Lessons I learned from playing Dota 2

Failure is necessary and painful

Everyone would like to be the undefeatable champion, and champion are not born but trained. Can I be a champion without losing or dying (in the game)? Nope. You could fast forward your newbie period by reading guides, but learning is accelerated through the adrenaline of PVP which end in frustrated death.

The more you fail the more you should rethink

Failure is the mother of success. Does that mean the more I lose/die the better I will become? Yes, only if you give thoughts to why you lose/die, and thinks of ways how to be better. If you just blindly keep dying and playing without refinement, you are just being insane: repeating the same thing and expecting different results.

You don’t learn much if you win occasionally

Sometimes you got lucky (killed a noob a few times), and sometimes your team mate is a champion; you won and found the game to be too easy, and then you lose the next game and start to wonder why. Loosing make you thinks for new strategy, and winning based on luck only helps your ego, and winning constantly validate your strategy.

Keep calm and take over the world

Keep clam, don’t just rush into battle even though you are a tank. Know your position (Attacker or Support), and wait for your comrades. If you are alone, wait or retreat. Not dying is as good as a kill.

It’s a Team Game

“I am damn good, but my comrades suck”. Dota 2 is a team game, and it does not guarantee victory even though you are a champion hero (though it increases the odds). Coordinate attack with your comrades (doesn't mean you can shout and boss people around by massive clicking, and be angry when people ignore you).

You can blame your comrades, but it doesn't help you win.You can choose to party with a champion player, but make sure you learn something from it.

Choose your hero based on your style/character.

Choose your hero wisely based on your playing style or character. If you are aggressive, chose an attacker and melee hero. If sneaky is your nature, choose an invisible assassin. If you like support from a safe distance, choose a ranged hero. There is not best hero, only hero who suits you; you might start with a popular hero, and it takes times to find your real hero.

Leadership is not bossing

Some people expect others MUST follow their orders else these bosses will click their minions to death followed by deteriorating comments. Understand than each player play differently based on their style, hero and skill; respect them and you shall be respected, help them and you shall be helped. Leadership is not demanded, it is earned.

Blaming others only make it worse

If you die, it’s mostly your fault. Even if someone make a mistake (like trapped you to be killed), blaming them doesn't improve teamwork or the odds of winning, just move on and look forward to the next battle. If they can, they will avenge you; if they can’t, they have their reasons and limitations; if they run away, it’s because they know they are going to die (besides, one less death on friendly side contribute to the odds of winning). Angry people have natural tendency to blame others, learn to refrain it.

Be a real Champion Leader

A champion win even though the odds are against him, with noob or disconnected players in the team, when the team is losing yet be able to turn the tide around. A champion does not play the blame game, doesn't boss people, but help and lead others to victory.

I must not Quit

Repeat the above before every game. If you are a real champion, you don’t quit because there are a few noobs in your team, you don’t quit because your team is losing, you don’t quit because you are constantly being killed, you don’t quit because your team mates doesn't listen to you, and you don’t quit because someone says you sucks. You play the game until the end: you die with honour defending your team mates, and you don’t abandon them.

Ignore the Assholes

They are bad people in the real world, and sadly they exist in the game as well. With an asshole in your team, the best you can do is not to let his remark and clicking affect you. You know what your are doing, and you know your capabilities and limits, and you play the game as best as you can.

Let the metrics be your mirror of reality

If you lose more than 75% of the time, you are either a noob or you sucks, admit it (your death is not due to others incompetency, admit it). Rethink your strategy or playing style, and try again. If you win 50% of the time, you are average and doing fine. When you are a real champion, you will know it.

It's not fair

Some people are more talented than others. Is this the right game for you?

It is competitive; it's a game

You could take it seriously, but don't forget to explore, have fun and make friends.

What did I learn from 1 week of Dogecoin mining

I am a late “adopter” of cryptocurrency. I heard of Bitcoin many years ago, but couldn’t truly understand it or take serious in it. When too many cryptocurrency news keep popping up, perhaps it’s time to get my hands on some coins.

How to get my hands on some coins? Mining of course, unless I sell something which accepts cryptocurrency as payment. I come across 3 cryptocurrency: Bitcoin (2009), Litecoin (2011) and Dogecoin (2013). Based on my understanding, mining get exponentially more difficult as times go (depending on how much had been mined). So it would be extremely difficult to mine Bitcoin, and Dogecoin is fairly new with light humour in it, so Dogecoin it is.

Below are a few of my observation as a Dogecoin miner for a week.

The Wallet

Firstly, I need a Dogecoin wallet, which is a piece of software which can store Dogecoin in a file. After the wallet is installed, it needs to download the blockchain, which is supposed to be ALL the Dogecoin transaction data as of today, which takes about 8 hours to download before I could start using the wallet. When someone else use Dogecoin to send to receive (a transaction), it will add to the blockchain, which will get bigger and bigger overtime.

There is no username for your wallet, so there is some basic anonymity. You could password protect your wallet (like a password protected zip file), just in case someone get their hands on your wallet. I think you can keep multiple copy of your wallet on multiple machines (I might be wrong).

How does people send money to you? You can generate an address (a string of characters), and ask them to send money to this address using their wallet software. You can generate multiple addresses to identify what money come from whom.

The Mining

There are CPU-based and GPU-based (using NVIDIA or AMD graphic cards) mining. Somehow GPU-based mining perform much better.

Somehow pool-mining perform better than solo mining, so join a pool.

Mining on my 2013-end Notebook (Gen4  i7-4500U @ 1.8Ghz, Nvidia Gefore 740M)

Mining speed in measured in khash/s, where each machine (or worker) should at least produce 10 khash/s in order to make mining minimally worthwhile at the current state.

The i7-4500U can run 4 threads, where each thread yields 10 khash/s, so my notebook is capable of 40 khash/s. I found that I can run on 3 threads in the background and my OS and virtualbox still run normally without much slowdown while I do web development in Python. The heat is slightly hot, and it isn’t noisy.
The Nvidia Gefore 740M only have 1 core and is capable of 40 khash/s. The heat is quite hot, and I am afraid it might damage the notebook if running for a long time.

So my notebook is capable of 80 khash/s, but I only run CPU-based mining on 3 threads (30 khash/s) for 12 hours per day.

Using a Dogecoin calculator, at 30 khash/s  (current difficulty=1771, assuming block reward=500000), I could mine 7 Dogecoin per hour, 170 Dogecoin per Day. At the current exchange rate (BTC per DOGE) of 0.00000212, the daily income is USD 0.35 (about 500 Doge to 1 USD). Since I am only running 12 hours a day, so I only get half of it.

Mining difficulty goes up fairly fast (it was 385 on 1st Jan 2014). Current Block Reward is 0 to 1,000,000 DOGE (500,000 is used as Average), but it is estimated to drop to half in 18 days.

Mining on my 2010 Notebook (Gen1 i5 M460 @ 2.5Ghz)

The i5 M460 could run on 4 threads, where each thread yields 3 khash/s, so my notebook is capable of 12 khash/s (it means my 2013 Notebook’s CPU is 3.33 times more powerful). The AMD Radeon performance is too pathetic, clocking only 3 khash/s.

Given the cost of power consumption and all that, I am afraid mining isn’t marginally worthwhile on this machine.

Mining on Digital Ocean (2 CPU, USD 20/month)

The DO server with 2 CPU could run on 2 threads, where each threads yields 6 khash/s, and the instance is capable of 12 khash/s (it means 2 CPU on DO is equivalent to the processing power of Gen1 i5 M460 @ 2.5Ghz).

At 12 khash/s, it could generate 67.5 Dogecoin per day (difficulty=1771, block reward=500000) and about USD 0.13 per day. The cost of server is USD 0.66 per day. So this is definitely not profitable at the current state.

Mining on AWS Spot Instance (c3.2xlarge, 8 CPU, USD 0.112/hour)

c3.2xlarge on-demand instance cost USD 0.60/hour, so the spot instance provide about 80% discount.

The AWS server with 8 CPU could run on 8 threads, where each threads yields 4 khash/s (DO CPU performs 50% better), and the instance is capable of 32 khash/s (it means 8 CPU on AWS is equivelant to 80% of processing power of Gen4  i7-4500U @ 1.8Ghz).

At 32 khash/s, it could generate 7 Dogecoint per hour (difficulty=1771, block reward=500000) and about USD 0.02 per hour. The cost of server is USD 0.112 per hour. So this is definitely not profitable at the current state.

Conclusion

Dogecoin mining is hardly profitable at the current state of 25 Jan 2014.

If you have a new and powerful CPU, you could mine in the background and hopeful of getting 500 Doge (about 1 USD) within a week. If you have desktop with powerful GPU, you might do better. But the future isn’t getting brighter for Dogecoin mining, just mine for fun.

I didn’t try to build a GPU-based miner or try GPU rig or AWS GPU-based instance as I believe I am too late into the game. Those with earlier experience mining Bitcoin or Litecoin would have a better advantage.

If somehow you get your hands on some free idle server or nvidia super computer, it could still be fun.

A CPU on DO yield 6 khash/s while AWS yield 4 khash/s. A Gen1 i5 M460 @ 2.5Ghz could yield 12 khash/s. A Gen4  i7-4500U @ 1.8Ghz yield 40 khash/s. I overestimated the CPU capability on AWS and DO. 10 CPU on AWS or 6.66 CPU on DO is equivalent to the processing power of Gen4 i7-4500U on a 2013-end notebook.

More than a Bookmarking App

I always wanted a better bookmarking app, a better version of Delicious, and I wonder what could it be.

Bookmarking

Old Delicious

The first bookmark app that got me excited is Delicious, where I could see how many people bookmarked the same link as I am. At the time I was using it, Delicious doesn’t even have a browser plugin to easily bookmark a page, where I have to visit Delicious page to add a link (much like HN), but it’s already wildly popular. Delicious has a few goodies:

• Store bookmark on Internet (before the age of Cloud and Syncing), so we wouldn’t lost all the precious links when the computer fail.
• Number of people who bookmarked the same link is a vote which signal the “authority or importance” of the link (much like submission and up-voting by HN or Digg)
• The tagging might be chaotic, but it does allow browsing for import links for a specific category.
• The front page shows hot links, which is good for reading and browsing (much like HN)

New Declicious

The new Delicious didn’t show hot links unless I signup. They didn’t show the number of people who bookmarked the link in the listing, unless I link on the link for detail.

The hot tags are Egypt, breakingbad, redskins, Olympics, recipes, which didn’t interest me. I realize the early communities of Delicious are techies, thus I found the links relevant. Now Delicious is like Reddit (cover everything from gossips to politics), where I wish it was like HN.

The bookmarking features work quite flawlessly, yet I am still not happy (perhaps I am looking for more than just a bookmarking app). I can follow people and find out what link they bookmarked.

Somehow the new Delicious just didn’t feel the same anymore; perhaps the expectations had changed since I last used it 10 years ago, perhaps the community behind it isn’t the same anymore.

Kippt

Kippt used to be simple bookmarking tool, until they decided to pivot into something called “make your information workflow and archiving effortless.” which I didn’t get it. It annoys me once in a while by prompting their “social” following feature. I don’t object to the feature, but I don’t link to be interrupted by opening the kippt page when I try to bookmark a page.

Chrome Bookmark

Isn’t chrome bookmark good enough? It is fast and simple, and sync seamlessly with mobile devices. Somehow I never quite used it, unless on mobile devices, because it require much more effort to bookmark on mobile browsers using third party tools.

Perhaps it lacks a webpage I could browse my links (Google Bookmark doesn’t seems to integrate with Chrome Bookmark), or perhaps I miss the social and hot links discovery part of Delicious.

Discovery

An important aspect of the Old Delicious is the “social” side, or more precisely the discovery of hot links which interest me, which I would end up bookmarking it.

Digg

In a certain sense, Digg as a news aggregator site have the discovery side of bookmarking app like Delicious, where we could see hot and trending links on the FrontPage. Why I didn’t use Digg anymore? The techies had left, and the gossips and entertainment had taken over.

Reddit

I never joined Reddit because the hot links on the front page didn’t interest me. I read somewhere the essence of Reddit nowadays is in the subreddit (focus topics) due to its grown size. I just added the subreddit into my feed reader.

Hacker News

I use Hacker News actively, because it has quality links thanks to the techie community (felt a bit like the Old Delicious, without the fancy features of tagging and bookmarking).

Lesson Learned: In order to discover the things you like, you need to attract the right crowd.


PS: as much as I like Hacker News, it's still very much a niche as compared to Reddit

Feed Reader

I like Google Feed Reader, where it had the social aspect of following my favorite blogs, and I get to discover good reads from time to time. Nowadays I used Feedly, it works well.

Not Just Bookmarking anymore

I thought I wanted a simple bookmarking tool, but it isn’t that simple anymore. I wanted a tool which keeps my favorite links and help me discover new favorite links (and find useful resource page).

• A simple tool for quick bookmarking, accessible from anywhere.
• Discovery of hot links like Old Delicious, Hacker News (need to attract the right community)
• Follow my favorite blogs, writer, and topics like a feed reader.
• Group similar links together to provide useful information for a specific topic. E.g. tagging, subreddit, Wikipedia page, etc. In a certain sense is like people keep a page to list relevant resources, e.g. Resources for Android Development, Best IDE for Python, etc.

I always thought of building a “better” bookmarking app, and now I realize I actually wanted a Delicious + Hacker News + Google Reader + Wikipedia.

PS: a quick google on "Bookmarking Tool" yield little meaningful results, perhaps it's not something people care about these days.

Why the Government doesn't listen to me?

Plenty of times Government did do some funny things

• Spying on the entire nation in the name of national security, irregardless how vulnerable the citizens feel about it
• Treat people like terrorist suspect with no dignity when going on board a plain
• When someone reveals dirty secrets about the government, that person is deemed to commit treason against the country (or the government?)
• Censor the Internet and limit freedom of speech, where you are not allowed to talk bad the government
• When the people try to voice up, the government threatens to put these people in jail through charges like disrupting the peace, treason, racial sensitivity, etc.
• When the people try to question the government, the government put up reasons like “this could not be questioned”.

It seems to me that the Government feels insecure, thus act defensive when feels threaten by the people, they very people they are entrusted to protect and take care of. Perhaps I am naïve and didn’t understand the concept of the Government. I thought the Government is a custodian to represent the people, and to act in the best interest of the people. Somehow I felt most government’s priority is to stay in power. What is possibly going wrong here?

Maybe Thomas Jefferson and I are wrong

“The purpose of government is to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness. Government exists for the interests of the governed, not for the governors.” ― Thomas Jefferson

“When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." ― Thomas Jefferson

Perhaps Thomas Jefferson and I are wrong about the purpose of the government, or maybe Tyranny is still a form of government though not favored by the people. I am not sure what kind of vow the elected representative of the country takes when they take the office, but I sure hope someone has the power to make them accountable.

Why I feel the government is not doing very well "to enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness"? Is this the primary objective?

Maybe I am not “the People”

Maybe I am not the intended People of the country, supposing I am the minority and everyone else thinks that the government is doing a great job. Many people could voice their discontent on the Internet, but many more didn't voice up, and even more didn't use the Internet.

When the Government proposed a law which I think is stupid or dangerous or both, how could I as the people stop it? We could do a petition or protest, but we could hardly gather the active support of 5% of the population; the government could claim that they have consulted all stakeholders and the majority support it. In fact, it was our elected representatives who pass the law. The government didn't see any unhappy people, did you?

It’s very hard to prove the Voice of the People, where it’s only actively polled once every 3-5 years during the election. Usually the ruling party shall be the upper hand in government election (access to media and resources, using government machinery for party, last minute favorable policy for the people, electoral divisions, etc.), where the results could easily skewed 10-20%. In another words, it would take 60-70% of favorable votes for the opposition to win.

Do we have a mechanism to effectively reflect the voice of the people for each intervals and events? How do we prove a policy or law is indeed stupid and dangerous in the eye of the people?

Maybe the people are too stupid?

Some people believe that people are too stupid to take care of themselves, what’s more about knowing what’s good for the country. If the people don’t know, who knows better?

Would you agree if the government give you free money even though it would bankrupt the government in the long run?

I have poor financial management skill, thus I hire a financial manager. One day the financial manager I hire thinks that I am too stupid and decided to steal my money. The people don’t know how to run a country, so we elect a government.

If the people could be stupid, the government could be a cunning smart ass, and I am betting the latter is more dangerous.

Why someone want to be the Top Public Servant?

I am in the committee as caretaker of my apartment building, where I don’t get paid, facing complaints, and with plenty of work to do. Why did I take up the role? Because the apartment operation and finance is on the verge of collapsing and there is no one else to pick up the shit. I always wonder what’s the reason other people are taking this role?

Why would you want to take up the top post of the Public Servant, where you have to serve millions of people who are literally your boss, and didn't get paid quite well given your responsibility? Why you didn't become the CEO of corporations where there are thousands of minions under you, and it’s not uncommon to be paid millions of dollars in remuneration?

People say you could get power and money by being the top public servant …

Why teacher get paid so little when they about responsible of educating our future leaders? Why our top public servants get paid lesser than CEOs while being entrusted with more power and money?

Why not we make it a policy that top public servants are paid as well as the CEOs (at least a few million per years, depending on the country’s performance), but are not allowed to be super rich (somehow manage to amass 10 extra million per  year from “business” during the tenure). If your business is prospering rapidly, I am sure you don’t have the time to run the country. If you immediate family fortune grows exponentially during your tenure, I am sure you would like to retire and spend the money with your family.

Do you know the fortune of the top public servants? Is it reasonable given their salary?

Public Servant should be paid well given their responsibility, but it’s unreasonable for them to get mad rich due to their position.

The People always complaint

A Korean friends told me the people always complaint about their government (including Korea), and the Singaporean taxi drivers complaint about their government as well.

Perhaps it's human nature to never be satisfied. Nevertheless, there is still so much room for improvement to build a better country, and I am afraid some of the current trend and policy is leading to a downhill path.

Please enable the people of a nation to live in safety and happiness.

Review: Do Things That Don’t Scale

Do Things that Don’t Scale by PG is one of the more insightful article I had read in recent times, and it’s pretty long (having a hard time taking notes).

Notes

1. The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually.
2. There are two reasons founders resist going out and recruiting users individually. One is a combination of shyness and laziness. They'd rather sit at home writing code than go out and talk to a bunch of strangers and probably be rejected by most of them. The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first.
3. If you have 100 users, you need to get 10 more next week to grow 10% a week. And while 110 may not seem much better than 100, if you keep growing at 10% a week you'll be surprised how big the numbers get. After a year you'll have 14,000 users, and after 2 years you'll have 2 million.
4. Marketplaces are so hard to get rolling that you should expect to take heroic measures at first. In Airbnb's case, these consisted of going door to door in New York, recruiting new users and helping existing ones improve their listings.
5. It's harmless if reporters and know-it-alls dismiss your startup. They always get things wrong. It's even ok if investors dismiss your startup; they'll change their minds when they see growth. The big danger is that you'll dismiss your startup yourself.
6. Microsoft can't have seemed very impressive when it was just a couple guys in Albuquerque writing Basic interpreters for a market of a few thousand hobbyists (as they were then called), but in retrospect that was the optimal path to dominating microcomputer software.
7. How do you find users to recruit manually? If you build something to solve your own problems, then you only have to find your peers, which is usually straightforward. 
8. Otherwise you'll have to make a more deliberate effort to locate the most promising vein of users. For example, Ben Silbermann noticed that a lot of the earliest Pinterest users were interested in design, so he went to a conference of design bloggers to recruit users, and that worked well.
9. You should take extraordinary measures not just to acquire users, but also to make them happy. For as long as they could (which turned out to be surprisingly long), Wufoo sent each new user a hand-written thank you note.
10. A lot of of startup founders are trained as engineers, and customer service is not part of the training of engineers. You're supposed to build things that are robust and elegant, not be slavishly attentive to individual users like some kind of salesperson.
11. I have never once seen a startup lured down a blind alley by trying too hard to make their initial users happy.
12. But perhaps the biggest thing preventing founders from realizing how attentive they could be to their users is that they've never experienced such attention themselves. Their standards for customer service have been set by the companies they've been customers of, which are mostly big ones.
13. Steve Jobs wasn't just using "insanely" as a synonym for "very." He meant it more literally—that one should focus on quality of execution to a degree that in everyday life would be considered pathological.
14. It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. But you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you make up the difference with attentiveness.
15. In software, especially, it usually works best to get something in front of users as soon as it has a quantum of utility, and then see what they do with it. Perfectionism is often an excuse for procrastination, and in any case your initial model of users is always inaccurate, even if you're one of them.
16. Sometimes the right unscalable trick is to focus on a deliberately narrow market. That's what Facebook did for Harvard students.
17. Any startup that could be described as a marketplace usually has to start in a subset of the market. It's always worth asking if there's a subset of the market in which you can get a critical mass of users quickly.
18. Most startups that use the contained fire strategy do it unconsciously. They build something for themselves and their friends, who happen to be the early adopters, and only realize later that they could offer it to a broader market. The strategy works just as well if you do it unconsciously.
19. Among companies, the best early adopters are usually other startups. They're more open to new things both by nature and because, having just been started, they haven't made all their choices yet. Plus when they succeed they grow fast, and you with them.
20. Pick a single user and act as if they were consultants building something just for that one user. The initial user serves as the form for your mold; keep tweaking till you fit their needs perfectly, and you'll usually find you've made something other users want too. Even if there aren't many of them, there are probably adjacent territories that have more.
21. Use your software yourselves on customers’ behalf. Viaweb: Some merchants don’t want to make an online store with our software, but they'd let us make one for them. It taught us how it would feel to merchants to use our software. Sometimes the feedback loop was near instantaneous.
22. When you only have a small number of users, you can sometimes get away with doing by hand things that you plan to automate later. This lets you launch faster, and when you do finally automate yourself out of the loop, you'll know exactly what to build because you'll have muscle memory from doing it yourself.
23. If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. It would be a little frightening to be solving users' problems in a way that wasn't yet automatic, but less frightening than the far more common case of having something automatic that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems.
24. The Big Launch don’ usually work. All you need from a launch is some initial core of users. How well you're doing a few months later will depend more on how happy you made those users than how many there were of them.
25. So why do founders think launches matter? A combination of solipsism and laziness. They think what they're building is so great that everyone who hears about it will immediately sign up. Plus it would be so much less work if you could get users merely by broadcasting your existence, rather than recruiting them one at a time. But even if what you're building really is great, getting users will be always be a gradual process—partly because great things are usually also novel, but mainly because users have other things to think about.
26. Partnerships too usually don't work. They don't work for startups in general, but they especially don't work as a way to get growth started.
27. The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going.

A Shorter Summary

Sometimes conventional wisdom (even in the startup world) could be wrong, or wrongly interpreted and practiced. When we are small and have no users, there is a lot of non-scalable manual work need to be done to attract users, keep them happy until we reach a tipping point. The side effects is that we could learn a lot while doing the manual work, better understand the user's need, and how to optimize the process better. After that, perhaps we could scale, or not. No everyone needs to scale like Google.

A local angel investor reminded me that sometimes it’s good to go local and do something which don’t scale, as it makes it harder for the “scaling” foreign player to enter the market. It’s more work with more “hardware” problems, but it’s also more defensible. Market too small? The VC might not be interested with 10 million dollar market, but I am.

Perhaps it’s not a matter of scaling or not, but doing whatever is required.

Invited: D`MUG’s Magic Mug

When I caught wind of a friend venturing into the ceramic mug business, I was curious and wondering what is special about mugs. Then I was told it is a “magic” mug.

It’s magic in the sense the mug is temperature-sensitive (react to heat or cold), where the image on the exterior of the mug will change color when the mug is being exposed to heat or cold (heat-sensitive based product is more common). The “magic” nature of the mug makes the mug much more interesting, where you could put hidden message or motive where it will only be exposed when in contact with heat, which makes a great gift candidate.

 

I would assume the most important aspect of magic mug is the design of the exterior image, where is not only have to be beautiful and unique, but the contrast between the normal image (room temperature image) and hidden image (appear upon heated) must be captivating and bring out “surprise”, the same expectation we have with magic.

I ask Dexter, the co- founder of Dexsim (the company behind d’MUG), about who their target customers are. He said the magic mugs are popular as corporate gifts, and they are targeting end users as well. From their design I would say it’s a “safe” design, meaning it probably more suited towards corporate with similar “look & feel” to those of souvenir gifts.

Before

After

I was given 3 design as samples: The TV (a black screen brighten up and showing the word “ON”), The Tiger (Stripes turn into a tiger) and The Words (Black words turned into colourful words). I am very satisfied with the quality of the mug (solid build, vibrant color), and the design is okay, but I feel there is much more room for improvement. The TV has lots of potential, as the black screen could be turn on into anything, but why just show the word “ON” (which is not very meaningful), why not a more meaningful hidden message, a funny character or “You Are Being Watched” or “I'll Always Watch Over You”, then switch the corresponding white background with similar mood theme. As for The Words, rather than showing a bunch of meaningless words, why not put a hidden message in it and color up the hidden message, such as “Marry Me”, will this be a potential best seller? The Tiger is quite alright, but I like The Zebra better.

To target the individuals, especially the younger crowd, the mug’s design should incorporate humor or cuteness (for the much younger crowd) or some special characters or styles (gothic, girlish romance, etc.). Since it is expected to be bought as a gift, it should have more meaning (especially hidden meaning) for occasions such as birthday, father and mother’s day, valentine, etc. There should be a message of love, message of praise, message which makes people laugh, and help people to convey a message. When I say message I don’t mean just text, as message could be translated in other visual form. We have enough of “safe” design flooding the market; I believe we are desperately looking for something special, unique and unconventional. The nature of the magic mug is very special, and it should be complemented with a special design.

The magic mug still makes a very good gift with a surprise element, and I have high hopes for d’MUG’s next releases. The mug is sold for RM 22 per piece on d’MUG’s online store (original price is RM 26) excluding delivery (For West Malaysia is RM6 for Normal registered pos & RM8 for Poslaju. For East Malaysia will be RM12  for Poslaju only). If you would like to save on the delivery fee, you could try to contact them (enquiry@dexsim.com) to arrange for pickup (probably near Subang Empire area). There should be discount for bulk purchase (at least 50 units).

If you are interested in custom design, they accept a minimum order quantity of 50, and you can even print some customized message at the bottom of the mug. What if you only want 1 or 2 unit? Probably still could be done, but the price shall be higher, do contact Dexsim regarding your request.

The mug is made of High Grade Ceramic Compound, which feels pretty sturdy. The Ink and the Mug is food safe, certified to be compliance with "Directive 84/500/EEC – approximating EU countries' laws on ceramic articles intended to come into contact with foods”

I believe d’MUG should be a popular corporate gift, magically presenting each company;s identity and “secret message”, and it comes with a solid blue color premium box, which protect the mug well and portray a premium image. Do email enquiry@dexsim.com for bulk discount and custom design.

Dexsim (M) Sdn Bhd
B-06-29, Empire SOHO, Empire Subang,
Jalan SS16/1,
47500 Subang Jaya,
Selangor, Malaysia.
Tel: +6017 888 4678
Email: enquiry@dexsim.com
Web: http://dexsim.com
Online Store: http://www.d-mug.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DexsimSdnBhd

Review: What I wish I knew when I was 18 by Stephen Fry

Notes:

• Technology is like a Mirror: if an idiot looks in, you can't expect an apostle to lookout
• Chasing techniques and answers (to happiness and richness) is fatal
• The worst things you can do to yourself in life is setting goals (goal orientation is disasterous): 1) You don't meet your goal and call yourself a failure 2) You meet you goal and ask, "I'm here, now what?"
• Work is more fun than fun
• The things that unsuccessful people have in common is they talk about themselves all the time (I need ...) = Egoistic
• The real of Heroism is people who quietly get on with their life and think about other people
• How can you know England if England is the only country you know
• One of the wonderful given ability in life is the ability to give
• Would you rather be someone who ask for money, or be someone in the position to give?
• On one hand you want to belong to a tribe, on the other hand you want to be outside and unique
• Online comments are usually nasty and resentful, which are meaningless and demoralizing
• Self-obsessed people are poisoning themselves and people around them
• The more in the world you encounter Kindness and cheerfulness, the better the world would be (it dwarfs talent, energy, commitment, justice, virtual, truth, ...)

Review: Brian Chesky of AirBnB (2010)

Video: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272180383

Notes:

• Everyone is once powerless and obscure.
• Press tactics: don't start with CNN, they won't cover you. Google for related keyword/news, find the bloggers who talks about it and email them. Then the local news will pickup from the bloggers, then the state news, then it's reach CNN. Got the 1st 800 listings.
• When you have plenty of time, make cereals
• PG interested because these guys won't die
• Whatever you focus on, you get
• Community marketplace for space
• Rent airbed for events -> cover non-events -> rent rooms -> rent apartments -> rent any space (private island, tree-house, boat, castle for events, etc.)

Launches

• Launch 1: Rent airbed from our apartment for an event (local hotels are sold out)
• Launch 2: Airbed for conferences for all over the country, launch by SXSW
• Launch 3: Stay with local while travelling (press tactics)
• Launch 4: Making Cereals
• Launch 5: Demo Day: YC (users -> profit)

Review: Ben Silbermann of Pinterest @ Startup School

Video: http://startupschool.org/2012/silberman/

Notes

• Making things can take a long time (quit jobs 2 years ago - work on multiple projects, 4 months to launch, get 3000 accounts in 3 months)
• Commitment to HAVE to make it work. You should just do it, or stop talking about it.
• Ways investors says No: 
• Call me back in a few months.
• Who else is in?
• There is NO way this will happen.
• Lessons about investors:
• Even rich people are subject to free cookie, investor are people too.
• Hack the leverage: fear of losing the deal, the believe that the thing will be so big.
• Don't take investors' advice as face value, they make mistakes too, judge for yourself.
• Be great at 1 thing, the ONE thing worthy of people's time
• Investors are subjects to the same bias and trends everyone else is reading on techcrunch and hacker news.
• Convince investors through users who is their friends and wives.
• A lot of different ways to succeed, not necessary following the trends; trust the user, data and your instinct
• Build something you believe in, else you will definitely burn out
• Don't give up: don't let others talk you out of your dream

Review: The Lean Startup

Notes

• Build, Measure, Learn
• What is startup? Human institution designed to create something new, under condition of extreme uncertainty.
• Startup = Experiment to creating a sustainable business
• Entrepernuership = Management
• The good entrepernuer doesn't have a better idea than a bad entrepenuer (equally ridiculous), the only different is they don't give up, neither do they preservere into studborness
• Pivot = change is strategy, not a change in vision
• Startup Runway = how many more opportunity to pivot before we run out; raise more money to extend the runway or get to the moment of pivoting sooner
• Learning is used to justify failure; could you fasten the learning from 6 months to 1 months, or by testing the market with a smaller product or no product at all?
• Innovation Accounting = MVP, weekly pivoting meeting
• How do products grow? Are we creating value? What's in the MVP? Can we go faster?
• Don't just listened to me as I am a failure, or I could be lying to you. A true entrepreneur don't take down notes at seminar like this and go back to implement them. What work for me might not work for you, and what work before might not work now. What I hope you would do is take bits and pieces of this scientific framework, experiment with it and tell me what you think.
• Daily/Immediate release cycle drastically reduce deployment time due to smaller batch size
• No penalty is releasing MVP early: either you get more customer feedback and promise them a better release, or they actually like the MVP more than the full product (Google search box vs Yahoo portal).
• Manager's role is big corporation is to prevent innovation, and to continue working on proven methods; if you want innovation  you should employ someone with the job title "Entrepreneur" and put them in a subsidiary or something.
• Focus on long-term benefits, as you can't do anything meaningful if you just focus on short-term profits.
• If you are wondering about product-market fit, you don't have it; you launch with the press when you have good results to show (not just fancy product with probably ZERO customers)
• Product is marketing; in a startup, there is no distinction or silos of department

Interesting: FAKEGRIMLOCK's Minimum Viable Personality

The world is full of boring products, don't make more!
Personality = Interesting = Care = Talk = Win!

3 Questions
1) How you change customer's life? (Superhero)
2) What you stand for? (Awesome)
3) What do you hate? (Boring)

More:

Be On Fire!

Review: Freedom Inc

I believe this is a good book (or at least I believe in the idea), but sadly it under-delivered by throwing too many elements which make up Freedom Inc. (you know you wanted to create Freedom Inc., yet there are too many ideas and lessons being thrown around). Like most books, at least it has some good case studies.

Freedom Inc. - Free your Employees and Let Them Lead Your Business to Higher Productivity, Profits and Growth. It might seems like a "dangerous" idea to toy with, believing that your employee are motivated and responsible enough to act in the best interest of the company without the need of tight supervision or told exactly what to do, but I believe that's the fundamental trust between employee and employer. Once you establish the trust and freedom culture, everyone start to take responsibility to make the company better, and self-govern among themselves, and the entire eco-system would prosper.

Notes:

• Management for the 3%: born of policies to control a small bunch and inconvenient the rest.
• Toyota: allow feedback to improve existing procedures; not push down by management.
• Believe in people willingness to do good job and to learn.
• "How" company are fundamentally hostile environments for the ideas proposed by the front-line people.
• Culture eat strategy for breakfast: you can have the best plan and the culture isn't going to let it happen, it's going to die ...
• The cost of stress
• Perceived control reduced stress
• From Artisan to Automation
• The experiment of 5 monkey and a Banana - the way corporate cultures are being sustained and eventually squash all attempts at change.
• Entrepreneurial Culture -> Real Manager Required -> Discipline (procedure & policies)
• Change start from top -> Anubi Baboom
• Freedom is neither hierarchy or anarchy
• Ordered Liberty: self discipline form of organization
• Rather than saying "you're supposed to use new oak barrel", you ask, "how to make the best wine?"
• Zappos: after 4 weeks paid training, offer compensation for people to quit, to ensure people really share Zappos' vision.
• Vision is more often something to be put on the walls, pasted into annual report and otherwise forgotten.
• People start owning the company's vision only when they are free to make their own decision to pursuit it.
• If the environment is right, then we do the product right and we make tons of money and have a blast. You can't force making money and have a blast.
• Freedom: it's culture and condition to make decision on your own, and freedom to express your art, craft and passion.
• People don't resist change, they resist being changed.
• Discuss in a town hall style meeting.
• Organization chart isn't very useful.
• Natural work group: get the right people come together, to the right work, and do it right.
• We are here to make products, good products, not hours.
• We'll learn by doing, being people of good faith, of common sense, and of good will.
• Does your company organization chart shows that man is not intelligent, lazy, irresponsible, are thieves and bad?
• The good prince is one who, by eliminating the constraints and exclusiveness, allows everyone to blossoms as he wishes.
• Front-line people set the procedures.
• Once you wakup everyday, you're at risk. There is only one state with zero risk, and it happens when you're dead. Talk about "love freedom" with risk "or die".
• Change CEO's behavior from talking to listening, removing bureaucratic symbol and practices that treat people as intrinsically inferior, and radically transforming managers' "how" habits into "why" questions.
• Self governance.
• People treated with consideration, support for growth and self direction, they self-motivate and take initiatives.
• When environment is controlling and deprives people of their universal needs, motivation become externally controlled and people do only what they are rewarded or punished for.
• Octicon Culture:
• Multi-job
• No department, replaced by project leader, guru to ensure professional standard, mentors to support. No more job title.
• Computer System: allow work from anywhere.
• No wall or partitions, replaced by plants and trees on wheel.
• Employee want to be treated as independent individual who are willing to take responsibility.
• Employee want to develop within their jobs and gain new experience, exciting and challenging tasks are more important than status and titles.
• Employee desires as much freedom as possible, yet accept the necessity of a clear and structured framework.
• The more freedom ... we as a company want to give to staff, the more clarity we must create about mission, vision, strategy and values.
• When people are promised freedom but then being denied it, reacted more strongly than those who has no expectation of freedom.
• If he wanted to build a free environment, he had to transform the executives' arrogant attitude towards Aviss front-line person - get them to become trainee.
• Self motivation and freedom to act as if this is your own company.
• Personal & fair, de-bureaucratizing and re-humanizing.
• Illusion of Control: People will game the system.
• Fairness & Respect.
• Make more mistakes than anyone else, but never make the same mistake twice.
• The genuine commitment to satisfying people's needs is what convinced employees to join in.

Review: Making The World of Software Engineering More Creative by Josh Linkner

 Notes:

• Creativity Crisis: My daughter was asked to draw a bear in school, and she draw a purple and funky bear, and the teacher says, "that's not what bears look like, go back and redo it". Lesson learned: Don’t take risks, don’t try something new, don’t do something interesting, just do the bare minimum
• Uglydolls: toy of the year 2007. Disconnection: we teach people to draw normal bear, yet we reward people who design funny bear. Lesson learned: Doing exactly the opposite is what allows us to reach our true potential.
• Fear: the number one blocker of creativity. You say like, "well what will my boss say? Will I look foolish, whose going to fund this idea? If it was such a good idea somebody else probably would have already said it. If this project goes forward and I’m responsible for it and I screw it up what does that mean to my career?"
• Creativity as a muscle, where it could be trained through exercised
• Jazz: 1% of the notes are on the written page and the rest of it you make it up as you go; spontaneous innovation.It’s not that jazz musicians were born more creative it’s that the culture they’ve built enables that creativity.
• Creativity isn’t only being Steve Jobs and inventing iPod or disrupting an entire field, creativity in the little everyday things can become transformative. How do you conduct your Monday morning meetings? How close is the printer? Can you save a couple of steps? How are you handling quality control? Creativity applied on an everyday basis again can be transformational.
• Show a random picture, and ask people what is the picture about. We start to make things up.
• Curiosity is one the key building blocks of creativity. Ask these three simple questions again and again and again. Why, what if and why not? 
• Example: Why do socks have to be boring? What if socks were colorful and fun and expressive? Why do socks match? Why do socks come in pairs of two you always lose one and that’s annoying?
• Solution: Little Mismatched, fun and colorful and expressive. You can’t buy a pair of socks that match. They are color coordinated but they don’t match. In fact you can’t even buy a pair at all because they come in sets of 3 or 5
• Toyota called the ‘5 Why’s’: like the children keep asking why and why, no matter what answer you put up. 
• Video: Louis CK Why?
• Where’s Waldo: You notice everything. All these things you wouldn’t ordinarily see.
• I looked at the market conditions of the day it was because I aimed at something in the future (no websites back then, now almost every company have one)
• Facebook isn’t doing this at all and so we are going to win: by the time you complete the product 12 months down the road, Facebook might be doing that as well.
• Aim at something in the future, use your creativity and innovation to think what’s about to happen not just what’s happening today.
• Dyson vacuum cleaner: 5100 times of failure. Failure isn’t fatal; instead mistakes are simply the portals of discovery.
• We are so worried about playing it safe only to learn that playing it safe has become the riskiest move of all.
• Video: from failure you learn, keep moving forward
• Sharply criticizing somebody who comes up with a little spark of an idea or letting him go and run and take a couple of risks along the way?
• Celebrate the failure of the year.
• Get out of jail free cards: They say take these cards go on a limb be creative and if you really screw something up hand us one of these cards, you’re off the hook no questions asked.
• Tradition: blindly saluting the flag of the past. Great in the family, deadly in business.
• Against Tradition: carve the Haloween pumpkin from the bottom: all the goop just plops right out (use gravity), light candle from bottom (no burn) and carry it around with the natural handle on top
• Pike Syndrome: an imaginary barrier is getting in the way of progress.
• I don’t have enough resources, I didn’t finalize my (?) my code isn’t tight enough, I’m too tall, I’m too short, too old, too young, I didn’t go to the right school, I didn’t have the right connections.
• Role Storming: pretend to be someone, and give ideas based on that persona. Pretend to be Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Sheen, etc.

Review: How to find undervalued talent

How to find undervalued talent from Rasmus Ankersen on Vimeo.

3 simple lessons to improve ability to spot talent:

1. Identify the right talent based on the right competence required: don't give the wrong competency test, or is the test relevant? how relevant?
2. Raw vs Polished Talent: learn the story behind, is there more room for improvement with better guidance and training?
3. Character and Mindset: why are you here?

Handbook to the life of Joy and No Regrets: The Bucket List

Just watched the The Bucket List, about two terminally ill strangers decide to create a bucket list together (list of things to do before you die), and work through the list. The billionaire decide to do something crazy and have fun, while the mechanic who regretted the life he had given up decide to seek the missing love for his wife on their new journey. They do some crazy and stupid stuff, travel the world, and chase some ideals and dreams; at the end, the things which they desired the most had always be with them (friendship and love), yet it will require an adventure and travel around in order to get “home”. This movie is a reminder to me: am I living a life which I truly desired? Focusing on the things which really matter to me? No putting any good plans on hold, building up huge pile of regrets along the way?

In order to find out the answer, I would say the best way is to create my own bucket list: so that I know what is not so important, what are the things which I always want to do, and probably how to have fun. Hopefully along the way, I would be able to live everyday as if it is the last.

“You know, the ancient Egyptians had a beautiful belief about death. When their souls got to the entrance to heaven, the guards asked two questions. Their answers determined whether they were able to enter or not.  ‘Have you found joy in your life?’ 'Has your life brought joy to others?’” -- The Bucket List

The Big Travel Plan
I once planned to travel the world for one year before I hit 30, but that didn’t happened, and now I am probably 33. What is holding me back? Partly I sacrifice it for developing a business with a friend which didn’t quite work out, and also the typical worry about sacrificing on financial support for my future family plan, and worry the hell out of my parents for trying to be a bump for a year. There are definitely a psychological barrier and plenty of excuses for not doing it, and at the same time, I still can’t shake the idea of my mind.

I try to satisfy the desire with short adventures, first spending a month in Nepal, then another trip to India and China, which are fun and memorable, yet it still isn’t my ideal travel. I don’t really like short trips (less than a week), as it all seems too rush, trying to cover too many grounds with too little time, it’s more tiring than enjoyable. One month sounds good, yet sometimes we are too greedy as well, trying to get to too many places, and it involved a lot of cumbersome logistic planning. I really like Nepal, India is chaotic but a good experience, and finally I didn’t get the kick out of China. Why? Perhaps we do too much sight-seeing, being more like a tourist than traveler. There is little connection with the people and culture of the place, or we didn’t sink in to really feel the place, or we didn’t found the perfect place.

What is my perfect plan? It should be something along this line: move around places, until we found a place which we really like, and stay there for a week or months, and immerse in the simple daily life in a new place. There is no need to find a tourist-packed monuments and scenic view, as there could be a tasteful back alley and perfect restaurant just waiting around the corner, with no crowd but serenity.

Now I know what I truly desire, and I have my little perfect plan laid out, what should I really do? This is the part where I truly don’t know how to proceed, except to pick a destination, buy the air ticket, start packing and be ready to go. I probably could summon enough courage to do another one month journey, but how do I really let go? Unless, I know I have less than a year to live.

To a certain extent, I don’t mind postponing the plan for a while, but until when? Do I do it by next year? Do I wait until the day my business got acquired for a million dollar, and then I pack my bags? Do I wait until my children (assuming I have them) grow up, and then we go together? Or someday somehow, when the times come, I shall know it.

Opportunities await man who is ready, and I do need a plan to make The Big Travel plan works. Different people work in different way, some could just pack their bags and go, some would never do it, and some do it at a slower pace. I am not a spontaneous person, and I probably won’t force myself to become one, so I need to come up with a plan which works for me. There are probably two show stopper for me: work and children. Since the children are still an uncertain plan, so let’s put that aside first. I think I can’t just bump around while traveling for a year; it should be a way of life where I travel, play and work in new places. I don’t plan to do waitressing as work, though I won’t mind short term work in a farm, but the best sustainable way I could come up with is to build an online empire.

The Online Startup
I always like online business, where I could run it from anywhere. I dislike business which requires physical contact and constant interruption from customers, as this would limit and affect the quality of my life; nor do I want to take the risk of physical stocks and physical business maintenance. It’s priceless to have a morning without phone call interruption, and no constant urgency which require me to attend to something ASAP. Management of a business which doesn’t require anything physical (no physical contact, no stock, no management, no logistic), money will come rolling in without the need to chase for payment. I want to create the ultimate online business, where nothing is physical and everything is self-serviced.

This online business will fuel the Big Travel Plan

Live life as if it was my last day, is something I am still learning to practice.

Let’s fill up the rest of the bucket list on another day :)

Review: Lessons from Robert Kuok 郭鶴年

Lessons

• Why invest in Sugar? It's a basic necessity besides rice and wheat which is always in demand; if you can source for cheap sources, you'll get rich.
• More than 90% is hard work, the rest is luck.
• What make you better than your competitors? I believe there are smarter than me, but they have a messy night life, while I work hard; my horses run faster than theirs.
• There are risk in every business; if you are not brave enough to grab on the first or next opportunities, then you shall be a poor person forever. 做生意的人一定要一种的胆量，但是胆量要对生意，不要用胆量对人。
• 你不能跑两只马。You don't try to reap sideline profit when you promise an unconditional help.
• What makes a successful sugar king? Focus. 一定要专一，不能花心。
• Why you invest in multiple businesses besides sugar, isn't that "not focus"? When doing business, you should be involved in a few types, because they are related with each other (compounded benefit).
• Hotel is a service industry (not product), and the most important element is you employees, and you depends on them fully to take of your customers; thus, we shall make it our primary agenda to take care of our employees.
• Why invest in China's industry in such an early stage? I have a good feelings that China tourism industry will become the busiest in the world, due to its rich historical relics and monuments. During that time, there is no good place to stay, and the toilets are terrible; we need to help China's tourism industry to grow.
• I admit that I am not a great businessman, I am not the calculative kind.
• 我们要争志气，不要给外面的人看不起我们华人。
• 给人帮助：不宣传，不用谢，不报答。
• My mother told me to conduct business following the path of morality, don't worship materialism.
• Advice from mother: 儿孙能如我，何必留多财；倘若不如我，多财亦是空；不为自己求利益，但愿大众共安宁。If my children are as capable as I am, there is no need to leave them with inheritance money; if my children are not capable, giving them more money is useless as well; not working just for my own benefit, but so that everyone can live in a safe and peaceful environment.
• My mom knows that I'm somehow a talented businessman, but she would not want me to turn to the dark side and be an "evil" businessman. She advice us to be a good person, and not be greedy about money.
• My love for my mom is eternal; and I believe most Chinese mom is like my mother.
• If my mom is still alive, she would advice me to continue to be modest and practice humility, and help the poor people.
• 脾气是没办法改的。You can't change your temper.
• Daughter: I father believe in hard work and learning Chinese
• I hope that my children will do good for the company, be a good leader, build a good family and reduce their shortcomings.
• He will almost invest in any development for the good of China
• In my early days, I see those people who are very aggressive in business using unscrupulous methods. We knows their methods, but we didn't complaint; we just try our best to compete. Today, these business are no longer around.
• Personally, I don't love money; but I like my company to be profitable, so that I could pay good bonus to my staffs.

Robert Kuok: humility guided by morality, passionate in building a business yet not influenced by materialism.

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko

View more presentations from Siam English

Lesson 1: There is No Plan

• It’s nice to believe that you can map out every step ahead of time and end up where you want, but that’s a fantasy. The world changes. Ten years from now your industry might not even exist.
• You do something for Instrumental (investment banking pays the bill) or Fundamental (comic artist is so cool) reason.

Lesson 2: Think strengths, not weaknesses

• Successful people don’t try too hard to improve what they’re bad at, they capitalize on what they’re good at.

Lesson 3: It’s not about you

• The most successful people improve their own lives by improving others’ lives.
• The most valuable people in any job bring out the best in others. They make their boss look good. They help their teammates succeed. They help their customer solve its problem.

Lesson 4: Persistence trumps talent 

• What do Musicians and Atheletes do that others don't? They show up, they practice and practice and some more.
• What's the most powerful force in the universe? Compound Interest - it builds on itself.
• The more intrisic motivation (doing things not for reward, but because you simply like doing it) you have, the more you persist, the more likely you succeed.

Lesson 5: Make excellent mistakes

• Too many people spend their time avoiding mistakes. They’re so concerned about being wrong that they never try anything.  Their focus is avoiding failure. The most successful people make spectacular mistakes. They’re trying to do something big. But each time they make a mistake, they get a little better and move a little closer to excellence.
• Make mistakes seems , but it's more risky not to.
• It's about excellent mistakes (try something no one else had done before), not stupid one (barge into something unprepared)
• bunko - to make a mistake from which the benifits of what you've learned exceed the costs of the screw-up

Lesson 6: Leave an imprint

• Did I make a difference? Did I contribute something? Did my being here matter? Many people get towards the end of their lives and don't like their answers, and by then it's almost too late.
• Think about your purpose, to recognize that your life isn't infinite, and that you should use our limited time here to do something that matters
• Those other five lessons are crucial, but truly successful people deploy them in service of something larger than themselves: they leave their companies, their communities, their families a little better than before.

Preview: Becoming a Professional Human Being by Jim Bagnola

I haven't finish the book yet, so below is just a glimpse of it :)

What Is a Professional Human Being?

• Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value. - Albert Einstein
• A Professional Human Being is a positive role model I would like to emulate.

Perform Your Magic

• If you love the work you do, you'll never work a day in your life.
• The magic trinity:
• Skills: What are you good at?
• Likes: What do you like to do?
• Needs: What does society need?

Magic Formula from Jim

1. Find your magic (Skills + Likes + Needs)
2. Serve the needs of others
3. Make a difference
4. Allow us to gain financial freedom (it's not our top focus, but it's the side effect)

Four Practices of the World’s Great Entrepreneurs (from the The Entrepreneurial Age)

• Sense of Mission
• Customer/Product Vision
• High Speed Innovation
• Improve something––anything––every day
• Speed up action: Create a sense of urgency
• Wipe out bureaucracy: Grow big by staying small
• Self-Inspired Behavior: Love what you do and get very good at doing it! Do what you are!

PS: Got the above wisdom from Jim Bagnola (thanks for the time, encouragement and guidance).

Review: Lessons from Boo

There are 2 surprises today:

• There is a non-mainstream media interviewing local entrepreneurs, and the content is very genuine and down-to-earth with no time limitation (a good 30+ minutes)
• A company that sell bags (Greenroom 136) actually have a secondary objective to do this (entrepreneur video pod cast) through ConcreteJungle.

Let's see what we can learn from the local entrepreneur for a change: Boo from HomeTuitionJob.com

Summary

• It's okay to wear shorts during interview if you are a real entrepreneur :)
• Get turned down by a grant provider made him more determined.
• Learn from Japanese Manga: Kawaii-factor (cuteness)
• SEO save the day
• Learn how to sell
• Attract talent: it's not about money, it's about a higher purpose (brightness of the future factor)
• SweetLogic: powered people through Internet, make a nobody into somebody
• Funding is a bonus to do a startup, not a reason; you don't really need money (except to survive)
• Inspiration from hotornot.com and plentyoffish.com (start from home without funding)
• Business exist to solve a problem, and get paid for it.
• When you don't have money, you become very creative.
• If you read too much, you become afraid to try; don't take too much advice, just do it.
• Don't be afraid to fail (though a taboo for Asian culture); web business fail faster, try again.
• Pero (between Zero to Hero): Pumping blood into the company.
• Make HomeTuitioJob global; the world is not the limit, the space is.
• Don't blame the investor if he don't invest in you.
• Something "strange" will help you along the way (divine intervention)
• Don't limit yourself

Review: Steve Blank's How to Fail Less

Source: Steve Blank Teaches Entrepreneurs How To Fail Less


SILICON VALLEY AND ITS UNIQUE CULTURE

• You need to development your own morale/entrprenuership compass: due to information/opinion overload - Take in the knowledge/opinions as a starting point, then figure out your way of doing things.
• SV no longer make products: we encourage risk and accept failure. 
• Failed entrepenuer in SV is: Experience; those who failed didn't shame your family or community, and we are interested to know about their next venture.
• The cost of doing startup is very low 

BEING A FOUNDER IS HARD ESPECIALLY THE FIRST TIME

• Startup is an experience: even though I give you a manual about how other startups fail, most probably you still can't avoid failure for the first time. It's like teaching a children not to touch a hot kettle, but they are more likely to remember the lesson once they touch it. 

ENTREPRENEURS ARE ARTISTS

• You see something other didn't; and you bring your pack towards your vision.
• You still need a process to validate your vision.
• Do customer validation yourselves, so you can't hide behind a supposingly "lousy" salesman; if 10 customers tell you head on that your product sucks, you need to do something about it.