GraffitiGeo Co-founder, now, Working in Loopt.
Contact me at:
siong1987 at gmail dot com
A lot of people have asked me about the books that I recommended in my presentation at Webcamp KL 4. Here is the list:
p/s: slides pending.
Warning: This is going to be a very long post. I will update it from time to time. Now, it is only about the first few weeks in Palo Alto. I am going to take my last final tomorrow morning. Time for me to get back to study.
So, summer is coming again. What have you planned for your summer? Last year, around the same time, I knew that I was going to California to participate in YC Summer 2009. My cofounder, Jared, had already found a place where four of us could live at, the HackerHouse. He had the lease from Sam Odio and had everything up properly before we moved in. We were cheap founders. In order to save cost, Jared managed to squeeze other 5 people into that house(joey, nick, mario, dan and alex). It was fun. And, things worked out really well. In the day, joey and alex would be at Google(intern), nick at Facebook(intern), mario at Stanford(graduate) and dan at Techcrunch(intern). So, we owned the whole place in the day. Btw, I hardly awaked in the day. My work schedule usually started about 5pm till about 9am in the morning the next day.
Our adventure started right after my finals last year. I was the only one who flew from Chicago to California. I google'd out the map and took a picture of the route Google Map showed me with my iPhone. I didn't have a data plan because it would be expensive for me to get an iPhone with a data plan since it was only my first year in US. I didn't had SSN, which also mean that I had to pay extra 500 for the deposit. Nikhil, Jared and Dan decided to drive Nikhil's car from Urbana to Palo Alto. Nikhil was graduating as a master. Jared, me and Dan were still undergraduate. My first destination in California was the San Jose Airport. I realized that I had been pronounced "San Jose" wrongly till Jared told me about that when I asked him about it few day later they got to the HackerHouse. When I first reached the airport, I had no idea how to get to the HackerHouse. I had the address and the map on my phone. So, I had to ask people around me to actually figure out how to get there. It was my first time taking public transport(Caltrain and some 10 Northbound bus) in US.
First lesson learned: Thing isn't as hard as you think. You just have to ask.
The first week in Palo Alto was spent on getting our work space up. We went to IKEA to buy our stuffs. But, chairs and tables basically occupied the whole car. Dan and I decided to walk back to HackerHouse from IKEA. It was a fun walk. I really liked the neighborhood of Palo Alto. I heard a lot people saying that you might bump into Steve Jobs here. Btw, Steve Jobs' house was just 20 mins walk away from HackerHouse. Stanford was just 10 mins walk from HackerHouse. HackerHouse was right in the middle of so many amazing ventures in Silicon Valley. It was really fun to walk down University Avenue and overhearing a lot of people talking about startups here. Then, I was part of them. I always thought that wearing the YC "Make Something People Want" tshirt and walking down the street was the coolest thing to do. Sometimes, you might even bump into other yc-founders who were wearing the same shirts too. Next time, if you see someone wearing that tshirt, feel free to say "hi". I might be one of them.
Second lesson learned: SV is the place where you should be if you want to start a tech startup. People here are startup people. We are never afraid of failures.
To be continued...
I will be posting my random thoughts on tumblr instead.
If you are a non-technical cofounder in a startup working with another technical cofounder, never say "I have this cool feature in my mind. It is simple and you should be able to implement it in an hour or so."
Something that looks simple for you might be difficult to build. For example, every website supports profile picture and it is definitely not a simple feature to build.And, it applies another way around too.I used to read others' success stories a lot. Now, I feel that those stories are useless because you pretty much learn nothing from those stories. You just waste your time. Why I say so? If you have read enough success stories, you can find that each success story contradicts another success story in one way or another. Steve Job's story told you that you have to drop out to start a business while many successful people have at least masters or MBAs.
But, there is one pattern that you can see in every success story - keep trying. If you keep trying, you will be successful one day.
Can idea be unique? Is it bad to copy others' ideas? How to define copying ideas? If Toyota comes out with a car that can fly, does it mean that the "flying car" idea copies from Boeing?
There are many Chinese websites that copies ideas from the US, like Facebook clone, Youtube clone, Twitter clone, etc. But, they out execute Facebook, Youtube and Twitter in China. Why? Because the market is different. You cannot use the same approach that you use in US to get massive number of users in China. You need a different execution plan even your idea might be the same. There are actually many ways that we can argue about this. We can take it to the extreme and say that everyone is copying each other idea. What I want you to bring home today is:Copying ideas is easy. Execution is hard.
Why are carrots orange? It is political
No, the image above does not some show some collection of freshly genetically designed hypercarrots in various colors of the rainbow. This is the spectrum of colors carrots used to have – and in some regions of the world you can still find white, yellow, red and purple carrots. In most countries however, carrots tend to be orange nowadays. Why is that?
They’re orange for entirely political reasons: in the 17th century, Dutch growers cultivated orange carrots as a tribute to William of Orange – who lead the the struggle for Dutch independence – and the color stuck. A thousand years of yellow, white and purple carrot history, was wiped out in a generation.
Although some scholars doubt if orange carrots even existed prior to the 16th century, they now form the basis of most commercial cultivators around the world. Presumably crosses between Eastern (purple), Western (white, red) and perhaps wild carrots led to the formation of the orange rooted carrot sub species. Turkey is often cited as the original birthplace of the hybrids (or mutations) of the two groups.
Whatever the origins, the Long Orange Dutch carrot, first described in writing in 1721, is the forebear of the orange Horn carrot varieties so abundant nowadays. The Horn Carrot derives from the Netherlands town of Hoorn in the neighborhood of which it was presumably bred. All our modern, western carrots ultimately descend from these varieties. Hypernature avant la lettre.
Source: Carrot Museum. See also: Hyper fruits, Comeback of the ‘ugly’ fruits, Better than the real thing.
Ther are two types of people. The ones who always lead people into the future and the ones who always follow someone into the future. So, are you the follower or the leader?
Leader is the kind of people like mark zuckerberg. When you first meet him, you know that you want to work with people like him. He is charismatic and smart. Followers are the kind of people who will admire leader like mark zuckerberg. Whenener you look at his videos, your inner self tells you that he is exactly the person who you want to work for. Leader is rare but follwers are everywhere. Are you born to be a leader or a follower? If you are born to be a follower, can you be a leader? Yes, you can. There are many kinds of leaders. People who are leaders of countries, people who are leaders of companies, people who are leaders of groups of people. Do you remember when is the last time you lead a group of people? There are steps that you can do to be leader. First, get out of your comfort zone. This is an old advice. But, believe it or not. It works. Don't walk the same old path that you use to walk to your work. Be an explorer or a leader. Try new path that might give you surprises. Surprises may be good or bad. But, they help you learn. Second, voice out. Tell people your discomfort. Announce to the world that what you dislike and what has to be changed. Start a blog and rant like what i am doing now. Express your opinions. Be yourself and be true to what you think. Third, never try to please everyone. Leader leads a group of people who like him. He never tries to please people who do not like him. He works toward a goal that is shared among his group. The goal is authentic and it will never be able to please everyone. So, pick a goal and please people who like your goal. Ignore those people who dislike your goal! Tell them to fuck themselves. Fourth, believe in yourself and your goal. Leader will never have any doubt in the goal that he pursues. He advocates it and he always persues people to believe in his goal. He works toward it and leads people to achieve it. Startup founders are all leaders. They get out if their comfort zone, quit their jobs and start their businesses. They voice out and tell the world why they are unsatisfied with the current problems. They will never try to please everyone who do not believe in them. They try hard to make their current customers happy. They also believe in themselves and their goals. They sell solutions that they believe to their customers. No one can change their minds. When I first started GraffitiGeo, I was still in school. School is fun. You are given chances to make mistakes. But, I took a semester off and did GraffitiGeo. It wasn't a huge success. But, it put me ahead of a lot of people. In GraffitiGeo, we believed that long reviews suck. We believed mobile was the future. People did not write long reviews on mobile devices. Short reviews had a lot of advantages. We believed in it and worked toward it. Ask yourself. Do you want to be a follower or a leader?
