your dream business? Soichiro Honda start his own auto repair shop in the age of 22, but not until the age of 42 that he created Honda. Everything will be beautiful in the right moments, don’t force something you can’t control.

3. Working hard makes you successful

If you want to be more successful than others, work more than 8 hours. Why? Because everybody works 8 hours a day. So to be better, work harder, longer. WRONG! If you want to be successful, work smarter. Why work 8 hours when you can finish it in 4 hours? Working longer in the office to impress your boss is counter-productive and diminish your social life.

As I’m discussing about office, here’s more crazy things we do everyday

• People who comes home the latest works the hardest: WRONG! People like that is mostly a procrastinator, bad at time management or likes goofing off all day. People that likes to work late makes efficient people feel uneasy to go home at 5pm because it’s just not nice to leave a comrade behind. So what do you do the uneasy comrade do in the office at night? Goofing around with office facilities. So please, just let people go home at the time they should be home.
• Meeting needs to be attended by everyone: WRONG! When I’m still working at an office, I always wonder why I got brought up in a lot of meetings where I don’t know what’s going on and cannot contribute personally. In the end it’s just a waste of everyone’s time, the time where I can actually do some work done. Less meetings means more productivity, not the other way around.
• You need to be in the office to work: WRONG! In fact, office is the least place people do their work done.

4. You need to have everything planned

Business plan is the biggest science fiction book you’ll ever write, why? Because planning is guessing*, let’s just name it as it is. No matter how much time you spent planning, something will always go wrong. So do short plans instead and change it accordingly, that way you can never be wrong :P

Ok that’s all for now, what are the things that YOU need to unlearn in life?

*Taken from Rework

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

Everybody as in big companies copy other big company, small companies copy big companies, big companies copy small company and of course small companies copy small companies. That is pretty much everybody. Let’s discuss this case by case.

Why do big companies copy? Because the bigger you are, the more careful you need to be. There’s stakeholders that you need to please, big teams you need to pay, the beautiful corner office you’d like to keep and other stuffs that feeds on money. With all those heavy baggages that they have, they just cannot afford to fail. I think this video from gamespot: Y U NO MAKE NEW I.P explained it nicely. Yes we understand that the economy is shitty and you want to keep your job. So what do you do when you just can’t afford to fail? You copy the best and hide the source.

Why do small companies copy? Well imagine college, a place where you are (suppose) to learn all the stuffs you need in the future working on your small office cubicles. What do you do when you want to learn something? You copy from the best and hope that you can actually make it as close as possible. It’s a natural process of learning, copying the best is indeed natural.

In short, it doesn’t matter if you’re big or small. Everybody copies the best, which is why they say: “imitation is the best form of flattery”. it’s a common practice, taught in college and is a natural process of learning. So don’t go hating copies/clone/imitation because sooner or later, you will copy somebody. If not, then you’re not learning anything.

BONUS: Here is another interesting article, a conversation between the maker of Muffin Knight and Super Crate Box. Hint: They made peace in the end :)

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.

Adding those deals alone and not counting outside investment got them $266M, not a bad number to spend on massive Asian invasion. They were also reported doing a massive recruitment spree in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. So watch out for your talents because they can afford to match up or maybe double whatever salary you’re giving your talents. Although I heard that they fire as easy as the hire people. I would not recommend working on that kind of company.

So should we, the local startup be worried? No.

Personally for me this is just business as usual. For the Indonesian market, maybe this is similar to the Punjabi Brothers. Self proclaimed as the most successful producer in Indonesia with Multivision production house. Massively profiting from cheap horror & sleazy sex movies. Indonesian filmmaker hates them because he’s “destroying” the quality of Indonesian movies but then again he made a lot of money doing it. Will he stop because of moral obligations? Highly improbable, he’ll keep making money and the filmmaker will keep on being pissed. C’est la vie.

I’m sure there’s a lot more businessman like Punjabi Brothers outside of Indonesia, as we’ve seen with Samwer Brothers. Nothing new here, so just move on and do business as usual. There’s no point in worrying about something that you can’t control.

Budi Rahardjo was the first to reply, mentioning that it’s ok to not go global since Indonesia, China and India is already super massive. Rulz also mentioned that it would be unfocused if we were to target globally from the start, starting locally using a sniper scope means you know exactly who your market is.

Chandra Widy opinionated that it’s easier to enter the less matured country and targeting our own country means we understood clearly what the problem is. Rhein said this idea could work if a US/Europe stakeholder was in place. The last comment of the night comes from Saiful Amri that boldly say that it can be done as long as you can make a the app as addictive as cocaine. Well, easier said than done.

Btw thank you for all of you guys joining the conversation!

So to sum it all up, it all comes down to these:

• Asia is big in volume and potential users, 250 million in Indonesia alone is a massive market.
• Start with focus on specific local market, even facebook starts with Harvard students first
• Going local means we experience the problem firsthand
• Don’t create a nice to have app, create a must have app as addictive as cocaine

Got any other points you guys want to add? Feel free to discuss it on the comment section, or twitter.. whichever hip these days.

Disclaimer: the writer does not encourage nor promote the use of cocaine

What do you guys think? Debate away in the comment section. I’ll post my view about it tomorrow.

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Nevermind, they are f*cked, and delusional.

Instead of multitasking, try focusing on one item at a time and finishing it quickly. In my experience, I get things done a lot faster with that method. I usually break a big task into smaller 45 minutes (max) tasks and resting 15 minutes for every task. Currently using Wunderlist to list and and cross the tasks one at a time. Crossing one little task gives a feeling of achievement and the motivation to finish another task. For example instead of naming the task: Redesign my blog, try to break it into little pieces like: make the design in PSD, generate the HTML, generate the wordpress theme, apply google analytics, etc. Another good thing about Wunderlist is that you can easily see what tasks you’re suppose to do today and focus only on that. Owh and did I say it sync to all your devices (Mac, Windows, iOS, Andriod, Symbian, Windows Phone and even Blackberry)? Definitely a recommended To Do app.

For writing tasks, a fullscreen editor like WriteRoom or iA Writer helps a lot in focusing. For project proposals, definitely iWork Pages in fullscreen mode. I still uses multiple windows for web development instead of the all-in-one editors because it’s a working habit and for me it’s simpler that way, but for everyone else it’s preferential. I close everything else, so no twitter, tumblr, facebook, even downloads (I use a different machine to download) so I can focus only at the tasks at hand.

So in short, this is what I do to be more efficient

1. Focus on what you should be doing today
2. Break big tasks into smaller tasks
3. List all of them and cross them when done to give the feeling of achievement
4. Focus on the task for 45 minutes
5. Rest for 15 minutes
6. Rinse and repeat

That works like a charm for me. Tell me how it works in the comments section if you guys decided to do it.