If I had to review 2017 with a single word, that word would be “Quest”. We started the year dealing with aftermath of launching Mindvalley Quests 1.0 at the end of 2016. It was put together hastily on our existing learning platform built on Ruby on Rails.
At the same time, we also started working on the next version of the Quest. It was time for us to move beyond Rails and we placed our bet on Elixir. The journey wasn’t easy as we had to learn, unlearn and relearn a lot of things.
When I meet someone during lunch, instead of being asked if I have eaten like a typical Malaysian, they ask if I’m on holiday. Then they will have this puzzled look after I tell them I’m actually working and I get to wear my t-shirts and shorts at the office.
My workplace, like many in the tech industry, adopt a more accommodating dress code for their employees. Instead of Casual Fridays, it’s Casual Everyday for us. This is a godsend as I can’t stand wearing slacks and long sleeves in this weather.
What does it take to turn a usually calm and collected person to an annoyed and agitated beast? A phone call. Well to be exact, an unanswered phone call.
When we were younger, my parents ran their business from our home. My sister and I were given very specific instructions on what to do when the phone rings. Within the third ring, we must answer it and tell the person on the other end of the line to hold while we get our parents.
On a typical day, us programmers and software developers spend most of the time staring at our computers. We could be churning out code, working on a bug ticket, improving the test suite or refactoring existing codebase.
Due to the nature of our work, it can be hard for us to fully grasp how our work affects the company as a whole. Even if you are working in a tech startup, you may be working on a small portion of a larger system.
If you are building a system, you’ll want it to be scalable. Ideally, it should be able to accommodate an increase in load with a proportional increase in resources. An example of this is the WhatsApp infrastructure which handles billions of messages every day.
If you are building a company, you’ll want it to be able to grow and scale up quickly as you add more headcount and resources. In theory, given more access to resources, a scalable business will be able to grow it’s revenue and profits proportionally.
If you have been to enough networking events, you’ll surely noticed the most common question, other than asking for your name, is what do you do?
Over the years, I’ve learned to alter my job title depending on the situation. If I’m in a tech event, then I’ll introduce myself as Software Developer. Normally, they may follow up with asking what language (programming language) I work with and all the techie stuff.
For almost all other cases, I’ll go with Software Programmer. It usually does the job of communicating that I write code for a living. Saying I’m a developer will confuse some people as they think I build physical buildings instead of software systems.
It has been more than three years since we embarked on this unexpected journey together and for some reason, we tend to find ourselves back to similar situations again and again.
When John and I first join Mindvalley, we were tasked to build Omvana Online. Then soon after that, we started working on Elula while growing the team. And recently, we started a new quest to develop the greatest personal growth learning platform the world have ever seen.
Personally, I think we are amazingly lucky to have the trust of the company to be the go-to team to build the next big thing. All of us should be thankful for the opportunities given to us and we should never take it for granted.
I'll admit I may have seen more than 1 episode of Carebears when I was younger. I don't remember what it was about except that they are colourful bears with different icons on their tummy.
But I like Carebears. Not so much the cartoon but rather people who are caring and are willing to sacrifice themselves toward things that matter to them. If you ask me what type of people I would hire, I'll choose a Carebear any day, any time.
The single most important advice Peter Thiel (Co-founder of PayPal & Palantir) gave to Brian Chesky (CEO of AirBnB) after he invested $150M in the company was, “Don’t f**k up the culture”.
He didn’t say “Don’t waste the money” or “Don’t buy a Ferrari”. What he is implying is that you need a good culture to build a successful company. But what the heck is company culture?
Early this year, in an attempt to shape and define our company culture, my co-founder John and I came up with a set of guiding principles for the company.
We decided we want our team to have the heart to serve, to communicate well, to constantly adapt to change and to make each other better.
