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Thankful

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am sitting at a giant table made by my brother and Dad while writing this. We have so many friends and family coming for Turkey Day that they decided to make a giant table. It is the first time in years I am at home for the holidays and most of the family, minus one brother is coming (he will join for Christmas), and it will be memorable.

Over the years I tended to just visit family during business trips but lately I haven’t needed to travel so I decided this year we would make the trip. Having kids myself now makes it more important to all get together and experience some holiday time. For me, this is the best time to enjoy the states. All the commercialism aside, the festive season is enjoyable when all your family is around.

I know not everyone enjoys the season and it is a very personal time. I hope anyone out there not enjoying the festive season has a friend or two to reach out and bond with. I am very thankful I am surrounded by family and friends. This is what it is all about.

Take care and enjoy the day.

Not writing enough

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I need to write more – both for myself and for myself.

November looks to be another good month even though I have not written about the last week or so. I have been in transit to America with two small kids. Takes days to recover. I am now in the secluded mountains of Alta, CA – enjoying the cold, the scenery and the slow internet. Stuns me how bad internet connectivity is – my parents pay the same as I do in Singapore for 2.5mbps line but I get 300mbps – soon upgraded to 600mbps. Shows you what happens when big telco controls the Internet.

Anyways. I just the new Desk blogging app for the Mac since I still write more on my laptop than I do on iOS – hoping this helps me to write more.

We shall see.

Back to my box of Twinkies for now…

Back in the US of A

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In LA for a few days. Hanging in the hotel cafe having a coffee and trying to stay awake. Of course every freaking TV has the piece of shit NFL on which is loud and annoying enough to probably help keep me awake.

I always find it comical to land and deal with immigration. Was surprised to see the computer kiosks for residents in place but what is comical is it just seems to add and extra step versus cutting down on time or process. First the kiosk but of course it seems you still fill out the dumb form on the plane. Why have both? Then the kiosk prints something and you wait to see an officer. He takes the paper from the plane and gives you back the receipt from the kiosk. Then go grab your bag. Talk to another officer to get out of that room. Then another line with another officer checking to see if they need to scan your shit. Seems I was not flagged for secondary this trip and sailed through but still comical there are so many checkpoints and that the computer part of it doesn’t seem to actually speed anything up.

Well the sun is shining, I have email to do, BigAssMeeting prep and some dinner to hunt down.

Happy Sunday!

More on Karma

~ michael_msft ~ 2 Comments

Sometimes current events remind me that Karma wins in the end. I’ll just leave it at that.

From Gruber I happened to read this post on politeness. It’s so good. I can’t claim to be this polite but damn I wish I was. We just had a small get together with some friends and family for my daughter’s birthday. She is two now. I hope I can teach her how to be this polite and caring.

I have touched on this subject slightly before – here: http://www.nokpis.com/2013/03/08/learning-from-the-masters/ and http://www.nokpis.com/2013/06/19/being-a-connector/ . The idea being that your past WILL alter your future. How you treat people will come back to delight or haunt you.

I think a lot about my past and can even recall specific events where I was NOT polite. It could be that I was too young to contemplate how my actions would be perceived. I wish even now I could go back and fix those events. Other times I was not polite and I knew it. I wish I could also fix those events as well but I am glad I remember them. A constant reminder helps me to be polite in the present.

I am older now. I think one of the coolest things about aging is that I can get better at my craft – the art of being me. I don’t care so much anymore what I wear or what people think of me. Other than if people meet me, or hear me speak or hear others speak of me – that they will have a good impression of me. I try to remind myself that this is more important than fashion, more important than my job and will in some way lead to delight in my future.

I am sure that I can improve upon this process. I will try. Starting today to be even more polite than I think I am.

Happy Monday!

Consumer services update – iCarsClub, veggies, and broken iPhone 5

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

So after about 2 weeks http://www.icarsclub.com finally approved my application for their service. I think it normally takes 3 days or at least that is what they say. Still no replies to my support emails or tweets. A fail then on all levels for customer service – what if I start using the service? How do I reach them?

On the vegetable front I tried this place :: http://www.greencircle.com.sg. In general it worked well but I think they could communicate a little better. I did the online order form which sends you a confirmation email. After that nothing happened but then my wife rang me to say someone left a box of veggies at our door. We didn’t know when they were coming and yes, get this – I never paid them. Still need to work that out. Veggies are good though and I will use them again. I might even pay them too. 😉

Last but not least my little girl dropped my iPhone 5 face down on the train yesterday and shattered the glass. I hunted around for someone to repair it near where I live and found this guy :: http://mworks.weebly.com. He quoted (130 sgd) over the phone and I went right over. Fixed it in like 20 mins and put a nice screen cover on it. Very friendly guy that Vincent and does awesome work. Even corrected one of the dents on the side of the phone so the new glass could lay down all the way into the phone. I may take him my bashed iPad mini and my other iPad with cracked glass. Highly recommend his work.

back to work…

Consumer services in Singapore…

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

I tweeted this yesterday mostly out of frustration with trying out a consumer service here in Singapore with horrible customer service. Looking at you http://www.icarsclub.com/. I signed up over a week ago – about 2 weeks now – for their iCarDriver service where you get access to automated short term car sharing. My app is still processing:

iCarDriver
To rent and keyless enter nearby cars affordably
PROCESSING

Okay – no drama. I user their online customer support email thingy twice. No replies.

I tweet at them in a friendly, like is anywhere there kind of way, and no response. Nothing. How does a consumer company not answer any emails or tweets? Appalling.

Seems they have not tweeted in 30 days. How is that possible?

Check out the tweet search about them – just all stuff about funding and nothing about customers, traction or customer service.

Yet this is a company recently funded – https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/car-sharing-startup-icarsclub-raises-035538613.html

Maybe they are just annoyed by me, wannabe paying customer, asking for help. I just don’t get it.

But this brings me back to my other feeling about the local ecosystem coverage. There is not much depth to it. It is announcements about starting/funding, then the buzz about someone doing well and then the general industry coverage. There is not a lot about actual reviews of the service, report cards on how companies are doing and a little, but not much about the failing companies – how they failed and what the peeps at the failed places are now doing. I am not bashing the coverage or the people that cover the scene – just highlighting what I think is missing.

Will anyone with a bigger voice than me look into the iCarsClub weirdness? Probably not.

Next I will look into one of these organic vegetable services.

The 3rd one

~ michael_msft ~ 3 Comments

It’s more a question than a statement. All one has to do is watch WWDC and Google I/O to see that Apple and Google are in a league of their own.

I keep thinking that Windows Phone is the one holding on to 3rd place but it seems like they are barely holding on according to this – http://gigaom.com/2014/06/30/windows-phone-sales-are-falling-in-the-u-s-and-china-according-to-new-survey/. Meaning they are only going to get 3rd place cause no one else is doing better than MSFT. Kind of a sad state.

I still think a healthy ecosystem in mobile phones would be the best thing for all of us product folks but of course I say that knowing the truth of the paradox – I am rooting for a 3rd place but I am not using anything or building anything for the runner up. There in lies the issue – if no one builds for #3 then there won’t be a #3. We want there to be one but we are not really supporting anyone right now apart from the two lead dogs.

This is kind of scary.

I played around with Firefox OS some and well – it’s interesting but has a long ways to go before I would use it or build on it.

We can see BlackBerry is still trying, http://crackberry.com/exclusive-pre-release-review-blackberry-passport, but seriously would you buy one of these phones? I wouldn’t. Someone might but I think BB will be a niche hardware maker with an OS not many developers are going to build for. I guess they may eventually make a great takeover target for some Chinese handset maker wanting to hedge their android bets.

So where does that leave the playing field?

Apple and Google getting it all or will MSFT do something cool – other than add folders?

How to become a product manager

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Just got the chance to check this out :: http://www.slideshare.net/isouweine/how-to-become-a-product-manager

I had the distinct pleasure of working with Isaac some at Yahoo as well as just chatting with him a bunch when he lived in Singapore. And yes – I have missed him a ton since he left.

It’s a great deck and one that I think about a lot since at Spuul I don’t have any PM’s but someday we might. I always wonder how a startup grows into acquiring or growing PM’s and how I would transition over to letting them manage things instead of the way we do it now.

I think a longer post needs to be written about the PM in a startup versus the PM in an established company. I am sure Isaac has lots to share there given his time at Yahoo and his new tenure at Frank and Oak.

Thanks for sharing Isaac!

Koprol – The Inside Story. Part 5

~ michael_msft ~ 3 Comments

Part 4 :: http://www.nokpis.com/2014/03/25/koprol-the-inside-story-part-4/

Yes – we closed the deal. My hope was to bask in the deal closing success and enjoy the moment but unfortunately there was not a lot of time to do that. All sorts of stuff needed sorting from deciding how to announce the deal, to sorting out the structure of operations and of course just dealing with all the demands placed on the newly acquired team. Koprol was now our emerging markets baby – everyone inside of Yahoo wanted access and people outside of Yahoo wanted to interview the principals. All good. I think Yahoo’s bonus from the deal was the huge amount of positive, organic pr. Something Yahoo was not normally used to.

As far as the event itself – the announcing the deal to the public, we planned for a medium sized private event where all the regional bloggers and media where invited. At this time there was some notion of activity around Koprol and Yahoo but there had not been any leaks and no one had forecasted what had actually happened. I was proud of both the Yahoo and Koprol team for not having leaked anything. I am sure many people suspected something but no one called it. The event allowed the Koprol guys to announce the deal and the APAC management to introduce themselves to the community at large. Corporate stayed out of it and the excitement of the deal took center stage. All in all I was proud of the moment and of Yahoo.

Post deal announcement my friend from the IGTF and I spent some time in Bali hanging and trying to come up with some basic plans. Apart form this celebration and a few post deal parties at some of the regional events the air of celebration was exhausted quick since the need to get down to business was at hand.

Fortunately the IGTF lead for the deal was still at Yahoo and focused on making this work – this along with the APAC team focus allowed us to plan next steps. The goal being to grow the product in the region, learn from it and see what the team could offer Yahoo in ideas for emerging markets. Apart from the this the rest of the details needed to be worked out.

There were lots of open issues:

– what to name or brand it?
– long term reporting structures
– dealing with logins – yahoo users
– scaling points of interest
– platforms to grow into
– how to scale the team in Indonesia
– how to engage the rest of Yahoo
– how to spread in the other Yahoo regions

Post closing the Yahoo APAC marketing team started to discuss the branding and of course wanted it to be called Yahoo Koprol. Part of me resisted this cause I felt that the best way to conduct the experiment in the large would be to not overly influence it. Koprol was tiny and Yahoo was huge and it was assumed everyone knew Yahoo and no one knew Koprol. The idea was call it Yahoo Koprol and everyone would feel better about it. The focus groups mostly alluded to the same answer but for me I was more interested in using the resources of Yahoo but yet trying to not over Yahoo everything.

This was really the entire crux of our new found paradox – how does one take advantage of all that Yahoo has to offer and get shit done but not be saddled with all the bullshit of Yahoo that is notorious for not getting anything done. This is where my Yahoo career probably nosedived as I stated to assume the role of protector as someone wanting to do the right thing for everyone but yet having to piss people off along the way.

There was the local team, the Koprol team, the users, Sunnyvale and the world all watching and everyone wanting a piece. Yahoo wanted to learn from the team, the world wanted to interview them, the users wanted a growing product and the Koprol team wanted to try and please everyone – there was no easy way to do this but my full time gig become trying to make all this happen. I am sure I failed – but I learned a lot along the way and I think everyone else did to.

Decisions were quickly being made – the product would be called Yahoo Koprol, the product would keep the multi login system although would need to make the Yahoo stuff the real login and we would start throwing some marketing dollars at promoting the product in Indonesia. In theory this was all good but there can be too much of a good thing since the product was still really new. The idea of marketing a hong product might make some sense but the offer on the table was to do a TV commercial for Indonesia. At first reaction one thinks hell yeah – let’s do that but then reality sets in and one realizes that the product may just not be ready for something like a TVC. Here is another decision that needed to be made in that we wanted the marketing help but we honestly wanted it to come later however the TVC budget was there and needing to be used ASAP. Looking back I think we should not have done the TVC since it made us put off some product evolutions to prep for the TVC and we were forced to make some decisions around the features or the marketable features so that the TVC would have the message Yahoo wanted for the region.

Essentially it meant accepting more compromises for what the team would be working on and how the product would be presented by Yahoo to the region. It was all too soon really since we wanted to experiment around product features and we wanted to grow it more organically or within the Yahoo ecosystem prior to doing any hardcore marketing. Yes – the TVC was well done and it made a huge difference in users but it was probably also the wrong kind of user and it meant Koprol was getting a huge amount of attention both within the company and around Indonesia. Other groups at Yahoo were slightly peeved at such a young product getting so much money since marketing money had to be shared around the region and the product was having to deal with rampant growth without the time to work on engagement and making it a better product. It was a mass tradeoff that in my mind wasn’t worth the hassles.

This began the journey for what ultimately started to cave the entire experiment – Koprol was now expected to be the hero product for the region with the idea that market it enough and it will be big rather than building the best product and figuring out how to make it something the region desires versus flogging it. This is actually a typically Yahoo dilemma since there are ways between marketing dollars, PR and the front page to unleash a firehose on something within or outside of Yahoo that will result in mass traffic but won’t king make something that is not ready or is not a good product. Koprol now had the firehose but it really needed more time to mature first.

JFDI 2014A

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I am back to trying to focus my efforts outside of Spuul in one place again this year – which is JFDI batch 2014A.

http://jfdi.asia/portfolio/

Last Thursday I met with with a few from the list but I think some have already changed their names. I will wait to see who I end up spending the most time with since it is usually up to the teams to ping me for follow up.

For now I have had the most conversations with http://storyroll.co/ and http://stylehunt.com/ . Storyroll is fascinating since it is some guys from Lithuania coming to singapore, frying their asses off, to make a go of the program. I figure I can help a bit given my video and consumer product background. For stylehunt I am always partial to the Thais and it turns out I am from the same part of the world as one of the founders which is cool.

We shall see who continues to bug me as the program rolls on and I will see what kind of impact I can have. Exciting stuff!

Before I get to my tiny advice column I will recall the dinner we had with Werner Vogels and some of what we learned from talking to him. The key takeaway I had was that Amazon is still lots of small teams working on lots of projects. As big as Amazon is today the small team ethos is still going strong. I dig that. The other thing Werner mentioned was how the team still writes the marketing one pager, the FAQ and the press release before any code is written. I love this. I should try to do this at Spuul as well.

It’s good advice to focus on what you want the customer to experience and then work backwards to make it happen. I am sure there are tons of ways to do this or to manage the process but the basics are pretty clear. Don’t code or draw pictures first. Take the time to write out what you hope to build before building.

Obviously this may not work for everyone who has already started making something or is in the program however I think for those who are in the JFDI program there is another way to handle this.

This is the advice I was giving out on Thursday to the companies I met individually with. I have seen a few batches go though the system and generally if one can keep themselves organized and productive leading up to investor day then the odds of success, as far as the program is concerned, are much higher. Fall apart, lose track of time, bicker, try to build too much, or lose sight of the product – will lead you to a bad investor day.

One could hope for breakout success, killer metrics, a sick viral loop or a crazy amount of pr – but pinning your success on the things that may not happen is not very smart. If these things happen consider them a bonus but instead focus on the event. The investor day. Imagine yourself or your team up there presenting, have a vision for what you want to say, make a few slides now that will be the boilerplate for that final day and focus on projecting now what you will accomplish on that stage.

Then work backwards to make it happen. Manage each week precisely enough, don’t go crazy about it, to ensure that you are meeting your weekly milestones that will add up to your successful investor day.

As a member of an accelerator program you are in a time compression chamber. Manage it will and you will succeed.