Can A Startup Do Offshore Development? Part 3

Posted 02.02.2010 in Business, Technology
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The biggest issue we faced as a team, with half our staff in the US and the other half in Malaysia, wasn’t communication, culture or misalignment of interest. It was collaboration.

Can A Startup Do OffShore Development? Part 2

Posted 07.15.2009 in Business, Technology
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In my previous article (Can a Startup Do OffShore Development? Part 1), I talked about alignment of interest and trust as being the two most critical aspect when starting a new offshore development team. Now on to more operational considerations. Hiring Of all the issues we ran into when we first built our team, hiring was the [...]

Can A Startup Do OffShore Development? Part 1

Posted 06.30.2009 in Business, Technology
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One of the first things I did at Zoecity was to build a new engineering team based in Malaysia. Zoecity’s headquarters is in Seattle but we have a satellite office in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. We started looking in January of 2008 and it took us roughly six months to fully staff our [...]

How To Evaluate Early-Stage Web 2.0 Companies

Posted 06.14.2009 in Business, Technology
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What is the most important thing you need to know about funding an early-stage Web 2.0 startup? DCF? TAM? SAM? What do you think? I found my answer changed when I went from investor to entrepreneur.

What Do You Do After You’ve Drank Your Kool-Aid?

Posted 06.03.2009 in Business, Technology
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Running as CEO of a startup, one big pitfall you can have is to over-believe your own Kool-Aid. When you lead a startup, you are a visionary. You see a future and believe in it so much that you put your company, employees and investors at risk to achieve it. So what do you after you’ve drank your Kool-Aid?

The Medium Is The Message Part 2

Posted 05.20.2009 in Faith, Technology
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The Internet is the most influential, prolific, and cultural impacting event in this lifetime. No other medium has created so disruptive a change in media consumption and distribution. What biases does the Internet medium portend for us?

The Medium Is The Message Part 1

Posted 05.03.2009 in Faith, Technology
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Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book, “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man” makes the statement that the medium is the message. In other words, any form of media, be it oral, print, TV or electronic carries with it an inherent bias that affects the consumption of the message.

How Twitter Reply Works

Posted 04.20.2009 in Technology
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There’s been some confusion among Twitter newbies in how @reply works in Twitter. I created a slideshow to explain the general concept. Here’s a test for you. Let’s assume the users here did not modify their default Twitter settings. benting: @colinwong What is the capital of Malaysia? colinwong: @benting Kuala Lumpur. Who will be able [...]

Managing User Expectations

Posted 04.09.2009 in Business, Technology
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There’s been quite a backlash from the Facebook community about Facebook’s latest UI change. One thing I learned is when you push out new features or change existing features, you don’t want to bunch too many of them and release it all at the same time. Here’s the reasons why.

Charging Money For Your Website

Posted 03.31.2009 in Business, Technology
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I came across an article on pricing strategies and it got me thinking about how we could charge money for premium services on ZoeCity. This is important in today’s economy. Ad revenue spending is decreasing and VCs no longer favor growth over revenue. How do you charge for services on your website, when everyone else is giving it away?