I met a (really nice) US family on a trip from Helsinki to Frankfurt. They have 2 really energetic daughters. Most interesting was Isabelle, 8 years old. I think she has a smile of a little angel. Hope that the world is round enough so I can meet them again some day.
He was one of the greatest singers I’ve ever known. He brought a lot of emotion to me ever since the first time I saw him.
He made me cry
He made me thrilled
He made loathe
He even made me laugh
But now he’s dead. Even though I feel sad, I think that it is best. At least he will live on as a legendary singer/dancer, not a legendary scandal maker/child molester.
The Urban Legends: Entrepreneurs can…
… and a lot more of such legends. In my opinion, there may be certain people who are physically and mentally capable of achieving such feats. But is it true that anyone who do exactly like that would become a successful entrepreneur? I don’t really know.
CC attribution MichaelMarlatt@flickr
I, also, yearn for being able to do just like those urban legends. There are times that I really did the same things. Even now, sometimes I might end up becoming an ultra workaholic. But most of the time, I find these to be much more common practices:
Real Life Practices:
In the end, I think there are always balance in life. It’s important to live life to the fullest and sometimes get into a frenzy of working and thinking. But generally, there must be times when we need to reward ourselves and get back to the balanced state of body and mind. For almost anyone, this sounds pretty normal. But I believe for entrepreneurs and entrepreneur minded folks, this can be a hard learnt lesson.
How much communication is enough to keep your team members be emotionally stable and don’t become emotionally anxious?
For me the answer is: “It’s never enough!”
The reason why human is human, simply put, is because we have emotion. And because we have emotion, working together, no matter in what professional field, means communicating with each other. If information flow is streamlined, everyone is happy. Team members know their purposes, what others are doing and the value of each one’s work. If information flow is stuck, everyone becomes worried. “Why am I here?” “Why the others seem to work less than me?” “Why am I getting paid the same as them?” are possible questions that would come up times after time.
CC attribution miscpix@flickr
In the past I’ve made mistakes in communication, hence I’ve lost valuable members. I didn’t tell them enough about my expectation, about the business situation, what I were contributing for the whole success and such. I was easily angered by what would be understandable unexpected errors. As a result, they became anxious and somewhat under-motivated to carry on. I’ve learned my lesson, and I’m trying my best to make change in our team’s communication.
As a team leader, I want to be open and share my status through any mean possible (including Twitter, Facebook and Blog). Except for confidential & sensitive information, I want everyone in my team to know where I am, how is my condition what I’m doing, thinking and playing. By sharing, I want everyone in the team to know and understand that I am committed to this ultimate goal: to bring wealth (either in knowledge, money or fame) to every team member.
As a team member, I want to know my other team mates’ statuses and thinking. The more information they share with me, the better our understanding would be. So if you are working or going to work with me, I expect you to be as open to me and others as I am open to you.
In Helsinki (Finland) there is a bakery/company called Eromanga. If you don’t know what’s the meaning of the name, try to Google for the images. The discovery was originally posted on DannyChoo.
Apparently I still haven’t live in Finland long enough.
Being able to tell jokes about the place one is living shows his understanding of the environment he is living in. So I suggest everyone who lives in Finland go to the place and check it out. Maybe buying some breads there, too. But there is no thing erotic there 
Google Map of Eromanga Oy
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Recently I went to Techstart+SDG Helsinki, where tech start-ups and developers gather together. In the same room where high level members of Finnish government discuss the most important decisions in various industries, I had the chance to listen to both inspiring and boring talks coming from evangelists of ICT/internet companies in Finland. Luckily the organizers managed to invite more interesting speakers than the boring ones, so despite the small size of it, Techstart+SDG was one of the best tech events I’ve attended so far.
Even so, I cannot help but to think about the poor evangelism here in Finland when I listened to the boring speeches. Let’s face it. Finland is still very far behind US in terms of technology innovation and activeness. We have great technologies here, great talents here, and great facilities here… Yet somehow we still lack good and outstanding evangelists.
I’m talking about Technology Evangelists here. They can be founders, executives, board members or employees of a company. Being an Evangelist means each of them contributes their 3”E” (Energy, Effort and Emotion) to raise awareness, stir up enthusiasm or improve adoption rate…etc. in the general market/community.
According to Wikipedia, “Technology Evangelist is a person who attempts to build a critical mass of support for a given technology in order to establish it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects. Professional technology evangelists are often employed by firms which seek to establish their proprietary technologies as de facto standards or to participate in setting non-proprietary open standards. Non-professional technology evangelists may act out of altruism or self-interest…”.
For me, a Tech Evangelist is simply someone who understands and talks about technologies. But above all else, he has the power to change other people’s perspective of technologies.
An Evangelist is absolutely not someone like this
But someone like this:
…or, for a more formal example, this:
Funny, interesting, enthusiastic, somewhat immune from embarrassment or stage fright… all can be considered good traits for an evangelist. I understand that Finnish companies are better doers than talkers. But there are things, great things that can only be achieved by companies that are good in both ways. That said, besides talented engineers, talented evangelists are crucial parts of any startup and business.
The top 10 speakers/evangelists of ICT and internet industry in my list are currently Steve Jobs, Guy Kawasaki, Steve Ballmer, Jason Calacanis, Bill Gates, Taneli Tikka, Marc Davis, Morten Lund, Joi Ito and Tuomas Syrjanen. Up until now I have met/talked with half of them (the last half). Hopefully within 5 years I would have met and talked with all of them, and co-operate with at least 3 of them. At least, that’s one of my humble goals :).
Let’s start first by asking “Why would we need to hire a comic artist?”
One word: Branding.
Having a comic artist in the team can help you create the following advantages for your business:
Mascots are unique and friendly people/figures that can evoke positive reaction, create much stronger lasting impression and make customers/users feel more interested in what you have to offer. Smashing Magazine has a nice article about using cartoon mascots in modern web design here.
Cartoon mascots can be seen everywhere on the internet these days. It’s a strong trend. Miku and Mirai from Vocaloid and DannyChoo are my favorite cartoon mascots .
Cartoon mascots can be found on physical products, like rice!
I definitely think something like that would be a big hit in Vietnam 
A ubiquitous type of branding strategy is to show your product/service through as many channels as you can. And besides video, audio, game… comic is another media to think about. Internet users love comics. And if you have something funny and meaningful for the users to read along the way exploring your site, people would appreciate the effort and feel more sympathized with your product/service.
The guys at PennyArcade are masters in terms of making comic strips for the purpose of branding. Their Penny Arcade Presents page is a must check.
My favorite comic strip in that page is definitely this one.
If you want to get a mascot for your site/product, either a graphic designer with a knack for creating comic characters or a comic artist with a knack for graphic designing would do. You can either find a comic artist on DeviantArt or simply purchase the rights for some specific artwork on iStockphoto. But before you move on, there are important thing to consider:
…and would they be attracted to comic characters? In GoDaddy case, which is an internet domain and service vendor, it happens that the target customers are mostly male grease monkeys, college students and geeky daddies (men, for short). So using human girl mascots for web design is the right strategy.
Otherwise, comic/cartoon/manga/anime style may attract younger audience of both genders and larger audience of female users in general. Of course, there are always male users who would be attracted towards cute 2D girl mascots instead of sexy human girl mascots (i.e. me).
If other competitors are doing the same thing, there would be two main options. One is to try making more unique mascot designs. Give your artist longer time and better payment. If you like his style, then have faith that something amazing will come up.
If you want to save time and money, the other solution is to make the same thing, changing a little bit and pray that the customers at your region won’t notice. This would be easier, but the tactic is not highly recommended. For web businesses that would be an impossible mission.
If there is enough money, another tactic we can think of is to do both. Most game companies nowadays have human mascot and digital mascots (based on game characters) at the same time.
For example, Luna Online use YaoYao as a real life mascot and have their cute cartoon mascots drawn based on the game’s characters.
Otherwise, a cartoon mascot would be a more effective and economical investment than a real life mascot.
Everybody knows that India and China are still the biggest players in the outsourcing industry. However, Vietnam is coming fast to become a new hot spot for web development offshoring (also other kinds of outsourcing). I strongly believe so, and in this post I’d like to share with you the top 5 reasons why web businesses, especially in Finland and Europe, should think about offshoring to Vietnam.
Talented IT employees are in short supply everywhere. Vietnam offers around 80 thousands IT graduates per year in 2007. With an increase of 12% each year, giving some self-study freelancers, there are roughly 100,000 new IT workers/ year now. Most of them live in big cities like Ha Noi and Ho Chi Minh city, or in smaller ones around these regions.
Just like in India or China, there is always high demand for quality knowledge workers. Anyway, things are getting better in Vietnam. Universities, colleges and institutes such as Aptech are churning out thousands of high quality developers each year. Nevertheless, some of the brightest minds can be found “underground”, deep inside self-learning geek communities *grin*.
Vietnamese culture emphasizes on education and credibility. Business partnerships in Vietnam are established base on the education level and commitment to keeping one’s promise of each side. Also there is a way of self-studying and perfectionism in every Vietnamese. That said, these traits are not promoted heavily due to another aspect of Vietnamese culture: “always keep a humble attitude”. So I can consider myself more boastful than a normal Vietnamese here, since I’m doing all this shameless promotion for Vietnam *big grin*.
Salary for a web developer in Helsinki region can go from 24000 up to 48000 Euros per year. While in Vietnam 3000 to 6000 Euros is enough an annual salary for someone with the same skill set and IQ. That said, an annual salary for 1 (ONE) developer in Helsinki can sustain a talented team of 8 (EIGHT) developers in Vietnam for a whole year! Roughly speaking, if we take other costs such as traveling, special bonuses and other operational costs into account; outsourcing to Vietnam is still a highly cost-efficient solution that would save you at least 75% of development cost.
While the payment scale in India and China is increasing, Vietnam still offers lower cost of IT salaries. At least, for the next 10 years IT salaries in Vietnam will remain 1.5 to 3 times lower than in India and China.
CC attribution creativesam@flickr
Even though English is not native language, it is the most popular and widely studied foreign language in Vietnam. Unlike Chinese, Vietnamese is written with alphabet character set, so learning English is easier for Vietnamese people. Hell, we even have “specialized classes for talented students in English/French” in public schools in Vietnam. No joke!
If you are familiar with blogging and think of blog as a better way of communication, then fyi Vietnamese are among the largest market for blogging services. The Yahoo360 community in Vietnam is so large that Yahoo even released a specialized version name Yahoo360 plus only for the Vietnam market. What does this mean? It mean that you can easily find enthusiastic bloggers for your online branding strategies in Vietnam, or technicality writing and community moderation stuffs.
Last but not least, Vietnam is a considerably big market of 86 millions people, with young, tech savvy and web oriented population. Offshoring to Vietnam can also facilitate your market expansion in the South East Asia region. And there are many good opportunities for any type of business, not just for web companies.
Even though I was born in Vietnam, it is not the reason why I’m writing this post. I want to share my point of view as an entrepreneur who’s living here in Finland, building up a web business in Finland, and planning to do so within Europe for at least the next 3 years. Any other perspective is all welcomed.
I’m going back to Vietnam this summer. Things are moving fast here in the Finnish entrepreneur community and we are going where the money goes, in order to facilitate our dream of changing the world.
In a business stand point, it’s not that we have forgotten our original mission. It’s just become bigger.
In a personal stand point, I’m more excited than ever to see the improving economic relationship between Finland and Vietnam, be involved in interesting projects and meet interesting people along the way.
Next entry I will write more about the tech scene in Vietnam, and why startups & businesses should think about offshoring to Vietnam.
“What does it mean? — It doesn’t mean anything. — Everybody falls the first time.” Those are the lines I remember most after watching The Matrix 9 years ago. It has been so true in many cases, either with me or with people I have met, that in order to master something, falling at some point along the way is unavoidable.
Yes, I want to admit right here, right now in this post: the fact that I’ve made quite a few mistakes being an entrepreneur in the last 1 year.
Failures… It does feel a bit embarrassing to talk about this topic. But I think for any one of us, admitting that we screwed up and thus learned valuable lessons is much better than hiding the truth and pretending that we never fail. So here goes, some hard-earned lessons I’ve got from my first year being an entrepreneur:
Prepare the pitch, plan the talk, so the best can be shown.
One of the biggest mistakes I made from the very beginning was being too carefree with personal impressions. First time meeting with a VC in Finland, I dressed up casually and talked about my business only on impulse. As a result, I got my first rejection, along with some really harsh words.
Being informal is not always a bad thing. Sometimes there are people who can see potential through your rough appearances, and they are definitely the most pleasant ones to work with. But many others can’t. So we take the risk of losing valuable partners with poorly planned presentation.
Anyway, the little embarrassment in the past inspired me to improve my presentation skill. It took me 3 months to learn pitching/ presenting our business in a professional manner. I studied the 30/20/10 rule of Guy Kawasaki, I understood the respectable formal dress code, I practiced pitching before important meetings… and it was all hard work.
October last year, we won the MindTrek start-up competition. A lot of amazing start-ups were there, with really interesting presentations. I learned that dreaming big is great; but being able to show others your dream and inspire them to have the same dream… it feels more than great. My next goal is to be able to deliver good presentation like Mohamed, CEO of Muxlim.
Communication is essential.
I learned, in the hard way, that no matter how tiring things can be, communication must be maintained at all cost. In the past I couldn’t manage my time (and also health condition) well enough to ensure the information flow. Hence we lost 2 talented team members, and some potential investors, simply because they didn’t have enough information to understand and believe in the situation.
The thing is, without continuous flow of communication, people tend to become anxious. And in the case of start-ups, insufficient communication is a fatal mistake. The stress, doubts and uncertainty can build up very fast, like fire spreading wildly without enough water in the air. No harsh word of a VC can make me feel more depressed than having a team member left for an opportunity elsewhere.
Again, it took some time to repair the mistake. Now, we are investing more time to communicate through various channels and update important news as soon as possible to interested parties. To our ex-team-members, I wish them best of luck. And to our current team members, I promise to always give you guys the latest and most honest news.
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And even though things are still rough ahead, I believe in the path we are walking on. There are many opportunities and we are making the best out of them. I hope that this entry is of help to everyone. Let us all look forward to the upcoming challenges and succeed together.