Entrepreneurship, technology and life

I believe most entrepreneurs have this conversation before, "Are successful people just lucky?".  I have talked to many businessmen who have made it and they attributed a big portion of their success to luck.  I have also talked to some who haven't made it and they were also attributing it to the lack of luck. Photo credit: mentatdgt Some of my friends argued that it is plain luck since everything is uncertain in the business world and some of these people are just "lucky".  My counter-argument to them would be, are you saying that if Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, or Richard Branson were to start a new business (assuming that they have no access to their established network and wealth), it is as good a chance to succeed as any random person from the street? After a few conversions on this topic, I decided to write about some of the conclusions that I have come to.  First of all, I believe even for a seasoned entrepreneur like Richard Branson, there will ...

If you are a Malaysian male (of Chinese/Malay ethnicity) and were born on October 28, 1977 (plus minus a week), please read on. You may have been told by your parents that you were adopted at birth, or you may doubt that you were adopted, or you may even have started looking for your birth parents with no avail. Photo credit: Luciana Ferraz I have just got to know that a friend's mom has a son who she has given away at birth.  She was then a 19-year-old young lady and she wasn't sure what to do with the unexpected pregnancy.  She insisted on not aborting the baby and followed her mom's advice to give the baby away when the baby was delivered in a clinic in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.  She didn't get to see the baby at all and the only information she had was that the couple who adopted the baby are Malaysians (of Chinese ethnicity) in their 40's back then.  Her mom has passed on now and she has limited information on where to look for her son. She is a...

Most of the online software lost traction in my company after 1~2 months of implementation. One of the best features in SaaS (Software as a Service) model is that we get to try out the software in real environment and we can ditch the software if we decide that it is not something that we will continue using, without losing much investment. Here are a list of software that we still stick to religiously after three months (a gage for us on whether the software is working for us or not).  Some of these may have been covered before in my previous posts: Company laptop and the software needed , Integrating Dropbox into company's file system . Asana - Tasks Management This software is like a software customized to our order, we have tried many other tasks & project management software, including Wunderlist, Insightly, Podio, etc, just to realize that we need a simple tasks list that is shareable.   How We Use Asana On daily basis, I go through: Inbox:...

Going green to me means being easy on the environment, but whatever we are implementing must also make sense (it can't be too tedious for users) and cents (it has to be same or lower in cost).  Here are some "Go Green" strategies that we have implemented in the office: Office Printer When shopping for our new printer, the requirements are: Laser printer with separate drum and toner unit.   Laser toner is much more economic than inkjets and we also make sure the laser printer we are getting have separate drum and toner unit as the drum unit usually have longer life cycle than the toner. Duplex printing , so that we can save on papers by printing on both sides of the paper without manually flipping and re-feeding the papers. Extra tray for recycle papers (papers that have been printed on one side only).  Please note that we only feed the tray with recycle papers that do not contain confidential information. Scan-to-email function.   Together with a vir...

In my digital marketing company, we outsource a lot of the tasks in the office.  The following considerations are weighed before we decide outsourcing or hiring: Is this role a core competency of our business? If the answer is yes, we will hire if we have enough jobs to keep him/her busy.  If we don't have enough jobs yet, we will outsource until we can get enough jobs to hire one full-time. Photo credit: rawpixel.com Is there a career path and environment for this role to grow in our company? We would like all our team members to grow professionally and personally.  We may have enough jobs for a particular role to be more cost effective hiring in-house, but if we know that we can't provide the right environment for this person to grow, we will outsource the jobs. We outsource our accounting, payroll, systems administration and office boy (despatch) jobs.  There is pretty much no career path for an accountant, a systems administrator and an office b...

We need a phone number for the company for general inquiries, support and also as a back-up number just in case a particular mobile number is not reachable.  This number will be printed and published on all our marketing materials, including letterhead, business cards, website, invoices, etc. Photo credit: Joenibraw Challenges We want as minimal hardware investment as possible and we always have the idea of able to have the whole company work outside the office when necessary. Simple solution will just be getting another mobile phone number and a dedicated mobile phone, to be carried by whoever responsible to answer the incoming calls.  However, we are afraid that having a mobile phone number as our company number would give the impression of a fly-by-night company or a freelancer. Solutions that We Adopted We came across a radio ads from our local telco, Maxis, promoting Unity Hotline service, where we can get a 1-700 hotline number and all incoming calls will ...

I am putting together some tips on data security.  This is not the most air tight security setup, but it is good enough to protect against basic security threat and they are relatively simple to set up. Photo credit: Pixabay Strong Password Will not elaborate on this as there are plenty of articles out there on this.   My rule of thumbs is that the password is at least eight characters, with combination of alphabet, number, and special character.  I also suggest not to use the same password for all logins.  Example, don't use the same password for your Hotmail account, Skype and company online system, so that they don't all get compromised just because one does. Google Apps (Google Suite) We run a lot of our software in SaaS (Software as a Service) and most of them integrate with Google Apps authentication for single sign-on.  This would mean if someone gain access to my Google Apps login, he will gain access to a lot of my company data.  I enab...